Welcome to Philosopher Fridays, where I aim to expose the academic underpinnings of my thoughts on story-telling and writing. In this series I make no attempt to give a comprehensive view of any of the philosophers I tackle, but instead pick out and explain what draws me back to their works again and again.
For the next few weeks I’ll be exploring the tenuous relationship between faith and reason in a sub-series I’m calling “Expecting Ambiguity“. My aim is to explain how philosophical arguments for the existence of God are not as concretely determinate (and thus as easy to dismiss) as they are often cast, but that they instead offer as much insight into the limits and powers of subjective human knowledge as they do into religion.
PASCAL: Born in 1623, Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, inventor, theologian, and philosopher until his death in 1662, when he was just 39 years old. He is known for his work in the invention of calculation machines, his development of mathematics, and notably, both his defense of the scientific method and his defense of religious belief – two things which are now painted as diametrical opposites – and by far his most famous contributions to the Western philosophical canon is his view of faith as a wager.
Pascal’s wager is essentially the theory that believing in God is a sure bet, not necessarily because you are guaranteed to win, but because you’re guaranteed not to lose. His premise is fairly simple: it is rational to believe in God because even the possibility of being wrong causes no harm, where as deciding not to believe in God may turn out alright, but might also be devastating in the long run. Belief in God carries with it both the greatest potential pay off, and almost no chance of losing anything, whereas denying the existence of God may result in no loss, but could cause you to lose everything. Essentially, the decision to believe in God (or not) comes, for Pascal, down to decision theory.
| Options: | God exists | God does not exist |
| Belief in God | Infinite reward | Nothing gained or lost |
| Denial of God | Infinite punishment | Nothing gained or lost |
In Pascal’s words:
“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up… Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (Pensees, 1660)
Now, it can get a bit more complicated than that; the IEP does a wonderful job laying out three different versions of the theory that have gained traction in the tradition, as well as prominent academic critiques, and I highly suggest you read through the linked page for a full understanding of the argument and its merits and faults.
I, however, am going to stay on the surface and boil it down to a pair of simple claims: that belief can be a matter of rational choice, and that rational choice can be inherently a gamble. Taken together, these claims reveal a surprising tie between reason and ambiguity. Reason is often spoken of as a system for dealing with empirical data, or as an internal system of axiomatic truths, but this view opens up a new understanding of reason as pure possibility – a gamble, but not a guess. And this says as much about our human intellect as it does about God.
No matter how well we reason things through and how much evidence we have available to us, there will always be at least a little bit that we don’t know for sure. And more often than not, there will be a lot we don’t know.
Following this, one could say that when we believe in scientific theories, we have a good reason to do so – but we’re still making a choice to accept the evidence as it is given. According to Richard Feynman, there’s always something missing from any scientific account, and thus always something more to know. The good scientist is one who holds on to doubt and skepticism. In this way, accepting a scientific theory, no matter how sure it is, still involves a choice to believe it while still be open to the possibility that the theory is potentially limited, incomplete, or even wrong.
This would, of course, be a very zoomed in version of Pascal’s wager. The personal stakes of being right or wrong are potentially lower (your life, perhaps, instead of your immortal soul) and the jump from probability to knowledge a much shorter distance (the gaps closed by empirical evidence), but in many cases the wager is the theoretically the same. If we only zoomed out half way between the close lens of the science and the wide lens of Pascal, we might find a similar model of decision making in those who rely on science, but know little about it, including those who work with chemicals, anyone taking medicine or having surgery, people operating heavy machinery, and those relying on safety equipment. They would have some knowledge, but would still be making a choice to believe based on the potential costs and benefits.
This makes me think perhaps that all knowledge involves a choice and a gamble, even when we’re not dealing with something as much of a leap as the existence of God. Even if Pascal’s bet on God isn’t in itself convincing, it still opens a wide range questions about what knowledge and belief require, and suggests that perhaps they’re not quite as distinct as we would like to think.
Stories & Soliloquies 
30 thoughts on “Philosopher Fridays: Pascal’s Ambiguous Wager”
medievalotaku
Reblogged this on Medieval Otaku and commented:
Here’s an well-written article on Pascal’s Wager–one of the best known arguments for belief in God.
