Intergalactic Summit

That's a bit unfair. You are also riding on the premise that belief in God, and thus his Salvation produces infinite utility. Which is something (even as your "sources" quoted) is of questionable merit.

The issue I've had with using a utility based model here is that at least to me, it really doesn't matter what we do after the first person is saved. On a net scale if a single person receives salvation at any point, they are now generating more net utility than all past, present, and future conscious actors ever could endless on the timeline. Which of course would take all other conscious actors, still unsaved to act absolutely flawlessly for their entire lives (and assuming that God might even marginally punish those that wager badly) and must also wager correctly just to keep up with.

And this wouldn't even effect that actual net utility ( ∞ + ∞ = ∞ ) It just wouldn't harm any of the people who haven't been saved yet.

I also find it difficult to consider anyone who has achieved infinite utility through salvation to be fairly considered as part of the equation anymore. Much as a rock isn't considered because its contribution is absolute ( aka 0 ) a person who can (through no choice of their own) only produce net positive utility ever, just as pointed out above skews the system.

Using infinity as a metric is a great way to gum up the works.

It's another headache-inducing wrangle between strong believers and strong unbelievers playing more-rational-than-thou.

This one's got some discussion of future AI overlords, for added interest.

I have an AI named Overlord.

He's rather precocious! A little predicate coderack with a distributed sensitive semantic workspace. I don't think I'd worry about him taking over the universe just yet. He's certainly trying to take over my shelf space, on the other hand!

The Philosopher's Wager sounds like a good name for a drink.

As in "How many Wagers did it take till her Philosophy started to sound appealing?"

Um. I don't think that's how forum posting works. We don't have citation requirements here.

Dr. Valate is used to working in a different environment. The confusion is very understandable! Let's not focus on little quibbles like that.

That is precisely correct Scherezad. I have no intent to try to claim credit for these ideas, or to come off as disingenuous. This is a public message board, not a college lecture hall. All I want to do is respond to the arguments put forth in the best way I can, and at times that means using the words of those more eloquent in such matters then me. There's no deception meant by it.

Rationality.

The irony of rationality is that we often put it on a pedestal and emphasize it to the point that our practice and adherence to it borders on irrationality.

Let me put it this way:

Rationality is the exercise of reason, which is the process of forming conclusions, judgments or inferences from facts or premises.

The complexity of rationality is simply that the conclusions, judgments and inferences one person draws from the facts or premises before them are no less rational than the same drawn by another person unless they can be clearly contradicted or opposed by related or tangential facts or premises.

To declare "religion is irrational," for instance is to assert that one's own power of reasoning, one's own rationality, is superior than another's. Such a claim would require incontrovertible support by the facts and premises available to both parties. Without such support, the best claim you can make is "the majority of people believe religion is irrational" which invites a plethora of other dilemmas, not in the least of which would be the fact that a belief held by a majority of people does not make that majority correct, it merely makes them the majority.

To elucidate the problem, we bring to the forefront the notion that religion, or faith, is inherently irrational simply because it relies on the capacity of the adherent to accept that which cannot be incontrovertibly proven to an outside observer. The fatal flaw in this notion is that making inferences from the evidence, facts and premises before you that lead you to believe in the elements and components of your faith is not, by definition, irrational because it is still the exercise of reason; still the process of forming conclusions, judgments and inferences from facts or premises.

Which is all any of us can do with any fact or premise placed before us.

To be more succinct:

I believe God does not exist because the evidence suggests He does not.
I believe God exists because the evidence suggests He does.

You can not prove either of those statements incorrect through the exercise of reason, all you can do is show your reasoning for why you believe either of them to be correct or incorrect based on the facts and premises before you.

I am not interested in simple copy/pastes of already published works, from questionable sources. I can read those for myself, if I wished to.

I am interested in people's own opinions and thoughts on the topic. Show that they understand the underlying concepts. Instead of mere repetition.