Note on the Text

            This text is a portion of my undergraduate thesis. The full text is a larger commentary on faith, its value and its pitfalls, and offering a counter to Pascal’s wager. I’ve titled this Owl, the One Wager for Life. This section of the text outlines Pascal’s Wager, its historical backgrounds, cultural foundations, and then ends with the question of how the wager (and theories like it) may still be valuable today. All of that leads into the final section of the paper, the introduction of OWL.

            The first part of this thesis will be focused more heavily on general faith studies. At the conclusion, I define faith as being the “Summary beliefs which defines and is defined by one’s worldview, and drives their logic to pursue a given line of reason.” This definition is what I mean when I refer to faith in any other part of the text.

Introduction

            Pascal’s Wager is a well-known and remarkably long-standing theory which is commonly used in defense of a belief in the Abrahamic God. This paper aims to analyze Pascal’s original wager, while exploring the cultural and historical foundations of the wager. After that I’ll compare two articles arguing in favor of the wager. The first is from Elizabeth Grace Jackson, who analyzes the wager through the lens of epistemic permissivism. The second is from Calum Matheson, who argues that the wager is fundamentally rhetorical, and is therefore unable to be diminished by the many logical objections. Using Jackson’s argument I will address the many gods objection, then ultimately analyze through Matheson whether Pascal’s calculated take on abstract belief is still valuable today.

Context

            Blaise Pascal was a 17^th-century French religious philosopher. Though he’s best remembered for his philosophy and theology, Pascal was intelligent in ways beyond abstract theory. A brilliant mathematician and physicist, Pascal was famous in his own day for his mathematics essays and inventions. Garnering the attention of the famous minds of the era, including Rene Descartes, Pascal is credited for creating the first “calculator,” around 1642. Known as the Pascaline, this incredible machine operated quite like a rotary telephone. With 5 wheels with spokes and a stylus, a person could enter in digits which were displayed on a rotating sign above. By entering consecutive digits on a wheel, the displayed result would be the addition of the two spokes. (Heather, History-Computer.com) Pascal’s fascination with mathematics and the sciences did not, however, take him away from his religious beliefs. The entire Pascal family remained practicing Catholics their entire lives, with Blaise himself further ingratiating himself when his father took ill in the mid-seventeenth century. With this combined brilliance in mathematics and religion, it only made sense which work of his would last through the ages. The culmination of the life of a religious and calculating man comes to fruition through Pascal’s Wager.

            Pascal’s Wager, his most memorable theory, comes from Pensées. Though, this title may be misleading. Pensées simply means “thoughts,” which may be fairly accurate as this work is a collection of Pascal’s thoughts on Christianity. However, Pascal’s original title, Apologie de la religion chrétienne, may too be misleading to an uninformed reader. Literally translated to Apologies of the Christian Religion (Orbical and Jerphagnon), an “Apologetic,” is really a form of Christian intellectual work (Britannica). The aim of these is not to apologize in the literal sense, but rather to have it act as a defense of the religion. Not unlike Socrates’ Apologia; not actually an apology for his actions but rather his actual defense before a court. Apologetics are foundational to Christian religious philosophy, dating back as early as 100 A.D. with St. Justin Martyr, and includes such famous philosophers as St. Augustine, who “presented Christianity as God’s answer to the fall of the Roman Empire, which the sin of humans was effecting.” So, Pascal’s approach was nothing new, though its contents were.

The Wager

            Of the many great philosophers who argue in favor of a Christian God, Pascal is by far the most unique. Rejecting any sort of certainty in God, Pascal’s work could well be considered heretical simply by the fact that he purports the possibility of God’s nonexistence at all. Though any accusation that Pascal may have been a nonbeliever is unfounded. The man had pages upon page of texts arguing for belief in Christianity. The only label that may be logical is a theological realist. He knew that even the logic of his predecessors like Descartes and Aquinas were overly dependent on abstract thought exercises. Pascal’s Wager is defined by his affection for gambling, and his affinity for mathematics.

