Pascal wager5/9/2023 Any religion that can do that can be argued for using the wager. No single religion can say that only they ever had an idea of a God who rewards with infinity in heaven and punishes with infinite suffering. It can be equally well used to argue for Islam. The first thing that might be said – and I think this seems fairly obvious to all – is that we might wonder why is the wager used exactly to argue for a Christian God? It gives us no reason to do so, except for the presupposition of Christianity. The argument doesn't suffer as much as some atheists thought and when properly understood it does not look useless. He instead suggests that you take steps to ensure you'll gradually acquire belief – to take the holy water, go to mass, hang out with religious people etc. So, Pascal does not say that you try to deceive God or to simply to decide to believe and you'll believe. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 Apr. " Pascal's wager." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Pensées Section III note 233, Translation by W. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.“ Follow the way by which they began by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. „Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. Pascal does not say – „it's better for me to believe in God, so I choose to believe in God.“ Instead, he says: Those criticisms seem correct but they are irrelevant to the wager. People go on to say that we cannot simply tell to ourselves – „from tomorrow I believe in God“ - against all of our beliefs we held so far. Next thing that is often misunderstood about the argument is that Pascal tells us what to believe, that we can simply choose our own beliefs. He argues that the belief should be your goal. But Pascal doesn't argue that we pretend. To be honest, I have seen the Wager misrepresented or misunderstood by some atheists who argue that God would see through that you're pretending to believe. Therefore the rational choice is to believe. And if you do not believe and you're right, you have only gained some finite resources like free time so your potential gains are smaller if you're right but if you're wrong you will suffer eternal torment. So, the argument goes to say that clearly, it is better to believe because if you're right you will enjoy eternal happiness and if you're wrong you might have suffered some minor inconvenience by having to go to church or the like. We stand to gain everything or lose everything. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is Yes but you must wager. „If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. He also states that this is not something we can know, so we must wager. The base of the wager is that we don't know whether God exists or not. The argument (wager) says that our goal should be to believe God exists because if we believe we can gain infinite rewards – an eternity in heaven and avoid infinite losses – an eternity in hell. Pascal's wager is an argument by Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher. We'll come back to these in a future post so stay tuned. There are certainly deeper interpretations and of Pascal's argument and there are also objections to them. It represents a superficial introduction to the argument and basic objections one might provide. Please note that, as with other similar introductory posts, like about Anselm's ontological argument, introduction to a cosmological argument or teleological argument, this post is not the alpha and omega of everything. In essence, the average person's version of the argument says that we should believe, just in case there is a God. Continuing with the introductions to the arguments for the existence of God, we'll now look at one of the most common arguments for God – the basic idea that the possibility of eternal bliss of paradise as a reward for belief or the possibility of terrors that can result as a consequence of non-belief are good reasons to believe.
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