Actually, Pascal never published his argument. It was in a pile of notes and thoughts that people found after he died and then published. He might himself not have approved the publication. I have a ton of bad ideas of my own sitting in unpublished note files; so I can appreciate the circumstance. If I die and someone publishes those, there will be a lot of people wondering “He was so smart, why would he publish that,” when in fact I didn’t precisely because I knew it was a bad idea.

Pascal may have intended to revisit the idea and see if he could shore it up or if he had to change or drop it before publishing, and simply died before having a chance to. Instead, it got published without him, and everyone else fell in love with the stupid idea. But also, it was only in a pile of notes for what was intended to be a comprehensive case for Christianity, so in answer to your other question, yes, Pascal certainly did imagine it had to be part of a larger case and could not function by itself.

For example, Pascal might have had in mind to use the Wager not as a reason to believe, but as a reason (a motive) to investigate whether Christianity is the true religion to wager on, which the rest of his intended treatise was supposed to provide. And the way he compiled his notes on it, seem to clearly indicate that was his plan. Which everyone ever after simply ignored.

Moreover, I love “Carrier’s Wager”! I think it can help a lot of people who are struggling to leave their religion but fear the supposed dire consequences. In fact, I use similar reasoning with myself when I was leaving Christianity and it helped a lot.

Basically, if God accepts totally cavalier hedge-betting “belief”, then anyone can just list off any God that accepts that, say “Sure, buddy, I believe in you” and be done with it.

No, that’s the “many gods” objection.

You might be confusing the two. That “just any god will do” is a separate criticism from the “insincere belief” criticism. Yes, they both apply. But they are separate criticisms, requiring separate solutions (if anyone wants to still defend this argument).

The “insincere belief” criticism is different, and not mine. It is written up multiple times in the peer reviewed literature; I’m responding to those presentations. This version of the criticism is based on the assumption that regardless of which god you pick, you still lose the bet, because (a) no good god would reward insincere belief and (b) no bad god would be worth betting on. One can solve that by introducing (arbitrarily) a god to bet on who would reward insincere belief and be good to you for it, and the problem usually claimed there is, as you note, that that isn’t Christianity. And indeed, a popular criticism is precisely that it doesn’t help the proponent of this argument that the only solution to this criticism is to abandon Christianity. It helps them even less that even that tactic still falls to the other criticisms, of course.

But that’s all moot, since we can bypass the insincere belief objection by pointing out, quite simply, that the belief thus generated would not be relevantly insincere to warrant maintaining the objection. Hence my point is the objection is misplaced even if we could establish somehow only one God could be bet on and it just so happened to be Pascal’s. You mistake the argument as being that the belief thus generated would be sincere in some fulsome, particular sense. To the contrary, it would be sincere in a lesser but fully sufficient sense. Once one accepts the moral legitimacy of argumentum ad baculum, that is (as medieval Catholicism in fact did: it’s entire theology was based on it). In other words, any God who would use argumentum ad baculum, would reward anyone who responded to it. So the minutiae of exactly what specific belief that requires is irrelevant.

Hence, I’m pointing out that the only reason the “insincere belief” objection works at all, is because it implicitly assumes the success of other objections (namely, the “ad baculum” and “many gods” objections), and thus is itself an unnecessary objection. Logically, if we reject those objections, then we must also reject the “insincere belief” objection. That’s the point I’m making.

Basically, if God accepts totally cavalier hedge-betting “belief”, then anyone can just list off any God that accepts that, say “Sure, buddy, I believe in you” and be done with it. That’s obviously not what the Christian wants. But if God demands actual belief, not just contingent or “I’ll take it as granted” belief, then your tsunami example doesn’t really apply. In the tsunami example, I am not at all convinced that there are no cars in front of me. I am convinced that it’s beneficial for me to act like there aren’t, but there is no conviction there. Not only would I not die to defend the belief that there are no cars in front of me, I wouldn’t even bet a paycheck on it. I am only taking that bet because the alternatives are worse. As you yourself note, it’s not “a belief the road is clear”.

What I suspect you are doing, understandably, is hedging against the common Christian apologetic tactic of equivocating on what faith means, the way that Ray Comfort does. They will go back and forth (motte-bailey style) between “We just mean trust, don’t you trust your wife?” to “Blessed is the person who perseveres against all possible doubt and evidence to the contrary”. But I like the “It’s not sincere belief” objection exactly because it exposes the underlying cravenness of the argument, and creates a fairly unavoidable fork for the apologist. No just God would put people into a position where they would choose to believe (not just in the existence but even in effectively the moral supremacy) based on a threat. And if God can be effectively conned by such a low-effort response, then God is kind of a putz. But if God isn’t, if our response to the threat requires real and firm conviction in the proposition itself (not our relative weighing of the likelihood of propositions attached to consequences – the actual epistemic certainty versus the risk management), then Pascal’s wager is useless, and demands something that (as Dillahunty notes) even Pascal knew could not be automatic. It even helps to bring up Protestant ideas that no one can be sure if they are saved because maybe they didn’t believe hard enough, having only a relative and not an absolute assurance of salvation. Pascal’s wager either requires something which isn’t sincere or it does, and neither says anything comforting about their theology.

This helps to expose that Pascal’s wager is just a really bad way of convincing people. Which then helps to show that any argument from force isn’t actually convincing, but compelling with a stick. The fact that it is so often used shows that the argument isn’t just baseless but requires accepting massive evil.

In other words, there may indeed be a formal defense of Pascal’s wager that is possible, but I suspect that it can’t be sincerely offered by most believers because it would contradict their theology. The God that responds to you betting against the odds and making a craven choice out of sheer self-interest is some hypothetical God, not the one they actually want you to believe in.

I think you overlooked the point there. The tsunami example was in the section where I say the argument is valid (not that it was sound). In other words, I am saying if the premises were true, then a valid argument follows. I did not there say the premises were true. The following sections then go on to explain that even though the argument is valid, unlike the tsunami example the premises are not true. Just as you are now pointing out.

It is not a problem with Pascal’s Wager, however, that “we can’t choose to believe what we do.” Despite that being often the leading objection to it voiced, it’s misguided. Yes, real belief must follow from the formation of a genuine conviction. But this can arise from recognizing the force of a bet.

You then went on to describe an analogy that include the existence and real present danger of a tsunami.

I see a real problem with this. As you stated real belief must follow from the formation of a genuine conviction.

But if someone approached you and tried to convince you that Russel’s Celestial Teapot was actually real, and that unless you believed in it and followed certain religious practices around that you would be damned to being boiled in a teapot for eternity, I don’t think you would be compelled to believe it (despite the stated cost for not believing it).

So trying to compare the real and present danger of a tsunami (which have been scientifically proven to sometimes happen) to that of the imagined danger of a particular Hell that awaits any/all non-believers of that particular religion (which has no scientific basis for even existing) is a fallacy in my opinion.