I think Pascal’s Wager is hilarious. Many Christians use it because they really haven’t thought about it, and it shows. Here are some examples of how to easily counter it.
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Which god? This assumption is a specific example of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. Humanity has worshiped between twenty-seven hundred and three thousand different gods since the beginning of recorded history, and those are just the ones we know about. The gods that could exist that we don’t know are practically infinite. Pascal himself acknowledged the weakness of this assumption, and later explained he was only speaking in terms of the Christian religion. To my knowledge he never addressed the problem of other religions and the gods they worship.
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Assuming we somehow manage to choose the right god, how do we know we’re worshiping that god in the correct way? There are many different sects of Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Christianity in particular has over forty thousand different denominations. Assuming that this god cares about being worshiped at all, how do we know we’re worshiping him as he demands? If the Calvinists are correct it doesn’t matter how you worship him, your salvation is pre-ordained whether or not you believe. If the Catholics are right salvation is only possible through rituals like communion and the last rites. If the Baptists are correct then only deliberate submission through prayer begging for salvation will do the trick. They can’t all be correct.
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Assuming that we have the right god and are worshiping in the manner that god requires, why would this god accept a lie? No one can force themselves to believe something they don’t genuinely think is true. Try forcing yourself to honestly believe that gravity is a myth and that you can float off your seat any time you wish. Simply claiming belief isn’t the same as believing. If this god is willing to accept such a lie, how does that make it worthy of worship? If it’s capable of being lied to, how does it qualify as a god at all?
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One should not believe in vampires in the fear that I might get bitten one day. It is irrational to believe something based on fear. Pascal’s Wager is an appeal to emotion and says nothing about the validity of the claim.
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Pascal’s wager assumes that if there is an existing god, that it rewards faith and punishes skepticism. There is no way of knowing that skepticism is the virtue being rewarded and that god does not punish faith and irrationality.
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Christianity takes away time and effort as well as money. If the chances of god are exceedingly low, you have wasted your life.
Can you think of any others? Add a comment to contribute to this list!
The counter-argument still applies, though. Once you invoke some kind of all-encompassing metaphysical truth, you’re responsible for all of the ramifications, even if your argument was “don’t gamble.”
Pascal was a good enough mathematician that even at the time he could have made a mathematical argument against gambling. He could have pointed out the fallacies associated with gambling (eg that downside risk means creating an imbalance in the expected value function). The position would be irrefutable. If you, for instance, wager $10k on a 50/50 chance to win $25k, that seems like a good deal. But if the $10k is all you have, then you have to include the downside risks associated with losing all of your money on top of the risk of losing $10k. By making it an argument about a petty and divisive omni-everything god, he made a far weaker argument against “sin”’than if he just made the kinds of mathematical observations he was eminently capable of.
In any case, even if it were true that he meant his argument for currently believing Christians not to gamble, it’s still used today as a common argument against atheism. I honestly don’t know enough about Pascal’s motivation for the original proposal and can take you at your word for the sake of argument, but authors like CS Lewis used the Wager to argue against atheism, and that application can be directly disproven by the standard set of anti-Pascal arguments, and they do not have a valid reply.
My standard anti-Pascal argument is that it demonstrates that people should worship the most horrible, cruel, and evil god-concept they can identify. What Pascal basically offers is the equation where P (the probability of a given god-concept as actually existing) * T (the degree of torture that god-concept promises to inflict on non-believers). This is opposed by P * H (the hedonistic or other reward component you get for following the teachings of the god-concept).
So there’s somewhere around 45,000 sects of Christianity alone, ranging from the Unitarian Universalists who believe in a single monotheistic and compassionate god who would never send someone to Hell, to the angry and abusive god who most resembles a drunk stepfather with anger management issues, to the predestination god who decided in the infinity of time before you were born that you and everyone in your family line is going to hell no matter what you do, and you have no ability to change that. The fun part is that all of them base their arguments on the same sets of books and first principles, and so can never win an argument with each other. Then figure in the tens of thousands of god-concepts that have been worshipped throughout history, and the infinitude of one’s no one has even thought up yet (eg, procedurally generated deities), and the Wager collapses under its own weight.
You can be a good game theorist minimax the problem - try to find the worst possible god-concept who could possibly be appeased (eg Cthulhu, who will reward his followers by killing them first when he arises from R’lyeh). You can follow the UU god who simply recognizes that a bad job badly done doesn’t deserve to suffer for the mistakes they had little to no control over.
Or you can say that none of it makes a lick of sense and shouldn’t be argued about by adults outside the confines of a game of D&D.