Where is the fallacy in Pascal's wager?

First is that you summarization of Pascal's wager is incorrect. When Pascal wrote the wager, he was talking about searching for God as opposed to not searching. He did not state Christ or a Christian god in his argument.

If you apply Pascal's wager correctly, then seeking to please God becomes the way to go as opposed to not seeking to please God as pleasing God offer ultimate reward and lack of ultimate punishment.

Placing a Christian god to this, however, places a false dichotomy. While you can break out the god dilemma into theire being a God or there not being a God, when you say there is not a God or there is a Christian God, it becomes a false dichotomy as there may be many other Gods. So should I insult a Hindu God, by worshipping a Christian God?

Now realize that the seeking of pleasing God, does not necessarily mean that you will find God or find the God that you feel bares enough evidence to worship over another God. So you can remain atheist and still be following Pascal's original wager in your seeking.

Mr. Smartypants,

Are you aware that Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and scientist? If so, why do you assume that he set his wager up in such a way that a false dichotomy is so easily seen? Read what he actually wrote, and you will not find mention of Christ or a Christian God. If you further look into his work, you will find it was a small part of a larger work published post-humously as a proof for Christianity. He did not reach the conclusion of Christianity being able to be proven, but he certainly did not make such an obvious false dichotomy either. He was much too smart for that.

Edit:

I agree with your conclusions of God's characteristics of "omnipotence, omniscience, rationality, and benevolence" and with God expecting us to live by universal moral laws. I also agree that Jesus eloquently laid out the moral laws with love god and love your neighbor as yourself. My difference is that I do not think one can get to Christianity by logic alone. Conversely, I think one can easily get to love God and love your neighbor as yourself from logic and understanding nature alone. This is why I think it is only important to follow Jesus' example and teachings of love, as opposed to declarations of Jesus' divinity. How else would people who never heard of Jesus attain heaven?

>Where is the fallacy in Pascal's wager?

Well, it depends how exactly you formulate it.

>Given the evidence for two competing claims about events after death

Which two claims are these? Do they cover all possibilities? If not, can you justify excluding other possibilities?

>The worst outcome for Christianity is the best outcome for atheism. Where am I going wrong?

You remember that 'covering all the possibilities' thing I just mentioned?

>there must be only one God because if there were multiple gods, none would have the omnipotence of God.

I don't think omnipotence is a necessary feature of any deity. You might be going somewhere with this, but if so, you'll need to be careful how you define your terms first. Equivocation fallacies are an easy pitfall.

>we have to assume God's omnipotence, omniscience, rationality, and benevolence; that he establishes universal moral laws and requires our faith, moral rectitude, justice, and benevolence toward others.

I see no reason why such a deity would require faith. In anything, much less in his existence specifically.

All it is one gigantic fallacy. Pascal forgot about all the other gods; the odds aren't 50/50 like he stupidly assumed. Either one religion is true or none of them are, but no one said it had to be Christianity that was the true one. What if it's really some African Traditional Religion in Tanzania? Pascal obviously would have lost his own wager.

Fallacy One: It assumes that there is only one god which can be believed in, the Christian one. This is not true, since there are a plethora of gods that have been believed throughout the millennia. This would have to be applied to each and every one of those gods to be true, and this would clearly be impossible, due to the clashing natures of many of the said gods.

Fallacy Two: It assumes that simply wagering on [the Christian] God will buy one entrance into Heaven. While this may be so, the Wager does not instill a belief, it instills an appearance of a belief. Since the god in question is presumed to be all-knowing, he would be able to tell a false from a true belief. Therefore, the belief from the Wager would not qualify should belief be the requirement for entrance into Heaven.

Fallacy Three: It creates a moral dilemma. You, by using this, are sending the most dedicated humanitarians, who just happen to not be Christian, to Hell, while you set a place in Heaven for those mass-murders who happen to be Christian. Since [the Christian] God is supposed to be a loving god, how then could he entertain the embodiment of hatred, yet turn away the embodiment of love?

Fallacy Four: It ignores too many alternate possibilities - some of which are addressed by existing religions, and some which are not. Some examples: A God could reward on criteria which seem meaningless to us - hair colour, taste in clothes, music etc. or A God might not be concerned with humans at all - the universe could be here for hydrogen for all we know. Or God may even reward those who don't believe.

