Believing in God causing him to send you to heaven is a gamble. The potential rewards must outweigh any prior probability of God existing, or any cost to your time spent praying and doing other religious things, right?
All I'm meaning to do here is tell you that your argument does not work. It doesn't work for convincing people, and it doesn't work as a matter of practice the vast majority of the time anyway. Take a straw man: the human species joins together and pools all our resources and the planet's resources into some giant project that, while lots of credible people claim is very unlikely, everyone helps out anyway. But it doesn't work out, and by the time we call it quits we're so starved for resources that we go extinct. Repeat with variations in as many hypothetical worlds as you wish, and maybe 1 or 2 get it right and the payoff was totally worth it because it made humans rulers of the universe or something. That's not a good gamble.
Do you believe that if the possible positive utility to be gained wasn't so vast, we shouldn't do scientific research because then the improbability of that utility and/or the costs that factor in begin to weigh on it? If so, that's an interesting belief. For myself, I don't find the probabilities that unlikely nor the costs that high, I don't need to posit the possibility of untold fortunes due to scientific research to argue that we should continue doing it.
All I'm meaning to do here is tell you that your argument does not work. It doesn't work for convincing people, and it doesn't work as a matter of practice the vast majority of the time anyway. Take a straw man: the human species joins together and pools all our resources and the planet's resources into some giant project that, while lots of credible people claim is very unlikely, everyone helps out anyway. But it doesn't work out, and by the time we call it quits we're so starved for resources that we go extinct. Repeat with variations in as many hypothetical worlds as you wish, and maybe 1 or 2 get it right and the payoff was totally worth it because it made humans rulers of the universe or something. That's not a good gamble.
Do you believe that if the possible positive utility to be gained wasn't so vast, we shouldn't do scientific research because then the improbability of that utility and/or the costs that factor in begin to weigh on it? If so, that's an interesting belief. For myself, I don't find the probabilities that unlikely nor the costs that high, I don't need to posit the possibility of untold fortunes due to scientific research to argue that we should continue doing it.