Why Do The Skeptics Take The Chance At Being Wrong When They Don't Have To?
Why is it so important to them to take that chance? Has their delusions been so real to them that, even though they have no evidence or facts to support their delusions, to stick with them? They keep demanding my brothers and sisters and I to prove that God is alive and His Word is Truth by pulling this burden of proof nonsense on us. Why can't they see the fact that, since God already has proven Himself to mankind by His Word and His Work, the burden of proof is on them instead of us?
They see the evidence but they will not accept it as evidence. They want to believe that this came about by some freak accident and allow the fairy tale of evolution to take over in their distorted thinking. What are they afraid of? Why do they run when faced with the Truth? Don't they know that God doesn't wish to harm them when they humble themselves and seek His Face?
It's certain that they are afraid of hell fire. They want to believe that hell doesn't exist. In order to accomplish this, they must also believe that God doesn't live, or even heaven doesn't exist. They'll probably read this and laugh and mock and ridicule, but, they'll never prove what they want to believe is true. Hell was not meant for man at all, it was meant for the devil and his angels. Unfortunately, a lot people believe that it was meant for man as well, which isn't true.
God hates this because letting some of His beloved creation enter into hell breaks His heart. People don't realize that when they enter hell, that they'll discover, what God already knows, that it's a place of torment which no man or woman could with stand.
Their heart knowledge seeks after the Truth of God and not the lies of men.
Again, why would skeptics want to take the chance at being wrong when they don't have to?
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@onewithshoes They were wrong, the wager only works if your religion is the right one as Pascal's Wager was originally set out to prove Christianity logical. Going back through historical writings of Christianity starting out as a cult before it took over as a main religion, evidence indicates that their religion wasn't just "always" around," and "always there" like it poofed itself into existence.
Choose a group of self-described Christians and call them Group A. Group A believes that Jesus was the son of God, he died on the cross for our sins, and only through him can we go to heaven.
Choose another group of self-described Christians and call them Group B. Group B believes that Jesus was the son of God, he died on the cross for our sins, and only through him can we go to heaven.
Given: for every Group A, there is a Group B that firmly believes that Group A is going to hell.
As a result, the statement "a rational person should wager as though God exists" is meaningless, unless you first define to which group you're referring.
There are a great many logical fallacies in how the Wager is applied. Often the Wager is suggested as some sort of proof or last-ditch argument for God. But since it was embedded in the Pens茅es, which was Pascal's life project to defend Christian thought, it seems unlikely he intended for the Wager to stand alone. Whether anyone would be convinced by such an argument seems not to be the main thrust of Pascal's formulation of the Wager.
The very introductory statement to his argument shows that Pascal concedes that God cannot be proven in the Aquinian sense:
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him.
Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in expounding it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their word; it is in lacking proofs, that they are not lacking in sense.
It makes more sense to view Pascal's Wager as a precursor to Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. In contradiction to Cartesian skepticism, we are free (even compelled) to act on beliefs that we cannot prove from first principles. Any reasonable reading of Pens茅es would conclude that Pascal is not trying to take the risk out of choosing the Christian faith. Rather, he was defending the faith from the charge that it is irrational
The logical flaw is that he ignored a third possibility. Essentially he assumed that either there is no God, or there is a God who will do something good for you if you do some set of positive actions or, at worst, will do nothing. The third possibility is that God is evil or just backwards, and does good only for those who disrepect him or don't believe in him or spend their lives convincing people to hate him, etc., and punishes everyone else. "Bad God" is just as probable as "Good God" without any other assumptions, so it makes no sense to believe that one or the other exists.
