Essays in Philosophy of Religion (Jostarhaye Falsafeh Din)

Pascal's wager and the many gods objection

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

amirhosein zadyusefi 1
Mohammad saeedimehr 2

1 PhD student, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran

2 Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran

Abstract
Pascal’s Wager is one of the arguments which is used to defend the rationality of ‘God exists’ proposition. One of the most important objections to Pascal’s Wager is called The Many Gods Objection (MGO). In this paper, we, firstly, present one of the most common versions of Pascal’s Wager, ‘Argument from Dominating Expected Utility’, and then we will introduce two versions of MGO. The first version is called the possibilist version and the second the actualist. Actualist version has itself three versions which come sequentially such that the second version of the actualist version is a result of an objection to the first version and the third version is a result of an objection to the second version. As a response to the possibilist version we will present Jeff Jordan’s response. The main idea of this response is that logical possibility does not imply an assignment of positive probability. For the actualist version, we present two responses. The first response is based on the denial of a proposition which is supposed to be true by actualist version. In the second response the main purpose of Pascal’s Wage is asserted.

Keywords

God's existence
rationality of religious belief
Pascal's Wager
the many-gods objection
decision theory
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