Volume 15, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2012
Lawrence Pasternack
Pages 158-178
The Many Gods Objection to Pascal’s Wager
A Decision Theoretic Response
The Many Gods Objection (MGO) is widely viewed as a decisive criticism of Pascal’s Wager. Some have attempted to rebut it by employing criteria drawn from the theological tradition. This paper will offer a different sort of defense of the Wager, one more suited to its apologetic aim as well as to its status as a decision under ignorance. It will be shown that there are characteristics already built into the Wager’s decision theoretic structure that can block many categories of theological hypotheses including MGO’s more outrageous “cooked-up” hypotheses and “philosophers’ fictions.”