No, it’s not (at least if we take the generous view and consider the Wager as an argument for belief in some type of deity, rather than the Christian one for which it was intended), because after considering all the hypotheses, you will still have to choose one (or more, I guess) of them, and it almost certainly won’t be atheism. I also feel like you completely missed the point of my previous comment, but I’m not sure why, and am consequently at a loss as to how to clarify.
because after considering all the hypotheses, you will still have to choose one (or more, I guess) of them, and it almost certainly won’t be atheism.
Why is that?
While a belief having adherents may be evidence for that belief, other people believing differently will be evidence against it. When religions function as evidence against each other and lose probability mass, more of the lost probability mass goes to atheism than to other religions.
Sure, but it doesn’t matter how much probability mass atheism gets, because the religions are the only ones offering infinities*, and we’re probably interested in best expected payoff, not highest probability. If religions have 1/10^50 residual probability mass and atheism has all the rest, you’d still probably have to choose one of them if at least one is offering immense payoffs and you haven’t solved Pascal’s Mugging.
*I guess one could argue that a Solomonoff prior assigns a zero probability to truly infinite things, but I’m not sure that’s an argument I’d want to rely on (also I know Buddhism offers some merely vast numbers, although I’m not sure they’re vast enough, and some other religions do too, I’d imagine).
While apologetics have adopted the idea that going to heaven offers infinite utility, the actual descriptions of heaven in the texts from which Christianity is derived (what little there are,) don’t describe anything like infinite utility, except if you accept that a finite utility times an infinite duration equals infinite utility. Given an infinitesimal chance of payout on Christianity, you’d probably be giving yourself better odds trying to achieve infinite utility by living infinitely long, even given the rather low odds of the fundamental laws of physics being amenable to that.
That’s fair. I guess adopting exponential discounting is also good enough to rule out Christianity. Not about trying to live infinitely long, though—it would depend on how much believing in Christianity would hinder you in achieving that. (Same for other religions that don’t promise sufficiently amazing bliss.)
I would think that a properly self consistent Christian would probably not try to live forever given the expectation of being able to go to Heaven and stay there forever after a lifespan of ordinary length.
On the other hand, Christians with sufficient alief to look forward to their own deaths are pretty rare.
No, it’s not (at least if we take the generous view and consider the Wager as an argument for belief in some type of deity, rather than the Christian one for which it was intended), because after considering all the hypotheses, you will still have to choose one (or more, I guess) of them, and it almost certainly won’t be atheism. I also feel like you completely missed the point of my previous comment, but I’m not sure why, and am consequently at a loss as to how to clarify.
Why is that?
While a belief having adherents may be evidence for that belief, other people believing differently will be evidence against it. When religions function as evidence against each other and lose probability mass, more of the lost probability mass goes to atheism than to other religions.
Sure, but it doesn’t matter how much probability mass atheism gets, because the religions are the only ones offering infinities*, and we’re probably interested in best expected payoff, not highest probability. If religions have 1/10^50 residual probability mass and atheism has all the rest, you’d still probably have to choose one of them if at least one is offering immense payoffs and you haven’t solved Pascal’s Mugging.
*I guess one could argue that a Solomonoff prior assigns a zero probability to truly infinite things, but I’m not sure that’s an argument I’d want to rely on (also I know Buddhism offers some merely vast numbers, although I’m not sure they’re vast enough, and some other religions do too, I’d imagine).
While apologetics have adopted the idea that going to heaven offers infinite utility, the actual descriptions of heaven in the texts from which Christianity is derived (what little there are,) don’t describe anything like infinite utility, except if you accept that a finite utility times an infinite duration equals infinite utility. Given an infinitesimal chance of payout on Christianity, you’d probably be giving yourself better odds trying to achieve infinite utility by living infinitely long, even given the rather low odds of the fundamental laws of physics being amenable to that.
That’s fair. I guess adopting exponential discounting is also good enough to rule out Christianity. Not about trying to live infinitely long, though—it would depend on how much believing in Christianity would hinder you in achieving that. (Same for other religions that don’t promise sufficiently amazing bliss.)
I would think that a properly self consistent Christian would probably not try to live forever given the expectation of being able to go to Heaven and stay there forever after a lifespan of ordinary length.
On the other hand, Christians with sufficient alief to look forward to their own deaths are pretty rare.