Should you believe there’s a God?
Should you believe there’s a God? Confused ? But there is no confusion on the stake that all of you must be having divergent perspective on this !! So, lets add one more interesting theory of Pascal’s wager about believing in God to your mental framework and see what happens.
Pascal’s Wager: A Pragmatic Argument on Should you believe there’s a God?
Pascal’s wager is a philosophical argument presented by the seventeenth-century French Philosopher, Mathematician & Physicist Blaise Pascal ( Wikipedia :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal ).
The basic form of the wager goes like this:
If God exists and I believe in God, I’ll go to heaven, which is infinitely good. If God exists and I don’t believe in God, I may go to hell, which is infinitely bad. If God does not exist, then whether I believe in God or not, whatever I’d gain or lose would be finite. So, I should believe in God.
Blaise Pascal
This decision matrix illustrates the argument:
Pascal’s Wager Argument :
So the argument on whether should you believe there’s a God? goes like this
- If God is real, and you bet that God is real and choose to believe in him, then you will be saved.
- II God is real, and you bet that God is imaginary and choose not to believe in him, then you’ll be damned.
- If God is imaginary, and you bet that God is real and choose to believe in him, then nothing will happen: you will be neither saved nor damned.
- If God is imaginary, and you bet that God is imaginary and choose not to believe in him, then nothing will happen: you will be neither saved nor damned.
This article gives a longer explanation of what Pascal actually said and some problems with his arguments.
Pascal’s Wager (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Pascal’s Wager differs from these approaches. Instead of focusing on whether it is true or false that God exists, the wager concerns whether belief in God is beneficial, or pragmatic, for the believer. Thus, the Wager is called a “pragmatic” argument, in contrast to what might be called an “evidential” argument.
Unlike traditional Religious arguments, Pascal’s Wager does not attempt to assert the Certainty of a creator’s existence. But instead, considers both Existence or Non-Existence of the Creator as having equally weighted probabilities.
Final Takeaways
The wager is unique because it leads us to consider many kinds of reasons for belief, including evidence, arguments, risks, and rewards. More specifically, even if the arguments that God exists aren’t successful, it’s interesting to consider whether we’d have a reason to believe in God anyway. However to many, Pascal’s Wager is not even an argument for believing in God; it’s a confidence game rather. It exploits the natural weakness in human reasoning for evaluating risk. The wager proposes that if you believe in God you stand to gain everything if you’re right and lose nothing if you are wrong.
Read More : Delayed Gratification & The Marshmallow Experiment ( https://thebrightdelights.com/delayed-gratification-the-marshmallow-experiment/)