Pascal's Wager:
1. "God is, or He is not"
2. A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
4. You must wager. It is not optional.
5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.
The problems with this argument should be obvious, yet to many, it appears, they are not.
1. This gamble only pays out if the person proposing it is correct, therefor, that person must necessarily be assuming that they are correct to begin with, rather than arriving at that conclusion over the course of investigation of the argument.
2. This argument excludes the possibility that other gods might be correct. Perhaps the Bible is a test, and to pass the test one must think for him or herself and reject the obviously absurd text. Perhaps Allah, Wotan or Zeus is the correct god. In any of these cases, the only way to escape torture and arrive at the truth is to reject the christian god.
3. This argument makes numerous fallacious assertions. Most obviously, it simply asserts that there is no consequence to following the christian religion, which is clearly false. To waste one's life following a falacious religion, to base one's life on its teachings, to live carelessly and with abandon looking forward to a greater life to come...all of these result in a tragic loss of appreciation for one's time on Earth, and promote ideas which lead to destructive and wasteful choices and lifestyles.
This falls cleanly into the category of "PRATT" (previously refuted a thousand times) and I sincerely hope I do not have to hear it again.
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