            The wager itself is quite simple to understand, though its simplicity sparks quite a few questions. Pascal believes in God, the Christian God to be precise. And he believes, as good Christians do, that to be loved by God is to devote oneself to him. Pascal also believes, in turn, in the Christian afterlife. Those who are good, meaning those who worshipped and loved God, go to heaven, and live in paradise for eternity. Those who were bad, meaning sinners, go to hell and are tormented forever. Pascal posits two possible infinities against each other. On one hand, praising God and embracing his love gives one the chance at infinite happiness, infinite joy, infinite pleasure. On the other hand, not praising God and rejecting his love gives one the chance of infinite evil. Being broken on a wheel or torn to pieces or forced to sit in Limbo with philosophers for all eternity. It is through these options that Pascal posits the wager. Either God is real, or he is not. If he is real, then so is Jesus Christ, so is the Devil, so is Moses and the Apostles and all the good and evil characters of the Bible. So is Heaven, and so is Hell. His mere existence creates inherent risk, the risk of eternal suffering. His existence also presents reward, the possibility of eternal joy. If he is not real, there is no risk, nor is there reward. There is no cost/benefit analysis to be made, for life simply is. However, this lack of risk or reward does not cancel out the other possibility.

            The Wager which Pascal refers to is divided into three arguments. The Argument from Superdominance, the Argument from Expectation, and the Argument from Generalized Expectations. The most effective summation of the wager comes from the argument of Generalized Expectations. Pascal gets deep into his gambling metaphors, referring to staking, “one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain.” (Pascal ##) Rather than use mathematical matrixes like most authors do for understanding the wager, I’d like to present it as four possible worlds, the “many worlds reading.” One world in which you wager for God, and He does exist, one in which you wager against God, and He does exist, one in which you wager for God, and He does not exist, and one where you wager against God, and he does not exist. For the sake of organization, I have named each of these worlds and defined them below:

1. World of Christ. God exists, and we serve Him.
2. World of the Church. God does not exist, but we still serve Him.
3. World of Heresy. God exists, yet we do not serve him.
4. World of Pagans. God does not exist, and we do not serve him.

            Pascal’s definition of the World of Heresy is up for some debate. Throughout the Pensées, Pascal does refer to “Hell.” Christian doctrine posits the belief that Hell is the land of eternal suffering, to which souls of sinners are sent for all eternity upon death. Ian Hacking subscribes to the belief that Pascal did argue for damnation in his 1972 book The Logic of Pascal’s Wager. “…if God exists, then wagering that there is no God brings damnation. Wagering that God exists can bring salvation. Salvation is better than damnation.” (Hacking ##) Hacking doesn’t back up this claim beyond an assumption given general Christian beliefs. Howard Sobel offers the opposite claim, however, that the World of Heresy is also a finite existence. He quotes Pascal, “[But] justice to the outcast is less vast… than mercy towards the elect.” (Sobel ##) Though this line may suggest the World of Heresy to have finitude as punishment for said heresy, I believe that the overwhelming majority of Christians believe in an eternal afterlife, whether good or bad. It is not illogical to assume Pascal believed the same, and for this paper we will assume such.

            Also unclear in the definitions of each world is what Pascal defines as the gains and losses from each. The general understanding of this argument when posited today is simply that you are balancing infinite gain against infinite loss or finitude. However, these are not the only benefits and deficits that can be insinuated from the logic of the Wager. In writing about these possibilities Pascal suggests there is still utility in believing when God doesn’t exist. Whether this is due to Christianity’s political power, avoiding social isolation, or whatever number of grounded consequences may come from heresy, this logic may then be followed to add more gains and losses to each world. To clarify reading Pascal as proposing, “Many Worlds,” this does not imply that the defined world is any different than our own. It simply defines the theoretical world as having a truth, yet humans are just as ignorant as that truth as we are in reality. The addended list on the following page offers some of the gains and losses I would find logically acceptable based on Pascal’s writing.

