Indeed, one of the critical flaws with Pascal's Wager, from a decision-science standpoint, is that it's Judeo-Christian-centric. AFAIK, only the gods of monotheistic religions seem to demand singular worship. Gods of other religions and belief systems don't seem to give a crap how many of them you worship, or whether you blend them into admixtures of faith.
Given that there is no evidence that the Christian God is more likely to exist than, say, Zeus, we must provide equal statistical weight to Zeus as to J.C. And so on for all the other possibilities, ad infinitum.
But it doesn't stop there. Some religions' tenets conflict directly with the tenets of others. So it can be said that there are multiple sets of compatible religions that can be held at a given time. Most of these religions are polytheistic. By contrast, adopting a monotheistic religion limits you to just one chip on the cosmic roulette table.
Ergo, from a statistical standpoint, choosing a monotheistic religion (such as Christianity) for the Wager is taking the worst possible odds.
> Given that there is no evidence that the Christian God is more likely to exist than, say, Zeus,
What do you think about a premise that if one of the gods of religion exists, it is more likely to be one that has been fairly successful or at least has not allowed his following to die out, perhaps on the assumption that such a god would be fairly powerless and not much worth following anyway. I suppose you could counter that such a metric of success would depend greatly on the time period you looked at. Still, I think it might be reasonable to assert that a god who let all his followers die out is less likely to exist than a god who has inspired his followers to successfully spread his name to every country on earth for two thousand years running. If so, you might at least restrict Pascal's wager to a few "major" religions and perhaps proceed from there.
It's an interesting thought, and the other side of the coin might be the assumption that all the various gods are just manifestations of the same God/entity/whatever, who has appeared to different people in the form(s) most suitable to their historical and cultural contexts.
Were that the case, however, it seems strange that the same being would demand more sacrifices of some than of others, or place stricter guidelines on one group versus another. (Though perhaps God is a behavioral economist, after all, and he's simply structuring different incentives for different groups, i.e., creating the frameworks the different groups need most? But, to your point, that wouldn't account for why some groups and gods died out altogether).
Continuing this point you need to exclude any major religion with significant exclusive splits like Christianity, or Islam. Leaving Budism and Hinduism.
Good point. I could argue that Christianty's splits are not generally considered exclusive, at least today (excepting minor ones like Mormonism), or that even if they are exclusive, splits like Catholicism and Protestantism might still be large enough to be included alongside Buddhism and Hinduism. But at that point things may be far too subjective to attempt to salvage the cosmic reach of Pascal's wager.
I disagree, I think most religions you could name or find in an encyclopedia (obviously the set of "religions" is infinite) are mutually exclusive. And statistically ... given that the set of possible religions is infinite, I'm not sure that you get much better odds; I'd have to think about that. Also, restricting yourself to what is in the current encyclopedia is pretty limiting ... Those poor citizens of the 1700s would have had no idea Mormonism was true. :)
Reminds me of a funny South Park bit, wherein a bunch of people wind up in hell. There's a demon serving as sort of a welcoming committee, and he tells the crowd he will answer any questions to the best of his ability.
"So...which religion was the right one?" someone asks.
"Mormonism," he replies. It turns out Mormonism was the correct answer. Sorry."
Reminds me of the Game of Thrones character matrices I've seen around. People who are religious, funnily enough, exhibit the exact same tendencies as Game of Thrones and Dr. Who fans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNtnN_DiP3o).
Given that there is no evidence that the Christian God is more likely to exist than, say, Zeus, we must provide equal statistical weight to Zeus as to J.C. And so on for all the other possibilities, ad infinitum.
But it doesn't stop there. Some religions' tenets conflict directly with the tenets of others. So it can be said that there are multiple sets of compatible religions that can be held at a given time. Most of these religions are polytheistic. By contrast, adopting a monotheistic religion limits you to just one chip on the cosmic roulette table.
Ergo, from a statistical standpoint, choosing a monotheistic religion (such as Christianity) for the Wager is taking the worst possible odds.