There might be multiple gods/spirits.

The morality of the god or gods may be very different from the morality of the human making the assumptions.

The god or gods may have no interest in punishing or rewarding humans.

The god or spirit may not have the power to punish or reward.

A “bad” god/devil/spirit may have more power than a “good” god/spirit.

The balance of power in the spirit world may change (or have already changed).

“God” and “Devil” may be different faces of the one entity. After-death consequences may be somewhat or entirely arbitrary.

The god of the Christian Old Testament may be just as nasty as it is painted by the OT writers. The kinder NT God may be the one which does not exist.

… and so on ad infinitum

From a purely probabilistic perspective, the chances of their being an eternal entity which is entirely consistent with any human’s conception of god is astronomically small.

Even within the single religion of Christianity there are myriads of beliefs about the details of the morality of the Jewish Tribal God/s (El and Jeweh) (god/s of hate) vis a vis the Jesus God (God of love).

This changes the “Christian wager” to “If my particular definition of (the Christian) god exists (or does not exist) then ….. which utterly destroys the utility of the wager.

The main reason is that if we don’t, Pascal’s wager doesn’t work. If God does not act morally then no one could rationally expect to be rewarded for good deeds and punished for bad ones.

Claiming that God is not moral is one way to defeat Pascal’s wager. However, trying to defend the notion that an all powerful being is necessarily immoral will probably result in even more unfortunate bickering than other arguments about religion.

1. An all knowing, all powerful, and perfectly moral God exists

morality is a human thing. why would you attribute this quality to god should be above morality?

so are we really just arguing about a specific understanding of god, or the actual idea of a god? god, being an entity with holds all knowledge; the counterpoint of existance

“You cannot change the assumptions in order to disprove the wager.”

However, if one shows that a key premise of an argument is false, it does show the argument to be unsound.

Pascal’s Wager assumes:

• The world has only two ‘divine possibilities.’
  • A God who rewards belief in God
  • No God

Independent of whatever actually exists, there are many other logically possible ‘divine possibilities.’ To show that this assumption of Pascal’s Wager is false I provided a counter example to it. The counter example is:

• Here are three ‘divine possibilities’
  • A God who rewards belief in god
  • No God
  • A Cruel Deity

Unless there is a contraction in the concept of a cruel deity (making it impossible), this shows the above assumption of Pascal’s Wager to be false and Pascal’s Wager unsound as a result.

Thanks for visiting Demokat. Interesting post but I’m afraid that it does not disprove Pascal’s Gambit really.

For it is based on certain assumptions, and one primary assumption is that God is good and rewards believers with heaven and punishes non-believers with hell.

You cannot change the assumptions in order to disprove the wager.

You can think of it this way:

If you believe in God, and he does exist, when you die, God does whatever he wants to do with you, and the possibilities are infinite.

If you believe in God, and he does not exist, then nothing happens, and the possibilities are nil.

If you do not believe in God, and he does exist, when you die, God still does whatever he wants to do with you, and the possibilities are still infinite.

If you do not believe in God and he does not exist, then nothing happens, and the possibilities are still nil.

Either way, the odds are always in favor of the House (or God), because our belief or non-belief in him has no bearing whatsoever on his existence or non-existence. If he exists, he holds all the cards.