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Lumifer comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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As C.S. Lewis would say-are they lying, are they mad, or are they telling the truth? People do lie sometimes, and perhaps my difficulty in letting go of Christianity despite a mountain of evidence against it is that my prior on people making up stories is too low. It would take an awful lot of psychosis to make someone believe that a leg had regrown, but again, people do go insane. But is there a way to get a sense of how likely/unlikely this is? With Pascal's Wager on the table, it's not enough to say there's ~40% chance Christianity is true, that's less than half, it's probably wrong. Rejecting it without constant fear would take near certainty that accounts like this one are fraudulant or deceived.
One major problem with Pascal's Wager (among others) is that it doesn't specify which god. It applies equally to worshiping Yahweh, Kali, and Huitzilopochtli -- and offers no guidance on how to choose between them.
Right, but given a large body of Christian miracle accounts, the only two hypotheses that seem plausible are 1. Christianity is true or 2. Christianity is false, and nevertheless generates an extremely impressive body of miracle claims. Given 1. Pascal's Wager is obviously worth taking, and given 2. I can't see any reason to believe in any God. The Wager only works if there's some other reason to consider the belief to be reasonable, otherwise we'd all end up praying to the Tooth Fairy.
Keep in mind that Christianity was the dominant religion of the West for a very long time and it certainly had enough incentives to assert, promote, and otherwise, um, sanctify a large number of miracle claims. All strange and unexplained events (as long as they are beneficial) would be classified as miracles in a deeply Christian society.
And let's not forget the hypothetical Trickster God, omnipotent ruler of the universe that sends all people that believe in Him to hell, and everyone else goes to heaven. In other words, Pascal's wager coexists with its exact inverse.
But even without the wager on the table, I think we can safely agree that the question of God's existence is high-stakes.