1. World of Christ. God exists, and we serve Him.
   1. Gains. Infinity in paradise, a life with the Church community.
   1. Losses. Life with minimal sin, including those which bring us pleasure.
2. World of the Church. God does not exist, but we still serve Him.
   1. Gains. A life with the Church community.
   1. Losses. A finite life, a life of false belief, and a life without sin (which is no longer limited).
3. World of Heresy. God exists, yet we do not serve him.
   1. Gains. A life of sin, including those which bring us pleasure.
   1. Losses. Infinity of damnation, social persecution.
4. World of Pagans. God does not exist, and we do not serve him.
   1. Gains. Freedom from damnation, a life of sin, no social persecution.
   1. Losses.

            You’ll notice that the losses section under the World of Pagans was left blank. This is for an important reason, as the following section will define and debate the most important objection to Pascal’s Wager. Pascal’s argument is not perfect, and his math is not always definitive. Much of his writing contradicts itself and despite being more dependent on mathematical logic than his predecessors, it’s often clear that at every step he still falls back into the cycle of, “But I believe in God, and now I must justify it.” Which is why when talking about Pascal’s Euro-centric, Christian-centric logic structure, it’s important to talk about the Many Gods Objection. But first, I’d like to touch on Elizabeth Grace Jackson’s A Permissivist Defense of Pascal’s Wager, as Jackson’s claims, I believe, are the closest we can get to a defense against the Many Gods Objection.

Epistemic Permissivism: Jackson’s Defense

            In a 2020 paper on the matter, Elizabeth Grace Jackson presented a defense of Pascal’s Wager through Epistemic Permissivism. “Epistemic permissivism is the view that there are evidential situations that rationally permit more than one (incompatible) attitude toward a proposition.” (Jackson 3) She also defines “intrapersonal belief permissivism,” which stakes that there are, “evidential situations in which a single person can rationally adopt more than one belief-attitude toward a proposition (bot not both at once).” (Jackson 4) Jackson goes on to use these claims to defend Pascal’s Wager against the Impossibility Objection and the Irrationality Objection.

            The Impossibility Objection is posited by multiple authors. The basic claim that runs throughout all of their versions is simply summarized in a quote Jackson uses from J. L. Mackie: “you cannot believe by simply deciding to do so…direct voluntary belief is not [possible].” (qtd. in Jackson) This, of course, is in contrast to Jackson’s proposed intrapersonal belief permissivism. Through various examples Jackson explains that there are many cases in which we can hold multiple beliefs at a time by setting aside one for the time being. Not all beliefs need be thought about at once, and if one does not require another to be present, they cannot override each other. As an example, say a woman named Liz believes in the Christian God. Simultaneously, she is a physicist studying multiverse theory and answering the great scientific questions of our time. But as Liz believes that God is infinitely powerful and impossible to fully understand (like Pascal on the latter, unlike him on the former), Liz’s belief in God does not have to falter based upon whatever revelations she has about the infinite universes that may exist. God could have created all of them for all she knows. Liz could choose to use her above average scientific knowledge as a reason to nullify her belief in God, but she chooses instead to allow the two to exist simultaneously.

            The Irrationality Objective is even simpler. The objection says that all things are founded on rationality, and that it is wrong to believe in something for which you don’t have sufficient evidence. Jackson particularly notes on the topic of “toggling,” brought up by Roger White as a term for “moving between permitted attitudes at random.” (qtd. in Jackson) But Jackson’s intrapersonal permissivism stands in contrast to this, giving someone who may believe in multiple things perhaps not the ability to always logically do so, but to, “explain the irrationality of toggling.”

