Pascal's Wager
Pascal · Pensées · 1670
You cannot know whether God exists: reason, says Pascal, can neither prove nor disprove it. Yet you cannot abstain, for to live as though God did not exist is already to have bet against. So weigh the stakes. Bet on God, and if God exists you win an eternity of happiness; if not, you will have given up little, a few pleasures of a finite life. Bet against, and if God exists you lose that infinite happiness. But an infinite gain, however unlikely, outweighs any finite stake: to bet on God's existence would thus be the most reasonable choice, not because it is true, but because it pays best.
Can an advantage stand in for a reason to believe? And can one even decide to believe what one is not convinced of?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Agnosticism (Huxley)attacks the position
Uncertainty does not justify neutrality: living already stakes a bet, and with stakes so asymmetric, suspending judgment is itself a wager, the worst one.
- The agnostic is right on one point: reason can neither prove nor refute God's existence. But he concludes that one may abstain from choosing.
- Yet one cannot not play: to live is already to stake. Whoever suspends judgment lives, in practice, as though God did not exist; his neutrality is a wager that does not speak its name.
- And the stakes are asymmetric: to bet on God is to risk a finite stake for an infinite gain; to bet against, to risk a finite gain against an infinite loss. Faced with such a gap, the calculation leaves no room for unscathed neutrality.
Therefore So uncertainty does not ground suspension: since one must stake, prudential reason counsels betting on God, and agnosticism ceases to be the fallback position it took itself to be.