UNFFwildcard
New Member
Squawk said:UNFFwildcard said:Hardly. Pascal himself suggested the possibility of obtaining faith through practicing the rituals of the Christian faith. Acquired faith is not fake faith..
And herein lies the problem. Please tell me on what grounds one would choose to practice the rituals of Christianity over the rituals of the thousands of other religions without some prior notion that Christianity was somehow more valid.
Regress still further, and why would one make the presumption that the practice of any religious ritual/practice, related or not to Christianity, would lead to some form of enlightenment?
The issue here is that a predisposition to faith is a pre-requisite for pascals wager to have any impact, and thus it is revealed as a circular argument whose only function is to bolster the faith of the previously credulous.
Pascal addressed this issue by supplementing his gambit with arguments for the validity of the CHristian faith. On the broader scale, as I've said elsewhere, one religion could be chosen (or, at least, the list narrowed down) by reasoning between them on various logical grounds. There is no need to draw pieces of paper from a hat.
Is enlightenment necessary to satisfy the gambit? I don't see how enlightenment is relevant.