            As an example, let’s return to Liz. Liz is making strides in multiversal travel and has just met Lizbeth, a version of herself from another earth which has red skies instead of blue. Lizbeth firmly doesn’t believe in God, and finds it strange that Liz does. Liz explains that she knows it may not be logical, but that the more her scientific knowledge expands the more she realizes she’ll never find all the answers. Not only that, but none of her scientific studies directly nullify the possibility that God exists. So, yes, perhaps the belief is in some ways irrational, and Liz should allow one to inform the other. But to keep herself grounded and from falling into a deep hole of questioning everything, she chooses to maintain her belief in God so her work as a scientist becomes more effective.

            Both of these arguments stand as an effective defense of the wager, arguing that despite the somewhat irrational and impossibility of it, belief in it may have some sort of practical standing in our daily lives. And that’s Pascal’s main point: That wagering for infinity is practical, not logical. However, this has yet to answer for us which infinity we’re going to focus on. That is a problem for the Many Gods objection.

The Many Gods Objection

            The Many Gods Objection is simple and self-explanatory. To even credit it to just one person would be unfair, as it’s the easiest objection to make regarding the Wager. Objectors to Pascal point out the bias of Pascal’s worldview, one which defines his mathematical wager. Paul Saka points this out in countering with the same logic structure as Pascal, but instead wagering for Gale, a god who, “rewards you with infinite bliss if you make a point of stepping on every third sidewalk crack that you walk over….” (Saka 3) This may be a heretical and incomprehensible approach to someone like Pascal, who was raised believing in the Christian God and would find such a specific God silly. Gods like that exist, though. Pantheons from throughout the ages have gods for the simplest of things, so in the modern day, why not a sidewalk god? This world where people may believe in such a god is what I defined earlier as the World of Pagans in the many worlds reading.

            The World of Pagans as I defined it is the world in which God does not exist, and we do not serve him. From the perspective of a 17^th-century wealthy Frenchman, this is a world of the sparse heretics you meet around the country, the working women labeled “painted,” and just about anyone who has beliefs different than yours. Though Pascal’s perspective is a more “realist” approach to a proof of God, or more accurately an argument for his praise, he is still working from a narrow worldview. Because while the World of Pagans may not be the one Pascal lives in, it is one that many did and still do across the world. Some, even, live in a world with a god, but not Pascal’s God. Many live in religions and cultures which have gods and afterlives of their own which, arguably, could fit in a wager of their own. Once again, the many worlds reading is not about defining worlds where we act any differently. Just where the truth is defined.

            The Many Gods Objection is the constant and possibly infallible objection to any belief in any god. The mathematics of Pascal’s wager make this especially challenging, as now instead of four worlds there are millions upon millions in which one god or many may exist, separately or even simultaneously. And these gods, as their religious texts define them, cannot be worshipped simultaneously to achieve any and all afterlives. In fact, figuring out how to maximize one’s religious beliefs into the version that will statistically get them into the most afterlives is pointless due to simple line in the Bible: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3). Which is most often interpreted as meaning that a good Christian is not to worship any gods besides Jehovah. So, already, Pascal’s religion is out as an option for achieving the most possible afterlives. Although Jackson’s intrapersonal belief permissivism allows for many beliefs, Abrahamic religions do not.

            However, Jackson seems to suggest that her point is not about whether we always should have multiple beliefs, but whether it is practical to do so. As covered in the next section, Calum Matheson acknowledges that Pascal’s Wager is dependent on faith. And without directly saying so, I believe Jackson does, too. By acknowledging that some beliefs are practical, Jackson seems to me to suggest that the practicality of belief is about how useful they become in day-to-day life. If Liz, the multi-dimensional scientist, let the overbearing weight of the reality that there are an infinite amount of Liz’s across space and time send her into existential dread, she would never discover the things across universes that her job is meant to do. So, Liz chooses to believe that there is a greater power out there, because logically, with all she’s seen, it’s probably challenging to accept that there isn’t a “why” at the center of it all. It’s human nature to try and find order in chaos. And sometimes, even today with all our scientific discoveries, it boils down to faith.

