Its a very Skinnerian view of religious belief isn't it? i.e. as long as a person follows all the correct rituals and observances they are assured of a place in heaven regardless of what their internal 'beliefs' are.

Yes. OTOH, since belief is not a matter of will, if God is good, salvation must be a result of [at most] behavior, not belief.

There is a (Catholic) sin of 'having impure thoughts' and it is generally considered that 'losing faith' leads to leaving the religion. So, from a Catholic theological viewpoint you are required to actually believe. It is true that you cannot 'will yourself to belief' so Pascal better have chosen a religion that only required observance of ritual, not belief (not Catholicism then).

I'll take your money Pascal, and improve your odds on it too. We may trivially generate an infinity of superstitions requiring belief at peril of eternal damnation, your God being only one of them. Since your wisdom isn't godly, and since no superstition relies on empirical evidence, your chances of backing a winner are 1 divided by infinity, which even you should call negligible.

To make a better bet we observe but one belief we can entertain that a reasonable God, or adequate facsimile thereof, could possibly forgive: what each finds in their heart. So that's most likely a winner. If it should turn out that an unreasonable God exists, or none do, then what's in each heart is happenstance, the game is rigged, and all bets are off. --Peter Merel

The historical fact is that there have not been an infinitude of religious systems anything like Christianity. So Pascal refers to something unique, not one of many.
Miles Whitener

You've missed something important, I think. I said, "we may trivially generate", not "there have been". Pascal is talking probability, so that admits all possibilities, including superstitions you and I never heard of and will never hear of.

Look at it this way: suppose Pascal is racing a horse, and he's betting his entire fortune on it winning the race. Is that a wise bet? Surely this depends on what other horses are running. Pascal's bet has assumed there's only two. This is the classical fallacy of bifurcation (http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#bifurcation).

[See also Bifurcation Fallacy]

Pascal's Wager has a definite context. It is _not_ addressing any other religious systems. It is only addressing whether one does, or does not, believe the words of Jesus Christ. BTW neither Pascal nor anyone else [not even ourselves] can cause us to believe. Only God can. -- mbw

In fact we can generate any number of other horses. Just take any untestable belief system - say, Hp Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" or Charles Schultz's "Great Pumpkin" - and combine it with the belief that failing to believe will result in eternal damnation. There's a horse. Now, how many belief systems can be generated this way? I won't hold my breath while you do the math.

You've done this before haven't you Peter ;-) --ta

Who am I to question someone's faith? We each possess one or another kind of faith, and none of us enjoy seeing it poked at. Not sharing Miles' faith, I'm content to agree with him. God is holy and I am a sinner. Perhaps my worst sin is that I don't perceive this as a problem. --Peter Merel

As to Christianity, or whichever particular sect of that group of beliefs one prefers, it remains an object of mystery to me that a god of perfect love and perfect forgiveness is thought to damn billions of otherwise good folk simply because they don't prefer to believe something untestable. I can't think of any reasonable person, much less a god justifying it. I really don't want to get into a thread about the validity of anyones belief, its about as personal thing as you can get. I just wanted to point out that Pascals wager can become more and more 'fine-grained' (to the point of meaninglessness?) if specific sects are taken into account the whole history of Catholicism vs Protestantism is an example (or, for extremes, the scottish 'Wee Frees, Wee Wee Frees and Wee Wee Wee Frees (Yes I am serious)). -- Tom Ayerst

Forget Jesus, forget faith. Peter's point is that Pascal's wager can be applied to any belief system, not just Judaic ones. If I had to choose between believing the Mutant Stargoat could be appeased by sacrificing a twinkie every day or not believing in a Mutant Stargoat, then obviously it would be better to sacrifice a twinkie to prevent the earth from being eaten. You can replace the Stargoat with any unprovable entity X, sacrificing a twinkie with any action Y to appease X, and eating the earth with any horrific consequence Z that may happen if you don't do Y.

If you won't admit to the fallacy, you aren't being rational (unless you can show logically why the fallacy is in turn fallacious). The entire point of this exercise is to find a rational excuse for religion. You can't counter with "faith isn't rational," or "based on my faith..." because that's totally moot--we're looking for a non-faith reason to believe. Pascal's Wager fails to show that religion (particularly the Judaic/western philosophic version of it) is rational, the entire point of the exercise. --

The wager most certainly does not apply to any belief system. It requires a belief system with a positive, non-infinitesimal probability of being true (this is one of Pascal's assumptions). For most of us, this rules out mutant stargoats. For some of us, this evidently rules out the Christian God, as well.

(Let me also note that Pascal gives a positive expression to the wager ("an infinity of an infinitely happy life"), while others give a negative one ("any horrific consequence Z that may happen if you don't do Y"). The two are not the same problem.) -- Tom Kreitzberg

To Summarise:
Pascals assumptions are:

• God is good and will not punish unbelievers, but they effectively exclude themselves from eternal life.
• Faith can be obtained by a rational act of will
• It requires that the non-believer actual believe (in order that the possibility of God to be positive and non-infinitesimal) if only to the extent that the non-believer excludes the existence of non-Christian beliefs more than he does the Christian God.

