Why Pascal's Wager Sucks, Part 1

There are two very separate arguments for why Pascal's wager is obselete and, I'll be honest, this isn't my favorite. I'll offer the one that works best for me later, but I want to offer this one first, as it directs itself right at the math, and not at the logic of gambling with the "soul."

Obviously, Pascal said that there is 50% chance that you can go to heaven or rot in the ground. Now, the real problem with this is that it really doesn't help picking out a religion to follow.

Let's say that every religion has a decent chance, since Pascal's wager insists that we do away with faith (or, if we're going to be honest, delusional arrogance), we can only say that every religion has an equal chance at being right.

You've got the Greek patheon (which I'll conjoin with the Roman one, for the sake of argument), the Zoroastrians, Mithra, the Hindu polytheists and the Judeo-Christian God. Now, obviously I've left alot of people out, partly because explaining their religions would take way too long and partly because we would get into trivializations. These are major monotheistic and polytheistic theologies, in that they are seriously different. (since there are plenty of Pagan faith indigenous to North America, not to mention Confucianism and Taoism and other, more modern South East Asian religions, it's probably best if we stick to the ones who's theological individuality cannot be argued)

Given those, you're shooting at 10% right now. Since there's a 50% chance that God doesn't exist at all (God is a yes/no question), every theology gets a bite of the other piece of the pie. Obviously, even that is generous, as these theologies are so elaborate that they are not simple "yes/no" variations that one would need to construct a real proof of probability.

So let's be generous and give the Abrahamic God 10%. You have to split the pot when you get to the birthright, and the rift between Islam and Judaism, because that's a "Isaac/Ishmail" question that we can only speculate on. It's pass or fail.

Judaism (the frontrunner) is now looking at 5%. Not really a bet I want to make, but that's okay, right?

No, not really, because once you get into Christianity, you split the pot again. As a Jew/Christian, you're argument really depends on "was Jesus the son of God?" which is, again, a "yes/no" split.

Now they drop to 2.5%. I should mention again, for the sake of argument, that this is my extremely simplified version of the wager. If you really pull in the New World's pantheons, this is really a generous wager.

Now, Spinoza's God (which is only seen as a single "yes/no") works within Pascal's wager, but the fall of theology is that it is so specific that it cannot be seen as a single "yes/no." We're not talking about coin flips, we're talking about card shuffles, and half of the deck is atheism.

Spinoza's God, though, doesn't really offer guidlines for an afterlife (and that's good, because if it did, it would fall into that same trap).

Yes, there's a fifty present chance that God exists, but there's only a 25% chance that God even gives a crap what you're doing. (calculated on the basis of another 50/50 split)

I'm going to take the fat side on this one.