 Comments for The Way Forward Someone please help me with Pascal’s Wager –
If belief in God requires (as it does, by inference in Pascal’s Wager) a commitment to biblical scripture, then the position of having ‘nothing to lose’ becomes completely erroneous. In other words, to get at the ‘everything to win’ part, I need to adopt biblical scripture and embrace it into my life. Why? Because the ‘everything to win’ essentially means eternal life in the kingdom of heaven, and that’s in the bible and access to it requires adopting a certain lifestyle and belief system as presented within the bible. So to get to the kingdom of heaven requires a significant commitment and sacrifice during my time here on earth.
In making a pledge to believe in God and biblical inerrancy, I’m actually required to give everything up, right here and right now. Believing in God is not simply a case of pledging (my life here on earth) and having it decided upon my death by a coin-toss, it is necessary to actually make the donation here and now, whilst I am still living. I have to relinquish it now, in the hope that I will be rewarded later. This is not the scenario that Pascal has us believe, it is not an infinitely sensible and obviously logical wager to make, in favor of God belief, as Pascal asserts. In fact it’s quite a risky gamble where the odds are completely stacked against me. I’m giving up everything now, and could end up with nothing later, therefore the sum total of my life, as measured in all eternity, could end up being zero, if God does not exist. And since there is no proof of His existence, how can that be a viable wager as Pascal has us believe?
Or am I missing something?
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