Does Pascal's Wager make sense?

[cathgal]

The way I see it, once an atheist make a leap to believing there is God, he is on a journey to seeking God. As long as he continues to seek God, he will find a way to salvation. Pascal’s wager is just that, believe or not to believe. But a person has to take a first leap before things will fall into places about God.

 

[Vaclav]

I understand your position. But if initial fear gets one thinking about God and then one begins to witness His love and Truth, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I thinks that is fair, after all, who are we to question how anyone arrives to God?

Fear, curiosity, and bewilderment about what comes after death is part of human nature I think. But, what you did not do (I’m guessing) is very analytically weigh your options and then decide to become a believer in order to gain eternal reward as if you were purchasing a new car.

That is the folly of Pascal’s Wager in my opinion, to reduce faith into an equation is to reduce Christianity to a cynical transaction.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

In the end, it’s better to have believed in God and be wrong than to not have believed in God and be right.

That kind of salvation STM quite hideously ego-centric - God is not a mechanism for avoiding damnation.​

Besides, there is nothing unjust in being damned - if anything, it’s one thing to which we have a right. There is no right to salvation; which is one of the reasons we can’t earn it.

The problem - or one of the problems - with the wager, is that it puts man at the centre of everything; which is entirely wrong. God - never ever sinful, unholy, disobedient, ungrateful, wretched man - is the Centre of all things. All things exist for, from, by Christ; He is “the heir of the ages” - not man.

If anyone enters Heaven it is because God has chosen them - they don’t barge in like gate-crashers at a party.This wager is fundamentally atheistic:

• it treats God as something to manipulate for our purposes
• it puts man at the centre instead of God
• it implies disbelief in God’s Providence
• it assumes that God has not elected for Himself who shall be His
• it seems to imply that we have to rely on our own efforts, & not on God’s grace & mercy

• so it is objectionable Biblically & well as doctrinally

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Additional Note - what several OPs have said or suggested or hinted, is that the wager is a fundamentally irreligious approach to a religious problem.

It’s prudential in its approach; it “plays safe”, as though God could be bamboozled into being used by man: but Christ sent his Apostles out, to be like lambs in the midst of wolves.

Hebrews 11 sums up what is wrong with the wager’s spirit:

• Hbr 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
• Hbr 11:2 For by it the men of old received divine approval.
• Hbr 11:3 By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.
• Hbr 11:4 By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he received approval as righteous, God bearing witness by accepting his gifts; he died, but through his faith he is still speaking.
• Hbr 11:5 By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death; and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was attested as having pleased God.
• Hbr 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
  Faith comes before certainty & safety - not afterwards. If an unbeliever’s hands are still full of old certainties, he won’t be able to open his hands & heart to receive the God Who alone is the certainty behind all certainties. The wager fobs off unbelievers with the lesser, passing certainties of knowledge, by making the life of faith (which is inherently dangerous) impossible; which means that the dangerous life of love (which brought God Himself to the Cross) becomes impossible. So it’s an argument that empties the Cross of Christ of all its saving power - because it encourages “safety first”, not “the Will of My Father in Heaven first”. Carrying the Cross is dangerous - but it is the command of Christ to us all, if we wish to follow Him.

The OP who said it led to a weak Christianity was spot-on

 

[Steadfast_love]

Actually, this shows a rather basic lack of knowledge in theoretical statistics… Infinity is not a number that you can take a probability of - it’s a construct for a limit that no number can be greater than. This precludes any form of basic multiplication/division, or taking of probabilities based upon it - why is why as a mathmatical construct all of Pascal’s wager is stated in infinites, infinitesimals, and absolutes.

Probability ranges from 0 to 1 and value ranges from negative to positive infinity. Their product is an expected value.

As an example of 1% of infinity, there are an infinite number of decimals on the interval [0,1] and also on the interval [0,100] yet the interval [0,1] is exactly 1% of the interval [0,100] and both contain an infinite number of decimals. (There are tricky problems with infinity, but this isn’t one of them. )

If the probability of a believer going to Heaven is not 100% and vice versa… Your system has entered an indeterminate state (google for Lewis Caroll’s Obtuse Problem for a good treatment of issues…)

Indeterminate? I don’t see why. We can solve Pascals Wager for any given set of odds for believers and disbelievers entering heaven. You should believe if God prefers believers, disbelieve if God prefers disbelievers and take your pick if he prefers them equally as I mentioned previously.

My conclusion is that Pascal’s Wager is not valid mathematically, but it does present a good argument for consideration of God, which from what I’m reading here now, seems to be what Pascal might have intended?

There’s nothing wrong with his math but some people make claims beyond what he intended. Historically his wager condemned hypocrites who appealed to a tiny sliver of doubt to excuse them from their Christian duty while still feeling good about themselves because they were believers “for the most part.” That his wager fails when misapplied to non-hypocrites does not abrogate it’s proper use.