just as a bet, because the bet the other way, you'll just lose the finite amount of atheist life if you commit to religion. Now, what commit to religion means is a little bit tricky. He doesn't mean that you should force yourself to believe; he means that you should, as he puts it, go to masses and the rest and wait for God's grace; take some serious action that will lead you to believe if it turns out to be true. It's a good bet. Alan Saunders : Yes, I think this is an important aspect of the argument, it's partly about decision theory, but it's also partly about putting yourself in the way of belief. It doesn't naively assume that you can bet yourself, as it were, into a position of belief. Peter Slezak, what's wrong with that? Peter Slezak : Well, generally, I think it's taken to be an argument in favour of belief in God. This may be my lack of scholarly knowledge on this, but certainly when the argument's run that way it's terrible. They fear that if they're in some sense not believers they've made the wrong bet. Now, I certainly think that in life generally a calculation of this sort -- a kind of a expected utility calculation of 'given the possibilities what's the best course of action' -- it works everywhere except where belief is concerned, and Jim perhaps rightly excluded that, but I think that's an important point nevertheless, because some