Pascal's Wager
... choose to believe in Him for personal gain instead of faith. Pascal tries to address in his argument this by saying that if you practice your religion actively then eventually you will become a true believer and it will eliminate the reward factor of the argument. The question that one could pose now is “will God let you into heaven if you believe in Him without being sincere?” Second Pascal premise is way too broad and can apply to many different religions. He makes the claim that it is better to live you life according to what it says in the bible or else you shall burn in hell. Yet all religions make some sort of claim as to eternal damnation if you do not abide by what ever their religion mandates. So we are faced with the dilemma of choosing a religion. The problem with the avoiding hell premise is that it works too well for all religions. If we as men are not able to understand Him then how are we going to be able to distinguish between the right and wrong religion? How then are supposed to pick one certain God knowing that if we indeed make the wrong choice we are going to hell. Pascal might then try to take the easy way out and claim that for you to get into heaven all you have to do is believe that there is a God and not necessarily in any particular religion. If that was so then it would be much easier to have beliefs on what or who God is. Yet once again we stumble over the same rock as we realize that this would ultimately be like picking a different religion. God would realize that we in fact do not believe in his religion and face exclusion from heaven. There is a flaw in his conclusion also. If you are a theist and you were trying to convert atheist into believers by using Pascal’s Wager it would never work. Someone atheist does not believe in God, Hell, heaven, and anything else that is in the bible. The idea of eternal damnation in hell is not as scary as it would seem since atheist have no belief in hell. The logic they would use to counter the argument of hell would be, “how could we go to a place that doesn’t exist.” To an atheist statements like “you’re going to hell” would be the equivalent of someone saying, “If you don’t believe in vampires then one will eventually bite you.” Pascal’s argument isn’t as strong as other theist arguments because Pascal doesn’t mentioned that God is all forgiving. It is assumed that no one can live a perfect life because Jesus died for our sins. Because of this a person can be an atheist his whole life and at the moment when death is imminent repent and be let into heaven. In a way being a good Christian is not necessarily needed. Also a bad Christian could be a great sinner, never go to church, and still get into heaven. While the person who wagered that there is a God has lived a wholesome life they will be in heaven with the same people who didn’t abide by the rules and the skeptics. Also Pascal makes many assumptions that weaken his argument. He assumes the existence of God and then assigns a probability factor to His existence. He claims that there is a fifty percent chance that God exists. As logical as it may seem, the idea is actually absurd. Most people would agree that the chances that God exist would be half; it would be either a yes or a no. However there is no way of proving such allegations so a variable would have to have been assigned to the probability. He also assumes that once people realize that he exist that they will accept his teaching such as abstinence and sacrifice. His last assumption is that he assumes that everyone would embrace God as the path to true happiness whether there be proof of God’s existence or not. Though all these assumptions seem logical, there are always those extremities that lie outside the norm. It can’t be assumed that because something is good for someone they will accept...