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drethelin comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the other popular religions don't really believe in eternal paradise/damnation, so Pascal's Wager applies just as much to, say, Christianity vs. Hinduism as it does Christianity vs. atheism. Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus don't believe in hell, but as far as I can tell. Muslims do. So if I were going to buy into Pascal's wager, I think I would read apologetics of both Christianity and Islam, figure out which one seemed more likely, and going with that one. Even if you found equal probability estimates for both, flipping a coin and picking one would still be better than going with atheism, right?
Why? Couldn't it be something like, Religion A is correct, Religion B almost gets it and is getting at the same essential truth, but is wrong in a few ways, Religion C is an outdated version of Religion A that failed to update on new information, Religion D is an altered imitation of Religion A that only exists for political reasons, etc.
Good post though, and you sort of half-convinced me that there are flaws in Pascal's Wager, but I'm still not so sure.
Even if you limit yourself to eternal damnation promising religions, you still need to decide which brand of Christianity/Islam is true.
If religion A is true, that implies that religion A's god exists and acts in a way consistent with the tenets of that religion. This implies that all of humanity should have strong and very believable evidence for Religion A over all other religions. But we have a large amount of religions that describe god and gods acting in very different ways. This is either evidence that all the religions are relatively false, that god is inconsistent, or that we have multiple gods who are of course free to contradict one another. There's a lot of evidence that religions sprout from other religions and you could semi-plausibly argue that there is a proto-religion that all modern ones are versions or corruptions of, but this doesn't actually work to select Christianity, because we have strong evidence that many religions predate Christianity, including some of which that it appears to have borrowed myths from.
Another problem with pascal's wager: claims about eternal rewards or punishments are not as difficult to make as they would be to make plausible. Basically: any given string of words said by a person is not plausible evidence for infinite anything because it's far more easy to SAY infinity than to provide any other kind of evidence. This means you can't afford to multiply utility by infinity because at any point someone can make any claim involving infinity and fuck up all your math.