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Originally Posted by gabriel12
...and it may have been answered in the 1000 plus posts that I don't feel like reading...
So, I think it comes down to faith for the non-believer or uncertain that they will continue their life not believing and not end up in Hell. It comes down to faith that the believers will continue believing and end up in Heaven. Either way, non-believers and believers are basically using the same theory of Faith, just in opposite directions. Blaise Pascal, a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, had a theory on belief called Pascal's Wager. "Wager posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing (which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing." Either way, believing or non-believing is based on Faith alone because according to this thread, you can't prove either way.
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I agree that it takes faith to absolutely claim the existence or non-existence of a god (see my post two above about everyone being truly agnostic).
Since you didn't bother reading the previous posts (that would take quite a long time, if you are just joining this thread now), I'll just mention that Pascal's wager has been brought up probably at least four times (maybe more, maybe less? I'm too lazy to go back and look too...
) already. And it still doesn't stand up as a reasonable explanation for why to believe in God. I'll re-summarize two basics reasons for this for you now...
1. "The expected value of believing is always greater than the expected value of not believing." Believing in what? Which religion? Which god(s)? All of them? Some of them? One of them? Why one and not the others? We know Pascal was talking about Christianity, but you might as well believe in all of them (and that's quite a few!), "just in case". Since that is the reasoning behind this wager - you don't want to face the consequences if your beliefs are wrong!
2. Do you think that an omniscient god (such as the Christian one), if there really is one, wouldn't know that you are only believing out of the sake of not wanting to be wrong when you die? If I were that god, I think that that type of believer (someone "faking it") would be worse than someone who doesn't believe at all. At least the non-believers are being honest about their true beliefs...
Pascal's wager, once deconstructed, isn't a solid reason for belief in God... it's just a cop-out from owning up to your true feelings about not believing. Either you do believe, and then you are prepared to face the consequences (if there is indeed some sort of afterlife) about believing the correct thing (which of course you think you do) or not... or you don't believe, and you're prepared to face the consequences of your non-belief (which you think there won't be any, as you don't believe in an afterlife). There's really no point in deluding yourself (and God, if there is one) about a pretend belief in him/her/it...
[Edited to add] Wes replied while I was replying, and his link spells out the fallacy of Pascal's Wager in much more depth than I did... thanks Wes!