I Have Never Met Someone Who Took Pascal's Wager Seriously As A Matter of Faith

Greta Christina is one of the stupider of the neo-atheist hate talkers and considering the low level of most of it, that's saying something.   If you want a good example, you can read her piece up at Alternet in which she takes on Pascal, or what she understands as..... no, that's not the right word.  What she pretends to understand of "Pascal's wager".   If you want to look at what I'm certain is a collection of cribbed comments about it from previous pop atheists, I'm powerless to stop you.   You might well skip the comments because with Greta, her posts are never of superior quality to the lower end of neo-atheist commentary, an asset in her field of hate-talk entertainment.   

It's a straw man in my experience because I have never known of anyone who claimed to have been converted to belief, or more relevantly out of disbelief by taking that wager.  I've never encountered someone who gave it any importance as an argument or a claim that it is a "proof" of God,  except for some of the stupider of the atheists who talk about it.  Which would, in itself be proof of their ignorance of what the "wager" consists of.   Pascal said in the 233rd "Pensee", where "the wager" is found,  

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him.

Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in expounding it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam;[90] and then you complain that they do not prove it!  If they proved it, they would not keep their word; it is in lacking proofs, that they are not lacking in sense. "Yes, but although this excuses those who offer it as such, and takes away from them the blame of putting it forward without reason, it does not excuse those who receive it." Let us then examine this point, and say, "God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Which makes G. C.'s decision to mount "her" take down of it in terms of  an especially absymally incompetent version of "The God hypothesis" a demonstration of her incompetence.   Either she never read what Pascal said, which I think is just about a certainty or she has no idea what it means or what an hypothesis is, though, I admit, all three of those are probably true.  Her piece is more likley compiled from crap garnered from the standard neo-atheist "skeptical" excuses for reference works.  If I had a dollar for every time an idiot online used the word "hypothesis"  badly I'd be in a spa having a massage of my aching back right this minute. [Pascal states exactly one explicit hypothesis in his book, this rather enigmatic one].

As to the further meaning of what Pascal, one of the more accomplished mathematicians of his or any time implied in his "wager" and the logical coherence or lack of it among people equipped to handle that aspect of it, here's part of what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say:

“Pascal's Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as “Pascal's Wager”. We find in it the extraordinary confluence of several important strands of thought: the justification of theism; probability theory and decision theory, used here for almost the first time in history; pragmatism; voluntarism (the thesis that belief is a matter of the will); and the use of the concept of infinity.

Certain that most of those expressing an opinion on the topic are as if not more at sea than I am, the problems of writing out of ignorance on it only mount rather steeply.   For just a little of that:

... But what is distinctive is Pascal's explicitly decision theoretic formulation of the reasoning. In fact, Hacking 1975 describes the Wager as “the first well-understood contribution to decision theory” (viii). Thus, we should pause briefly to review some of the basics of that theory.

In any decision problem, the way the world is, and what an agent does, together determine an outcome for the agent. We may assign utilities to such outcomes, numbers that represent the degree to which the agent values them. It is typical to present these numbers in a decision matrix, with the columns corresponding to the various relevant states of the world, and the rows corresponding to the various possible actions that the agent can perform.

In decisions under uncertainty, nothing more is given — in particular, the agent does not assign subjective probabilities to the states of the world. Still, sometimes rationality dictates a unique decision nonetheless. Consider, for example, a case that will be particularly relevant here. Suppose that you have two possible actions, A1 and A2, and the worst outcome associated with A1 is at least as good as the best outcome associated with A2; suppose also that in at least one state of the world, A1's outcome is strictly better than A2's. Let us say in that case that A1 superdominates A2. Then rationality seems to require you to perform A1.[1]

Being quite out of my depth, already, I will warn anyone who wants to continue that math is required as well as a knowledge of regular and Bayesian probability that I doubt one in five hundred of the neo-atheists who go on about these things has any competence in.  Pascal is sometimes considered the father of probability mathematics, after all. 

Having said that I've never encountered anyone who used Pascal's Wager for religious purposes, except atheists, their railing against it is rather funny in a mildly annoying way.  Its use by legitimate researchers is as a problem in probability mathematics which has yielded different opinion and no conclusive results, which would obviously not surprise Pascal as he started by saying reason was no help in the matter.  I doubt he ever considered it was going to be persuasive in convincing people to act as if they believed in the moral teachings of his version of ultra-fundamentalist Catholicism.  Pascal was a Jansenist and a defender of Jansenism and, in a kind of delicious twist, thus a heretic as Jansenism was declared heretical by a long string of bishops and popes.  Just to put in a fun fact.  Though I'm anything but an expert on Pascal's thoughts, I know his thinking on religion is not restricted to the atheist use of his "Wager" which is a thought experiment, as he said a game, but one in which a choice was to be made.  I don't think anyone has ever made that choice on the basis of the stakes he puts up, he merely put those up to come up with what he already concluded from his real experience.