The Wager Today: Matheson and the Nuclear Bomb

            Calum Matheson admits to the reality of Pascal’s wager in terms of the Many Gods Objection. “Given a range of mutually exclusive options, each representing a potentially infinite impact, there is no longer a way to choose amongst them. For Pascal, that decision boiled down to faith….” (Matheson 281) Faith is the ground floor of all religious philosophy, whether it’s directly acknowledged or not. It is the foundation which leads one to then construct large, complex arguments in its defense. This isn’t a new or revolutionary tactic, in fact it’s how all arguments are structured. You begin with an idea, a hypothesis if you will, and you construct your argument around that. Even completely unrelated arguments, like Aristotle’s four forms, begin with a foundational idea. “I can observe objects, and I can know what they are. Therefore, they must have some form. Let me now try and define what constructs these objects.” All of this is to say that having one’s belief in God, faith, be the foundation of an argument, does not make it an inherently bad start.

            Matheson presents the argument that Pascal was a rhetorician over a logician. This stands in contrast to a large portion of this paper, though with the Many Gods Objection being difficult to overcome, is a more favorable reading of his text. As compared to being a skilled mathematician and gambler who also happens to love and praise God, Matheson believes Pascal is, “employing his persuasive art to win the hearts of believers along with their minds.” (Matheson 275) In employing this art, Pascal is not telling his audience what to believe. It is a plea from a religious man, begging us not to wager against impossible odds. It is not a perfectly logical argument for belief, but a call to action based in logic.

            In addition to being a rhetorician, Matheson draws connections between the wager and the sublime. “The sublime is not strictly speaking something which is prove nor demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel.” (qtd. in O’Gorman) Particularly, Matheson draws a connection to negative theology, using both as examples of Pascal as accepting of the unknowability of God’s nature. He writes on negative theology:

“Negative theology is an ancient tradition in Christian thought with strong parallels in other religions. Its central concern can be framed as the problem of infinity: if God is infinite and exceeds all human understanding, how are we to talk about the divine?” (Matheson 277)

            The problem of infinity is ever-present in all philosophy. For some Christian religious philosophers, the traditional view of God as being infinite, all-powerful, and all-knowing is not as universal as one might believe. William James famously believed in a God who was, “a combination of ideality and (final) efficacy… he must be cognizant and responsive in some way.” (Schwartz 25). Though Robert Schwartz agrees in his book that this is not a Biblical God, it does seem to be an Abrahamic one. This sort of belief is known as Theistic Finitism, the belief that God cannot be infinite as that would make him equally bad as he is good, and a thing cannot be entirely good if it is also bad. Therefore, it cannot be infinite.

            In addition to whether or not God can be infinite, the question of the problem of infinity is also whether we can understand God, or if language is capable of capturing the essence of God. If a being like God could even be understood by us as infinite, there is no physical way a human brain could comprehend what that actually means. We rarely even have a complete grasp on our surroundings. This even furthers the reading that Pascal’s wager is a plea to wager, not a direct argument, as he is telling us that we cannot fathom the alternative possibilities.

            Matheson uses this reading of Pascal’s wager engaging in negative theology and the problem of infinity to argue for why it’s so brilliant. It forces readers to look closer and to engage with the text, causing them to think and rethink things. Matheson uses the example of Paul Valery, who apparently spent years frustratingly focused on an individual sentence in the wager. (Matheson 275) I would add to this reading that it also manages to achieve the opposite.

            Pascal’s wager appeals to those of us in the fields of logic and reason because it’s simple to pick apart, critique, and pick and choose which parts work for us (similar to what Jackson argued). His insistence that he’s focused on logic and mathematics pushes the buttons of us philosophers because we can see the clear faults in what he wants to pretend is an unbreakable argument. On the other side of the spectrum, however, are the average, everyday people who can’t be bothered to think too hard about these things.

