I’m sure Pascal’s wager has long since been debunked, but I’ll flesh it out here because I have some additional points about it that I think are probably original.
First things first. Obviously, there’s an unlimited number of possible gods or other conceivable things, beings or principles that one could imagine would send them to heaven or hell for eternity for believing or not believing in them, or even for believing or not believing, or doing or not doing, any other random thing. One particularly relevant thing to consider, for example, is the possibility that God sends Christians to hell because He hates religious people. And there are, of course, myriad other such contravening possibilities.
Pascal’s wager, on the other hand, implicitly assumes that it’s either the Christian god or nothing, even though the Christian god is an arbitrary invention of human culture (unless one assumes the Christian god is real, of course, but if one assumes that, then one doesn’t need Pascal’s wager to begin with…). Or even if we generalize it to include any god that sends us to heaven or otherwise rewards us for eternity and/or sends us to hell or otherwise punishes us for eternity, the problems outlined in the first paragraph still apply.
But now on to the original stuff. All of the above assumes that it even makes sense to be placed in any one superlatively positive or negative place for eternity, which it doesn’t, because as they say, the only constant is change.
Everything we’ve ever observed in the world or universe at large has been the subject of change. One could argue that math, logic, or the laws of physics themselves don’t change over time, but an eternal paradise with the golden gates or an eternal lake of fire doesn’t exactly derive from math, logic, or the laws of physics any more than Czechoslovakia did. Also, even the laws of physics as we know them are known to break down as we regress to the very first tredecillions of a second of cosmic inflation. And not to mention that math and logic probably don’t exist outside of our minds anyway (see https://myiachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/why-mathematical-platonism-is-silly/ and https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/18/the-universe-is-neither-logical-nor-illogical/.) But of course, the mutability or immutability of math, logic or physics is really neither here nor there for the reason already stated.
So, the ridiculousness of such a hypothetical as a never-ending heaven or hell is congruent with the absurd and paradoxical nature of Pascal’s wager as implying an infinite bounty for believing (and an infinite penalty for not believing) which almost by definition outweighs/trivializes any possible drawback or risk.
One could even reason that the longer some god could and would hypothetically keep a person in some particular heaven or hell, the less likely such a god would be to exist (because, again, change is only natural, and the longer the period of time, the more likely things would change, and the more energy and/or effort God would have to put into controlling the situation to preserve stasis), thus making the god who sends one to heaven or hell for an infinite amount of time infinitely unlikely. In other words, , where t is the amount of time some conceivable god puts a person heaven or hell, and p(t) is the probability of that god existing. Or alternatively, p(t) could be viewed as the probability of a given god to be able and willing to put a person in heaven or hell for an arbitrary amount of time t.
Of course, I’m sure some Christian apologists would argue that heaven and hell (and God, for that matter) are supernatural entities and thus don’t conform to everything we’ve ever observed and known including the ubiquity of change, but that’s pretty far-fetched because it doesn’t conform to everything we’ve thus far observed and known. (And also, if they’re so transcendental, why do their descriptions so thoroughly resemble worldly things and phenomena?) And I argue in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/on-the-term-supernatural/ that everything is natural and that there are no such categorical divisions in Nature, even if it does include all things spiritual, mystical and metaphysical, and that the term “supernatural” is therefore misleading.
EDIT: I just discovered from a cracked.com article that there was already an argument fairly similar to mine, but less mathematical and more allegorical, by Nick Bostrom:
Pascal’s Wager said that not believing in god is a gamble that has no payoff. Risk-analysis philosopher Nick Bostrom clapped back with his own weird thought experiment: what if you were getting mugged, but the mugger forgot to bring his mugging weapon? The mugger makes you increasingly insane offers: hand over your wallet now, and you’ll get double your money back. You’ll get 10 times your money back. You’ll get one quadrillion happy days of life. Even though the chances of the mugger following through are slim, at a certain point, the potential payoff is so big, you’d have to be an idiot not to hand over your wallet.
Going back to the point about Christianity being a human cultural construct, one could argue that just the fact that Christianity came to be gives the Christian god precedence over other possible gods and things to consider in Pascal’s wager because the human mind tends towards truth (at least to a degree that beats random chance), but to that I’d say that Christianity has all the trademarks of a meme complex (as in a complex of ideas that becomes popular simply because it’s “viral” rather than because of any inherent truth in it), especially the ideas of eternal reward and punishment for believing and not believing, respectively. I wrote in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/02/23/christianity-as-a-meme-complex/, among other arguments for Christianity being a meme complex:
1. It says if you believe, you go to heaven for eternity, the best possible place to be, for the longest possible amount of time. It describes heaven as an environment with all the things that people would typically desire to live in.
2. It says if you disbelieve, you go to hell for eternity, the worst possible place to be, for the longest possible amount of time. It describes hell in nearly the most tormentive terms imaginable.
How convenient are these two points for a meme complex? You can’t get any simpler, more direct, or more absolute/superlative than that when it comes to components of an effective meme complex. It not only serves as a stronghold in the individual’s head, but i think it’s the main impetus in Christianity for people to want to spread it, including spreading it by passing it down to their children via direct indoctrination and indoctrination by the churches they’re forced to go to, trying to spread the “good word” from door to door, and going on missions to foreign lands to convert other peoples to Christianity. Maybe it’s a main impetus to spread Christianity via war and conquering, too, but I feel that’s probably more about other factors. You don’t really murder and subvert people because you’re concerned about their welfare.
