[b450]

It's amusing to consider how much of a Rorschach test this article must be. But it's a great point, even if it arms us to abusively write off unwelcome ideas as scams. As the author points out, Pascal's reasoning is easily applied to an infinity of conceivable catastrophes - alien invasions, etc. That Pascal specifically applied his argument to the possibility of punishment by a biblical God was due to the psychological salience of that possibility in Pascal's culture - a truly balanced application of his fallacious reasoning would be completely paralyzing.

[aspenmayer]

I often like to pair Pascal’s wager with Hitchens’s razor:

> Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states:

> > What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor