Wrestling with Religion

At the risk of beating a dead Pascal, I want to challenge two assumptions in his argument that belief in God is infinitely more lucrative than unbelief. One is that the main motive for unbelief is the unbeliever’s concupiscence (often sexual desire but not limited to that). People disbelieve so they can be free to misbehave. Another is that unbelievers benefit in a finite way by liberating themselves to pursue to unbridled pleasure. Pascal himself contradicts these elsewhere when he says that Christian belief  makes a person “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend" (418). Anything that deprives a person of this is hardly a benefit, even a finite one. I doubt, however, that these benefits actually proceed from belief, having read extensively in newspapers, autobiographies, and popular fiction from the 19th-century South, where the existence of God, sin, heaven, and hell were taken for granted. Belief in God was well-nigh universal am...

The 2001 film cartoon Monsters, Inc . imagines a corporation of monsters that feed off scaring children through doors that are portals to their bedroom closets. This is a variant on the motif of the monster under the bed. In both cases, a presence is felt but never seen. It’s the opposite of the refrigerator light that seems to be always lit. Just as we never see the light off, children in the cartoon world never see the monsters. They can never confirm or disconfirm the existence of beings who exit through magic portals whenever closet doors are  opened. Despite their ontological indeterminacy, the monsters do frighten children. They power Monstopolis with juvenile screams, so there's clearly a psychic drain caused by the children’s belief in monsters. But if monsters are unfalsifiable, why should children believe in them at all? Why scream needlessly? Shouldn't they imagine more pleasant unfalsifiable creatures in their closets? Shouldn't they imagine, say, magica...

Even if we accept the possibility of a God that dispenses an infinite jackpot for belief and withholds it for disbelief, Pascal’s Wager--his argument that it is infinitely more lucrative to believe in his God than not to--is reasonable only absent the possibility of another God offering the opposite payoff. Here are some possibilities: (1) a God who rewards reasonable disbelief and punishes gullibility or (2) a God who insists that we make specific theological choices (such as Baal vs. YHWH, Catholic vs. protestant, Christian vs. Muslim) and rewards only the correct choice. The possibility of even one such Being creates an opposing infinity and invalidates Pascal's Wager.  Belief in a generic supreme being also seems not to be enough. The priests of Baal (who competed with Elijah to call down fire from heaven and were slaughtered for it) believed their god was more powerful than Elijah's Yahweh, whom Pascal identifies with the true God, so if all that is required is beli...