robtex said:
It is the misnomer many believers have about atheists, agnostics and other skeptics. It isn't that the non-theist rebels against God, the idea of his existance or the desire for his existance but is unable to overcome the hurdle of rationales and deductions that precude a higher power's existance. I can't imagine too many people not liking the idea of an all-powerful loving enity in the sky that nutures his creation.
The wager seems to suggest that we abandon reason for desire and that abandonment of one's reality is the penalty for making the wager in pascal's favor. If one believes we have only one life and we live it with the understanding that there is no afterlife and no God or are at least skeptical of a deity's existance there is a diminished or most likely non-exitance importance of graveling, praying in hopes of changing our current reality and doing things in this lifetime to prepare for the next. That is the penatly for betting pascal's way what the measurement ofthat penatly is may be a debate in itself.
The suggestion of the abandoment of reason and critical thought has been a calling card for many religions most notably christianty and the Islamic one. Why that is be a comfort zone for many quite a large population of the world functions natually and optimally with a large dose of both reason and critiical thought and taking that from them in exchange for betting Pascal's way is cost of "doing business" so of speak.
It is not the rejection of God that makes one a skeptic but the hurtles of reason and deductions added to the penatlies of living a life congruent to ideas of a creation of an all mighty being that is not tangent to a skeptics perception of reality.
The concept of bettting or gambling on the existance of a higher power itself is odd even to many non-skeptics. A God that wanted graveling, complete obediance and constant attention in exchange for an eternal afterlife of bliss seems so unlikely to conceal oneself from observation and be completely committed to non-detection.
The wager assumes God wants to be brown-nosed while ignoring the blatent observation of his non-evidencable existance. This can be viewed as a rider on the wager. What I mean is that is pre-supposes that God expects daily graveling/obedience along with belief in him which are really two seperate ideas and most armchair religious philosophers would more adroitly address as two seperate issues.
The suggestion that skeptics reject God comes across as a challange of "I dare you to believe in no God" instead of a presentation of theories as to why there is a God which intellectually comes across as a cope-out from a frusterated theist who lost one too many arguements from skeptics so he devised an analogy as to why it was better believe in lew of his failures at convincing the skeptic there may be a God.
Well, one of the bad things bout Pascal's Wager is that it rests on a bifurcation fallacy. It's assuming there is only A or B, whereas A is GOd exists or B God does not exist. Neither could be true. There aren't only two possibilities.
Like someone mentioned, the Pascal's wager ony works if there is one religion and atheism, not when there are various religious with different interpretations and rules regarding God. You have Christianity, Islam, and the Jewish Faith, as well as myriad equally implausible Pagan polytheistic and non-pagan polytheistic religions. You are religious with an afterlife, but no president God/gods. You have religious with spirituality, but not heaven/hell etc.
Even if you take the Wager and believe in God, you can still lose out becaue y ou have more of a chance that you are just wasting your time following rules you don't want to follow or that you are going to choose the wrong religion or the wrong God. If you do that, you will get punished regardless.
