Many think that Pascal’s Wager is a hopeless failure. A primary reason for this is because a number of challenging objections have been raised to the wager, including the “many gods” objection and the “mixed strategy” objection. We argue that both objections are formal, but not substantive, problems for the wager, and that they both fail for the same reason. We then respond to additional objections to the wager. We show how a version of Pascalian (...) reasoning succeeds, giving us a reason to pay special attention to the infinite consequences of our actions. (shrink)

One version of moral error theory maintains that the central problem with morality is an ontological commitment to irreducible normativity. This paper argues that this version of error theory ultimately depends on an appeal to Ockham’s Razor, and that Ockham’s Razor should not be applied to irreducible normativity. This is because the appeal to Ockham’s Razor always contains an intractable element of epistemic circularity; and if this circularity is not vicious, we can construct a sound argument for the existence of (...) irreducibly normative truths that contains a similar kind of epistemic circularity. This argument is a version of Pascal’s Wager which I call “Parfit’s Wager,” because it is based on a passage from Derek Parfit’s On What Matters. It states that, if we believe that there are some irreducibly normative truths, we are more likely to be believing what we ought to believe compared to not believing that there are such truths, and that this indicates that we ought rationally to believe that there are such truths, justifying the ontological commitment to irreducible normativity in the process. (shrink)

Pascal’s Wager does not exist in a Platonic world of possible gods, abstract probabilities and arbitrary payoffs. Real decision-makers, such as Pascal’s “man of the world” of 1660, face a range of religious options they take to be serious, with fixed probabilities grounded in their evidence, and with utilities that are fixed quantities in actual minds. The many ingenious objections to the Wager dreamed up by philosophers do not apply in such a real decision matrix. In (...) the situation Pascal addresses, the Wager is a good bet. In the situation of a modern Western intellectual, the reasoning of the Wager is still powerful, though the range of options and the actions indicated are not the same as in Pascal’s day. (shrink)

In part one of this book I argue for the conditional claim that if Christianity has at least a 50% epistemic probability, then it is rational to commit to living a Christian life (and irrational not to). This claim is supported by a contemporary version of Pascal's wager. In part two, I then proceed to argue that Christianity does have at least a 50% epistemic probability, by advancing versions of the cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, and historical arguments for (...) the plausibility of the resurrection (along with a few other relevant considerations). Assessments of the problem of evil and divine hiddenness are also given. Finally, in part three, I discuss the lives of three Christians from the 20th century (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jean Vanier, and Immaculee Ilibagiza) in an effort to illustrate how a life of Christian commitment is not just reasonable, but worth desiring as well--satisfying both the head and the heart. (shrink)

Is it reasonable to believe in God even in the absence of strong evidence that God exists? Pragmatic arguments for theism are designed to support belief even if one lacks evidence that theism is more likely than not. Jeff Jordan proposes that there is a sound version of the most well-known argument of this kind, Pascal's Wager, and explores the issues involved - in epistemology, the ethics of belief, decision theory, and theology.

“Pascal's Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as “Pascal's Wager”. We find in it the extraordinary confluence of (...) several important strands of thought: the justification of theism; probability theory and decision theory, used here for almost the first time in history; pragmatism; voluntarism (the thesis that belief is a matter of the will); and the use of the concept of infinity. (shrink)

I argue that a version of Pascal's Wager applies to the persistent vegetative state with sufficient force that it ought to part of advance directives.

In his famous Wager, Blaise Pascal offers the reader an argument that it is rational to strive to believe in God. Philosophical debates about this classic argument have continued until our own times. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of Pascal's Wager, including its theological framework, its place in the history of philosophy, and its importance to contemporary decision theory. The volume starts with a valuable primer on infinity and decision theory for students and non-specialists. A sequence of (...) chapters then examines topics including the Wager's underlying theology, its influence on later philosophical figures, and contemporary analyses of the Wager including Alan Hájek's challenge to its validity, the many gods objection, and the ethics of belief. The final five chapters explore various ways in which the Wager has inspired contemporary decision theory, including questions related to infinite utility, imprecise probabilities, and infinitesimals. (shrink)

