Accepting God as a probable hypothesis has a lot of epistemic implications. This is not just one thing, everything is connected, one thing being true implies other things being true, other things being false. You won’t be seeing the world as you currently believe it to be, after accepting such change, you will be seeing a strange magical version of it, a version you are certain doesn’t correspond to reality. Mutilating your mind like this has enormous destructive consequences on your ability to understand the real world, and hence on ability to make the right choices, even if you forget about the hideousness of doing this to yourself. This is the part that is usually overlooked in Pascal’s wager.
Belief in belief is a situation where you claim to have a belief, and you believe in having the belief, but you act in a way that can only be explained by working from the understanding of reality that involves the belief in question being wrong. Belief in belief keeps the human believers out of most of the trouble, but that’s not what Pascal’s wager advocates! Not understanding this distinction may lead to underestimating the horror of the suggestion. You are being offered an option to actually believe, but this is not what people have experience with observing in others. You only see other people believing in belief, which is not as bad as actually believing.
Hence, while you believe in belief that Pascal’s wager offers you an option to believe in God, actually you believe that you are offered an option to believe in belief in God. (Phew!)
Regarding the first paragraph, I don’t see that Pascal’s wager requires all these contortions. It only requires estimating the utility of belief in God, and then makes a positive assertion about what you should do with that utility.
Would you agree that your arguments are arguments for why the utility of believing in God should be low?
Regarding the second paragraph, I agree there is a weird double-think aspect to Pascal’s Wager. Just in that someone admitting, if PW converted they, that they are believing in something just because it was convenient to do so. Can you really believe something for that reason, knowing that is the reason? So this is an argument in the category, ‘you can’t really choose your beliefs as an act of will’.
Accepting God as a probable hypothesis has a lot of epistemic implications. This is not just one thing, everything is connected, one thing being true implies other things being true, other things being false. You won’t be seeing the world as you currently believe it to be, after accepting such change, you will be seeing a strange magical version of it, a version you are certain doesn’t correspond to reality. Mutilating your mind like this has enormous destructive consequences on your ability to understand the real world, and hence on ability to make the right choices, even if you forget about the hideousness of doing this to yourself. This is the part that is usually overlooked in Pascal’s wager.
Belief in belief is a situation where you claim to have a belief, and you believe in having the belief, but you act in a way that can only be explained by working from the understanding of reality that involves the belief in question being wrong. Belief in belief keeps the human believers out of most of the trouble, but that’s not what Pascal’s wager advocates! Not understanding this distinction may lead to underestimating the horror of the suggestion. You are being offered an option to actually believe, but this is not what people have experience with observing in others. You only see other people believing in belief, which is not as bad as actually believing.
Hence, while you believe in belief that Pascal’s wager offers you an option to believe in God, actually you believe that you are offered an option to believe in belief in God. (Phew!)
Regarding the first paragraph, I don’t see that Pascal’s wager requires all these contortions. It only requires estimating the utility of belief in God, and then makes a positive assertion about what you should do with that utility.
Would you agree that your arguments are arguments for why the utility of believing in God should be low?
Regarding the second paragraph, I agree there is a weird double-think aspect to Pascal’s Wager. Just in that someone admitting, if PW converted they, that they are believing in something just because it was convenient to do so. Can you really believe something for that reason, knowing that is the reason? So this is an argument in the category, ‘you can’t really choose your beliefs as an act of will’.