Fallacy Five: It assumes any person is overly fearful of death to be worried about it being a conclusion to their life.

Fallacy Six: It assumes that a belief in God is all that is needed, when many Christians would disagree and would suggest that there are "guidelines" that you should live by (and that God requires you to live by if your belief is sincere). If these guidelines require a change on your part (for example: No sex before marriage, no smoking, denying you are a homosexual, not marrying a non-Christian, etc.), then it could be argued that you have lost something if the Christian God turns out to not exist.

The reason Pascal (the father of algorithms and a mathematical genius) did not publish his wager is based on the point made by a few here. It assumes God does not know our hearts. God invented math and in no way can be bested using its principles.

What Pascal's wager really does for us is show us how straw men are created with the purpose of justifying a guess about reality. Look at these websites that have sprung up around UNPUBLISHED work of a mathematical genius. You see them, right?

Pascal, being a man of math and science, knew there could be only two logical conclusions when it came to the reality of God. Either He is real and wrote the Bible, or He is not real and this is just a huge illusion or conspiracy of some sort.

Where were these other gods when the Bible became the first book off a printing press? Were these other gods asleep while Christians invented airplanes, cars, computers, and invented the word "science"? Perhaps the followers of these various gods were too preoccupied with their insane rituals of torture and execution of the innocent. Who knows?

What we know by math and the odds of such matters is it has to be one of two. Any other conclusion is based on ignoring of mathematical and scientific principles. The truth of algorithms.

Have a Happy 2013th year of our Lord, Jesus Christ. God be with you.

His primary error is assuming there is a choice only between being atheist and Christian. He fails to take into account the thousands of other competing systems of belief.

Less commonly discussed errors are:

When a man decides to live his life in accordance with a system of beliefs which is not consistent with external reality he can face a situation where he must face the consequences in this life. An extreme example would be a man who believed that fire was suitable food, but a man's spiritual beliefs can also have practical consequences.

One cannot simply choose what to believe.

You're wrong in the fact that you are forgetting about all the other competing religions and gods which make similar claims of hell/punishment and/or Heaven/reward.

So, to put it another way, tell me what is wrong with this statement: If you bet on Allah and are right, when you die you live in paradise forever blah blah blah but if you are wrong you remain dead.

See?

The bottom line for me, however, is that belief is not a choice that I can make based on weighing the risks of said belief or lack there of. Belief is a natural result of a claim passing my BS detector which the Bible does not.

Pascal assumed (as you are assuming) that there are only two choices--Christianity and atheism. The thing is, if God exists, then the 'true' religion could be Islam or Buddhism or Shinto or the 'Great Spirit' of the American Indians.

There are really two questions here. (1) Does God exist and (2) if he does exist, what is he like? What does he want from us? If you believed in God but didn't happen to believe that The Bible was his true, inerrant word, then you could never be sure about the second question. This is one of the positions of Deism, that God is largely unknowable, so the only way to understand him is through studying his creation, i.e. SCIENCE.

Again my friend in Christ I have to repeat....TEST the God of the Bible for his truths...This is the only way we know that we have the right and proper God ..this is the only way we know that WE are on the right track....

When I say TEST God, I don't mean that God needs to prove himself in any way for form...I mean simply test the method that God provides for ourself...this is especially true for the Doubting Thomases and Atheists and non-believer around the globe...

I personally have tested both sides of the spectrum..I have at one point, not known an not understood the God of the Bible earlier in life...So I journied out in search of the truth for my own well being...I learned as much as I could about his word...I repented and asked forgiveness for all the wrong I had done....I forgave my ownself ....this point we take too lightly but until we begin to acknowledge that we do not and will never have the full capacity of intellect we will never get past this step. I learned to spend as much time with God and in the Word of God until I was drenched with the Word ..

It was at this last point that I began to realize that God was showing me that the sooner I learned to commit my entire life to him the sooner I would come to total success with life and love and knowledge of peace, and Word....While I'm still learning and I also believe that we continue to learn as long as we live because the World is always changing , I am at great peace with God and man..

The wager can indeed be reversed, since it can be argued that the best option, the one with only limited loss or limited gain, is non belief.

The main fallacy in the Wager is that it assumes constant probability for all Gods to exist, and that is not a fact. It is akin to saying that you have a 50/50 chance of winning the lottery, because only two outcomes are possible.