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Three Arguments Against Pascal's Wager

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Belief is not Decision Pascal’s Wager, the argument that an individual who believes in God’s existence is entitled to infinite gains. There are three objections against Pascal article, including “the wrong motivation”, “too many options” and “Belief not a decision”. Among these three reasonable objections, I believe that the strongest one is “Belief not a decision”, because everything needs a reason as people are born as rational creatures. Otherwise, people believe in the existence of God because they trust that God could bring benefits to them. For me, although the objection is reasonable, I still think the Pascal’s response is stronger. Belief is not decision, because people can not just decided to believe something, they believe in something for a logical and rational reasons. In other words, believe in God by making a decision that people get infinite gains in life is a bet, because this method is not useful to let …show more content…

The objection is based on people always think rationally, but the fact is people could not keep rational mind all the time. When facing the specific conditions, people could not always think rationally, especially when they face of the infinite benefits. As an example have been discussed, if someone promised to give me a billion or even ten billion dollars instead of a million in order to let me believe there is life On Mars, I will try to believe that because the benefit I can get from the money is much bigger. So when people make a decision with some specific conditions, they sometimes will lose their rational. Same in the case of belief, Pascal’ s view is that people who believes in God’s existence is entitled to infinite gains. Under this situation people choose to believe in god because they can gains infinite benefits but not keep their logical mind. Thus, people's thinking is not always keep

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