Blaise Pascal was a 17th century French philosopher who was famous for proclaiming in Pascals Wager that proof of Gods existence was not needed when deciding to believe or not to believe in God. Pascal, however, does not provide a rational basis for believing in God. Pascal’s reasoning necessitates some understanding of God, constricts the available decisions into two choices and incorrectly presumes the cost of the wager. Pascal’s argument is not valid.
Pascals Wager in its basic form is an argument stipulating that the reward for believing in God is so great compared to its cost that not believing would be foolish. Pascal has no first-hand account of God and gains his understanding from the Bible. Pascal has been heavily influenced by
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This tribe would have zero contact with the outside world and lack any knowledge of the Christian God. It would be impossible for these people to take part in Pascals Wager because they would have no knowledge of it. These people would be unable to choose disbelief or belief. It’s not possible to categorize these people as non-believers because non-belief necessitates knowledge of an option. Further assume that this culture has the same moral beliefs as Christians but came to follow these morals by way of their own rule and not divine intervention. These people according to Pascal would be doomed to an infinite hell as …show more content…
Pascal has incorrectly assumed that there will be no loss with a possible gain in his wager. The win that Pascal speaks of is the infinite win of bliss according to the Christian tradition. The loss that Pascal speaks of is believing in God and adhering to Christian teachings only for there to be no afterlife. The claim that there is no loss in this wager is false because there is a loss of time, energy, resources, and freedom. Most Christian sects require significant sacrifices of time, participation in rituals, worship, monetary contributions, sexual restrictions and could require disowning loved ones for religious blasphemy. Here the price begins to be seen. You may be demanded to live a life that you don’t want to live and if that life has been altered to please a nonexistent God it could be considered wasted. If people only have one life to live than even one second in a finite existence is immeasurably important and one second wasted is infinitely
Then he goes on to conclude by saying that, “The lessons learned from observing people and their beliefs support the position that I have defended: rational people may rationally believe in God without evidence or argument” (Feinberg 142). In schools today, students grow up listening to lectures that are subjective and then later are tested on what the teacher thinks and believes. Whether or not the taught perspective is factual or not, it teaches students from a young age to just take what the teachers, adults, and any authority says as truth, as a way to respecting authority. In the same way that it is reasonable to believe respectable authority, it is rational to have belief in God without specific evidence because we are created with the inclination that a higher being exists and God has shown Himself to be true to every generation. Furthermore, God has placed in every human the inkling to believe what is right or wrong, so when it comes to deciding whether to act a certain way, we can rely on our gut feeling if it is a good action or not. It is a very common and suggested thing to trust one's gut feeling when making a decision, even though it does not require any evidence to see if it is actually the right decision to
It is crucial that every belief must be thoroughly explored and justified to avoid any future repercussions. Clifford provides two examples in which, regardless of the outcome, the party that creates a belief without comprehensive justification ends up at fault. It is possible to apply the situations in The Ethics of Belief to any cases of belief and end up with the conclusion that justification is of utmost importance. Justifying beliefs is so important because even the smallest beliefs affect others in the community, add to the global belief system, and alter the believer moral compass in future decisions.
Thesis: Pascal’s Wager calls for the need for people to choose to believe in something, to allow them the chance of gaining more than ever, and with that your chances for gain will be higher with the belief of a god, but the highest with the belief in the God of the Bible.
The controversial topic involving the existence of God has been the pinnacle of endless discourse surrounding the concept of religion in the field of philosophy. However, two arguments proclaim themselves to be the “better” way of justifying the existence of God: The Cosmological Argument and the Mystical Argument. While both arguments attempt to enforce strict modus operandi of solidified reasoning, neither prove to be a better way of explaining the existence of God. The downfall of both these arguments rests on commitment of fallacies and lack of sufficient evidence, as a result sabotaging their validity in the field of philosophy and faith.
Pascal’s Wager was a major strength of his theory on God and Religion. The argument made in Pascal’s Wager is an example of apologetic philosophy. It was written and published in Pensées by the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal’s Wager claims that all humans must bet their lives on whether God exists. He argues that rational people should seek to believe in God. If God does not exist the loss is minimal, but if God does exist there is an infinite gain, eternity in Heaven. It was a ground-breaking theory because it utilized probability theory and formal decision theory. Pascal’s Wager is applicable both to atheists and theists. While other philosophies may
Pascal’s Wager is an argument that tries to convince non-theists why they should believe in the existence of the Christian god. Pascal thinks non-theists should believe in God’s existence because if a non-theist is wrong about the existence of God, they have much more to lose than if a theist is wrong about the existence of God. Pascal begins his argument by stating that everyone must make a wager. This wager everyone places is on whether or not God exists. Pascal believes everyone must make a wager based on two reasons, everyone eventually dies and God is a possible being.
