In my post Pondering the ‘Afterlife’ (Part 2 – Fear of Hell and Pascal’s Wager) I discussed, among other things, the pointlessness of a believer trying to urge an atheist to convert to Christianity on the grounds that:
..even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because so living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
This is called Pascal’s Wager. To put it another way, believers argue that:
..you’d rather believe in ‘God’ than not, because if ‘God’ doesn’t exist, presumably nothing has been lost by the believer and the non-believer. However, if it turns out that ‘God’ does, in fact, exist – then the non-believer will go to Hell, where as the believer will go to Heaven. From this it is argued that one would therefore be better off believing in ‘God’ than not.
One of my favourite atheism blogs has brought to my attention a wonderful video illustrating many of the problems with such reasoning. This video is a collaborative effort between Theramin Trees and Qualia Soup. Here it is, enjoy:
Meanwhile, here below is Matt Dilluhunty of the Atheist Experience TV Show tearing up Pascal’s Wager. He does it splendidly:
Matt’s show is available as a weekly audio podcast that you can download.
Bye bye, Pascal’s Wager.
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April 17, 2010 at 10:23 am
David K
I like to call the followers of Pascal “the just in case believers”…if heaven is presumed to be real, “purity of soul” is what is likely to get you there…not the pretensions that Pascal is suggesting.
I saw 27th Comrade’s response to this in the Afterlife posting you made. Somehting about mass murderers, etc confessing at the last moment and somehow fluking their backsides into heaven. Is this possible really? In your dying moments, can you really summon the faith to be saved, beyond a shadow of a doubt that is required and manage to pull it off? Well, I cannot speculate on the innerworking os people’s minds but if my experience is anything to go by, a life spent sinning remorselessly cannot get you to pull this act off. But then again, I do not profess to be an anthority on the subject. Maybe the 27th Comrade, whose writing and articulation and brilliance and knowledge and an entire plethora of positive attributes that I could bestow on him, I admire, would be able to break it down for us. Over to you Comrade…