confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
8d ago
I don't see how it could be otherwise than that they cancel out exactly.
Deciding a course of action is more likely than another action to get those infinite rewards would require some knowledge of God, knowledge that the Wager specifically excludes. The only state which is logically possible in our state of complete ignorance is therefore one where every action is equally likely to lead to infinite rewards. This would cancel out the infinite reward part when deciding which of two actions is better, as both are equally likely to get you there.
How would you go about figuring out which actions are more likely to lead to infinite rewards in this situation? Whence comes this knowledge about the unknowable?
confidentcrescent
9d ago
Pascal's Wager is compelling because it claims to prove a benefit through logic. For the argument to still hold, may be possible isn't enough. I also have opposite intuitions and would find it incredibly surprising if we could logically go from zero knowledge to greater than zero knowledge.
If what you mean by more than one religion/source of infinite concerns is the modern version of Pascal's Wager that doesn't specify a religion and just says you should pick one, that version is still assuming a limited list of religions rather than the unconstrained list of any possible religion that a state of zero knowledge would require.
confidentcrescent
9d ago
How can you estimate the probability space on a thing which, as the wager argues, is fundamentally unknowable through reason? Shouldn't every possible God be equally probable in a situation of zero knowledge?
The wager only works because it smuggles in the assumption that it's Christianity or nothing, but this is an unproven assumption.
Removing these conditions makes for a very different argument than the original, which aims to sidestep the question of evidence for God by providing a chain of reasoning that assumes no evidence.
I'm less interested in going into a debate over whether the real world provides evidence for or against a God, but I've yet to see an argument that has moved me away from a position of ignorance on the subject.
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