Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) Pensées

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There are two kinds of argument for theism. Traditional, epistemic arguments hold that God exists; examples include arguments from cosmology, design, ontology, and experience. Modern, pragmatic arguments hold that, regardless of whether God exists, believing in God is good for us, or is the right thing to do; examples include William James's will to believe and Blaise Pascal's wager.

Pascal — French philosopher, scientist, mathematician and probability theorist (1623-1662) — argues that if we don't know whether God exists then we should play it safe rather than risk being sorry. The argument comes in three versions (Hacking 1972), all of them employing decision theory.

Some acknowledge that Pascal's wager cannot decide among religions, yet maintain that "it at least gets us to theism" (Jordan 1994b, Armour-Garb 1999). The idea is that Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems, and devil-worshippers can all legitimately use decision theory to conclude that it's best to believe in some supreme being. Against this there are two objections. First, it disregards theological possibilities such as the Professor's God. The Professor's God rewards those who humbly remain skeptical in the absence of evidence, and punishes those who adopt theism on the basis of self-interest (Martin 1975, 1990; Mackie 1982). Second, the claim that Pascal's wager yields generic theism assumes that all religions are theistic. But consider the following sort of atheistic Buddhism: if you clear your mind then you will attain nirvana and otherwise you won't — i.e. if you fill your mind with thoughts and desires, e.g. if you believe that God exists or if you love God, then you will not attain salvation (Saka 2001).

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