Thanks for this post… I’m sorry that Christians are so stupid.

My tax dollars are going to pay for this shit? Even if it’s only a penny of my measley tax obligation, I am outraged. This must be stopped now.

Killing Muslims in the name of Christ? Jesus would be rolling over in his grave (if he had one, that is). Why doesn’t he stop this shit done in his name? Is he powerless? Oh, nevermind.

Pascal originally thought of conversion through the wager argument as having two parts. In the first part, he convinced you that there was a good reason to believe that God existed, or that Christianity was good to believe. His argument had nothing to do with trying to show that Christianity corresponded with reality, but just that it was a good bet. This is odd, because normally when someone convinces you that there is good reason to believe a proposition it is because someone convinces you that the proposition, in some sense, corresponds to reality or best explains some data (or something like that). And if someone convinces you that some proposition corresponds to reality, then you really can’t help but believe it. However, since Pascal didn’t try to prove that belief in God was a rational belief by showing that belief in God corresponded to reality, he had a problem: he showed that there was good reason to believe something but gave no way of showing how to actually come to believe it.

The next step of the argument (which is really brief in the original essay) suggests that you start going to church and that through some miracle the sacraments will help you believe in God. One reading of this is that you can, in a sense, force yourself to believe in something by associating with the right people and behaving in the right way. That’s a strong empirical claim, but I have never seen definitive proof that it’s false.

So, in an important sense, Pascal’s wager is really a bet. The person accepting the argument sees the belief as rational and then places his bet by jumping “off the deep end” and going to church and becoming immersed in Christian culture with the goal of brainwashing himself. There’s really something to bet in Pascal’s wager: your life (or your sanity). The person accepting Pascal’s wager never chooses to believe in Christianity, but chooses to immerse himself in Christian culture with the goal of forcing himself to believe. The first step in Pascal’s argument isn’t just to get you to pretend to believe; it’s supposed to get you into church.

The text of Pascal’s wager supports that reading of the argument. Whether you can really force yourself to believe in God by “jumping off the deep end” (and into church) in that way is an empirical issue, I guess. So, in the end I prefer to respond to the argument at the first step instead of the second. Pascal never shows a good reason to believe in Christianity, so there is no need to get into a discussion of whether you should try to believe in Christianity (or whether you should start going to church).

Perhaps a better approach would be to attack the dimensions of the boat itself, as well as the materials used to make it. They could still cry “magic!” if they wanted to, but it’s a bit sillier saying that the boat was a specific size but somehow still fit all the millions of animals onto it (did “God” shrink them down to pocket size?). I mean, if that’s the case, when why build a large ship at all? They could have used a raft if the animals were going to be magically shrunk, or if size wasn’t an issue.

The best one can do when following Pascal’s advice is to PRETEND to believe (going through the motions of ritual and admission); and if an omniscient god existed, it would see right through that farce.

I think there are hidden assumptions like that in a lot of arguments for the existence of God. Take the example of the teleological argument: things are designed so there is some kind of designer. That doesn’t even show that the designer is still alive.

P.S. I think “factoid” was a fine word choice.