> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?<p>That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.<p>But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.
> But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus<p>Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.<p>Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.<p>Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.<p>Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.
Pascal's wager was not at all anchored to any specific attestations, you are taking his wager and reinterpreting it to give it some kind of legitimacy that it never originally held. The entire point of the wager was to justify belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost. If your now arguing that Christianity is more credible because of historical evidence, so be it and stick to it but you've abandoned Pascal's wager and moved on to an entirely different argument.
> by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost<p>The supposed asymmetry only holds in a framework that assumes the Christian God as the only possibility. The point is that it's possible for there to be a god that isn't Yahweh, and that god might sentence you eternal torment for believing in Yahweh, so in fact believing in Yahweh can result in infinite cost, destroying the value of the wager.