Sam K. answered • 09/16/20
Writing, English, and Philosophy Tutor
Pascal's Wager arguably contains several logical fallacies. I'd argue that it's at least a false dichotomy--the assumption is that there is either a God who will reward you for believing, or no God at all. But there are infinite possibilities here, not just two. What if God will punish you for believing? What if there's not God in the Christian sense but rather a deity who will punish you for believing in your idea of God and not believing in them? What if God exists but is not sentient or omnipotent in the way of being able to reward or punish you at all?
Given that the chance of God existing and rewarding you for believing is no more likely than any of the other options, you have just as much to lose by believing in God for that purpose as you do by believing anything else. Therefore, it is illogical to believe in God for the purpose of being rewarded after death.
Steven H.
Pascal's wager replies on a calculus, not on dichotomy. To properly be able to suggest a false dichotomy, you'd have to demonstrate a reliance of the wager on the existence of a dichotomy in its argument. Pascal's wager turns out to be unaffected by granting any number of theses about God's relationship to eternal torment and doxastic attitudes. For instance, we grant without qualification that other notions of God are available and so on, just as you say, however, Pascal imagines that nothing could be worse than eternal torture. So for any notion out there, if the stakes aren't as high as being eternally tortured, then we ought not give them credence, all else being equal. This is a prudential argument, not a deductively valid one. We don't need to presume Pascal is excluding ideas such as there also being a possibility that there is a God who eternally tortures believers. Pascal is offering, and it seems to me only offering, an objective basis for committing to one belief or another. Like a moral tragedy, he may end up with two or more contradictory propositions, but this wouldn't effect the wager itself. The wager is a calculus much like that of Bentham and Mill. The salient question in the wager is to what we ought to commit and why. It takes an argument's reliance on a dichotomy to properly be able to accuse an argument of false dichotomy. Pascal's wager does not so-rely. Here are what seem to me to be better objections: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/#ObjePascWage06/08/22