Pascal, Pascalberg, and friends

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 87 (1):109-130 (2020)
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Abstract

Pascal’s wager has to face the many gods objection. The wager goes wrong when it asks us to chose between Christianity and atheism, as if there are no other options. Some have argued that we’re entitled to dismiss exotic, bizarre, or subjectively unappealing religions from the scope of the wager. But they have provided no satisfying justification for such a radical wager-saving dispensation. This paper fills that dialectical gap. It argues that some agents are blameless or even praiseworthy for ignoring all but one religion as they face the wager. The argument leads us to multiple Pascals: a Jewish one, a Christian one, a Muslim one, and more.

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Sam Lebens
University of Haifa

Citations of this work

Pragmatic Arguments for Theism.Elizabeth Jackson - 2023 - In John Greco, Tyler Dalton McNabb & Jonathan Fuqua (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Religious Epistemology. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 70–82.
On the Harmony between Epistemology and Pistology.Samuel Lebens - 2021 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (1):29-35.

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Political Liberalism.J. Rawls - 1995 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57 (3):596-598.
Knowledge and Action.John Hawthorne & Jason Stanley - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (10):571-590.
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.Michael Sandel - 1982 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Evidence, pragmatics, and justification.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (1):67-94.

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