God.

[devonin]

Using something as evidence for or against, in an argument that is well outside the bounds of the kind of argument the thing was intended to be evidence for or against tends to have the natural effect of making it not stand up very well.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler gives an argument for why Jews are responsible for most of the evils of the world. If you are going to argue against this argument, don't do it outside the text or you're committing a straw man.

Funny how you strawman me to try to make a point about the perils of strawman.

I didn't say you were only allowed to object to Pascal from inside Pascal. I said that Pascal was starting from very specific premises when framing his wager, and so if your problem is with the premises, you need simply prove that the premises are incorrect (which you made a strong argument for, and I agree with you) and then simply don't bother addressing the argument at all, because, having disproved the premises as true, the entire thing falls apart.

My whole issue was with the fact that the previous poster said that the prospect of the larger theological stage in which the world operates made Pascals "guarenteed outcome" not guarenteed, when premise 1 of Pascal's wager is "Assume that iff there is a God, it is the christian god"

The question the original poster was addressing had no room for Pascal at all, because Pascal's wager doesn't allow for itself to be considered in the larger theological stage. I was correcting what appeared to be a misunderstanding of the scope of Pascal's wager, and therefore using it in a context where it was not appropriate to prove another point (Thus, my claim of straw man)

As so often seems to be the case Kilroy, I make a minor statement that is intended merely to clear up one single use of something in a thread, and instead of seeing where and why and how I was framing what I said, you leap directly to some larger context issue that has nothing to do with what I was saying, and we get drawn into this (albiet enjoyable and fascinating) discussion about some wholly unconnected problem to the problem at hand.

My entire issue that sparked this back-and-forth was basically "You used Pascal to prove your point, in a situation where I don't feel using Pascal made any sense" That's all...nothing more. I wasn't trying to declaim disagreeing with anything by pointing to larger issues, I wasn't trying to claim that Pascal's wager was the God's own truth, I was just pointing out that it is only really meaningful to consider Pascal's wager from a christian perspective, because (As you went to great lengths to point out) in a larger perspective, his entire point doesn't work.

All kinds of arguments and experiments are conducted starting from premises that are in some cases even provably false. (I've taken part in physics experiments that assumed a frictionless universe, that assumed gravitational constants other than the one which is presumed to exist) They set up beforehand the context in which they are claiming to work, and so only -want- to be judged within the context in which they are claiming to work. If I hatch a clever scheme to abuse the welfare system in Canada, pointing out that the welfare system doesn't work that way in the United States does an excellent job of proving why you couldn't use my scheme in the United States, but does no job at all in proving why I couldn't use my scheme in Canada.