Blaise Pascal's Argument On Religion And Morality

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Recommended: The relationship between morality and religion

Religion and morality are two things that people seem to connect quite often. Many people believe that in order to be moral, there has to be belief in God. This belief makes you a moral person because you follow what God is stating in his bible, such as never lying or stealing. But is that the case of every individual? Is a person who believes in God morally correct all of the time? Being moral means to know and act upon the differences of good and bad, wrong and right. Your behavior is morally correct if you do a good action, such as helping someone. If you are immoral, you would ignore what is right and do something wrong. Opposing other’s views that do not correlate with yours tends to happen when you do not agree with something another …show more content…

Blaise Pascal’s argument was fairly simple: you are better off believing in God because if he does exist, you will go to heaven, but if you do not believe and he happens to exist, you are likely to be punished with hell. There are several things wrong with his argument because he is insinuating that if people go about living a morally correct life, but do not believe in God, they are not welcome in heaven, if God is proven real. With that being said, Pascal rules out all the people that do well in the world and basically live by God’s biblical rules, but do not believe in his existence for a matter of reasons, whether it is lack of evidence or perhaps they believe in another God. A fallacious point made in Pascal’s argument for making people prefer to believe in God, is that he does not mention what God to believe in. If a person is to believe in another God that Pascal is referring to, that person will not benefit from heaven because they do not believe in that exact …show more content…

On the other hand, if a person is atheist, but is morally just, they more often than not are considered “not good” people. While it is certainly acceptable to believe in a God, it is the actions that you present to the world that make you a moral person. Another problem with Pascal’s Wager was that if people choose to believe in God just so they can go to heaven, they would have to follow the religion untruthfully and pretend to have ties with it just to go to heaven. It would be an immoral thing to pretend to follow a religion for one’s benefit and if God were to be omniscient, he would be aware of the false beliefs of a person. With the problem of evil comes the problem of free will for humans and God’s omnipotence is challenged. People’s free will decides whether they will do immoral actions or not. God’s omnipotence is tested because if he would be able to truly have a power over us, he would always make humans do the moral thing in our everyday lives. Human beings create many problems that are immoral from their own free will. Since many people devote to religion, perhaps the people committing crimes or immoral actions are religious beings that do in fact believe there is a

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