As you know, I think the essence of Pascal’s wager is this:
If believing in X has positive utility, then you should believe in X.
I think there is enough to debate about in that statement alone.
But suppose that X = God exists. It seems to me that you are consistently writing that Pascal’s Wager fails because in this case the utility of X is impossible to compute due to the complexity of X. I don’t believe this makes the argument fail for two reasons:
Pascal’s Wager says, “If belief in X has positive utility, you should believe in X’. This argument doesn’t fail (in form) if the utility is negative or impossible to compute.
I disagree that the utility is impossible to compute, despite all your arguments about the complexity of X. My reason is straight-forward: atheists do calculate (or at least estimate) the utility of believing in God. Usually, they come up with a value that is negative. So it’s not impossible to estimate the average utility of a complex belief.
As you know, I think the essence of Pascal’s wager is this:
I think there is enough to debate about in that statement alone.
But suppose that X = God exists. It seems to me that you are consistently writing that Pascal’s Wager fails because in this case the utility of X is impossible to compute due to the complexity of X. I don’t believe this makes the argument fail for two reasons:
Pascal’s Wager says, “If belief in X has positive utility, you should believe in X’. This argument doesn’t fail (in form) if the utility is negative or impossible to compute.
I disagree that the utility is impossible to compute, despite all your arguments about the complexity of X. My reason is straight-forward: atheists do calculate (or at least estimate) the utility of believing in God. Usually, they come up with a value that is negative. So it’s not impossible to estimate the average utility of a complex belief.