William James's Argument Has No Force to it.

James argued that we either have to act as if God existed or act as if he did not. If God exists we just might have to "meet that hypothesis halfway" with faith. This argument was pretty powerful to me until I realized that it could be used to convince someone into being a Muslim, or a Mormon, and it probably has. A live option is one that the perceiver thinks is a live one, so it depends on which culture we were raised in which option is a live one for us. When I realized this, his argument lost all of its force. At that point the issue before me was more like who the best athlete was of all time. On that I must suspend judgment. At that point I became an agnostic. Today I'm an agnostic atheist.