Edit: To clarify, when I say "accept Pascal's Wager" I mean accepting the idea that way to do the most (expected) good is to prevent as many people as possible from going to hell, and cause as many as possible to go to heaven, regardless of how likely it is that heaven/hell exists (as long as it's non-zero).
I am a utilitarian and I struggle to see why I shouldn't accept Pascal's Wager. I'm honestly surprised there isn't much discussion about it in this community considering it theoretically presents the most effective way to be altruistic.
I have heard the argument that there could be a god that reverses the positions of heaven and hell and therefore the probabilities cancel out, but this doesn't convince me. It seems quite clear that the probability of a god that matches the god of existing religions is far more likely than a god that is the opposite, therefore they don't cancel out because the expected utilities aren't equal.
I've also heard the argument that we should reject all infinite utilities – for now it seems to me that Pascal's Wager is the only example where the probabilities don't cancel out, so I don't have any paradoxes or inconsistencies, but this is probably quite a fragile position that could be changed. I also don't know how to go about rejecting infinite utilities if it turns out I have to.
I would obviously love to hear any other arguments.
Thanks!
Great question.
Let me offer the idea of "universal common sense."
"Common sense" is "the way most people look at things." The way people commonly use this phrase today is what we might call "local common sense." It is the common sense of the people who are currently alive and part of our culture.
Local common sense is useful for local questions. Universal common sense is useful for universal questions.
Since religion, as well as science, claim to be universal questions, we ought to rely on universal common sense. The galactic wisdom of crowds, if you will.
Of course, we can't talk to people in the past or future. But even when we rely on local common sense, we are in some sense making a prediction about what our peers would say if we asked them the question we have in mind.
We can still make a prediction about what, say, a stone age person, or a person living 10,000 years in the future, would say if we asked them about whether Catholicism was real. The stone age person wouldn't know what you're talking about. The person 10,000 years in the future, I suspect, wouldn't know either, as Catholicism might have largely vanished into history.
However, I expect that science will still be going strong 10,000 years in the future, if humanity lives to that point. And I expect that by then, vastly more people will believe (or have believed) in a form of scientific materialism than will believe in any particular religion. Hence, I predict that "universal common sense" is that we ought not spend much time at all investigating the truth of any particular religion.