Unlike other classical arguments for the existence of God, Pascal’s Wager provides a pragmatic rationale for theistic belief. Its most popular version says that it is rationally mandatory to choose a way of life that seeks to cultivate belief in God because this is the option of maximum expected utility. Despite its initial attractiveness, this long-standing argument has been subject to various criticisms by many philosophers. What is less discussed, however, is the rationality of this choice in situations (...) where the decision-makers are confronted with greater uncertainty. In this paper, I examine the imprecise version of Pascal’s Wager: those scenarios where an agent’s credence that God exists is imprecise or vague rather than precise. After introducing some technical background on imprecise probabilities, I apply five different principles for decision-making to two cases of state uncertainty. In the final part of the paper, I argue that it is not rationally permitted to include zero as the lower probability of God’s existence. Although the conditions for what makes an act uniquely optimal vary significantly across those principles, I also show how the option of wagering for God can defeat any mixed strategy under two distinct interpretations of salvation. (shrink)

Pascal's wager is an argument in support of religious belief taking its name from the seventeenth century polymath Blaise Pascal. Unlike more traditional arguments for the existence of God, Pascal's wager is a pragmatic argument, concluding not that God exists but that one should wager for God; that is, one should live as if God exists. After an introduction to the elements of decision theory needed to understand the wager, I discuss the interpretation of Pascal's reasoning (...) in the Infini rien fragment of the Pensees, in which he presents several versions of a wager-style argument. Recent discussions of the role of the wager within Pascal's overall project of Christian apologetics are also examined. I then review contemporary formulations of, attacks on, and objections to Pascal's wager. Recent authors have pressed moral objections, epistemological objections, objections relating to infinite utilities, the many Gods objection, and objections to the expectation rule, among others. After an examination of this literature, I conclude with a brief discussion of noncanonical versions of the wager, including Jeff Jordan's Jamesian wager. (shrink)

In Pascal’s famous wager, he claims that the seeking non-believer can induce genuine religious belief in herself by joining a religious community and taking part in its rituals. This form of belief regulation is epistemologically puzzling: can we form beliefs in this way, and could such beliefs be rationally held? In the first half of the paper, we explain how the regimen could allow the seeking non-believer to regulate her religious beliefs by intervening on her evidence and epistemic (...) standards. In the second half of the paper, we argue that regulated religious beliefs can be rationally held. (shrink)

Doctors and dentists have traditionally used antibiotic prophylaxis in certain patient groups in order to prevent infective endocarditis (IE). New guidelines, however, suggest that the risk to patients from using antibiotics is higher than the risk from IE. This paper analyses the relative risks of prescribing and not prescribing antibiotic prophylaxis against the background of Pascal’s Wager, the infamous assertion that it is better to believe in God regardless of evidence, because of the prospective benefits should He exist. (...) Many doctors seem to believe the parallel proposition that it is better to prescribe antibiotics, regardless of evidence, because of the prospective benefit conferred upon the patient. This has been called the “no lose philosophy” in medicine: better safe than sorry, even if the evidence inconveniently suggests that following this mantra is potentially more likely to result in sorry than safe. It transpires that, just as Pascal’s Wager fails to convince because of a lack of evidence to support it and the costs incurred by trying to believe, so the “belts and braces” approach of prescribing antibiotic prophylaxis is unjustifiable given the actual evidence of potential risk and benefit to the patient. Ultimately, there is no no-lose if your clinical decisions, like Pascal’s Wager, are based on faith rather than evidence. (shrink)

This paper argues that Pascal's formulation of his famous wager argument licenses an inference about God's nature that ultimately vitiates the claim that wagering for God is in one's rational self-interest. In particular, it is argued that if we accept Pascal's premises, then we can infer that the god for whom Pascal encourages us to wager is irrational. But if God is irrational, then the prudentially rational course of action is to refrain from wagering for him.

Epistemic permissivism is the thesis that the evidence can rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. Pascal’s wager is the idea that one ought to believe in God for practical reasons, because of what one can gain if theism is true and what one has to lose if theism is false. In this paper, I argue that if epistemic permissivism is true, then the defender of Pascal’s wager has powerful responses to two prominent objections. (...) First, I argue that if permissivism is true, then permissivism is true about theistic belief. Second, I show how epistemic permissivism about theistic belief dispels two objections to Pascal’s wager: the objection that wagering is impossible, and the objection that wagering is epistemically impermissible. (shrink)

