> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.
But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.
> But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus
Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.
Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.
Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.
Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.
> It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.
I don't think so. It isn't concerned with giving any description or shape to the negative case, just an invitation to consider a particular positive case.
There are positive cases for other gospels and worldviews... there's nothing wrong with invitations to engage with one or another.
As science has shown, the truth is best discerned by considering each theory individually (and continually) against evidence. Not "dark matter sounds cool, I think that's true, not MOND" but rather considering each individually for internal consistency and against observation and predictiveness.
"It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." --Richard Feynman
Sure, you can consider the issue in isolation: If you accept the axiom that there is either no god or the Pauline Christian god, then Pascal's wager makes sense (assuming that that god doesn't care about sincerity, which is certainly not my reading of the gospels, but that's a different issue).
If you want to do a fun thought experiment, you might accept that axiom.
If you genuinely believe that an eternal future of unbearable torture hinges on your choice, you might want to cover your philosophical bases a bit more thoroughly.
That may be true, but embodied human life and history provides a base set of axioms by which to evaluate further axioms -- starting with the 5 senses.
So yeah, Christianity has some axioms, but it doesn't ask people to merely accept them on faith; that's a mischaracterization. The invitation is to consider (a) how good the evidence really is for your current worldview, and then (b) how good is the evidence for Christianity's truth claims.
Pascal goes one further and suggests considering what you have to gain and lose either way -- which may have been helpful for some when the alternative was mere atheism or unbelief in Christianity, but I disagree that it's helpful in all cases. People coming from Islam have a tremendous amount to lose, including their family, community, livelihood, reputation, and the risk of being condemned eternally by Allah for committing shirk in embracing Christianity, if Islam is true.
I think a better question to ask, whatever someone's background, is "do you want to know the truth, even if it turns out you don't believe it now, and are you willing to follow it no matter what the cost?"
> I think a better question to ask, whatever someone's background, is "do you want to know the truth, even if it turns out you don't believe it now, and are you willing to follow it no matter what the cost?"
I don't understand. Is it a rhetorical statement from your part?
How can you know that what you are being told is the truth? If it can be proven, then there is no need to be told or to doubt it. If it can't be proven (or at least observed), then by definition, it is a belief, not a truth.
Also why would you agree to learn the truth if you're not going to believe it?
I'm just hoping to clarify how I think Christian evangelism (or indeed any sharing of a worldview) is best received -- a desire to know and follow the truth, because it's the truth, regardless of consequences.
> If it can't be proven (or at least observed), then by definition, it is a belief, not a truth.
If you believe Socrates and Alexander the Great existed, do you say those are "truths"?
The evidence for those people is, relatively speaking, scant compared to the evidence for Jesus - his recorded words, death, and resurrection.
Historical events aren't something one can "prove" in any scientific or mathematical sense. We believe what we believe about history based on strong consilience in informed observation of artifacts. By design, Christianity supplies just 1 empirical foundation upon which everything else is built: the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
Are you saying the case for Scientology can't fail when considering its internal consistency and correspondence to reality?
I would think its positive case isn't that strong... it's more like an attack chain with an arbitrary payload (including money extraction) for minds with certain vulnerabilities than a coherent set of truth claims (let alone truth claims with at least some evidence in favor).
I'm not sure what you mean by "attested" there, it's doing a lot of work.
Certainly there are specific propositions that someone will or has attested to that a god exists that will punish you for believing in the Christian god.
Sure, if you insist there is more reason to suspect the existence of the Christian god than other gods, then your decision is already made for you; it was not my understanding that Pascal's wager was based on that assumption, but I guess it was implicitly, sure, while explicitly claiming to be based on a clean slate of assumptions. Which makes it even sillier.
Pascal's wager was not at all anchored to any specific attestations, you are taking his wager and reinterpreting it to give it some kind of legitimacy that it never originally held. The entire point of the wager was to justify belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost. If your now arguing that Christianity is more credible because of historical evidence, so be it and stick to it but you've abandoned Pascal's wager and moved on to an entirely different argument.
> by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost
The supposed asymmetry only holds in a framework that assumes the Christian God as the only possibility. The point is that it's possible for there to be a god that isn't Yahweh, and that god might sentence you to eternal torment for believing in Yahweh, so in fact believing in Yahweh can result in infinite cost, destroying the value of the wager.
Not at all. The asymmetry holds whenever the other possibilities don't introduce an opposing infinite penalty for belief. There could be countless other gods who are indifferent to Christian belief, reward it, or impose only finite penalties, and the asymmetry would remain intact.
The hypothetical god who punishes believers of a Christian God is a legitimate objection to Pascal's wager, but it doesn't establish the original assertion I objected to. You're confusing demonstrating that the asymmetry isn't guaranteed with demonstrating that it requires Christianity to be the only possibility. Those are two entirely different claims.
>The asymmetry holds whenever the other possibilities don't introduce an opposing infinite penalty for belief.
Or in a stronger argument. It only works when you're the only possible infinity that exists with the set of possible requirements. The moment another infinity exists that has even a single conflicting requirement then it falls apart.
Using language we can create infinite conflicting infinities which makes Pascals wager a weak argument in a generalized set.
Now, if someone vibe coded up Roko's basalisk into a real entity that was copying humans and torturing them for eternity that's a different story, at least until someone made a second incompatible basalisk.
I agree Pascal's wager is generally weak. But I think the strongest reason it's weak is because people in other worldviews, particularly Islam, have a tremendous amount to lose if they convert to Christianity but it turns out Islam is true.
According to MOND theorists, a dwarf galaxy like DF9 doesn't prove dark matter, since it's sitting in the gravitational field of a big neighboring galaxy (NGC 1052) and thus its boost is suppressed. They call this the "external field effect".
A lack of information density... I felt like I could glean more from the above-the-fold Yahoo.com site in 2001 than any site today.
Note Japan has not embraced the so-called "clean" UI design aesthetic. Check out any Japanese website and it looks like US web sites in 1999, but even more so. I wouldn't mind me some of that.
- reverse-engineered a Mac AppStore menubar ppp (using Ghidra), modernized its UI, and added support for Apple Silicon. It took about 90 minutes running in the background.
- created faithful macOS ports of ~7 classic 68k Macintosh games via 68k disasm tools Claude wrote for itself; most are now written in Swift, with MacToolbox routines reimplemented (one exception: MS Flight Simulator 1.02 worked better as a plain C and SDL2 app, since it has a hand-authored bytecode interpreter in 68k assembly and draws the entire UI itself)
All it takes is a goal with nearly 100% specificity
> a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8
The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]
I think this ought to be the goal with any important (but well-defined & bounded) venture in life: own it so thoroughly that it becomes routine, uninteresting, assumed, and boring.
When it has become boring, it no longer consumes brainspace, freeing you to pursue further goals. It effectively has become part of the platform upon which you implement the specifics of your life.
It's also available for both 68k and PPC architectures. And the PPC version can run 68k software (it internally emulates a 68020)
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