|
God is a safe bet.
--Pascal [implied]
"If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost
nothing -- but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be
incorrect, you will go to hell. Therefore it is foolish to be an
atheist."
Pascal was a very intelligent mathematician, he carried an esteemed and respected mind in his time. His single lined statement is so simple, eloquent, and meaningful. If you disagree with Pascal, you will probably be shunned by the people that use Pascal's Wager as one of their key justifications for religion.
If someone so intellectually gifted could think about such a controversial topic, and pull a seemingly flawless single line to summarize his thoughts--why even bother to disagree? It seems he, with all those other religious and scientific men, are correct. Religion is true, and Atheists are the mistaken, faithless ones.
Unfortunately, Pascal's wager does not tell us which religion to follow. We could follow one religion, and wind up in another "correct" religion's Hell. This is the "avoiding the wrong Hell" problem.
If you did believe in God and truly were incorrect, then you have lost nothing, according to Pascal. This is rather untrue, because if you believed in the wrong God, the real God may punish you for your foolishness. And do not forget the deaths we have seen, of people who have died because they favored prayer over medicine. Then there are the deaths caused by Crusades fought in the medieval times we must account for. The Holy Wars whose ultimate goal was a mass genocide of competing races, when "Thou shalt not kill" wouldn't apply for such causes. Then we have our present day religion fighters like Hitler who killed Jews to defend Christianity. And can we forget the numerous splits the Christian church has undergone so it could meet people's own desires? Of course not, recall the Church of England which was formed because the gonorrhea-infected King wanted a divorce he couldn't have.
If the possibility of there being a God is close to zero, the argument seems suddenly so much less persuasive. This argument, for that reason, will only convince those who already believe into believing even harder.
The intellectually honest people see, understand, and then believe. Belief for them is based upon evidence, with some amount of intuition1. They do not choose because of will, or cost-benefit analysis. Therefore, those who take the wager and believe, are in the pool for the wrong reason. They want to go to "heaven", and secure their pleasant afterlife by mumbling prayers and reluctantly giving charities; not because they truly believe. What is the assumption Theists have about the afterlife of people who go
1 Intuition which can be tested either through sensible rationalization or deep scientific study based on fact.
(Continued on next page)
|
|
