Pascal’s wager also misrepresents the dichotomy, where all the risk is assumed to reside in atheism, but none with theism. Point by point here are some flaws in that rationale.
- The wager is presented as a lottery, that if you don’t enter you will definitely lose (the risk), but there is no evidence for this lottery, so the risk is unevidenced assumption.
- There are literally thousands of “lotteries” to choose from, so there’s clearly an inherrent risk in belief, as you may easily be entering the wrong one, a risk the wager ignores.
- Each “lottery” has virtually limitless choices in what you need to win, so the risk extends even further, and beyond which “lottery” you enter.
- The wager implies that you can trick a deity with limitless knowledge and power, that your belief is genuine, a demonstrably erroneous idea.
- The wager ignores the risk to this life, the only thing that requires no unevidenced assumptions, and the risk of entering the wrong “lottery” or the wrong version of the one you choose is both extensive and can involve a very real risk to life and limb, and to those you love, throughout human history, and even now. Again the wager ignores this risk.
Bottom line there is plenty to lose in believing in a deity, even if it turns out there is a real deity, and many of those risks associated with belief don’t go away if no deity exists, despite the wager claiming the opposite. The wager also implies a risk to non belief that is never evidenced, or even questioned, given the wager is wrong to claim there is no risk in belief, this is a substantial flaw in its core assumption that you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain from belief in a deity.
As Cog points out, anyone claiming to not be an agnostic is making a claim to knowledge about the nature and existence of a deity, yet despite millennia of relentless navel gazing, no such knowledge has been objectively evidenced.
If a claim is unfalsifiable then by definition we must all be agnostic about it, if we choose to believe such a claim then what is our criteria for disbelieving all other unfalsifiable claims? The only open minded position is to withhold belief from all unfalsifiable claims, or to believe them all, which I find absurd, believing one, and not all the others is an inherently biased position, so closed minded by definition.