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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Pascal's Wager, as originally formulated, was addressed to an audience for whom only Catholicism and atheism had non-zero subjective probability.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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