Thread: Response to Pascal's Wager

Atheist Response to Pascal's Wager

Pascal offered this wager to all atheists for a reason to become theist:

Belief/Wager That God Exists:
If God exists: Gain all
If God does not exist: Status quo (nothing)

Belief/Wager Against God:
If God exists: Misery
If God does not exist: Status quo (nothing)

You can essentially see the argument best here. As an analogy:
You can bet on two flips of the coin. There are two sets of wagers:
Bet for Heads:
If Heads: Win $1k
If Tails: Nothing

Bet for Tails:
If heads: Lose $1k
If tails: Nothing

From the above, you can best see which seems intuitively best. It seems to be a strong argument. In fact, many people base their entire beliefs just on this logic.

Atheist Response/Wager

Premises:
+ Believing in certain Gods takes away personal meaning to ones life. Likely, if you do believe in the above, that statement will startle you and you immediately want to jump in response to it. Here is why:
- If you believe in a monotheistic God, you believe that everything has been planned out for you, life has been pre-arranged, an entity knows everything about you, etc.
- Essentially, you relinquish personal responsibility - your credibility for all your actions.

Quintessentials:
+ If you believe in God, you will live a life to fulfill expectations of that God. Of course, this severely depends on your definition of God. Considering that the above wager works from a God that would punish you for eternity if you did not believe in him, I will respond with that God in mind.
+ All you can be certain of if this moment and what you are right now. If belief in a God were factual, we would not be able to debate about this. Let us work from the standpoint of what we can see and function with.
+ If we work from the above, then a meaningful life would be one that utilizes fundamental and functionally viewable beliefs.
- Example 1: If I believe in gravity, I will not jump off a cliff.
- Example 2: If I believe in God, I will do my best to abide by their doctrine.
This would likely include worship, etc.

With these premises in mind, consider this alternate wager:

Belief/Wager God Exists:
God Exists: Gain all
God Does Not Exist: Wasted Personal Life

Belief/Wager God Does Not Exist:
God Exists: Misery
God Does Not Exist: Fulfilling Life.

Confident Atheist Wager
This may also apply to fundamentalist Atheists (ie. those that fervently deny any proof of a God. They believe God does not exist whatsoever).

Many Atheists are very confident that God does not exist and feel no worry about misery. To demonstrate to Theists how an Atheist views this wager on a more personal level, consider this matrix:

Belief/Wager God Exists:
God Exists: God does not exist, so this would not be a considered wager.
God Does not Exist: Wasted Personal Life

Belief/Wager GOd Does not Exist:
God Exists: Not a concern; that type of God simply does not exist.
God Does not Exist: Fulfilling Personal Life.

The above is not an argument so much as an illustration of how Atheists tend to think of the manner. It truly comes out looking like this:

Live An Independent Life:
Atheist

Live A Dependent Life:
Theist

(Keep in mind before responding that this is in response to the type of God that would punish [misery] for not believing in it, as proposed in the initial argument by Pascal. Other definitions of God are open to discussion, but not entirely relevant.)

What do you think..?

References:
+ Pascal's Wager. (2004) Stanford University. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

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Makes sense.
Not to mention the big error of Pascal's wager. The fact that you don't consider all the other gods (including the ones that haven't been made up). The atheist and christian can argue about the wager only to die and land in Hades or some other afterlife.

Originally Posted by Bonsay

Makes sense.
Not to mention the big error of Pascal's wager. The fact that you don't consider all the other gods (including the ones that haven't been made up). The atheist and christian can argue about the wager only to die and land in Hades or some other afterlife.

True.

I suppose what is also up for debate is the plausibility for all these Gods. The question that seems to be proposed by these 'wagers' is which one is the safest.

Amazing how we can isolate the most enourmous forms of debate into simple sentences.

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The fact that none of the gods are based on facts (from my point of view), makes all the other ones just as plausable. Is an idea in my head any less real then the ones of millions of others? Not to mention that I very rarely see two people believing the same thing. One christian mastrubates, the other one hates "fags" etc. etc. Even if we only look into one group of christians we should still find differences, if they know it or not. It will be so untill we make telekinesis possible. Only then will we know what the other person realy means/thinks.

(Sorry for talking about christians as an example, everything I said can be attached to everyone.)

Originally Posted by Bonsay

The fact that none of the gods are based on facts (from my point of view), makes all the other ones just as plausable. Is an idea in my head any less real then the ones of millions of others? Not to mention that I very rarely see two people believing the same thing. One christian mastrubates, the other one hates "fags" etc. etc. Even if we only look into one group of christians we should still find differences, if they know it or not. It will be so untill we make telekinesis possible. Only then will we know what the other person realy means/thinks.

(Sorry for talking about christians as an example, everything I said can be attached to everyone.)

Yeah I think plausibility can be gauged in this aspect. Taking human intervention and manipulation into consideration as a noise affect on the plausibility of the Gods probable truth, we could gauge plausibility factors.

It would be analgous to a baseketball shot:
- Are you more likely to get it into the net, not in the net, off the backboard, off the pole, off the ceiling, off the bleachers, off someones head, explode, implode, turn green, etc.

Which are most plausible can easily be gauged in the above, I think the same can relatively be said about Gods. (ie. Zeus, flying spaghetti monster, flying teapot, boogeyman, etc.)

Get what I mean..??
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But who here has the right to say what's plausible or not. We can laugh at the sphagetti monster, but why should we? Is a humanoid god more plausible then a pasta god?

We can talk like that about the basketball aswell. It may seem turning it green is impossible. What if it's the other way around? What if it's impossible to get it into the net and we were just lucky all this time. If we want to be objective we have to do it everywhere. Which makes everything possible. That's the problem... if we want to talk about plausibility we have to be subjective, which shortens our list of gods from "infinite" back to historical religions list. Because nobody want's to have a pot god.

I can't be subjective about that. I believe a pot-god is as plausible as anything else.

Originally Posted by O'nus

- If you believe in a monotheistic God, you believe that everything has been planned out for you, life has been pre-arranged, an entity knows everything about you, etc.
- Essentially, you relinquish personal responsibility - your credibility for all your actions.

Just one thing to point out --

Not all monotheistic religions are like this. I'm not sure about Christianity, but Judaism(Monotheistic) stresses free will. You are responsible for your actions, God cannot compel you to do something.

Seems like a waste of time, since anyone who needs to see this won't read it and probably won't understand even if they did.

Originally Posted by Grod

Just one thing to point out --

Not all monotheistic religions are like this. I'm not sure about Christianity, but Judaism(Monotheistic) stresses free will. You are responsible for your actions, God cannot compel you to do something.

Precisely why I emphasized on responding to that type of God as Pascal's wager functions on that type of deterrant God.

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So essentially the Christian God?

Originally Posted by Grod

So essentially the Christian God?

It would seem to be the one being addressed. However, it applies to any sort of God that would punish those that do not believe in it or follow their doctrines.

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Heh, then basically all of them.