Sunday, August 2, 2009

Pascal's Wager

One argument proposed by the theist is the following:

If one believes in God, one loses nothing if he or she is wrong, but if one doesn't believe in God, one loses everything.

Pascal's Wager fails in so many different ways it's embarrassing:

First off, suppose God does exist. If he wants people to follow reason and evidence and not believe in things simply because it will save their hide, then if one agrees with Pascal, they could go to Hell and the atheists to heaven.

Second, Pascal's Wager does not specify which god one should follow. Is it Zeus, Tupa, Yahweh, Shandi, etc...? Get it wrong and you could end up separated from God or tortured for all eternity.

Third, the argument assumes believing in God means you lose nothing -- which is just not true. Every moment you spend praying, believing in an unproven or even contradictory idea, following rituals of a religion, etc..., is a moment you will never get back that has been wasted when it could've been used to do something good.

Fourth, if God is so immoral that he rewards blind faith and punishes logic and reasoning, it is a god I would never worship or want to be in the presence of.

Fifth, Pascal's Wager assumes you can just make yourself believe God exists. Saying one believess doesn't make it so, and it wouldn't fool any omnipotent deity.

To show how big a caricature of a logical argument Pascal's Wager is, consider another argument I just made up off the top of my head:

If we believe in giant invisible killer bunnies that won't attack you if you believe in them then we lose nothing if we're wrong, but if you don't believe in giant invisible killer bunnies they might kill you.

Pascal's Wager is an incredibly naive argument, and one I hope I will never hear again.