Pascal's Wager: The Many Gods Objection

Dr. Craig responds to the "many worlds" objection to Pascal's Wager.

QUESTION: What about the many gods objection to Pascal's Wager, where it's not just a decision between Christianity and say atheism; you've also got to consider Islam, you've got to consider Hinduism, you've got to consider all of these different versions of religions. So it's not just as simple as this option or this option. So how would you respond to this objection to Pascal's Wager?

DR. CRAIG: That's right, and that is the most important objection. I think there are two ways of responding to that. One would be that if the alternatives are so improbable, they can be safely ignored. For example, that Odin or Zeus might turn out to be the true God. The probability of that is so utterly negligible that these can be safely ignored and the argument will not be impaired. The other response would be if you can use rational argument and evidence to reduce the alternatives to a tractable number, like two or three or four, then you can run the argument just using those alternatives. And I think that for Pascal himself, he believed that the alternatives basically came down to Christianity or naturalism. Although Pascal believed that belief in God is properly basic, he was an enormous fan of Christian evidences, and there are portions of the Pensees that contain arguments for the resurrection of Jesus that read like Gary Habermas or some other evidentialist! And so I think for Pascal, he thought that basically the choice was going to be between naturalism and Christianity, and when you compare those two, as I said in the response to Kyle, then it is just so clear that the enormous benefits that will accrue as a result of Christianity being true just outweigh any costs associated with it, far more than naturalism which has virtually no great benefit accruing to it if it's true.