The Wonderful Wager of Pascal

While I have spent a serious amount of time of the past three years of my life contemplating religion, I believe that all my efforts to reach a decision are futile. Let me first add to my own ego by boasting (for my own self esteem) that I believe I am a fairly inept religious thinker, if I can be called one as an atheist/agnostic but I bet on the former, and it is not as if this is my first crack at the question of god. But I may admit futility in submission to a man by the name of Blaise Pascal. If this name is foreign to you I greatly suggest you reexamine calling yourself a cultured intellectual if you so do at the present time. I now promise this is the end of my ranting and boasting, if I have offended you, as I am not attempting to do here but I have been guilty of trying to do that in the past, I apologize but you either hate me or you love me and I am assuming almost all of you are thinking the former. But enough digression. Pascal formulated the famous “Pascal’s Wager.” This is the argument that we cannot known definitively if god exists. However, he believed that it is better to believe that he does exist than that he doesn’t exist. Wikipedia.org claims that this is a form of decision theory, something I admit I have hitherto not heard of, but it makes perfect sense nonetheless. It is important to note that Pascal was a Christian who at the age of 36 died intellectually at the passing of his father and committed the final eight years of his life Christianity and produced nothing in the realm of mathematics, science, or philosophy. Allow me to say that he was an immaculate genius in all three disciplines, and to think that I am worthy (do not debate me here) to ever write about Pascal is an honour.

Pascal did believe in the Christian God, and he himself may have been convinced but being as he was a genius logician he formulated the wager. As I have said in a previous post we formulate our own arguments for God, the creator, and we decide upon what constitutes as proof for God. Since we do not know what constitutes as proof, it is impossible to know if he exists or not. This is to ignore the fact that the creator may have instilled us the ability to speculate, but not to know and we need to make a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” towards either theism or atheism.

So The Wager States makes for a better life to believe in God than to not to, and we cannot know either way about his existence. I fear that it is impossible to improve on this in terms of an argument for theism. Professor Peter Kreeft, whom I am a great admirer of (which is a great compliment from an atheist/agnostic who was born a Jew to pay to a Christian Apologist, but Professor Kreeft has returned one of my emails, but I have since emailed him twice and he has heretofore not yet returned them, and I hope greatly to meet the man for whom I have such respect). But how can an argument for theism be improved upon? I do not believe in god, as I have said an abundance of times hitherto, but it is imperative to attempt to see a better argument for theism. Any argument from a phenomenon and I can just say that I do not believe it proves god. One idea that I am working on is the idea that if I can see a being perform something that violates the laws of physics and nature, with the exception of the Second “Law” of Thermodynamics which I am still exceedingly skeptical of, that at least proves there is a force with unanticipated power. Another problem is that any argument for atheism may not be strong enough to hold up to The Wager. I cannot argue that atheism produces more favourable results than believing in God. When one looks at Nietzsche, Sartre, (some would argue me but I am BY NO MEANS close to the aforementioned two) as well as many other atheists they tend to be very defensive, angry, and nihilistic. This is an overgeneralization but atheists are more likely to be nihilists than theists. I contend this knowing that Calvinists who believe in predestination are prone to nihilism. So it cannot be said that atheism produces less favourable results than theism. If one takes a Pragmatist’s view then God exists, and atheism is a fallacy.

Even if one attempt to argue that atheism produces more favourable results in life than theism, it may be from a lack of commitment and a feeling of freedom, or from a belief that one is closer to the truth (this one I adhere to. to an extent). Yet does this security that one is closer to the truth make life better? I do not plan to answer this because that would entail defining life and better and make, something which I do not desire to do.

Pascal’s Wager still has one other hurdle to jump. It does accept that one is not searching for the truth, but just what works the best. This may be called accepting the cliché ‘ignorance is bliss.’ Yet it can be circumvented by saying that Pascal’s argument is not directly an argument for theism, but an argument for belief in God. Pascal does not care, or for the sake of this conversation is not concerned immediately with, if God exists, but if we ought to believe in him. Try as I might I cannot find a better argument for believing in God. I believe that a stronger argument can come from science, but hitherto science has not been able to prove his existence. I think the answer may lie in thermodynamics, the nature of infinity, or a branch of astrophysics, but that is another essay another time.

I do not know if I have said much in this piece but I at least wanted to address the idea of Pascal’s Wager and say that it might be the simplest, but most lucid argument for belief in God. And when I said I would not digress anymore it was obvious this would be a digression riddled piece. Regardless, does God exist? Ask me again later.