Well, I'm simply trying to bring up the same logical question that I mentioned earlier.
I want to know why the Wager is allowed to count Christianity and not every other religion. If it claims to use logic, then shouldn't there be a reason for that?
And I use the hamburger example because I want to know WHY it's wrong. (and keep in mind that I'm questioning the pure logic of Pascal's Wager here, not necessarily Christianity itself.)
The only answer I can guess is that the stories of Christianity are far more popular than the stories of a single person. But of course, popularity doesn't make things correct. But of course, you could say that it could make one unprovable thing more likely to be correct than another. But if that's the case, why are you a Christian and not a Hindu?
You're now making me have the whole conversation with myself, but hopefully you can see how I'm trying to break the thing down...
(and I know we already had this exchange which is why I was directing it at Iacchus)
How is the word of a person on the phone in the middle of the night different than the word of the person who introduced you to Christianity? Or the word of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? Why is one more valid than the other?
In terms of pure logic, I agree the wager falls apart, but on face value, it's only the wager that God exists. In actual terms, because Pascal was a man of his time and place, he assumes that this must require that he adhere to the Catholic faith, which includes, of course a proviso that not believing in God is a grievous sin indeed. This is an obvious flaw in the wager, which makes it, to my mind at least, a foregone conclusion. The dice are loaded.
However, I still think your example fails. If you take the wager on its face value and say "belief in god," it entails no further faith and does not require him to believe in you. It assumes that any belief in any God is a better bet than atheism and stops there. All other bets must be made on their own odds. IN this situation, popularity might well be a significant factor. It certainly is in some things. Is your disbelief in flying saucers based only on scientific evidence, or is it not, at some level, also based on an assessment of
who sees them and who doesn't?
If you take the wager at its obvious meaning for Pascal, as I believe he makes pretty explicit, that it means accepting the authority and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, then with that package, he gets some benefits. The acceptance of authority, a hugely important aspect of most faiths, and especially of the Catholic one, puts the burden elsewhere. The Church gives you some rules on what you must believe and what you may doubt, and a whole slew of official procedures and authoritarian processes by which claims like your hypothetical one could be tested, including the very simple one of asking his priest, in his capacity as an agent of that supreme authority, what he thinks and accepting the priest's authority when he says you're full of BS. He's off the hook. The people who run this operation are not total fools, however odd you may think their doctrines. They must realize that the open trust and faith that they require of their followers runs the risk of credulity about other things as well, and as a result they are quick to assert their authority and to provide safeguards against what they claim as false beliefs, imposture, heresy, etc. Faith, at least of the sort we're talking about here, is not universal and open-ended. I repeat, to be a Christian you need not become a zombie.
