Saturday 11 October 2008

Pascal's wager

Pascal's wager has seemed to me to be extremely logical for an extremely long time. It is true that if God does not exist then it does not matter what we do because life is due merely to chance and therefore is meaningless and random. But if God does exist then following his laws is obviously the right thing to do. Some people have complained that even though this is logical to an extent, it is still not possible to have faith from a theory like this as faith is a gift. Also belief very rarely comes about by logical postulations. We only believe things that we are capable of accepting by our environmental conditioning. I believe that the an atheist would not be convinced by such a logical argument because faith is outside of their mental concepts. To have faith for people like these is nothing more than miraculous. Ultimately the problem with Pascal's wager is that which tenets of which God should we follow? The Catholic, the Protestant, the Islamic, the Buddhist, the Vedic? In other words even if we accept that it is better to live assuming that God exists because you do not lose anything by doing so but you may gain something. However, we cannot logically choose which god by reason. That is a gift either of faith or environment.

No comments: