Objecting Vaguely to Pascal's Wager.
This article presents an objection to Blaise Pascal's Wager. Arguments in the philosophy of religion do not get much more interesting than Pascal's Wager. There is its interest to historians of probability as essentially the first instance of explicitly decision theoretic reasoning in print, its int...
| Published in: | Philosophical Studies Vol. 98; no. 1; pp. 1 - 15 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Springer Nature
Mar2000
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | This article presents an objection to Blaise Pascal's Wager. Arguments in the philosophy of religion do not get much more interesting than Pascal's Wager. There is its interest to historians of probability as essentially the first instance of explicitly decision theoretic reasoning in print, its interest to decision theorists for its invocation of infinite utility, and its interest to everyone as a putative proof that belief in God is an obligation of rationality. Certain assignments of vague probability to God's existence scotch the Wager. Rationality requires one to assign positive probability to God's existence. |
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