Pascal's Wager

Have you ever read any of Pascal’s Thoughts, sometimes referred to as his Pensées? I have been working my way through the nearly 500 page work, Pascal’s Thoughts and Minor Works and find it challenging.  Maybe because he was a brilliant mathematician and I’m not.  

Still, I could share many quotes that are crystal clear to all.  Like this one: “The feeble-minded are people who know the truth, but only affirm it so far as consistent with their own interests.”  Or how about the thought-provoking, “We owe a great debt to those who point out our faults…They prepare us for the exercise of correction and freedom from fault.”

One of the most famous topics of his Pensées is referred to as Pascal’s Wager.  Each of us must take a sort of gamble: do we trust God, particularly the God described in the Bible?  To believe in—trust—God will cost us something in this life; what if it is all a hoax?  On the other hand, if we do not believe in God, we live our life as we please; but what if the whole God thing is true, and there really is eternal life or death at stake?

Here are excerpts from Pensée #233 (as translated into English by W.F. Trotter) in which Pascal describes the wager:

‘God is or He is not.’  But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us.  A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up.  What will you wager?  According to reason, you can do neither the one nor the other; according to reason you can defend neither of the propositions….The true course is not to wager at all. Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. …

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. …

[But you protest] ‘I may perhaps wager too much.’ …But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances [one] of loss, and what you stake [this life] is finite….Wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. …

[In a typical wager] every player stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty, and yet he stakes a finite certainty to gain a finite uncertainty, without transgressing reason.  There is not an infinite distance between the certainty staked and the uncertainty of the gain; [but in the case of this wager of the existence of God] that is untrue. In truth, there is an infinity between the certainty of gain and the certainty of loss.  But the uncertainty of gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss.  Hence it comes that, if there are as many risks on one side as the other, the course is to play even; and then the certainty of the stake is equal to the uncertainty of the gain, so far is it from fact that there is an infinite distance between them.  And so our proportion is of infinite force, where there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and loss, and the infinite to gain.

Now what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful.  Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others?  I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

I just love that last sentence.  The longer we live, the clearer it becomes that we have given up nothing to gain everything!  If God is anything, and I believe He surely must be, He is profound and beyond our imagination. Making peace with Him before death seems like a pretty good idea to me.  Anyone who does not trust God will go to his death bed with a lot at stake. Just saying.