Take that Pascal

This is a response to Pascal's Wager. For those of you who don't know who Blaise Pascal is or why he is the subject of so much scorn, here's a quick write-up. Pascal is the French mathematician who brought you Pascal's triangle, although I could have made up that triangle in my dreams, and the guy who have the SI unit of pressure named after. Apparently he also had a knack for sticking he nose where it didn't belong, namely in reason.

Pascal's wager, if you didn't already know, is the bet that says if you bet on god and it turns out you're right, you go to heaven. While if you didn't bet on god, then you go to hell. Of course, his medieval mind would then associate heaven with infinite good and hell with infinite suffering. His point being that you have everything to gain by wagering that god exist, and nothing to lose, so just pray. Understandably, anyone who knows reason would know that that logic is simply flawed at best, or totally incoherent at its worst, of which the "nothing to lose" part have just been dismantled by the comic.

First one have to wonder why an omnipotent (all-present) and omniscient (all-knowing) god wouldn't see through your cheap bet. Why in the world would he let in those cunning, scheming people who go onto their knees just because they hope to make it into heaven, while leaving the sincere and honest atheists who proudly proclaim their disbelieve to go to hell. If that deity is even one bit as moral as all the sacred books and all his followers claim him to be, then he certainly would at least have it the other way.

The next thing is how do those faithful fanatics know which is the god that really exist of the so many that have been created from the dawn of civilisation? The Greeks had three different gods to democratically judge where you would go for an afterlife, and no, believing that they exist wasn't in the Greeks' criteria. Then there's the Babylonian, Egyptians, Romans, Norse and many, many other mythologies to pay attention to. Are we supposed to practise the rituals of every single culture, just so that we can negligibly raise the chances that we get to enjoy our afterlife? And how do they even know what the intention of those gods are anyway? People always like to say god works in mysterious ways when he kills thousands of people in floods and hurricanes, so how do we know he isn't doing one of those mysterious things again, and instead rewards atheists with the good afterlife instead?

Lastly, we can also break apart the links holding those many arguments in position, and question the whole "mathematical" model behind it. What if the chances of the existence of any gods at all is so small that it is negligible, so what happens when you put negligible chance together with infinite happiness? Huh, did Pascal ever thought about that? And what if the right way to calculate the value of life is in percentage, and if the atheists were right, then you have just wasted a significant portion of your only life into adhering to some of those absurd rituals, while if god did exist, you'll might not make up those percentage lost time, because you still carry on some stupid rituals in heaven?

The only thing Pascal's Wager is, is a scheme of a religious huckster. It's like a salesman trying to sell you a lousy piece of junk by giving it a fake gold coating. It amazes me how this crazy man could ever have been immortalised in Physics.