I examine the relationship between taking Pascal’s wager, faith, and hope. First, I argue that many who take Pascal’s wager have genuine faith that God exists. The person of faith and the wagerer have several things in common, including a commitment to God and positive cognitive and conative attitudes toward God’s existence. If one’s credences in theism are too low to have faith, I argue that the wagerer can still hope that God exists, another commitment-justifying theological (...) virtue. I conclude with two upshots of the argument, including how it provides responses to common objections to Pascal’s wager. (shrink)

Included in this volume are fourteen of the fragments intended for Pascal's Jansenist-inspired defense of the Christian religion. Using the Chevalier edition, these are grouped to present a logical development of three themes, "The State of Man in Ignorance of God," "The Wager," and "The Christian Life." This translation closely follows the French text (cross-referenced with the paragraph numbers of the Brunschvicg edition) and does not conceal the fragmentary style of the original. Translated and edited by Arthur H. Beattie, (...) this volume also contains an introduction, a list of principal dates in the life of Pascal, and a bibliography. (shrink)

A. Pascal's statement of his wager argument is couched in terms of the theory of probability and the theory of games, and the exposition is unclear and unnecessarily complicated. The following is a ‘creative’ reformulation of the argument designed to avoid some of the objections which have been or might be raised against the original.

A. Pascal's statement of his wager argument is couched in terms of the theory of probability and the theory of games, and the exposition is unclear and unnecessarily complicated. The following is a ‘creative’ reformulation of the argument designed to avoid some of the objections which have been or might be raised against the original.

In "To Bet The Impossible Bet", Harmon Holcomb III argues: (i) that Pascal's wager is structurally incoherent; (ii) that if it were not thus incoherent, then it would be successful; and (iii) that my earlier critique of Pascal's wager in "On Rescher On Pascal's Wager" is vitiated by its reliance on "logicist" presuppositions. I deny all three claims. If Pascal's wager is "incoherent", this is only because of its invocation of infinite utilities. However, even if infinite (...) utilities are admissible, the wager is defeated by the "many gods" and "many wagers" objections. Moreover, these objections do not rely on mistaken "logicist" presuppositions: atheists and agnostics traditionally and typically hold that they have no more--or at any rate, hardly any more--reason to believe in the traditional Christian God than they have to believe in countless alternative deities. (shrink)

One version of Pascal’s Wager says we should commit to, or cultivate belief in, whatever religion we think is most likely to bring us eternal joy. I pose a reductio for this version of the Wager. After exploring some ways the Pascalian might respond, the verdict is that it provides some reason to suspect that somewhere, somehow, the Wager goes wrong.

Can Pascal's wager for the existence of God be turned against the religious believer and used as an argument for not believing in God? Although such an argument has been very briefly sketched by others its details have remained undeveloped. In this paper this argument is worked out in detail in the context of decision theory and is defended against objections. The result is a plausible argument for atheism.

Pragmatic arguments seek to justify the performance of an action by appealing to the benefits that may follow from that action. Pascal’s wager, for instance, argues that one should inculcate belief in God because there is everything to gain and little to lose by doing do. In this chapter I critically examine Pascal’s wager and William James’s famous “Will-to-Believe” argument by first explaining the logic of each argument and then by surveying the objections commonly arrayed against (...) them. Finally, I suggest that among the various versions of the wager found in Pascal’s Pensées is a neglected version that anticipates the Jamesian argument and that avoids the many-gods objection. (shrink)

An adaptation of Pascal’s Wager argument has been considered useful in deciding about the provision of life-sustaining treatment for patients in persistent vegetative state. In this article, I assess whether people making such decisions should resort to the application of Pascal’s idea. I argue that there is no sufficient reason to give it an important role in making the decisions.

In Pascal's Wager: A Study Of Practical Reasoning In Philosophical Theology ,[1] Nicholas Rescher aims to show that, contrary to received philosophical opinion, Pascal's Wager argument is "the vehicle of a fruitful and valuable insight--one which not only represents a milestone in the development of an historically important tradition of thought but can still be seen as making an instructive contribution to philosophical theology".[2] In particular, Rescher argues that one only needs to adopt a correct perspective in order (...) to see that Pascal's Wager argument is a good argument. Moreover, there seems to be a certain amount of contemporary support for Rescher's claim that Pascal's Wager argument can be seen to be a good argument when properly construed .[3] However, despite this recent trend to adopt a more sympathetic stance towards Pascal's Wager argument, I propose to defend the traditional view that Pascal's Wager argument is almost entirely worthless--at least from the theological standpoint. (No doubt, it has historical significance from the standpoint of decision theory; but that's a separate matter.). (shrink)