Michelle Joelle
Thank for the link and the kind words 🙂
medievalotaku
Your welcome! I thought that it was a very well written article on perhaps one of the more controversial arguments for belief in God.
rung2diotimasladder
I tried clicking the link “a bit more complicated” but it didn’t work for me. Not sure whether that’s a problem on my end or what. I’d love to read it. Sorry if I repeat anything here that’s already in that link!
Well, this was a great overview. I like the way you lay out the wager. It makes it much clearer in my mind.
I once sat in on a lecture directed towards graduate students and professors on the subject of whether or not we can will ourselves to believe. The lecturer never mentioned Pascal, which I found strange, and after a lot of technical language and head scratching on my part, I figured out that he was basically saying, no, you can’t will yourself to be believe (excluding self-deception and the subconscious, etc) because the truth of the proposition is always the issue. (And truth of a proposition is always independent of the believer, and the believer is assumed to be rational and aware of this characteristic of truth.)
On the whole I agreed with the lecturer, but I felt he was missing something about Pascal’s wager…of course, I could never be sure we were talking about Pascal, even though the topic seemed to be based on the wager.
I wanted to raise my hand and ask, “So…are you talking about Pascal?” And, “What about epistemically neutral propositions, or propositions about which we cannot know the truth?” Because in those cases the wager makes a lot more sense. Willing oneself to believe still seems problematic, but much less so. (I didn’t ask these questions because I had basically horned in on the lecture and wasn’t even a student at the U of A.)
In fact, I feel that a lot of people make Pascal’s wager on their death beds. They might not know what they’re doing, but have you ever noticed how people convert at the last minute? Or they might suddenly want a priest by their bedside in their final days? My father and uncle—both raised Catholic, neither particularly religious or practicing—did this in their final days.
I’m also wondering, who was Pascal’s intended audience? As I recall in my very bad memory, he was addressing agnostics rather than atheists. I’m really unsure of this. But if I remember correctly, his wager would be even more forceful. (Assuming that atheists think they know that God does not exist, whereas for the agnostic, the matter is really more open.)
Your point about our knowledge, especially laymen to science, is interesting. We base a lot of our beliefs on probability based on partial evidence. Here, though, there is some evidence, even if we don’t have true knowledge of the subject. The same case could be made for events in history. We could insist that one had to see 1st hand these events to know they really happened, but most of us would not want to be so exacting in these matters (because that might involve denying the Holocaust, etc). We instead rely on 2nd hand accounts and a certain cohesion that makes the event seem likely to have happened.
I wonder if Pascal’s wager is unique in that it’s a wager in the face of the unknowable, not even partial evidence?
Michelle Joelle
Thank you for your comment! You bring up a lot of great questions, and I can’t answer them all. One thing to point out is that most of these ancient, medieval, renaissance, and even early modern proofs are framed in the context of believers debating whether or not their beliefs can be proven – and mot explicitly about convincing non-believers.
To the issue of knowledge, i see Pascal’s wager as an exaggerated model of the kinds of cases you mention. It takes that last gap in our knowledge, that last seed of seed of doubt, and blows it up in isolation from the available evidence. In a lot of cases, if there is more evidence than doubt, we dont give that doubt enough consideration and actively make that unconscous wager you speak of below. Which is to say that i dong think Pascal is totally unique in concept, but perhaps unique in his open acceptance of his gamble.
rung2diotimasladder
Okay, I had to look this up. Here’s what he says in Pensees, the wager:
“If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is. That being so, who would dare to attempt an answer to the question?”
So from here I have inferred that he’s not talking to atheists, I should say a certain kind of atheist who believes positively that God does not exist.
Then he goes on to say that those who refuse to wager have effectively made the wager, because it all goes back to what you have in your post under “Denial of God”. You refuse to make the wager and you take the risk of infinite punishment.
