This point was achieved, to an extent, a few years later (1921-1922) at the Washington Disarmament Conference which resulted in several treaties between an assortment of the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and China, chiefly limiting naval powers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLeVlBca5lg

Here, Pascal flips a modern argument for agnosticism known as the argument from incomprehensibility: agnostics argue that, since we have no way of knowing without doubt the nature or existence of God, it would be illogical to believe in a God; Pascal, on the other hand, asserts that you are just as likely to be right in belief or non-belief, so you are just as justified in believing either

Although Pascal dismisses our ignorance of the nature of God as irrelevant to his argument, it is, in fact, very central to his argument

Pascal assumes a component of the nature of God in asserting that, if one believes, they will be infinitely rewarded with Heaven; however, if we are truly ignorant of God’s nature, we cannot be sure that believers are rewarded in Heaven and non-believers punished in Hell

Section 233, here, is where we find possibly Pascal’s most famous contribution to philosophy: Pascal’s Wager.

Pascal makes an argument for belief in existence of God without really providing evidence for the existence of God, making this a quite idiosyncratic approach.

This counterargument to the anthropic principle can be represented a bit more clearly analogously, using an example from philosopher John Leslie as told by Francis Collins:

An individual faces a firing squad, and fifty expert marksmen aim their tifles to carry out the deed. The order is given, the shots ring out, and yet somehow all the bullets miss and the condemned individual walks away unscathed.

In the aftermath of such a botched execution, would the individual be surprised that they are alive? Yes. Should they reject this surprise on the grounds that “they wouldn’t be able to realize they were alive if the shooting hadn’t failed?” No. Theists can apply this analogy to resist the anthropic principle.

The previously prevailing Argument from Design, introduced analogously by William Paley, was based on a biological argument from design: because humans and animals are so complex, and each individual part within them contributes so perfectly to the whole, there must be a designer. However, this argument is challenged by Darwinian evolution theory, which can alternatively explain was each part of an organism is so well suited for its purpose

The argument from fine-tuning, though, as outlined here, is based on physics, and the perfect and perfectly improbable conditions which exist in it to sustain intelligent life

This concept can be supported by the problem with infinite regression: your parents made you and their parents made them and their parents made them and so on and so forth. At some point, one must be confronted with a problem: who made the first parent? Such is it with Paley’s proposed watches

This seems to be a quite bizarre scenario to propose: watches obviously don’t, in and of themselves, produce other watches. This seems quite random and irrelevant

However, Paley surmises such a watch to further his analogy in anticipation of a counterpoint. In the attempt to transfer the argument from design Paley is proposing to humans, one may object that humans do, in a sense, have a “designer” in other humans (namely, their parents); watches do not have any such thing. Thusly, Paley presents his defense through hypothetically assuming that watches do actually have the ability to reproduce