Unlike a lot arguments for the existence of God, Pascal’s Wager requires a lot less faith than most of the other ways. You do not have to be born and raised in that religion, follow every custom strictly, or dedicate your life to the church. Pascal’s wager suggests that one needs to believe in God to receive the benefits of afterlife and that belief comes through practice. In response to people who do not believe in God, but want to, Pascal states, “Follow the way by which they [previous non-believers] began; acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will make you naturally believe, and deaden your acuteness” (Pensèes, 2). With many people often fearing deep involvement, this is a less drastic way
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
-Pascal’s wager was meant to show that while not believing in God will only have loss of some things, believing in God will allow you to gain everything.
When I was at school in Vermont, one of my teachers explained to me Pascal's Wager. According to this teacher, the philosopher and mathematician Pascal had tried to establish the costs and benefits of believing in God. He saw it in this way: you can either believe in God or not. If you do believe in God, and there is in fact no God, then you will perhaps have spent some extra energy unnecessarily abstaining from certain pleasures and wasting your Sunday mornings in Church, but overall you did not give up too much. And, it could be argued, you may have actually treated your fellow men more kindly then you would have otherwise. If, however, there is a God, and you believed in him, then you get eternal salvation.
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.
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.
...n anything at all. Therefore Pascal represents a better argument than Clifford. We live our lives seeking happiness. When someone plays the lottery they play with the intent to win but if they don’t they still did not lose anything. Well living your life for god is the same thing. Refusing to believe in god could only lead to a loss, lose situation. If you live your life with faith that god is watching over you, you will only live a much happier life. In (KJV John 15:7) god tells us: If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. That is gods promise to us that if we abide in him he will supply our needs. If there were anything in the world worth wagering for believing in god should be one of them. We were given the ability to act upon our faith with confidence to hopefully one day to have everlasting life.
...ople to come back to Church and to believe in God but not out of self-interest. In order for the argument to accomplish this it must first be rewritten. It needs to define its terms (i.e. the use of the word God), it should not be based on chance or self-interest but rather to make known to the person that it is quite possible that God exists, and finally, it should include a fifth outcome where a person believes in God out of self-interest and is eternally damned anyway for lack of faith, love and for selfishness. Pascal’s Wager calls to mind a famous quote by Albert Camus: “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.” Until Pascal’s argument is solid and fully developed, one should not adopt the argument as a mean for conversion, evangelization or lifestyle.
The teleological argument says a complex world such as ours could not exist without having an original designer such as God. Since this world is in existence, there must be a God. Pascal’s wager suggests that as humans we do not have the mental capacity to understand the existence of God and so believing in God is our safest bet. These arguments are also both referencing a specific God.
Instinctually, humans know that there is a greater power in the universe. However, there are a few who doubt such instinct, citing that logically we cannot prove such an existence. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, wrote of five proofs for the existence of God. The Summa Theologica deals with pure concepts; these proofs rely on the world of experience - what one can see around themselves. In these proofs, God will logically be proven to exist through reason, despite the refutes against them.
All moral arguments for the existence of God work on the principle that we all have a shared sense of morality. Despite cultural differences, broadly speaking, humans worldwide have a vague idea of what is right and what is wrong; a moral argument for the existence of God would say that this mutual understanding is proof of God's existence.
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.
But if God exists, the believer gains everything (goes to heaven) and the unbeliever loses everything (goes to hell). If God doesn’t exist, the believer loses nothing and the unbeliever gains nothing. There is therefore everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God.” However, there are many flaws with this logic. Pascal’s Wager theory depends on the idea that you don’t lose much by believing. Many have died from putting their trust in God for help instead of seeking reality-based solutions such as medicine. Every day billions of believers devote significant time, energy and money to worshipping their god. That money could have been invested in the development for both the individual and for humanity as a whole which explains why the least religious nations are also the most advanced nations. Nigeria, for example, is one of the most corrupt nations today and also one of the most religious. Another flaw with Pascal's logic is that you are assuming that all unbelievers will go to hell. There are horrific religious people as well as good-hearted
Either God exists or He doesn't. There is no middle ground, and any attempt to remain neutral in relation to God's existence is automatically synonymous with unbelief. It is far from a "moot" question, because if God does exist, then nothing else really matters; if He does not exist, then nothing really matters at all. This is kind of unfortunate for someone like myself, because I've always lived on that nonexistent middle ground. Until now I've never been put in a position where it was questioned. The last couple of years I've referred to myself as a recovering Catholic, but never redefined my religion (or lack thereof) since then. When I found out I had to take a stand in this paper one way or another, yes or no, black or white, it was unsettling. At that point it became more than a term paper. Can I, with a clear conscience, write a 15 page paper denouncing the existence of God? I kind of cringed as I imagined being struck down Indiana Jones style, and in that, I had my answer. So without further adieu, the next 15 pages is me, making my case (I think) for the existence of God. What better place to start, than Pascal's Wager.
There are benefits and disadvantages of believing in the Catholic faith. A benefit of believing in the Catholic faith is that God will forgive you for your sins as long as you repent and are truly sorry for acts that you have committed. Catholics believe in a heaven and hell, which is an advantage and a disadvantage. As an advantage when a person dies, according to the Catholic religion, they will go to heaven as long as they followed a good Christian life.