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    Pascal's Wager, as originally formulated, was addressed t... — Carmelics
    Home/Natural Theology
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Pascal's Wager, as originally formulated, was addressed to an audience for whom only Catholicism and atheism had non-zero subjective probability.

    Natural Theology
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Pascal's rhetoric is addressed to real agents — 'men of the world' in Paris in 1660.
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    • 2.For that audience, the spectrum of religious theories to which they attached grounded subjective non-zero probability consisted of just Catholicism and atheism.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Pascal's own correspondence and the Pensées show awareness of Islamic and Jewish traditions as live religious options in 17th-century Europe.
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    • 2.The 'many gods objection' raised by Diderot in direct response to Pascal demonstrates contemporaries immediately saw the wager as underdetermined by competing theisms.
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    • 3.Acknowledging non-Christian monotheisms as live options for a Parisian intellectual audience undermines the claim that only Catholicism had non-zero probability.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Attributing a restricted probability space to Pascal's audience conflates the rhetorical framing of an argument with its logical scope.
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    • 2.The philosophical validity of the wager's structure cannot be rescued by restricting its intended audience, since logical force must hold universally or the argument proves too little.
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    Natural Theology

    Related

    Acknowledging non-Christian monotheisms as live options for a Parisian intellect...Attributing a restricted probability space to Pascal's audience conflates the rh...For that audience, the spectrum of religious theories to which they attached gro...Pascal's own correspondence and the Pensées show awareness of Islamic and Jewish...
    +3 moreShow less
    Pascal's rhetoric is addressed to real agents — 'men of the world' in Paris in 1...The 'many gods objection' raised by Diderot in direct response to Pascal demonst...The philosophical validity of the wager's structure cannot be rescued by restric...

    Similar

    For that audience, the spectrum of religious theories to which they at...87%Some members of Pascal's audience assign a probability other than 1/2 ...82%Pascal's equiprobability argument does not speak to those in his audie...77%Relativizing Pascal's Wager to Pascal's intended audience does not dis...76%

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    SEP: pascal-wager
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    In response, some authors argue that in such a competition among various possible deities for one’s belief, some are more probable than others. Although there may be ties among the expected utilities—all infinite—for believing in various ones among them, their respective probabilities can be used as tie-breakers. Schlesinger (1994, 90) offers this principle: “In cases where the mathematical expectations are infinite, the criterion for choosing the outcome to bet on is its probability”. (Note tha
    Extraction notes

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    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit