Pascal: Deploring the Tendency to Understand God’s Existence While Probing “Why Not?”

Pascal’s Wager outlines a somewhat encouraging viewpoint for people who believe in a Christian God such that if one considers the probability of all potential outcomes, it makes the most sense to believe in God during one’s lifetime. He claims that “If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is,” which explains that reason isn’t up to the task of explaining God’s existence because we can’t as humans aren’t able to comprehend something like God. We can’t know whether or not God exists; therefore, believing in Him is taking a chance that He exists. This idea of chance is a somewhat problematic, probabilistic viewpoint that weighs the pros and cons of believing or not believing in God as the sole explanation for God; however, it fails to assess the downfall of using a gamble as the only basis of believing in God. While people who already had some semblance of faith might consider this as a persuasive argument for God, those who don’t have religious background or those who don’t trust the authority of religious scripture as evidence might not be swayed by Pascal’s perspective. 

The main argument about taking a chance on believing in God’s existence exemplifies that there are four viewpoints on one's belief or disbelief in God. The first of these is that if God exists and you believe in God, then you live in eternal happiness with infinite gain. If God doesn't exist but you lived your life believing He does, then there is a finite loss and nothing bad happens to you overall. To add to this, the finite “loss” is really no loss at all because at the end of your life, you tried to be a good person every day and that may have had an overall positive influence on your quality of life. Right off the bat, he makes a strong case as to why one should believe in God— with personal gain in mind and the consideration that nothing bad can happen from it, there is no reason not to believe in God during your lifetime. Pascal then says that if God does exist but you lived your life believing that He doesn't, then you live in eternal displeasure with infinite loss. Lastly, if you lived your entire life believing that God doesn't exist and you come to find out at the end of your life that you were right and He doesn’t exist then there is no overall loss. According to the two by two matrix we refer to as Pascal's Wager, there is no significant loss if one believes in God during their lifetime and a small likelihood of infinite gain. Through this, Pascal essentially argues that one might as well believe in God: “What harm will befall you in taking this side? 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...that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing,” (3). Since there is no possible loss by believing in God and a potential of infinite reward, why would anyone risk the chance of infinite loss if they don't believe in God during their lifetime when they could gamble on the possibility of infinite gain? His wager that you lose nothing (and potentially gain everything) through believing in God and that you could lose everything by not believing has the intent of convincing people to overcome whatever restrictions that might cause them to have disbelief against the existence of God.

Pascal presumes that one can force themselves to have faith in something they don’t believe in for the sake of long-term personal gain. While this might be able to occur situationally, faith in God is not an applicable relationship for forceful faithfulness. Pascal’s Wager forces one to make a decision, as the act of choosing agnosticism is still choosing not to believe in God. Although an agnostic is unsure of the existence of God, they aren’t living their lives in such a way that emphasizes their belief in God, so they have indirectly chosen to believe against the existence of God. Therefore, the only people who reap the benefit of a belief in God are the truly faithful believers, and everyone outside of them would have chosen otherwise. However, Pascal’s Wager doesn’t supply any convincing reasoning regarding the existence of God Himself, besides the thought that we can’t know of God’s existence. Although I agree with Pascal’s reasoning as evidence for believing in a God, he fails to provide sufficient evidence for the existence of a God and thus doesn’t provide a persuasive argument. Pascal’s argument could be considered controversial because he supports a viewpoint that one should be able to believe in a God without reasoning or evidence for His existence, which is very different from the arguments of other philosophers we’ve read about in this course. Further, Pascal deplores the tendency to recognize an existing God through his disagreement of the perspectives of other philosophers we examined throughout this course with his claim that we as humans can’t be knowledgeable of God’s existence because it is beyond the capacity of our understanding and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind. 

Pascal argues in this reading that we have no way of knowing for sure whether or not God exists until it is too late. He claims that reason itself cannot decide whether or not God exists—thus emphasizing his point that the reality of His existence is based on nothing but a chance or a wager. While Pascal’s Wager provides sufficient reasoning as to why one should believe or would want to believe in a God, it doesn’t advance the topic of why or why not a God can or can’t exist. Therefore, Pascal’s Wager is not persuasive for someone who doesn’t have prior faith or knowledge in the existence of God—especially because Pascal’s Wager doesn’t go to any lengths to discern whether God exists, and if he is, which God is worth believing in. Pascal proposes a persuasive consideration about one’s belief in God; however, his application of a gamble or a wager suggests that God’s existence is as trivial as a coin flip. His consideration that God’s existence is analogous to the probability of getting heads or tails on a coin flip propounds the idea that God is simultaneously existent and nonexistent until the moment that his existence is observed, in the form of a mortal person’s death. 

One might argue against this objection by saying that the coin flip isn’t analogous to God’s existence but is instead symbolic of one’s belief in Him; but the probabilistic nature of a coin flip exemplifies that it is representative of chance, not a choice. In the matter of believing in God’s existence, someone has to decide whether or not to believe in God during their lifetime. This aspect is the choice that someone makes, which has no bearing on whether or not God exists; it is merely picking a side of the probabilistic expectation about what might or might not be true. Thus, the binary “heads or tails” property of the question at hand, or the existence of God, is represented by the coin flip. The analogy of the coin flip becomes confusing because it hints that God is both existent and nonexistent until the moment his existence is observed—like a superposition of two situations that collapses at the moment that one dies.  By choosing to believe in God or not to believe in God, one is making that choice between a heads or tails choice about God’s existence, which can’t be proven to be the right choice or the wrong choice until the moment that the coin lands, or in the broader scope, one dies. 

Ultimately, Pascal details a broad view of religion by suggesting that there is no explicit downfall for believing in the existence of a God. If there is nothing to lose, then why shouldn’t (and why wouldn’t) one want to make that wager? While this provides a tempting viewpoint, his wager is not a persuasive argument for the question of whether or not God is existent. He presents God in such a way that it makes Him incomprehensible to humans—thus eliminating the possibility to prove his existence. Whether or not he is trying to uproot the arguments of other philosophers through the thought that God is incomprehensible is difficult to maintain, but it becomes clear that he is simply trying to support the idea that one should have belief in God because it is a fair enough wager with no loss and the potential for infinite gain. By probing with “why not?” Pascal pushes his agenda by allowing his audience to look deeper into the reasoning behind believing in a God.