Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Or maybe he'd even penalize you for it.

It's important to recall that an all-knowing God isn't necessarily very compassionate, or even rational. Some of the people I've known who knew the most have been the biggest assholes. Or insane.

What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?

> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?

That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.

But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.

> But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus

Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.

Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.

Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.

Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.

loading story #50250183
loading story #50253314
Pascal's wager was not at all anchored to any specific attestations, you are taking his wager and reinterpreting it to give it some kind of legitimacy that it never originally held. The entire point of the wager was to justify belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost. If your now arguing that Christianity is more credible because of historical evidence, so be it and stick to it but you've abandoned Pascal's wager and moved on to an entirely different argument.
loading story #50249895