Pascal's Wager - Any Way to Live a Life

I can imagine Our Lord at a cocktail party of deities were he is something of a celebrity. Billions of deities want to get invited to the eternal celebrity party."You are not being rational", says God, and goes onto explain that being rational is the only way to get into "heaven", the name of said party. The deities plead and cajole saying that they are rational, but they've never been given a chance to prove it.So God says "I'll make a bet: I will create a universe which contains no evidence that would confirm my existence. I will provide no rational way to determine anything about its creator. I will then send your souls into this universe, and I will integrate them into the universe so perfectly that you there will be no reason for you to suspect I had done it. You will have no memories of me, just your innate reasoning skills which I will preserve in the guise of a thing called a 'brain'.I bet you will still come to believe that you are able to determine my properties, my character or my intentions - against all reason to the contrary.If you take my bet and you do not accept my existence by the end of your time in this universe you will get tickets into the celebrity deity cocktail party of eternity. If you take my bet, and by the end of your time in this universe you do have irrational beliefs about my character...then you will be sentenced to spend all of eternity in my universe which I will ensure is a terrible suffering place. I'll create some really nasty places where your soul will dwell for eternity. Pain and horror will be your only friends.Any takers?"

I'm pretty sure that's false.Let's say that I will that I am agnostic. I do not want evidence one way or another.But then God pays me a visit and presents me with proof of his existence. However, I suspect I've gone crazy or enter some other state of wilful denial, trying to retain my agnosticism.Against my will, however, I am convinced that God exists.How can you say that I am not really convinced by am only a 'professing believer'?I know, Pascal's wager is qualitatively or even categorically different. You could argue that my will was ultimately to accept the evidence, but sometimes there really isn't any sense of conscious choice. 'Seeing is believing' and all that. If someone tells me the football scores for a game I have on TiVo for tonight, I can really try and persuade myself they were trolling me, but it seems that isn't the reaction I and others tend to have. We are 'convinced' against 'our will' of the outcome of the game, and feel like it is almost pointless to watch it, knowing the end result as we do.But Pascal's wager is an argument from pragmatism, rather than an empirical situation. Indeed, that was just the general principle in clear terms.One interpretation of religious belief is that it is a lie others tell you so often you start to tell it to yourself so often that you just simply come to believe it. That is, religion as a natural phenomenon. Pascal's Wager could potentially weigh on the heart of a simpleton who engaged in violent criminal acts that acting along with other cultural reinforcers can result in a non-believer becoming a believer.This would be against his will from the perspective of his pre-PW self, but at the end he's probably using volition to believe. This was Pascal's view (sort of): that by acting as if one believed or in 'professing belief' one could become a believer.It's kind of a tactic to workaround your own will.

Do you intend to supply an argument as to why your opinion should be given consideration, or are you happy just to serve it on the rocks like that? Why not explain why 'trying not to be convinced' prohibits absolutely being caused to firmly believe something? I can see it inhibiting it - but prohibiting it? That seems counter to my own experiences and I am not convinced it can be the case.I'm pretty sure there are people that became convinced the religion they were brought up in was wrong, even while trying to hold desperately onto their faith as an example.

