belief & religion · new to this edition
pascal’s wager
a bet on God that costs almost nothing to win and everything to lose.
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician who helped invent probability theory, put it to his readers in the 1650s as a problem in decision-making rather than theology. He never claimed to prove God exists. He claimed that, whatever you think the chances are, belief is the rational bet. Take the wager in three stages and see where it breaks for you.
do you take the bet?
Pascal’s argument runs like this. Reason cannot settle whether God exists; it is a coin toss at best. But you must wager: not choosing is also a choice, because you will live either as a believer or as a non-believer.
Look at the stakes. If God exists and you believe, you gain an infinite reward. If God exists and you do not, you lose it. If God does not exist, believing costs you a little: some pleasure, some time, some convenience. Even if the probability of God is tiny, an infinite gain multiplied by any non-zero chance outweighs any finite cost.
On these terms, would you wager that God exists?
further reading
- pascal’s wager stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- pensées (full text) project gutenberg
- pascal’s wager wikipedia