The biggest problem with this whole line of thought is the conclusion that if Heaven and Hell are incentive structures then they cannot exist. Your statement that they are incentive structures is a statement about their purpose, not about their existence. In order to disprove them, you have to attack their existence and I fail to see that evidence provided here.
You’re correct that the OP as it stands is not a thorough, logical proof in the non-existence of God. A couple of commenters below pointed out the same gap in logic. What I’m leaving out here is my life story from age 9 to age 15. There was lot of growing in those years, and at least one major crisis of faith that I came out of with faith still intact, due to the occurrence of a seemingly unlikely event I desperately prayed for. Ultimately, I believed because I thought it made me part of a club of the blessed, like a Sam’s Club for good luck. I didn’t have any other reasons to believe. It was that plain framing of Pascal’s wager that caused me to step outside my belief and examine it. At the time that I realized my own reason to believe in a personal God looked a lot like the general reasons for believing that Santa Claus is a real person, there was nothing else around to sustain my irrational belief in God, so it collapsed. I was otherwise a very rational person, particularly good at analyzing questions and arriving at useful answers. Pascal’s wager removed my blind spot where belief in God was hiding.
methinks: If you find out that there is a very good reason for which people would talk about Heaven & Hell, whether it existed or not, doesn’t that make the hypothesis that Heaven & Hell don’t exist more plausible (given what I think SRStarin’s priors were, roughly)? Isn’t the correct update in this scenario in favor of “Heaven & Hell don’t exist”?
The biggest problem with this whole line of thought is the conclusion that if Heaven and Hell are incentive structures then they cannot exist. Your statement that they are incentive structures is a statement about their purpose, not about their existence. In order to disprove them, you have to attack their existence and I fail to see that evidence provided here.
You’re correct that the OP as it stands is not a thorough, logical proof in the non-existence of God. A couple of commenters below pointed out the same gap in logic. What I’m leaving out here is my life story from age 9 to age 15. There was lot of growing in those years, and at least one major crisis of faith that I came out of with faith still intact, due to the occurrence of a seemingly unlikely event I desperately prayed for. Ultimately, I believed because I thought it made me part of a club of the blessed, like a Sam’s Club for good luck. I didn’t have any other reasons to believe. It was that plain framing of Pascal’s wager that caused me to step outside my belief and examine it. At the time that I realized my own reason to believe in a personal God looked a lot like the general reasons for believing that Santa Claus is a real person, there was nothing else around to sustain my irrational belief in God, so it collapsed. I was otherwise a very rational person, particularly good at analyzing questions and arriving at useful answers. Pascal’s wager removed my blind spot where belief in God was hiding.
methinks: If you find out that there is a very good reason for which people would talk about Heaven & Hell, whether it existed or not, doesn’t that make the hypothesis that Heaven & Hell don’t exist more plausible (given what I think SRStarin’s priors were, roughly)? Isn’t the correct update in this scenario in favor of “Heaven & Hell don’t exist”?