Blaise Pascal was one of the most brilliant men to ever live. He made major advancements in math and science. He published an influential treatise on probability when he was only 16. However, after a dramatic conversion to Jansenism he abandoned his pursuit of science and wrote very eloquently about the philosophy of religion. He died, at the age of 39, before his final work, the Pensees, could be completed. In philosophy he is most well known for a few pages from this incomplete work known as Pascal’s Wager. This argument basically asserts that everyone ought to live as if God exists because it is the best bet. I’ll outline how this works, then I’ll talk about some of the criticisms of this idea. Whether people know about Pascal or not, I run into people regularly who base their relationship with God on similar reasoning.

The Argument

If you are unsure whether there is a God or not, there are two possibilities before you. Either you can live your life like you believe in God, or you can live your life as if there is no God. There is no third option. There are also two possibilities for God’s existence. Either God really does exist, or he does not. Now if we combine these two ideas we end up with a nice little chart of possible outcomes.

We can see that if God does not exist then there is no eternal pay off or loss no matter what we believe. However, if God does exist, then heaven and hell are at stake. For you poker players and mathematicians out there, it is easy to see that if the pay off is infinite, then it does not matter what the probability that God exists is, even if it is very close to zero. You should still always choose to believe in God, because it is your best bet.

The Criticism

There are several critiques of this argument that are pretty obvious but aren’t really what I want to talk about. Just to mention a few, Pascal excludes the possibility of other Gods or religions that also offer heaven, or perhaps God punishes people who believe in him blindly and rewards people who don’t believe in him for good reasons. These are good counterarguments and are worth thinking about if you are interested.

However, the biggest problem that I have with this argument and how it often gets used is something that Pascal realized himself in his own writing a few pages later. The problem is that acting like you believe in God because it is your best bet is not at all the same as having true faith in him. Pascal knows this and argues that this wager is only an effort to show the unbeliever the gravity of his situation. He claims that accepting this argument will not lead to true faith, but rather one ought to simply go through the Catholic sacraments even if he does not truly believe, because this will soften his heart so that eventually he will really trust in God. This leads to one of my favorite Pascal quotes, “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” which means, “the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

I see this principle played out all the time as I share the gospel with people. I often find people who live a certain way and hold a certain belief system simply because they think it is a good bet. I find many Christians who went to the altar just to buy some fire insurance. There is no sense in which they have really sought out God, met with him and come to the conviction that they must live for him. My challenge to people who are uncertain of God’s existence is not to weigh their options but rather to seek him out.