Pascal's wager
You should bet your life that God exists, argued the great French thinker. But wasn't a punt on the almighty a denial of faith?
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: The Hammer of Witches; Socrates and the first ‘self’; Digiselves versus Bioselves
DISTURBED BY the intrusion of science on religion, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) corralled all his literary and intellectual powers in defence of Christianity against those who dared question the existence of God in the post-Copernican world.
This astonishingly gifted mathematician, physicist, philosopher and theologian, the inventor of the mechanical calculator and author of the Pensées, craved the Almighty with an unearthly passion.
Pascal was a Jansenist, a member of the Christian sect that followed the ideas of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who taught a peculiar reading of Saint Augustine, the belief that ‘faith alone’ would lead to salvation and that only a select few were predestined to be saved.
By taking this position, Pascal set himself against the Catholics, the Protestants, the Cartesians, the atheists - indeed, anyone who wasn’t a Jansenist. Pascal was particularly troubled by the geometric certainties of Descartes.
In the Cartesian universe, the human body worked like clockwork, the soul resided in a gland and proof of God was as demonstrable as an isosceles triangle, or two plus three equals five. Nor was Descartes’ intellectual arrogance to everyone’s taste: there he stood, at the gates of Saint Peter, waving his ‘proof of God’ in God’s face (see: Descartes ‘proof of God’).
The humbler Pascal bowed before the incomprehensible grandeur of the universe and the pathos of the human condition: he saw the limits of his mind and the frontiers of reason. He recognised the impossibility of ‘proving’ God’s existence by reason alone. Neither salvation nor the afterlife were demonstrable or explicable. Neither God nor the soul’s immortality were knowable or provable. They depended for their existence on faith.
Those who eroded faith by sowing doubt Pascal marked as his most dangerous enemies, chief among them the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the first moral relativist, whose essays insinuated doubt in the reader’s mind even as they charmed and seduced.
Montaigne had infuriated Pascal and all people of faith by remarking that the Bible was not the only source of revealed truth. The pope placed Montaigne’s offending work on his List of Prohibited Books.
Montaigne was an elusive target. He offered no hard edges that one might blunt, no clotted argument that one might dissolve. His blend of anecdote and personal quip and intellectual brilliance hung around like a stubborn fog, as the poet T.S. Eliot observed: ‘You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences . . .’
Pascal loathed Montaigne, contending that the French essayist played whimsical games with truths Pascal held sacred. So Pascal quietly read and studied him ‘with the intention of demolishing him’.
—
Pascal would turn Montaigne’s scepticism and Descartes’ arrogance against each man. Acknowledging the limits of ‘reason alone’, he conceded:
‘I shall not undertake here to prove either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that nature; not only because I [cannot] find in nature arguments to convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge without Jesus Christ is useless and barren.’
The answer was to surrender to one’s faith. Faith answered the prayers of a Christian where his or her reason failed. And faith began in Christ, the ‘reason’ for everything, Pascal argued: ‘Jesus Christ is the end of all, and the centre to which all tends,’ he wrote. ‘Whoever knows Him knows the reason of everything.’ Few were so privileged because Christ’s father – God – had blinded many (such as Montaigne) and enlightened others (such as Pascal).
If Pascal could not prove the existence of God, as he conceded, he was in no doubt about the divinity of Christ. Christ the messiah had been foretold by the Jewish prophets, he claimed: ‘The prophecies are the strongest proof of Jesus Christ . . . He has scattered all these prophecies among all the Jews, who carried them into all parts of the world.’
By ‘slaying Him in order not to receive Him as the Messiah’, the Jews had proven that Christ was in fact the Messiah, Pascal insisted. Doing so had ‘fulfilled the prophecies’ of Isaiah and the Psalms.
The bleakness and sadness of the lives of the faithless (as Pascal perceived them) aroused in him both compassion and revulsion. The idea of the godless multitudes brought a hellish vision to his mind, of fallen men and women thrashing around in sinful misery, goaded by legions of inner demons, seizing on diversions and trifles, surrendering to the pull of wealth and fame, however elusive or self-destructive. And a sense of awful isolation consumed him, as though he walked alone in a darkening world, unable to comprehend the beast that rioted around him:
‘When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself, and, as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island, and should awake without knowing where he is, and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair.’
—
Pascal’s solution was to place a bet, measured by faith, that God exists. Pared to its essentials, ‘Pascal’s wager’ amounted to a celestial insurance policy. If you choose to believe in God, and he exists, you will enjoy infinite happiness.
If, however, your faith is misplaced and he does not exist, you’ll meet a finite end like everyone else, in the dust from whence you came. In short, a no loss situation.
But if you choose to deny God, and bet against his reality, and then find after death that he does exist, you’ll endure the infinite torments of Hell. Therefore you have a practical self-interest to believe in God. What do you have to lose? So you must decide: are you with God or against him? Are you willing to bet on his existence, by believing in and obeying him, or not? Not taking a position was not an option.
To summarise:
If God exists and you believe in God, you gain eternal happiness (infinite gain).
If God exists and you don’t believe in God, you face eternal punishment (infinite loss).