I'm not sure that is terribly common, though. It may be that people lose faith because they become convinced that any creator deity is non-interventionist in some way and their faith is of an interventionist God.It might be that once a person has declared to themselves or others that they are an atheist, that there is a psychological disincentive for professing to be convinced otherwise, which may even influence their actual capacity to be convinced.But whether or not God exists and whether or not they give a hoot are two separate (but related) questions. Answering the first gives us no clues to the second (though the reverse is not the case - if God cares, then He must exist). So if you really think that if it exists God doesn't care, that should not inhibit your tendency to be convinced that God exists. You can believe he exists, but not believe she cares.On the other hand, wilful disbelief is very useful skill that does not come naturally to people. So I think a shout-out to wilful disbelief is required at this point. It was believed that humans should not travel faster than about 10m/s, that large iron or steel boats could not float, that disease is an unpredictable or supernaturally driven event....As humans we are actually pretty easily persuaded naturally. Observe that most people are (by definition, really) normal, and yet normal people have been persuaded into all sorts of horrific acts and bizarre beliefs throughout history.Wilful disbelief not only gave us science, but it is a potent tool in coping with mental health issues (schizophrenics are educated in wilful disbelief as a means to avoid getting lost in the madness (increasing clarity and insight)). I understand that to a religious believer the idea seems, in some sense, taboo - but I think it is a notion that is discredited too much. This sounds very dangerously close to circular. Why did you make that decision? Did you will it? Why did you will it, was it your decision? Or disbelief. In fact, only being of two minds seems a little conservative to me. It's difficult to grasp this statement, I think that's due to it being slippery. Not your fault, probably, you are writing with a host of other beliefs which clarify the meaning of much of this statement, but I don't have access to all of them from here. 'even if God existed'...
This is particularly soapy. You are proposing a conditional. 'If x exists' and going to say 'then y would still not acknowledge'. You include the word 'even' at the beginning, which is used to express some kind of surprising or incredulous context to the conditional. 'Even if I punched you in the mouth, you'd turn the other cheek!'.If God existed, presumably the world would look the same as it does now? So can our angry and hurt people 'acknowledge' something when they don't believe it exists? Or are we talking only about believers?The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is
'If it was proven to their satisfaction that God exists' '...they would see no reason to acknowledge Him.'Here we have 'reason' and 'acknowledge' to wrestle with. As one Christian commentary runs that acknowledging God is 'to recognize, in all our dealings and undertakings, God's overruling providence, which "shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will." It is not a mere theoretical acknowledgment, but one that engages the whole energies of the soul (Delitzsch), and sees in God power, wisdom, providence, goodness, and justice. ', Pulpit CommentarySo yes, if we use that version of acknowledge, then it may be that a certain individual, even being convinced of God's existence would not subsequently conclude there is enough evidence or logical reason to suppose said deity has anything to do with goodness and justice for example.For that we would need 'reason', and 'I exist' is no reason for you to constantly recognise my 'overruling providence'. Some folks are angry or hurt...Let me illustrate the point I want to make with this: Some folks are so frightened of death they cling to the idea of an afterlifeDespite the fact that I used the weasel word 'some' such that I am almost certainly saying something that is true (and/or unfalsifiable), I'm implying other things.I'm communicating that the only reason I can think of that's worth consideration for someone to believe in an afterlife is 'fear'. Or I'm implying that it is the only reason. And there is the implication of the reverse situation: that if someone believes it is likely because they are afraid.On your example, you seem to think that 'pain' or 'anger' are the only things worth consideration as to why they would not 'acknowledge' God, and that essentially if someone were refuse acknowledgement in the event that God's existence was not in dispute this would best be explained through 'anger' or 'pain'.I think the result ends up being unpleasant. I've likely done it myself, so I'm not judging you as being bad for engaging in it, I just think it's worth mentioning and trying to put in an effort to avoid. I'm not saying you were intending to suggest any of the above, only that the implication haunts those kinds of expressions whether you want it to or not.Finally, do you think it is possible to
a) Decide to believe in God for pragmatic reasons (such as in Pascal's wager)
b) Decide to believe in God for pragmatic reasons, when you don't want to (ie against your will)
c) Be convinced that God exists empirically, when you want to be convinced he does not exist empirically
d) Be convinced by logical alone, even if you are trying to avoid being convinced?I didn't mean for my dissection to be mean-spirited, but any further attempts to be more diplomatic will result in a much lengthier posts, hopefully you can pick your way through my own assumptions and hidden beliefs that went into the construction and together we can become {a little more} enlightened.

Fair enough, I was just confused when you said 'I don't think' and 'I think' Well the saying strongly implies prohibit: 'A person convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.' that is: being as it is against his will this prohibits actual persuasion.A person convinced against his will, is lying to silence the shrill.
A person truly convinced against his will, believes it beyond his fill.