Pascals Wager

[tonyrey]

As most religions are more concerned with how you live your life rather than what you believe (unless God is a Protestant!) so it would make more sense to be agnostic and act like there is a God rather than just having ingenuine belief in a God as some kind of hell insurance.

Pascal was no fool! He didn’t believe faith is just a matter of belief. How we behave reflects to a great extent what we really believe. He is not asking any one to be insincere but to suspend their scepticism and live as if the teaching of Jesus is true: to pray and abandon their vices - which are the main obstacle to faith!

 

[razredge]

Pascal was no fool! He didn’t believe faith is just a matter of belief. How we behave reflects to a great extent what we really believe. He is not asking any one to be insincere but to suspend their scepticism and live as if the teaching of Jesus is true: to pray and abandon their vices - which are the main obstacle to faith!

Oh yes, sorry I didn’t realise - of course it wouldn’t just be ‘sola fide’ if it was Pascal - the atheists usually object to Pascal’s Wager as it suggests that insincere blind faith is rewarded over a moral life without faith so I was thinking the Wager was posed in those terms.

But if the terms of the wager are to suspend skepticism, seek the truth and live a moral life then it is the same as I was suggesting before.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

**Many atheists argue that if Pascal’s Wager is correct then God values blind belief in a deity without any real reason to do so besides avoiding going to hell **

Pascal’s argument is no different than the position every atheist finds himself in as he nears death. Has he blown it by refusing to acknowledge and engage with God? Jean Paul Sartre and Antony Flew, two of the most famous atheists of the 20th century, as death approached found themselves nearer to God than they ever had been before.

In peril of losing God forever, they began to engage with Him.

This is Pascal’s approach to all atheists. Live as though you had eight hour left to live. The mind gets wonderfully focused on what really matters in that condition. Instead of thinking you can get along just fine without God, you begin to think just the opposite. If there is a God and He wants a relationship with me and I have refused His advances into my heart … how ungrateful I have been … and what reward can I expect for such arrogance?

Better to live* as if *there is a God, learn gradually that indeed He exists and loves me and is worthy of my love … that way lies my own best interest … which is also God’s own interest … that I be with Him rather than without Him.

 

[tonyrey]

Oh yes, sorry I didn’t realise - of course it wouldn’t just be ‘sola fide’ if it was Pascal - the atheists usually object to Pascal’s Wager as it suggests that insincere blind faith is rewarded over a moral life without faith so I was thinking the Wager was posed in those terms.

But if the terms of the wager are to suspend skepticism, seek the truth and live a moral life then it is the same as I was suggesting before.

A man of Pascal’s integrity would hardly be so cynical as to advocate deceit or self-deceit for any purpose! He has been unjustly denigrated by those who distort his argument and fail to realise it is an attack on the futility of immorality as well as the sterility of scepticism…

 

[Charlemagne_II]

The central problem of the atheist is not prove or disprove the existence of God, but for the atheist to find out why he is fleeing from God. Nothing is more obvious in all the atheist literature than the fact that atheists want nothing to do with God. That seems to me a condition that the atheist would do well to examine in himself.

If one can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, why dedicate one’s self so adamantly to opposing God?

Freud argued that religion is a neurosis. But why isn’t atheism a neurosis? Because Freud was an atheist?