There is a famous gamble made by a man named Blaise Pascal. Essentially, his wager is there is no harm in believing in God. If you are wrong and God is not real-oh well. You lived a righteous life. If you are right and He is real, you made a great choice. If you are right and God isn't real then you lived a life of no morals doing whatever you want. However if you are wrong and He is real, then you are spending an eternity in a torture, fiery place called Hell. By my calculations this bet is 100% fail-safe. Why aren't more people believing it? It could be a bunch of factors such as having to live a life with morals or it could be they are counting on their own wager: The Atheistic Wager.
The Atheistic Wager is a belief that there is no point in believing in God. Live however you want. If God is real, then he is also benevolent and accept everyone into heaven. This sounds real appetizing and an "answer" to atheistic prayer giving them a reason not to believe. However, this has one very serious flaw to it.
By using the Atheistic Wager, Atheists (and non-believers to I suppose) can ignore God till they die. Thats when they assume they will be sent to heaven. However, the entire time they were living, God has been true meaning the Bible and everything inside of it is true to. Ultimately, their wager is forced to accept God as a very real Creator in order to hold any water. If they must accept Christianity is true then must accept what is written about life after death. That quite frankly says that the road to heaven is very narrow and the ONLY way to Heaven is through Jesus Christ as your savior. The Atheists ignored this part largely due to their ignorance and will find themselves in hell as they are only willing to accept some of Christianity in their wager.
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7 comments:
Blaise Pascal was an incredibly bad statician and that's why it seems like the argument makes sense. Being an Applied Mathematics major I can tell you with certainty that the math is quite faulty. In any gamble of probability you need data that correlates to the defined criteria you wish to observe.
What Pascal did was look at only two sets of Data, God vs. No-God. A good mathematician would look at ALL the god's ever concieved by the minds of humanity. So for the "wager" to be truly effective as a model to believe in your particular God, you must accept into your data all the gods of Egypt, Sumer, Hinduism, etc. As you can see the wager for your particular brand of deity becomes very small and the chances of it descend rapidly.
As a popular saying in the Atheist camp goes, "your practically just as much an atheist as me, I just believe in one less god."
Pascal didn't need to wager every single God out there. He wasn't necessarily giving the option of only the Christian God. He was making an argument of the absurdity to not believe in a higher being (God) because of how much you could lose if you lost the bet and how little you lose believing and following a God
That's not how the bet/wager works. Because if you follow Jesus and the real afterlife is ruled by Kali, then you have the same LOSS. Believing in Jesus doesn't help you get through to Ra or any other deity, thus you MUST consider the other deities.
Again, you do not fully understand the scope of the argument and neither did Pascal.
Again, it is the absurdity of not believing in a God. Who you chose to believe in relies on the individual and what they find most believable. I don't believe Pascal was intending to give a detailed bet with every God in mind, but when you had your choice.
I know that wasn't his intention, because he's NOT a good statician, as I've already pointed out. If you insist on using the argument incorrectly prepare for atheists to mock you. I was just trying to help by showing you why his argument makes no sense.
That's nice, but in your post you say it is 100% fail safe. What ISoS is trying to tell you is that it is not. You can lose and go to a hell if you place your bet on the wrong god.
Furthermore, I would like to point out to you that not many atheists believe in an afterlife. I don't assume I go to heaven after I die, because I believe my complete life ends at the moment of death.
Your post reminded me of something Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:14-20 (and 20 is key here). I guess it's basically what makes the difference between believing in the God of the Bible and Jesus his Christ and any other possible god, whether in another particular religion or just something that rules and guides the way you live your life. I know ISoS and Waldheri probably take "god" to mean something more literal (like the ones they were listing off) but I think we might as well look at a god as anything to which we wholly surrender ourselves, whether that is our own moral judgements or scientific fact or another person we love, etc. Air-Ek it seems like you are lumping all such "gods" together and setting the God that we know through the Bible apart from that. Your thoughts on this? I feel like I'm getting really off topic, though, so I'm going to stop here.
One other thing, though, before I go, when reading through these comments I also thought of 1 Corinthians 1:18, "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." At first I thought, I won't put that in there, that would probably offend those guys, to say that I think I'm living and they're dying. But Waldheri seems perfectly content with just dying, so that has taken on new meaning for me. Curious.
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