I don't see how Pascal's Wager can be applied in any meaningful sense. People don't just decide to believe stuff because it's to their benefit. People believe stuff because, in some way hard to describe, stuff just makes sense to them. Some people believe stuff because they have seen arguments for its truth that (at least to them) sound logical. People believe stuff because they think it fits with what they've seen in the real world. Some people believe stuff because that is what they've been taught and they've never seen any reason to think differently.
But I don't think very many people ever sat down and said something like, "You know, if I believe that George Bush personally planted explosives in the World Trade Center and detonated, then I'll be respected among my peers, I'll become rich, and chicks will dig me. So I will believe it. I DO believe it!"
Hell, I was a fundamentalist Christian, and I didn't want to become an atheist. I already knew that, if the evangelicals were right, that unbelievers would go to Hell, and so forth. But, you know, that never entered into consideration. The only that matters whether something is a fact or not is the evidence and the logical conclusions one can draw from the evidence. And I fought against becoming an unbeliever. If I was able to choose my beliefs, then I would have remained a conservative, evangelical Christian literalist.
The main fallacy of Pascal's Wager is that it is entirely irrelevant to what a person sincerely believes. People just aren't going to listen to it and say, "Wow. That pay-off is fantastic. Well, I'm going to
choose be become a believer."
Incidentally, I believe that Pascal himself recognized this fatal weakness of this particular argument.
Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. --
Rick Perlstein
™ Version 4.2
