Believing In God: Pascal's Wager

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Pascal’s Wager is not an effective tool in showing that believing in God is the best bet because it overlooks fundamental questions which render the wager redundant.
Famous Mathematician and Philosopher Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 France, where Catholicism was the practiced religion. He himself a devout Catholic, came up with ‘Pascal’s Wager’, a method aimed to show that it is a better bet to believe in God. Pascal saw this as a good argument for believing in God, however objections arose from fellow intellectuals. The wager states that; 
 ‘‘Either God exists, or He does not. To which view shall we incline?Reason cannot decide for us one way or the other… Let us weigh the gain and the loss involved in wagering that God exists. Let us estimate …show more content…

This is because there are too many unknowns about which god is real and how to get infinite rewards. A strongly religious person, like Pascal himself, may argue that it is better to believe in God even if he does not exist in reality. Many religious people hold the idea that God gives life meaning. Does this mean that atheists live meaningless lives? Pascal might argue that the believer is rewarded in this life the gift of purpose. I believe that purpose is not tied to the existence of God and that people can have purpose without religion. He may say “look at the positive effect ‘God’ can have on an individual, whether existent or imagined”. In response I would remind Pascal that religion has also done a lot of harm to people. Consider homosexuals, who’s nature is considered a sin in the Bible, Qur’an and various other religious texts. Surely they lose value of life by believing in God, rather than being able to accept their sexuality without feelings of guilt or self-hatred. The opposing view to Pascal would be that to wager for God is to waste life. Nietzsche calls this ‘life-denying’ and raises an important point that we are wasting the gift of this finite life in an almost greedy pursuit to live forever. Pascal’s wager treats wagering for God as though we lose nothing but in reality religion may cost us our time, money, relationships, jobs, freedom, opportunities and open-mindedness to name a few. Because there is a chance we only have one life, we should not deny ourselves from experiencing

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