Michelle Joelle
My last reply is meant to cover this comment as well.
stephencwinter
The kind of atheist who “positively” believes in the non-existence of God has chosen to do what Pascal says cannot be done. That is to say that it is possible both to posit a knowable god and then to say it is impossible to believe in such a being.
rung2diotimasladder
Yes, exactly. So then for Pascal, both the atheist and theist who think they can argue for the existence of God based on reason alone are misguided, since he’s saying there’s no way of knowing (through reason).
stephencwinter
And, as my daughter said to me the other day, what thing of value have I said when I say that someone or something “exists”? There are so many more interesting things to say!
whitefrozen
I have a rather different interpretation of Pascal (who is one of my favourite thinkers) than most, who try and set his ideas into the context of decision-theory. His wager is far less a pragmatic argument than it is an exhortation to ‘seek in faith’, as it were. Pascal spends dozens of pages demonstrating that not only does Christianity not have a clear vision of God but that God actively hides himself from all but those who seek Him with all their heart – ‘In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.’ It would be rather odd to try and make a simple wager when what’s being wagered on actively tries to hide from those wagering!
Michelle Joelle
I think that’s a great reading of pascal, and a great explanation of his understanding of faith.
whitefrozen
That’ and he’s also responsible for the greatest single comment ever written about Descartes:
‘Descartes: useless and uncertain’.
That line is just pure gold.
Tienzen (Jeh-Tween) Gong
“… rational to believe in God because even the possibility of being wrong causes no harm, where as deciding not to believe in God may turn out alright, but might also be devastating in the long run. …”
At age 6, I reached the same conclusion and went to church then. Yet at age 16 , the issue of ‘right or wrong’ became more important than the reward/punishment, and I trashed the wager tactic. In search of God became my life mission, and my conclusion was summarized at http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/the-stoic-egg/comment-page-1/#comment-9729 : {In physics,
white sheet is called ‘initial condition’ while misnamed as ‘God’ by the ignorant religious groups;
the ‘action’ is called ‘transformation’ while misunderstood as ‘creation’ again by the ignorance;
the ‘evolution’ goes with the axiomatic-expression process while is again misunderstood as ‘teleology’ by the ignorance, mistaking the axiomatic outcomes as providential.
Initial condition will be ‘linked’ to the known ‘universe (including lives)’ via transformations which are described in detailed math equations and physics-processes while the ‘God and creation’ are totally mumbo-jumbo nonsense.}
“My aim is to explain how philosophical arguments for the existence of God are not as concretely determinate (and thus as easy to dismiss) … faith as a wager. …
This makes me think perhaps that all knowledge involves a choice and a gamble, even when we’re not dealing with something as much of a leap as the existence of God.”
With my above view, I thank that the issue of God can be concretely determined.
SelfAwarePatterns
My issues with Pascal’s Wager include the classic criticisms:
Can we consciously will ourselves to believe? What happens if we fake it?
Which god are we talking about and what happens if we choose the wrong one?
The observation that the God side of the wager isn’t as trouble free as presented.
On scientific theories, in my mind, all knowledge is probabilistic, with no sharp distinction between belief and knowledge. There are only beliefs with lower and higher levels of certitude, which can only be assessed in relation to other high certitude beliefs.
For example, I believe with high certitude the scientific view of reality because, ultimately, I’ve had personal experience with its benefits. That I’ve had those personal experiences is a high certitude belief. Many people will, of course, say the same thing with their religion’s view of reality.
Michelle Joelle
Thank you for the comment – there’s a bit more I’d like to say in hindsight, and you’ve given me the perfect chance to do it!
To your first point, I think Whitefrozen’s commentary gives the right response – that Pascal did not mean something concrete or specific in his wager, but instead by framing it in terms of a wager, meant something ambiguous and unknown. To pick one specific God at the expense of another is to cancel out that deliberate openness to a positively construed unknown. The criticism seems geared more toward overly determinate interpretations of Pascal.
Further, I think the issue isn’t whether we can will ourselves to believe in just this one case, but in all cases. I like to see the wager less as a proof for God’s existence, but as an exaggerated version of how we make rational decisions about what is true in the absence of comprehensive knowledge.
SelfAwarePatterns
Thanks Michelle. I agree that belief in God shouldn’t be treated any different on the question of whether we can consciously control beliefs. I think the question is a very complicated one. I don’t think I can casually will myself to believe anything. I either believe or don’t believe it.