If God does not exist and you believe in God, you lose nothing or have a finite loss (wasted effort in belief, time, etc.).
If God does not exist and you don’t believe in God, you gain nothing or experience a finite gain (freedom from belief, time not wasted, etc.)
That was how Pascal framed the wager. ‘Wager, then, without hesitation that He is,’ Pascal advised. God deserved the benefit of the doubt, he concluded, ‘for if you die without worshipping the True Cause, you are lost’.
Those who opposed the wager argued, ‘But if God had wished me to worship him, He would have left me signs of his will.’ Pascal countered that God had done so, ‘but you neglect them. Seek them, therefore . . .’
To non-believers and atheists, he sent an unsparing message: ‘I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.’
Pascal presented his wager as a rational human reaction to an irrational, unpredictable cosmos.
Ironically, the gamble provoked philosophical and theological questions that challenge the nature of the ‘faith’ Pascal held so dear. If fear of being wrong about God was the only reason you bet on him – in case he existed – could that really be called faith or was it simply insuring against the risk of perdition?
Another objection is that the likelihood of betting on the right God (or the right version of God) was very small. What if you placed your bet on the Christian God and found to your dismay after you died that Vishnu or Buddha or the Zoroastrian God ruled the afterlife? Pascal fails to address this, or whether you could place multiple bets just in case you backed the wrong horse.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in Pascal’s wager is that if God existed, wouldn’t he – in his omniscience – see through your little punt and forsake you for trying to have it both ways? A true believer, such as Job, maintained his faith in God regardless of his doubts and fears.
—
The avenues of thought that led Pascal to place a bet on God are intellectually riveting.
He accepted (unlike Descartes) that the nature of ‘God’ and ‘salvation’ were beyond the powers of human reason.
He then looked at the human condition and judged men and women to be helpless, ignorant creatures trapped in an unknowable cosmos. Only faith in God would fill the void and alleviate the misery of infinite loneliness.
The charm of his classic work Pensées (‘Thoughts’) is the eloquence with which Pascal strove to resurrect ‘faith’ and to re-sanctify the post-Copernican universe, to ‘recreate’ the creator of a boundless realm whose presence is manifest in the tiniest atom and the outer frontiers of space.
‘The whole visible world,’ he wrote, ‘is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought . . . All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite. Who will follow these marvellous processes? The Author [i.e. God] of these wonders understands them. None other can do so.’
This is our ‘true state’, Pascal insisted. This is what makes us ‘incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance’. Pascal saw the human condition rather as, three centuries later, Werner Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ explained the subatomic world, as a realm whose nature changes the moment we observe it. Wrote Pascal:
‘We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever . . . we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite.’
In this limitless unknown, the human mind seemed helpless, puny, uncomprehending. And yet without our minds, our bodies were useless blobs of decomposable matter that ‘can know nothing at all’ – least of all a conception of self and God. ‘For it is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual,’ Pascal argued.
If man cannot truly ‘know himself’, Pascal wondered, then can he ever know his own soul (which he referred to as ‘she’)? Were the greatest minds closer to knowing ‘her’? ‘What have they thought of her substance? Have they been more fortunate in locating her? . . . Is then the soul too noble a subject for their feeble lights?’
—
In answer, Pascal created a grieving ‘Everyman’ who felt the trauma of the eternal unknown and prayed, Job-like, to a silent universe. ‘I know not who put me into the world,’ this poor homunculus wondered, ‘nor what the world is, nor what I myself am.’
‘I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul . . . I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why . . . All I know is that I must soon die . . . I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be for ever assigned. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty.’
Like his creation, Pascal was overawed by the ‘infinite immensity of spaces’ spread out before his birth and after his death. His little life in between was ‘the frailest thing in the world’, a will-o’-the-wisp.
Alone in this spatial and temporal infinity, in a prison of chronic uncertainty, humankind yearned for a benevolent deity who loved us, Pascal reasoned. ‘What joy can we find in the expectation of nothing but hopeless misery? What reason for boasting that we are in impenetrable darkness?’
A blend of fear and ignorance and horror at his condition led Pascal to affirm that faith was not only desirable, but also vital. The alternative was unthinkable: actual Hell or self-annihilation. Choosing to believe in the God of Christ, he insisted, gave humankind the spiritual assurance to endure our brief stay on Earth, this mere transit lounge between birth and death.
You can bet your life on it, Pascal wrote; the cost of not doing so was eternal hellfire or an infinite silence.
And if the punters won their bet, and found that God exists, would the Lord usher them happily into paradise? Or scorn their little flutter as demonstrating a want of faith? Pascal doesn’t say.
Next Thursday, 3rd October 2024: The Hammer of Witches
Selected sources and further reading:
Adamson, D. (1994) Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist and Thinker about God, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pascal, B. (2020) Collected Works of Blaise Pascal, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.
Pascal, B. (1958) Pascal’s Pensées, with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot, Boston: Dutton.
Pascal, B. (1993) Pensées, Paris: Flammarion.
Pascal, B. (2015) The Collected Works of Blaise Pascal, Oxford: PergamonMedia.