The standard version of Pascal’s Wager suffers from serious problems. In this paper I present a modified version of a Wager-style argument that avoids several of the most serious objections to the standard version, viz., the objections of Duff and Hájek relating to infinite utilities, moral objections concerning the use of pragmatic considerations, and the many-gods objection. I argue that a serious commitment to living a Christian life is rational (and the failure to make such a commitment (...) is irrational) if one is rational in assigning a credence to Christianity of at least one-half. The upshot is that considerations of practical rationality dramatically lower the bar for natural theology. (shrink)

Epistemic consequentialism is the view that epistemic goodness is more fundamental than epistemic rightness. This paper examines the relationship between epistemic consequentialism and theistic belief. I argue that, in an epistemic consequentialist framework, there is an epistemic reason to believe in God. Imagine having an unlimited amount of time to ask an omniscient being anything you wanted. The potential epistemic benefits would be enormous. Considerations like these point to an epistemic version of Pascal’s wager. I compare and contrast (...) the epistemic wager with the traditional wager, and argue that the epistemic wager has several notable advantages. (shrink)

Pascal’s Wager is simply too good to be true—or better, too good to be sound. There must be something wrong with Pascal’s argument that decision-theoretic reasoning shows that one must (resolve to) believe in God, if one is rational. No surprise, then, that critics of the argument are easily found, or that they have attacked it on many fronts. For Pascal has given them no dearth of targets.

The wager fragment in Blaise Pascal’s _Penseés _opens with the phrase "_infini rien_"—"infinite nothing"—which is meant to describe the human condition. Pascal was responding to what was, even in the seventeenth century, becoming a pressing human problem: we seem to be able to know much about the world but less about ourselves. The traditional European view of human beings as creatures made in the image of God and potentially capable of a mystical union with God was increasingly confounded (...) by the difficulty of finding God in nature. Despite his own scientific work, however, Pascal argued that if one does not know whether or not God exists, one should bet that he does: if one is right the rewards are infinitely good and, if one is wrong, what one has lost is, by comparison, utterly trivial. The argument behind this wager is one of the most celebrated—and disputed—in the history of philosophy. It has been seen in terms of the calculus of probabilities, as a piece of religious apologetic, as an event in the religious and psychological life of Pascal himself, and as an event in the life of the Jansenist movement and its various expressions at Port-Royal. In this book, Leslie Armour explores the underlying logic of ideas brought to the surface by the intersection of two philosophical lines of thought. He shows that Pascal had come to philosophy by way of two particular strands of Platonism, one strongly mystical, associated with the founder of the French Oratorian order, Pierre de Bérulle, and the other the Augustinian Platonism associated with Duvergier de Hauranne and Cornelius Jansen. At the same time Pascal was engaged in an internal struggle with skepticism. While he agreed that it is difficult to find God in physical nature, he disagreed with the claim that we know nothing of nature. The problem is that the human being is both infinite and nothing. Thus, Armour locates Pascal’s wager within the confluence of a vital neo-Platonism and an intellectually powerful skepticism. He concludes that even today, "If we must act and cannot know enough, we must bet.". (shrink)

Recent scholarship has shown that the success of Pascal’s wager rests on precarious grounds. To avoid notorious problems, it must appeal to considerations such as what probability we assign to the existence of various gods and what religion we think provides the greatest happiness in this life. Rational judgments concerning these matters are subject to change over time. Some claim that the wager therefore cannot support a steadfast commitment to God. I argue that this conclusion does not (...) follow. By drawing upon the line of reasoning employed in getting married, I explain how unstable considerations can provide a sufficient rational foundation for a stable commitment. (shrink)

Pascal’s Wager is simply too good to be true—or better, too good to be sound. There must be something wrong with Pascal’s argument that decision-theoretic reasoning shows that one must believe in God, if one is rational. No surprise, then, that critics of the argument are easily found, or that they have attacked it on many fronts. For Pascal has given them no dearth of targets.

This paper outlines a formal application of the decision tree analysis technique to Pascal's Wager. The author utilizes Pascal's Wager to engage students in various methods for interpreting and utilizing decision tree analyses. The method targets students’ comprehension of the reward system as it is interpreted in Pascal's philosophy. In addition, students are able to engage with philosophical questions concerning the existence of God in view of the questions’ application.