But if I *really* want to believe something, I can go to elaborate lengths to generate that belief, and it may work. From what I’ve read, Pascal covers this by recommending immersing oneself in daily religious rituals. Do that long enough and I could see belief forming via a form of self indoctrination. Of course, I’d have to want to want that belief 🙂
Tienzen (Jeh-Tween) Gong
SAP: “On scientific theories, in my mind, all knowledge is probabilistic, with no sharp distinction between belief and knowledge. There are only beliefs with lower and higher levels of certitude, which can only be assessed in relation to other high certitude beliefs. … ultimately, I’ve had personal experience with its benefits. That I’ve had those personal experiences is a high certitude belief.”
You will definitely win the vote count as it is the view of the majority at this point. Yet, I must disagree with it totally.
Today, we know enough ‘facts’ (not personal experiences) about nature, and those facts form ‘anchors’ (checklist). Any theory (scientific or else) which does not make contacts to ‘all’ those known anchors will be incorrect.
For example, M-string theory, multiverse and ‘naturalness’ issue are all not relevant to the four-known-anchors; thus, they will be incorrect theories {see, A comment to “Matt Strassler’s report of ‘Naturalness 2014 Conference’ (hold on November 16, 2014), http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2014/11/13/dark-matters-creation-from-annihilation/#comment-1707359008 ).
SelfAwarePatterns
Tienzen, I think you pretty much said the same thing I did, but I was more general and you more specific with your personal high certitude beliefs.
How do you “know” about those facts, this checklist? To know something, you have to believe it. But what makes that belief knowledge? The traditional answer is that knowledge is justified true belief. But how do we know truth? And how do we assess justification? Ultimately, you can only do so in relation to other knowledge, to other beliefs you feel is true and justified, that you believe with a high degree of certitude. But that sets up a recursion that can’t be infinite. It ends with your personal experience, which is generally our highest certitude beliefs.
Tienzen (Jeh-Tween) Gong
SAP: “… knowledge is justified true belief.”
I am not an argumentative person. I normally make my point and let it go. But, this is a very important issue, and I would like to make my view more clear.
Your view is the majority view which I have read it many times at many places. If ‘knowledge’ connotes truth, then that statement is totally wrong.
Truth is as a lock which cannot be opened with ‘belief’. For a combination lock, you either know the numbers or you don’t; there is no ‘belief’ involved. For a traditional lock, the teeth of key in your hand is either correct or not are totally independent from your ‘belief’. Your belief that it is correct (while is wrong) will not open the lock.
When I sent a letter to my friend with a ‘belief’ that his mailing address is X (while the correct one is Y), that letter will never reach my friend.
We are a part of this ‘Nature” which operates with its own rules, and one of which is the lock/key rule. No key and wrong key, one will be locked out regardless of his ‘belief’. When one has the correct key, there is no need for him to ‘believe’ that it is right, as he ‘knows’ that it is.
Your statement is the views of many great philosophers in history. But, it is totally wrong, totally nonsense. No, belief is not knowledge. Knowledge is not belief. Knowledge is the ‘key’ for the lock.
SelfAwarePatterns
Tienzen,
Sorry, missed your reply until now. In general, I find definitional arguments unproductive, so I’m replying just to clarify. Your definition of “belief” is different than mine, although perhaps in line with that of some scientists who insist that they’re not in the belief business. I perceive that both they and you are reacting to a religious type of belief, to faith, to having trust in a notion explicitly despite not having epistemic justification for that notion.
My definition of belief is broader. It is simply accepting or regarding a notion as true. Knowledge is a subset of belief. Not all beliefs are knowledge. For me, saying you know something but don’t believe it is like saying that you’re in Bejing but not China. For that statement to be meaningful would require an unusual definition of “China”.
My belief in the correct address for a letter may or may not be knowledge. If my belief is accurate, and I have justification for believing that is the correct address, then we can say I know the correct address, but that doesn’t mean that belief is out of the picture. If I know the address, I also believe that that is the address. At least according to my operational definitions.
rung2diotimasladder
I agree with you, I do think Pascal’s wager raises this question of whether we can will ourselves to believe. It’s a very interesting question with a lot to talk about.
How dependent is belief on perceived truth? I sense that it’s very dependent, but I want to make that connection flexible, as you said in bringing up levels of certainty. I think that dependence on truth (and knowability) is there and it guides how strong the belief is.