            The nature of philosophy is that most of it is done by people in privileged positions that gives them the free time to think about and pick apart arguments. However, that doesn’t make us the only people who believe in things and have opinions. The everyday people of Pascal’s time, and of ours, all subscribe to whatever beliefs they may be informed of throughout their lives. In Pascal’s world, the people were largely Christian, influenced by the large and powerful church. So, when those people look at the wager, they will nod along to Pascal’s claim that he’s perfectly logical and makes perfect sense and assume that’s true. It makes sense, given Pascal’s worldview and their worldview, to simply follow the man who’s giving mathematical proof of infinite suffering. Life is hard enough; why risk the afterlife being hard, too?

            It’s both of these ways in which the wager attracts people that inform its brilliance and, importantly, its modern usefulness. Matheson draws from Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth, in which Schell vehemently insists that the risk of nuclear war is, simply and without question, humanity’s annihilation. Matheson draws his argument from the below passage:

“the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account…. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs … although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble … we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species.” (qtd. in Matheson)

            Matheson argues that this section, and Schell’s entire argument, is a nearly exact structure as Pascal’s Wager. He breaks it down as follows:

1. “Schell asserts an infinite value coupled with an uncertain probability.” (Extinction with nuclear war). (Matheson 279)
2. “Schell argues that although the chances of extinction are unknown, we should act as if it is a certain result of nuclear war.” (Matheson 279)
3. “Schell appeals not only to the unknown but to the unknowable. The impact of a nuclear war is beyond our comprehension….” (Matheson 280)
4. Schell makes an, “impetus for action,” an “explicit call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.” (Matheson 280)

These four steps directly parallel Pascal’s comparing of heaven with finitude (the World of Christ against the World of Pagans), the argument that God is unknowable and therefore we should not assume anything, and then the call to serve God despite our unknowingness. Schell, like Pascal, is not dependent on certain mathematics or definitions, but is dependent on the unknowability of things. The risk compared to the reward is not just far greater mathematically, but it is far beyond any being’s comprehension. Schell, like Pascal, is pleading with us to not risk infinite unknowability.

            It is this example which displays the modern importance of Pascal and Pascal’s wager. Matheson, earlier in the paper, touches on Pascal’s Art of Persuasion, in which Pascal defines his argument structure as defining terms clearly, proposing principles to prove an argument, and always knowing what your words mean (for example, when I say faith, knowing I’m referring to the definition defined at the top of this article). Pascal’s wager, for all of its faults, succeeds in following this art of persuasion, and is clear and purposeful in its reason for defining such a wager. And if you follow the faith that Pascal does, it may seem as desperate to urge people to follow God and wager on infinity as nuclear war seems to us. Pascal perhaps fails in the end to convince those who do not already share his worldview and believe in his God. However, his failures are outweighed in his success at convincing people through sublime rhetoric, appealing to our desire to consider the unknown, despite being unable to comprehend it.

Conclusion: Introduction to OWL

            In this paper, I’ve outlined Pascal’s historical and cultural foundation before explaining his argument through the many worlds reading. Then, I explained Elizabeth Grace Jackson’s permissivist defense, the belief that one can have many beliefs at a time and, moreover, that some beliefs remain due to their practicality. Using this model I addressed the many gods objection to Pascal, admitting that that problem may not be solvable, but that Jackson’s argument that some beliefs are practical gives Pascal’s wager some foundation. Finally, I addressed Calum Matheson’s reading of Pascal as pursuing his argument through the sublime rhetoric, and used Matheson’s example of Schell’s “Choice,” about nuclear war to display the modern importance to logical structures such as the wager.

            When it comes down to it, Pascal’s wager is not the perfect mathematical formula for why you should believe in God. It is a plea for people who share his worldview to not take major risks when it comes to infinity. While Pascal may not effectively argue for why you should share his worldview, his logical structure remains important today for moments where a worldview should always be shared. And there is no logical structure required for arguing for valuing one’s life. That’s why I, like Schell, offer one wager, the only wager that matters. The one wager for life, or O.W.L.