The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion

Rowe, William. 1982. “Religious Experience and the Principle of Credulity.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13: ...

end p.167 7 PASCAL'S WAGERS AND JAMES'S WILL TO BELIEVE Jeffrey J. Jordan During the summer of 1955 John von Neumann, the mathem ...

The wager presupposes a distinction between (A) a proposition being rational to believe, and (B) inducing a belief in that propo ...

This leads to the second constitutive feature: a Pascalian wager is a decision situation in which the possible gain or benefit a ...

those, like William Paley (1734–1805), who employed the design argument to argue for a divine designer, and then used the argume ...

In this matrix there are two states of the world (possible ways that the world might be), one in which God exists and one in whi ...

The conclusion—that one should believe that God exists—is an “ought of rationality.” Pascal probably did not intend, nor need a ...

Put schematically: For any person S, and alternatives, α and β, available to S, if α carries a greater expected utility than do ...

No matter how unlikely it is that God exists, as long as there is some positive nonzero probability that he does, believing is o ...

Like its predecessors, the fourth version implies that the benefits of belief vastly exceed those of nonbelief if God exists; bu ...

other than God exists? Perhaps there's a deity that harbors animus toward theism, such that he or she rewards nonbelief (Martin ...

think that belief in a deviant deity correlates with the kind of positive benefits associated with theistic belief. But this abs ...

If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true af ...

To facilitate matters, I paraphrase eight definitions made by James: • Hypothesis: Something that may be believed. Option: A de ...

One might object that James has at best shown only that theistic belief is momentous if God exists. If God does not exist, and, ...

minimizing our stock of false ones. Clifford's rule derives its moral validity, one might contend, from that intellectual goal. ...

Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God Perhaps one further characteristic shared by Pascal's wager and James's argument should be ...

4.While it may be better to understand the acts as bringing about belief, and remaining within nonbelief, for convenience, I wil ...

Pascal, Blaise. 1995. Pensées. Trans, Honor Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. 2001. Justice As Fairness: A Res ...

Ryan, Jack. 1945. “The Argument of the Wager in Pascal and Others.” New Scholasticism 19: 233–50. Schlesinger, George. 1994. “A ...