Skeptics Laugh, But Pascal’s Wager Has the Goods On Them

Imagine a man with the tech moxie of a Steve Jobs, the psychological acuity of a Jordan Peterson, and the reasoning powers of a Socrates. That was the Frenchman Blaise Pascal. Pascal was a tech giant beforehis time, the only 17th century thinker to have an actual computer program named after him. He was also a profound thinker about the human condition and ultimate truth, and a brilliant writer.

Modern skeptics only know “Pascal’s Wager,” and they really don’t know that. They’re betting he’s clueless on that. They could gain far more from understanding this great thinker.

In his best-selling 2006 book The GodDelusion Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins described Pascal’s Wager this way: “The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God’s existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong.”

Dawkins thinks Pascal was saying the reason to believe in God is because it’s a good bet. If you believe, but it turns out He isn’t real, all you lose is a few Sunday morning sleep-ins. But if you fail to trust God and He turns out to be real, you lose your immortal soul. There may be hardly any real reason to believe in God, but still the smart money puts its bets on faith anyway.

It’s a caricature, but Dawkins believes it anyway. He said Pascal “wasn’t claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds.” And who can force himself (he wondered) to believe that way? “I can . . . swear on a stack of bibles [sic] that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don’t.” And which God or gods should we bet on? Yahweh? Baal? Shiva?”

Recently Alex O’Connor, a bright young Oxford philosophy student and fan of Dawkins who calls himself “Cosmic Skeptic” online, has picked up Dawkins’ line of thought: “Pascal’s Wager can only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God.” To that he adds, “It seems to me that any intelligent God would far more appreciate intellectually honest skepticism than a half-hearted thing ‘just in case.'”

It sounds like a great rebuttal of something, and it could be if Pascal had said what Dawkins and O’Connor claim he said. The first question to ask such critics is, “Have you actually read Pascal?” Because all this is nonsense. Almost every modern skeptic overlooks five patently obvious and supremely important points about Blaise Pascal, and the Wager he made so famous.

First, Pascal didn’t set out to write a wager but a book. The so-called “Wager” is just a few paragraphs of a work titled Pensees, French for “thoughts.” Careful scholars read arguments in the context in which theyappear, not isolated in a few pithy quotes on random web pages.

Secondly, Pascal did not complete the book. (He only lived 39 years.) “The Thoughts” are hundreds of “fragments” Pascal jotted down in preparation for a full defense of the Christian faith. He never finished it, in fact never even started, other than making these notes. Some fragments are complete essays, others just a sentence or two. Some appear as finely-sculpted jewels, worth quoting on your Facebook page, one a week for years on end. Others are sketchy, more like “to do” lists stuck to your refrigerator door. Editors disagree on how to properly order these thoughts.

That means no one knows for sure how Pascal meant to tie his “Wager” to other points he would make. But clearly, if you want to understand that famous bet, you should not ignore the book in which it was meant to appear.

Third, other fragments in the Pensees do exactly what skeptics deny Pascal does: They offer evidence for the Christian faith. They show how it differs from other religions, and how that matters. Pascal’s evidence falls into three or four categories: miracles, prophecies, the character of Jesus and the accounts of his life that we call the gospels.

If Jesus had not worked miracles, Pascal says, “There would have been no sin in not believing” in him.

Pascal described the Old Testament as a “cipher,” the key to understanding which is the life of Jesus: “I see many contradictory religions . . . But I see that Christian religion wherein prophecies are fulfilled.”

Some sayings in the Pensees even begin with notes such as “Proofs of Jesus Christ.” Obviously, Pascal thought the Christian faith was supported by evidence!

The character of Jesus astonished Pascal not because it was too Stoically perfect, but for its apparent weaknesses, like the agony he went through before his death: “Who has taught the evangelists the qualities of a perfectly heroic soul, that they paint it so perfectly in Jesus Christ?” (Fragment 800)

The evidence of Jesus’ life was closely tied to evidence Pascal saw for the gospels in which that life is described: “The apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition has difficulties; for it is not possible to mistake a man raised from the dead.” 

https://stream.org/skeptics-laugh-pascals-wager-has-goods/