Watching University Challenge on the Beeb tonight, there was a question about Pascal’s Wager which reminded me of an almost exactly opposite philosophy I have been developing over the last twelve years or so. Pascal’s posed that even though the existance of God cannot be disproved, a person should believe in God as doing so has everything to gain and nothing to lose. Bascially, a life times false belief in a God is better than eternal damnation. After a weekly debate with some Jehovas wittnesses that bothered me every Sunday when I was studying for my final exams, I was frustrated by the fact that every argument I made about life the universe and everything was followed by a ‘God made it that way’ sort of argument. I finally got to the point of asking ‘if the existance of everything in the universe is because God put it there, what put God there in the first place?’. There was no answer to this and they gave up admitting that you just ‘have to have faith’. Ha!
Since that early success of logic over dogma, I have come up with what I am going to call “Campbell’s Wager”. That is: if there are so many religions in the world with incongruent beliefs (mono/polytheistic etc. etc.) then they cannot all be right… but they can all be wrong. In the absence of evidence to support one religion over another, the odds are that they are all wrong.
And that is why I am a happy atheist 
Blaise Pascal (left), James Campbell (right)
Tags: Religion?