None of the above should be read as an attack on anyones beliefs, just on this particular argument for them. --Tom Ayerst

If you won't admit to the fallacy, you aren't being rational (unless you can show logically why the fallacy is in turn fallacious). The entire point of this exercise is to find a rational excuse for religion. You can't counter with "faith isn't rational," or "based on my faith..." because that's totally moot--we're looking for a non-faith reason to believe. Pascal's Wager fails to show that religion (particularly the Judaic/western philosophic version of it) is rational, the entire point of the exercise. --

By all means believe what you believe because you have faith in your heart. This is natural and necessary. But if you're going to try arguing from probability, you have to take all the possibilities into account. This is also natural and necessary. --Peter Merel

Pascal's Wager is not posed to someone trying to choose among all possible truths. It is posed to someone trying to choose between belief in the Christian God and belief in no god. I don't think this is a Red Herring; I think it's an assumption that Pascal makes that does not hold for everyone.

If you wanted to extend the wager to someone trying to choose among all possible truths, I think the way to do it is to pose it as an answer to, "Give me one good reason to try to obtain infinite beatitude." Then the assumption becomes that the person grants a positive, non-infinitesimal probability to the proposition, "It is possible to obtain infinite beatitude." This leaves the question of how to obtain infinite beatitude for later, but then so does Pascal's Wager in the original form.

By the way, it makes a difference whether a thing is probable or merely possible. Anything that is merely possilble -- that is, has only an infinitesimal probability of being true -- may be ignored for the purposes of the wager. -- Tom Kreitzberg

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but the above seems a Red Herring to me. Let's do as the two Toms suggest and keep it in Pascal's form: if you believe in Christ, you get eternal happiness; if you don't, you get nothing. Still there are an infinitude of parallel formulations: believe in Krishna/ Buddha/ Allah/ Cthulhu/ Great-Pumpkin/ Anything-But-Christ/ etc and you get eternal happiness; if you don't, you get nothing. The probability of a successful wager remains 1 divided by infinity.

There are not too many religions (I'm not talking about hypothetical ones, but actual ones [BTW injecting hypothetical religions here introduces an infinitude of strawmen -- how handy!]) that say that if you reject them you are going to go to endless torment. There are more that promise eternal, conscious happiness, but certainly not all. If we want to apply Pascal's wager to religions other than Christianity, it seems that we need to restrict the religions to (non-hypothetical) ones claim the same promise (heaven) and threat (hell). -- mbw

I think thats what I was getting at in assumption 3. Pascal and the other Tom (I think) assume that there are not a infinite number of possibilities. Therefore to work the non-believer must accept assumption 3 or the infinite possibilities erupt and the argument collapses. Peter said it at the top .

Having mutually exclusive belief systems isomorphic to Christianity is unnecessary to undermine Pascal's Wager.

Case one: The argument presumes acceptance of the belief system being argued, which is circular reasoning.

Case two: God is not well-defined. To state that something does not exist requires some context that one is stating it doesn't exist in. Let's call our fundamental context "reality". Now, to state that X doesn't exist in some context (such as reality) requires some other context to supply the concept of X. For example, before I can say that lightsabres don't exist (in reality), I have to specify what a lightsabre actually is -- otherwise, my assertion of its nonexistence can't be tested. In this case, the context is Star Wars, where it's readily obvious that lightsabres exist. My point is, if you are considering that God does not exist (or even that God does exist), any statement to that effect is meaningless without a context defining what God actually is.

Once the second problem has been corrected (i.e. God has been defined), the argument for belief in God's existence now depends on a prerequisite argument for accepting a particular concept of God. Before a discriminating thinker can consider Pascal's argument, she must have already accepted the assumptions mentioned above. See Case One. -- Josh Juran

I believe the whole tradition of rationalizing religion is more of an after-the-fact, excusatory exercise rather than a real push to convince new believers. It probably hurt the great philosohpers' minds to be so rational in all other aspects of life, yet so bleeding heart when it came to religion. Moreover, rationally speaking, the assumptions and premises they chose could only have come from an external source (their religions) because they are just plain wacky to choose from a first principles point of view.

Either way, there is no way that rationality can lead to faith because faith is only defined in the absence of reason. The excusers merely wish to remove faith from the equation in a desperate attempt to justify that which can't be justified.

Indeed, Pascal's wager goes a step beyond justification to pure apologetics. He's even admitting that his religion is unjustifiable, so he's sidestpeping the issue by playing "what if."

"Daddy, does God eat?" -- Ashley (today at lunch, 5 y.o.)

"Well, God is Everything, so It is synchronous with all things that are eating. People eat to get power. But the Paternal Aspect of God [what they're teaching you about] IS power, so He does not need to eat." --Daddy

"[The secret message in many religions is that] God eats human souls." --What Daddy's really thinking...

One very significant point that I haven't seen raised here: Pascal's Wager is not an important argument. Pascal thought it was hot stuff, but few others did. Generally speaking, Christians never put much effort into defending it and non-Christians never needed much effort to dismiss it. -- Tom Kreitzberg

Yes. Though I came across it I never even bothered to read it. And that was in spite of considerable regard for Pascal's maths, his devotion and his experience of the Holy Spirit: "Fire, fire, fire" as he described it in his diary.