The Proof of the Existence of God There are many arguments that try to prove the existence of God. In this essay I will look at the ontological argument, the cosmological. argument, empirical arguments such as the avoidance of error and the argument from the design of the. There are many criticisms of each of these that would say the existence of God can’t be proven that are perhaps.
Truth, what is truth? This question itself has a thousand answers, no person can ever be sure of what truth is rather, truth can be justified, it can checked for reliability with strong evidences and logic. If the evidence proves to be accurate then it can be established that a certain answer is the truth. However, have we ever tried to think about what intrigues us to seek the truth? To think about a question and set foot firmly on the path of knowledge. Definitely it has! That was the very cause itself which is why this world has witnessed some of the greatest philosophers like Aristotle, Plato and Socrates etc. along with the school of thought. The ability to think and reason is one of the greatest ability humans have, it is what distinguishes us from the animals. It is what gives us free will, the ability to control our own outcomes. However, it is that ability to ‘think’ itself which has caused men to rebel with the myths and statements established about the unseen and natural forces since the beginning of time. It gave rise to questions such as: Do aliens exist? Is there a world of the unseen? Life after Death and the most popular question since the beginning of times, Does God exists? And the answer is ‘yes’. Here is how I will justify my stance.
Many works of literature have been known to have their words wrap around a certain subject such as gender, politics, and experiences. But some works go into a more personal level such as religion. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Salman Rushdie’s “Imagine There’s No Heaven”, they talk about the strength in the relationship between individuality and religion. These two authors have written their stories based on how an individual’s life, choices, and beliefs can or can be altered by the religion that surrounds them. As one reads these stories, they might be able to notice that they have a lot in common but there are many difference on what the stories are actually about. These two authors have expressed the relationship between individuals and religion through the similarities, differences, and resolutions.
In order to be considered a non-evidentialist, one must believe that actual evidence is not required for all of our beliefs. Pascal believ...
The role of faith has been debated among many theologians, scientists, and philosophers. It has been greatly discussed and depicted throughout history as whether faith is logical when it comes to religion or whether faith is completely absurd. In this essay, I will focus on the role of faith through the lenses of Christian philosophers Sorean Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. Faith plays an important role in Kierkegaard and Tillich theology; I will critically examine their depiction of faith and compare and contrast their passages. Kiergarrd view of faith is that it is completely absurd where as Ti
God can be defined as a being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions (1). There are many people that do not believe in any religion. People who do not believe in a religion have no reason for believing in a God. People who do not believe in a God and argue against the existence of God are proving something that is completely false. There is a God for numerous reasons.
In today’s modern western society, it has become increasingly popular to not identify with any religion, namely Christianity. The outlook that people have today on the existence of God and the role that He plays in our world has changed drastically since the Enlightenment Period. Many look solely to the concept of reason, or the phenomenon that allows human beings to use their senses to draw conclusions about the world around them, to try and understand the environment that they live in. However, there are some that look to faith, or the concept of believing in a higher power as the reason for our existence. Being that this is a fundamental issue for humanity, there have been many attempts to explain what role each concept plays. It is my belief that faith and reason are both needed to gain knowledge for three reasons: first, both concepts coexist with one another; second, each deals with separate realms of reality, and third, one without the other can lead to cases of extremism.
When looking at Pascal’s arguments that emerge in Pensees; the history, ideas, and people that influenced Pascal must be examined. Many of Pascal’s arguments involve the unity of both religion and science. This can be very controversial at a time where an absolute monarch challenges and tries to destroy other faith practices. Along with introducing scientific ideas others may misinterpret as trying to disprove God’s existence. Pascal was heavily influenced by the Christian church and was a firm believer in God. In fact, Pascal’s discoveries and experiments only solidify his faith even more. Pensees is Pascal’s thoughts on God and some other subjects that tie philosophy and the nature of man.
The argument that is used in the idea of skepticism has comparable and incompatible views given from Augustine and Al-Ghazali. Both monologues cover and explain the doubts one should have, due to the