Pascal's Wager

  I'm reading "The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans" by Bill Hammack Ph.D. and wanted to share this quote with you.

"Pascal gathered his scratch paper notes to create his great work Pensées (“Thoughts”), in which he proposed his famous “wager.”8 He wrote, “Either God is or he is not. But to which view shall we incline?” He assigned probabilities to God’s existence or onexistence: “a coin toss is being spun which will come down heads or tails.” It is, he implied, a fifty-fifty shot, although he later admitted that the probability of God’s existence might be smaller. He assigned utility and value to the outcome of believing or not believing—a yet more sophisticated version of the plus-and-minus system of the āšipu. Following the prevailing Christian beliefs of seventeenth-century France, to believe in an existing God granted an eternity in paradise after death, while disbelief damned one to hell. Belief in a nonexistent God, however, only compelled one to live according to religious standards based on a misconception with no eternal reward. Disbelief in a nonexistent God gave one more freedom in life while being left to the same fate after death as the believer. Following the āšipu’s model, belief in an existing God provided essentially ultimate, infinite benefit, and disbelief in God provided infinite loss. If God didn’t exist, belief provided finite loss, while disbelief provided finite benefit. Given the stats, the best one can get from belief is eternal bliss, whereas the best disbelief offers is a marginally better life on earth. The worst one suffers from belief, on the other hand, is a life inconvenienced by religion, while with disbelief comes the possibility of eternal damnation. So Pascal concluded that a risk analysis compels belief in God. Although the theology, even logic, of Pascal’s wager has been debated for centuries, he shows us a turning point in probability theory: the idea that the mathematics of games of chance can be applied to a wide swath of life, that probabilities can be developed into an art of conjecture, a way to think about future events with some enumerated degree of confidence that we can use to make informed decisions to mitigate risks and solve problems."

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