Dismantling Pascal’s Wager

The French scientist, philosopher, and mathematician Blaise Pascal, other than being famous for Pascal’s triangle and being the namesake of the Pascal, the SI unit of pressure, created a quasi-philosophical proof advocating for belief in God. Pascal’s logic was that it was better to believe in God and be proved wrong than to not believe in God and be proved wrong. The proof stated:

If somebody believes in God and is correct, they will be rewarded with eternal paradise upon death.

If somebody believes in God and is wrong, it is inconsequential and they are neither punished nor rewarded upon death.

If somebody does not believe in God and is correct, it is also inconsequential for they are neither punished or rewarded upon death.

If somebody does not believe in God and is wrong, upon death they will be handed a life of eternal punishment and damnation.

Therefore, Pascal concluded, it is best to wager to believe in God rather than not, because if you don’t believe in God, then you have nothing to gain and everything to lose whilst those who do believe in God have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Obviously, this line of thinking isn’t going to sway either the highly religious who already believe in God and the highly non-religious (such as myself) who don’t believe in God, but it could provide a sound argument for belief in God for those on the fence. I hope that I can at least quell that argument, for Pascal’s Wager is wrong on many fronts, and fails to take in quite a few measures, some of which I will discuss. So please, join me in dismantling Pascal’s Wager, one piece at a time!

The Idea You Can Choose Belief

The first logical fallacy that Pascal provides us with is the idea that one can choose to believe something or not based on logic. Using Pascal’s Wager implies that you don’t really believe in God, but are doing so anyway just so you won’t get eternal punishment. Surely the omnipotent God would rather you say that you simply don’t know instead of only half believing in him. If you are truly thinking about whether or not you should believe in God, you can’t simply trick yourself into believing in him. You either do or you don’t, there really isn’t a gray area (I’m looking at you, agnostics. Get off that fence). If the only reason you ‘believe’ in God is because of Pascal’s Wager, than you really don’t believe in God at all and will probably end up with eternal damnation anyway, so why waste the effort? Just get on with your life and worry about punishment for all eternity when you die.

What if God Rewards Disbelief?

If you could choose between being stuck in a box for all eternity with a religious fundamentalist or an atheist, who would you choose? Most would lean towards the latter, simply so that they wouldn’t be bothered by the religious person’s constant praying to God and thanking God and loving God and talking about God all the time. So which one would God choose, then? Unless God is a narcissistic bastard (which he looks like from the Bible, but that’s besides the point), he’d probably choose the latter too, just so he isn’t annoyed by the religious fundamentalist. Remember, God has to hang out with these people for all eternity. The other thing people overlook is that if a God did really create the universe and all the laws inside of it, he is, by any account, primarily a scientist. So what if this is all God’s test to pick the coolest people to hang out with in Heaven? What if that people who believe in God with just pure faith and refuse to look at the facts are punished by God, and those that reject him are rewarded by God for rejecting him because there was no evidence towards his existence? If I was God, I know that’s what I’d do, because I’m sure that it’d be much more interesting in Heaven hanging out with the likes of Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, and Karl Marx rather than Sarah Palin and co.

What About Other Gods?

The third huge factor Pascal fails to take into account in his wager is the fact that there has been more than one God throughout history. So what if, instead of Yahweh being there at the gates of Heaven, it was Thor? Then all the Christians, Muslims, and Jews would be sent straight to hell while only the worshipers of Thor, Odin, Freyja, etc, would be let into Heaven. Or perhaps it was some obscure tribal god worshiped by only 73 people on the face of the Earth? Therefore, it’s better to not worship any god at all rather than waste an enormous amount of time and energy worshiping only one of the thousands of Gods that could in fact exist only to find out that the true God guarding heaven was a different one. As it is now painfully obvious, Pascal’s Wager is a philosophical argument full of enormous holes simply waiting to be poked. The three reasons I gave here are but a few of the myriad of reasons why Pascal’s Wager should not be used as justification for religious belief. Among the reasons why Blaise Pascal should remembered, Pascal’s Wager should not be counted among them.