As one who frequently condemns Pascal’s Wager I was prompted to look this up. I ended up listening to the “classical theism” (Catholic) webcast where they listed the following objections to Pascal’s wager:
- You cannot control your beliefs
- Many gods/religion objection.
- It’s not Christian because it is profit seeking rather than about love.
My response to these objections are
- This idea you cannot control your beliefs is nonsensical and Rota’s solution is just word games. You choose your beliefs for a variety of reasons and the only question is whether this Pascal’s wager provides a good reason or not. To be sure a benefit for believing may not sound like a good reason to you because you are not a pragmatist in matters of belief.
- This certainly does change things because the god and religion changes the benefits. And I see no reason to restrict the choices either. The fact that Buddhism would certainly not condemn atheism just goes to show how the benefits are greatly changed. And classifying Hinduism as not being monotheistic is just plain ignorant.
- No Pascal’s wager is not Christian. But the reason given is a strawman argument.
In any case these are certainly not my objections. My objections are the following:
- The assignment of benefit values are completely subjective and self serving.
- Those particular assignment of benefit values are based on the premise that belief in God is all that God cares about. But the evidence from both the Bible and the world doesn’t support this premise at all. Rota’s version only changes this to Christian religious practices being all that God cares about which is likewise dubious in the light of what the Bible says.
- Pascal’s Wager is the opposite of faith according to Paul in Romans 10. He says that faith doesn’t imagine you can say who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. Faith doesn’t look for rewards and accepts that you are not entitled to any rewards. So expecting rewards nullifies any supposed faith.
- So contrary to the premise of Pascal’s wager I think it is all too possible that these are the results:
God exists, you don’t believe, but doing what is right for its own sake earns the highest rewards.
God exists, but you believe because of Pascal’s wager so get the worst results.
God does not exist and you do believe then you live a stressful life fearing a nonexistent threat.
God does not exist and you don’t believe so you have the peace of mind that death is the end and absolutely nothing to worry about.
So I can assign benefit values (rationally scaling everything to a +/-100 scale): +100,-100,-50,+50 Then your calculation of the expected result assuming equal probabilities is: belief -75 (poor expectation), disbelief +75 (good expectation).
Just demonstrating how subjective are the assignment of benefit values to these possibilities.
As for me, I believe God does exist but don’t expect that belief to earn me anything and instead do what is right for its own sake and have faith that God will do what He can for me and my regard for God is entirely based on who He is and not at all upon some expectation of benefits.