Criticisms of Pascal

There is also the question of morality - some have argued that it is somehow immoral for God to give special favour to those who believe in Him despite there being no good evidence for Him. In fact, good evidence for God could be the subject of a whole new entry. In which case taking advantage of God's act would make the believer complicit in immoral behaviour. This is a very combative stance to assume, since it effectively states that all Christians are immoral, and is generally understood to be inappropriate in polite company.

Let us grant Pascal's conclusion for the sake of the argument: rationality requires you to wager for God. It still does not obviously follow that you should wager for God. All that we have granted is that one norm---the norm of rationality---prescribes wagering for God. For all that has been said, some other norm might prescribe wagering against God. And unless we can show that the rationality norm trumps the others, we have not settled what we should actually do.

There are several arguments to the effect that morality requires you to wager against God. Pascal himself appears to be aware of one such argument. He admits that if you do not believe in God, his recommended course of action will "deaden your acuteness." One way of putting the argument is that wagering for God may require you to corrupt yourself, thus violating a Kantian duty to yourself. Clifford 1986 argues that an individual's believing something on insufficient evidence harms society by promoting credulity. Penelhum 1971 contends that the putative divine plan is itself immoral, condemning as it does honest non-believers to loss of eternal happiness, when such unbelief is in no way culpable; and that to adopt the relevant belief is to be complicit to this immoral plan. See Quinn 1994 for replies to these arguments. For example, against Penelhum he argues that as long as God treats non-believers justly, there is nothing immoral about him bestowing special favor on believers, more perhaps than they deserve. (Note, however, that Pascal leaves open in the Wager whether the payoff for non-believers is just, even though as far as his argument goes, it may be extremely poor.)

Finally, Voltaire protests that there is something unseemly about the whole Wager. He suggests that Pascal's calculations, and his appeal to self-interest, are unworthy of the gravity of the subject of theistic belief. This does not so much support wagering against God, as dismissing all talk of "wagerings" altogether.

Go to Inappropriate Argument

Reference:

1. Philip,L,Quinn,"Moral Objections to Pascalian Wager",Jordan, Jeff(Ed),Gambling on God: essays on Pascal's Wager, (London, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Inc.,1994)p.61-82

2.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/#5

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