Ouphilpo

Pascal’s wager is an attempt at providing a pragmatic reason for believing in God. While not entirely a heartfelt conversion into belief, Pascal’s reason is reason. He proposed it was reasonable to believe in God, and therefore only a madman would do otherwise. The context of this wager lies within the forced choice where “…you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked” (Pascal 107). We embarked on our journey and went out to the sea of life with no hope of turning back. From the start, we encounter rule one: everyone must wager.
The unavoidable wager is to choose to believe in god, or not to believe in god. Even to choose the seemingly negative choice of atheism or agnosticism is to still make a wager. Atheists, too, are embarked on the same journey as even the most pious. The wager itself is unique, “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing,” (ibid) or, winner wins all, loser loses nothing. For if one believes in God, and is right, then such a person would be rewarded with eternal life and salvation. For the other three possible outcomes, the ending is the same. If one chooses to not believe in God, and is wrong, one would have the same fate—death (no eternal life in heaven), as if one chooses to believe or not in the second scenario of God not existing in the first place. For Pascal, the only way to ‘win’ the wager is to believe in God—it makes the most sense, logically.
Not only does this argument provide a logical reasoning for believing, this suggestion of reason determining faith’s route underhandedly implies that reason and faith are complementary, or at least not antithetical, as well as removes all passion from the choice of belief or rejection. What could once live as a passionate or intimate choice of believing or not has been reduced to an algorithm of deductive logic. Inversely, one could see Pascal as an idealist, claiming that the tools we already possess (reason, logic, cognition, etc.) could possibly lead us to make wise choices on matters that would otherwise overwhelm us—metaphysical deductions. Whether or not Pascal dims the passion of faith or illuminates the potentiality of humanity remains a choice of the reader. However, what remains most important is how he used reason as the reason for believing and his wager’s implications on the interrelationships between faith and rationality.