Pascal's Wager

Pascal’s Wager is an interesting thought. The logical flow follows thus:

1. There are two possibilities, a belief or a non-belief in God
2. If you choose not to believe that it turns out that there isn’t a God, then there is no net effect.
3. If you choose to believe and it turns out that there isn’t a God, then there is no net effect.
4. If you choose not to believe and there is a God, then you will be punished.
5. If you choose to believe and there is a God, then you will be rewarded.
6. Therefore, the most logical course of action is to believe in God.

However, there are several elemental problems with this idea.

First, let’s look at number four. This is not entirely true, for several reasons. First, many conceptions, even of the Judeo-Christian God, allow for the possibility that the Lord actually likes questioning. But further, you always have the forgiveness factor to look to. Moreover, there is no guarantee that it would be the Judeo-Christian God anyway (more on this now).

Now let’s look at the highly suspect number five. This is incredibly shaky, mostly because it assumes that the God you choose to believe in is the one that actually exists. For example, what if you chose to believe in the Judeo-Christian God and then God turned out to be Odin, a guy who doesn’t look kindly upon being replaced with Christianity. Punishment. If we further consider the fact that there are almost an infinite number of conceptions to be dealt with, it is almost impossible to select the right God on a probability scale, meaning that at a rate of ∞:1 you will lose.