“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées No. 200
“If I’m wrong about the afterlife, no problem, I’ll just cease to be, but if you’re wrong and you face God, I’d like to see you talk your way out of that.” — Garrison Keillor
BLAISE PASCAL WAS ONE of those supercilious French men famous for their thinking. Although he died in August 1662 at the age of only 39, he managed to think about all kinds of things. A child prodigy, he excelled in math and science. At the age of 16, according to Wikipedia, he “wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry.” A couple of years later, he invented the mechanical calculator. Before he died, he had originated the first public bus line, written many seminal and still-influential texts in math and physics, and changed scientific views about gravity and air pressure. I first encountered Pascal when I did my eighth-grade science project on the laws of probability (e.g., What are the chances of a flipped coin coming up heads if it’s already come up heads a dozen times in a row?). Among many other things, Pascal was obsessed with gambling, odds and risk strategy.
It’s this kind of thinking that led to Pascal’s Gambit, also known as Pascal’s Bet and Pascal’s Wager. In 1654, this profoundly Catholic kid had a religious experience and gave up mathematics for philosophy. In 1657 and 1658, he gathered various notes and ideas – slips of paper, really – that he called Apologie de la Religion Chrétienne (“Apology of the Christian Religion”) but is usually published under the title Pensées (“Thoughts”).
Pascal’s Gambit was this: If there is an afterlife and a God (being a devout Catholic, Pascal assumed that God must be the Christian God), then it behooves us to believe in Heaven and Hell and Him. We sacrifice little and can be rewarded greatly. On the other side of the wager, if God does not exist, we lose little by believing in Him. On the one hand, accept the Christian faith and have a shot at infinite goodness; on the other hand, be a skeptic and possibly rot in Hell. Even if the existence of God cannot be settled through reason, rational people should wager that God exists because, well, why not? What do you have to lose?
Sorry, but I’m not a big believer in faith. I know that faith can make our lives more comfortable, less confusing, more consistent, less demanding. But I prefer proof. I’m not going to believe in Heaven just because, after I’m dead, I might have easier entrance to and through the Pearly Gates. It’s too absurd for me to have faith in a bearded old man sitting on a nice, big throne judging me not by my actions but by my thoughts, by my pensées.
Philosophers have had 400 years to debate Pascal’s Gambit. And philosophers love to debate. On one philosophy site are long threads discussing the problems with Pascal’s argument. My favorite: One logician asks, “Would God accept fake faith?”
I doubt Pascal would have been persuaded by such an argument. He made his bed and he made his bet, and he was sticking to it. Given the choice, he advised, “Wager without hesitation that He is.”
Coming on Sunday: The Tibetan Book of the Dead