Pascal’s wager was presented to me before. It is one of the favorite tools of religious preachers who try to appeal to famous names and a kind of logic to convince people to enter their faith. Pascal’s argument is that believing in God is a rational choice. Since we cannot prove or disprove God’s existence, we can evaluate the pros and cons of worshipping God. If God exists, then worshipping and living by his tenets will bring one eternal happiness after death. If God did not exist – nothing bad would have happened. If one does not believe in God and it turns out they exist, one is sentenced to eternal damnation. Therefore, Pascal argues, it is a safe bet to believe in God.
The argument is fallacious on numerous levels. First, the wager assumes that the person would have lost nothing if one worshiped God and it turns out they do not exist. That is false, as worshipping Gods places a number of restrictions on a person’s behavior, to the point of forbidding interaction and love between people of opposite religious groups. Praying and performing ceremonies also take a significant amount of time that could have otherwise been spent productively. Finally, there is the price of one’s own self-respect and muting one’s logical reasoning in order to ignore the obvious fallacies of religion.
The second argument against Pascal’s wager is in the unclarity of which God to worship. During the time Pascal came up with his logical fallacy, he obviously implied Christian God as the right answer. However, Christianity alone has over 60 subbranches of some renown, and the overall number of different religions with a cult following is significant enough numbers over 4,300. Note that the majority of them, even if they are worshipping the same God, promise the punishment of Hell if the person is not worshipping their God or does not do it in their way. This makes the bet on God as a “safe precaution” to be far less safe, with the chances of winning the wager about the same as winning the jackpot in a lottery, but with the price for participating being significant and certain. Therefore, the only logical solution is not to play.