Question

What is the fallacy inherent in Pascal's Wager?

Answer 1

there are like 10 fallacies, which do you want?

Answer 2

list all of them :-D

Answer 3

so I can pick them up and write about them.

Answer 4

my favorite is that it assumes there is only one religion to choose from, which clearly is false.

it also assumes, for example, that if god exists and heaven exists, god rewards blind faith that has been given only for the selfish reason of trying to get into heaven.

Answer 5

Seems Pascal was only good for his calculator, triangle, and programming language. Was he a good philosopher too?

Answer 6

he's arguing that your only choices are to "believe", and he implicitly means believe in christianity, or "not believe", which leaves aside the possibility that they're both wrong and the only way into heaven is, I don't know, zoroastrianism or islam or some religion on another planet we've never heard of

Answer 7

I only thought of that first fallacy: "that it assumes there is only one religion to choose from, which clearly is false.". Gonna present that as the big argument

Answer 8

the wikipedia page of pascal's wager has a list of other fallacies

Answer 9

it must be really hard to be a teacher for any essay class today when students just rip stuff off the web all the time. at least when i was in school you had to go find a paper encyclopedia and copy manually, and most kids were too lazy to do that. it was easier to do the work.

Answer 10

Google is the world's librarian :-D

Answer 11

hmm but I think nearly all religion have the hell and heaven concept

Answer 12

ok, so which one should you believe? most of them have mutually incompatible requirements for getting into heaven. i will leave aside for a moment not one of them has good evidence for being true.

Answer 13

also, not all religions have heaven and hell. judaism, for example, speaks only vaguely about "the world to come". mormonism doesn't have a hell, but just three levels of heaven, the lowest of which is supposedly way better than earth.

Answer 14

therefore, Mormonism is the most pragmatic religion :-D

Answer 15

nah, i just invented a religion 5 minutes ago that says everyone gets into the billionth level of heaven, which is the highest. that is the most pragmatic religion.

Answer 16

also free hot dogs

Answer 17

hmm right. the church of 'do whatever the f*** you want' I would definitely subscribe to.

Answer 18

Lol

Answer 19

It's possible that an existing God would send you to hell for believing the wrong thing, but is cool with you believing they don't exist, or believing nothing at all.

It also assumes that God is good, and that we actually want to go to heaven to be with Him. It's possible that he's malevolent (if you've read much of the Old Testament, it wouldn't take much convincing :P), and that we're better off away from him.

Answer 20

Is there anything good about Pascal's Wager?

Answer 21

It's a good wager if he's right I suppose.