SelfAwarePatterns
I agree it is a very interesting question. Of course, we know people can subconsciously convince themselves of things; they do it all the time. The question is whether we can consciously do it. I think we sometimes can with repeated and sustained effort, but success isn’t guaranteed.
rung2diotimasladder
The lecturer I listened to on this subject was very careful to exclude any psychological reasons for believing. He wanted to talk about rational, conscious beings, which is an important distinction. What do we care what people do when they aren’t being rational?
I think you’re right about putting in effort. Going to church, for instance, practicing whatever it is you want to believe. Results are not guaranteed, and the thing in question must seem plausible. No one can will themselves to believe something they think is outright false.
whitefrozen
Forgive this long comment – Pascal is very near to my heart.
The epistemic issue of whether we can ‘will’ ourselves to believe a given proposition is pretty murky and in my opinion isn’t terribly relevant for the rather simple reason that Pascal himself noted that belief isn’t a matter of pure intellect but of the heart (going so far as to say that first principles are known by the heart). I do find myself siding with William Alston in saying that while we may not be able to ‘choose to believe’ X, we can alter our practices of belief. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.
Much of Pascal’s Pensees are devoted to the demonstration of the ‘wretchedness of reason’ – the famous ‘heart has its reasons’ passage is sort of the climax of his arguments against reason.
‘We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose. We know that we do not dream, and, however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument. (We have intuitive knowledge of the tri-dimensional nature of space and of the infinity of number, and reason then shows that there are no two square numbers one of which is double of the other. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.) And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them.’
The key thing to remember about the wager is the context. Pascal isn’t trying to convince the Schoolmen or the Rationalists – his use of the form of a wager is a clue to his audience, which consists of gamblers, dice-players, billiards-players, etc. He really could care less about logic-chopping or probability in the formal sense – his use of the wager is designed to jolt the complacent soul into an existential awareness and not into propositional assent.
Pascal spends a number of pages in his Pensees on boredom. He sees mankind as a fundamentally bored species, who seeks all manner of diversions so as to keep the boredom at bay. Pascal’s aim, then, is too argue against this indifference and boredom and jolt the passive unbeliever not into believing but into taking seriously the notion of belief. The wager is not a slam-dunk argument, but it’s not meant to be. It’s not meant to stand up to rigorous analytic philosophical dissection. It is the climax of Pascal’s efforts in the Pensees. After spending page after page detailing the misery of man in his boredom, the wretchedness of his reason and his pathetic attempts to keep boredom at bay, Pascal’s wager then is meant to move the apathetic person from his state of boredom and diversion into a frame of mind that takes seriously Pascal’s religious claim – that apart from God, man is only in misery and darkness.
To end this all to long ramble – I’ve developed and defended my reading of Pascal regarding his wager in some detail here: https://theologiansinc.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/pascal-the-hidden-god-wagers-and-the-burden-of-seeking/
Michelle Joelle
I’m not sure I mean something all that different than what you say here – perhaps I’m not wording things well, but I hoped to convey that Pascal’s Wager effectively suggests that we ought to question the precision and certainty of reason by tying it to chosen belief (and all the ambiguity that entails). I see how my phrasing suggests the inverse – that belief thus suggests reason. Thank you for your clarification – I never mind long replies as long as they’re on topic, as this very certainly is.
whitefrozen
Ah, I meant that in reply more to selfawarepatterns comment, not yours. Stupid technology.
Michelle Joelle
Ah, I see! I sometimes worry when I attempt to respond speculatively to philosophers I’ve never studied formally or written about before. It’s a risky proposition!
stephencwinter
I was driving with my 17 year old daughter the other evening and we got to talking about God. I asked her whether she had come across Pascal (she is studying Philosophy at the moment and the “Concept of God” has been a recent topic). She said she hadn’t so I talked a bit about his famous wager. I said it was not so much the question of punishment or reward that drew me to what Pascal had said; it was more a matter of knowing that you can’t drift through life, you have to make a choice. Pascal himself wrote “Il faut embarquer”, you have to get on board! I said that for myself I have bet that Love will have the last word and that I try to live by that commitment. I don’t think I have misused Pascal too much in that thought or commitment.
Michelle Joelle
I don’t think you’ve misused him at all! I think that the aspect of choosing is itself productive of some kind of meaning for Pascal (and indeed for Augustine, who I will come to later in the series).