{"id":171,"date":"2021-02-20T23:52:38","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T05:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/?p=171"},"modified":"2025-10-04T08:28:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T14:28:17","slug":"responding-to-pascals-wager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/2021\/02\/20\/responding-to-pascals-wager\/","title":{"rendered":"Responding to Pascal\u2019s Wager"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Put simply, Pascal\u2019s Wager states that it\u2019s best to believe in God, because if he\u2019s not real, nothing happens when you die, but if he is, you have everything to gain or lose by believing or not believing.\u00a0 It\u2019s an argument Christians sometimes advance in favor of their beliefs, and as a discussion-loving Atheist who is part of Christian circles, I\u2019ve encountered it several times.\u00a0 It has a few issues though, which I\u2019ll explain here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Go to Responding to Pascal’s Wager<\/a> to keep reading!<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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Issue #1: Christianity isn\u2019t the only religion with an afterlife.<\/strong>
What if Allah is real?\u00a0 What if Zeus and the other ancient gods are real and we just don\u2019t know it because no one has followed them in ages?\u00a0 What about the Flying Spaghetti Monster?\u00a0 If Christianity were the only religion in the world, this argument might make a little more sense, but it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 On the one hand, if the goal is to minimize risk, logically you should convert to the God(s)\/religion in which you\u2019re most likely to go to Hell should it be true and you weren\u2019t a believer.\u00a0 You should pick the most violent and jealous God, which may or may not be Christianity (unless you look at the Old Testament by itself\u2026).\u00a0 On the other hand, if \u201cjust in case\u201d is a good enough reason, I could follow any<\/em> religion and\/or god whose standards are relevant to me, whether or not said standards involve avoiding Hell.\u00a0 By your own values, several different religions are all acceptable choices, and so you\u2019ve forfeited the right to evangelize for yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Issue #2: Fire insurance isn\u2019t the same as real faith.<\/strong>
I was a Christian for 16 years, so be warned that this paragraph contains Christianese.
Assuming for a moment that the Christian God does get special priority in the wager: does that kind of faith actually make you a real Christian?\u00a0 Is half-heartedly thinking that God is real, ticking the \u201cChristian\u201d box on surveys, and going through some of the motions \u201cbecause it\u2019s best to assume he\u2019s real\u201d the same as being a true, devoted believer who strives with all their\u00a0 heart to follow God\u2019s commands and maintain a close relationship with Jesus?\u00a0 I spent years going to church, and have read the Bible from cover to cover.\u00a0 I\u2019m fairly certain a halfway kind of \u201cfire insurance\u201d faith, where you aren\u2019t really confident God is real but assume he might be in order to save your butt from landing in Hell, isn\u2019t what God wants if he\u2019s actually real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Issue #3: Deciding whether God is real isn\u2019t the same as flipping a coin.<\/strong>
The wager implies that whether or not God is real is a question of chance, and you have about a 50\/50 chance of being right or wrong.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not luck.\u00a0 We can verify whether there\u2019s an archeological or historical record for Biblical events (the Romans were good record-keepers).\u00a0 We have logic and reasoning.\u00a0 We can look at the Bible itself and notice if it has contradictions.\u00a0 The scales aren\u2019t up to chance at all – they have evidence and logic tipping them one direction or another.\u00a0 Different people would give different numbers, but just as an example, let\u2019s say it\u2019s a\u00a0 90\/10 chance.\u00a0 That takes a lot of the risk out of not believing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Issue #4: Humanity has a lot to lose, too.<\/strong>
Disregarding the other arguments, you might think \u201cWell I haven\u2019t lost<\/em> anything at any rate.\u00a0 I was a good person because of it, and if I was wrong, nothing bad came of it.\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately, this is not the case.\u00a0 First of all, you don\u2019t need to be a Christian, or religious in any way, to live morally.\u00a0 There are plenty of kind, generous, good Atheists out there.\u00a0 Rules like \u201cdon\u2019t murder people\u201d and \u201cdon\u2019t cheat on your partner\u201d are just logical because they make life work better for us as social creatures.\u00a0 Second, religion does in fact have a cost.\u00a0 However, this section turned out to be about as long as the whole rest of the post so far, so I\u2019ve made a separate post laying out the downsides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion (i.e. another header to clarify that the above point is done)<\/strong>
Hopefully this gives you something to think on, especially if Pascal’s Wager comes up in your conversations.\u00a0 Feel free to drop a comment with your thoughts (whether you agree or disagree), and tune in next time to get part 2 about what I think are the downsides of religion!<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Put simply, Pascal\u2019s Wager states that it\u2019s best to believe in God, because if he\u2019s not real, nothing happens when you die, but if he is, you have everything to gain or lose by believing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":172,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[16,17,15,14],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thinking","tag-atheism","tag-christianity","tag-pascals-wager","tag-religion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}