To sum it up: Pascal’s wager is not a proper line of argument. ”

Wrong again Joe. Your point #1 would not be a Christian. Jesus changes a man’s wants and attitudes. If you change only to buy your way into heaven you are not a Christian. You should really do some study before taking on Pascal.

1. Every Christian would agree that believing in Jesus requires you to change your life. But what if someone does not want to change his life because he is happy with the way it is? Then believing in Jesus might mean to live a much less happy life now in exchange for a possibly happy life after you death.

2. Every Christian has to admit that he is not 100% certain whether or not God exists. (Otherwise it would not be about faith and believing, but about knowing.) In fact, most honest Christians do know that there are times in life when it is difficult to believe and there are loads of doubts. Books by “great men of faith” are full of these experiences. So being an honest Christian implies acknowlediging that faith is not about being 100% sure.

Conclusion from 1. and 2.: Also a Christian can see that (a) depending on how someone values the quality of his (possibly eternal) life as a Christian versus his current life, and (b) depending on the subjective probability that there is a God/no God, it might be a rational decision NOT to become a Christian.

BTW: This is not just an academic exercise, but a real life thing. Imagine a gay person with a stable, long-term, monogamous, happy relationship who has found his one, true partner for life. Quite a few Christians would expect this person to give up his partner because of what they perceive as Christian believes. If this person thinks that the probability that there is a God is very low, how could they ever be so stupid to become a Christian? To exchange certain perfect happiness for certain unhappiness with an uncertain reward after death? For such a person, choosing this anti-gay Christianity would be outright irrational and stupid.

To sum it up: Pascal’s wager is not a proper line of argument.

(BTW2: I’d pity everyone who becomes a Christian because of Pascal’s wager. How can you have a loving(!) relationship with God if the reason why you believe in him is just being afraid of hell?)

But I am always open to new information.

3D, from the Christian POV, prove Blaise Pascal wrong.

Regarding #12:
If I had lived for God and there was no God, I would have lost the one and only opportunity to understand and experience life as it is, without religious ideologies. In other words: your line of argument were correct only if believing in your God had no negative impact on my short life here on earth. But this is not the case.

this is also pretty interesting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

2. Regarding the cause-effect problem, you will always run into trouble, no matter if you assume there is a god or if you assume there is none. If you assume there is a god, you have the problem of explaining where god came from (unless you just say, s/he has always been there, which is not an answer). If you assume there is no god and follow the evidence that supports the big bang theory, you have the problem of explaining why a big bang was possible in the first instance (so the big bang theory is not a definite answer either).

3. This is why the truly fundamental question is not creation versus big bang, but instead it is: WHY IS THERE SOMETHING AND NOT NOTHING? This question is open, no matter whether or not you believe in a higher being.

4. From the point of LOGIC(!), this question cannot be answered using a cause-effect relationsship because a cause-effect relation never terminates and always needs a higher cause to lead to a lower cause. The only way I can see in which you stop a cause-effect chain is by assuming that the very first effect did not have a cause, i.e. came out of nothing. But neither the concept of god (how did god come out of nothing?) nor the concept of a reality that allows for a big bang (how did this reality come about out of nothing?) answers this question.

5. I doubt that human beings will ever
be able to answer the question of why there is something and not nothing.

6. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasise that, while from the point of LOGIC both the concept of creation and the big bang theory leave open the same question and are therefore equivally disappointing, there are good reasons to assume that the universe was NOT created by a god, but developed via a big bang scenario. These reasons, however, are NOT logical reasons, but EMPIRICAL reasons. We have sufficient empirical evidence to assume that the big bang scenario is realistic.

7. Finally, I hope that it has become clear one more time that we have to address the problem of religion as an empirical problem. And in this way it turns into a scientific problem.