On Pascal's Wager

When I roast coffee, one of the natural byproducts is CO2 gas, which escapes from the beans for about 18-36 hours of "resting." If one attempts to grind beans and prepare coffee from them before they have "off gassed" the flavor is ruined.

When one finishes reading a great book (or even in the midst of reading), a natural temptation arises to draw conclusions about the story or ideas the book discovers to the reader. The mind has been heated and agitated (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively) and wants to pronounce judgment in order to regain composure, or make good on the ideas through application.

The maxim "make haste slowly" (festina lente) applies in this moment of temptation. The mind needs to "off gas" for a period of time before its conclusions will have the flavor of wisdom. Unfortunately, traditions of misunderstanding can be built upon "off gassed" ideas, ruining the value of an author's work for those who do not encounter it directly, or who take up the work with a tainted palate.

"Off gassed" ideas have accumulated around Pascal's idea of "the wager," which is found in his posthumously published book, Pensées. The standard view takes the wager as a "proof" of God's existence offered to atheists, intended to induce them to belief through an intricate probability game. Here's a portion of it from Pascal:

Yes, but you must wager. There is no choice, you are already committed. Which will you choose then? Let us see: since a choice must be made, let us see which offers you the least interest. You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist. (Pensées, p. 123 in 1995 Penguin Classics edition, from which all quotations are taken)

At first glance the wager seems a straightforward inducement to belief in God, but taken in conjunction with other claims Pascal makes throughout the Pensées, to accept it as a complete apologetic proof would be contradictory.

Instead, when viewed in the context of Pascal's view of man and how man comes to know God, the best The Wager provides is a goad toward seeking after God rather than remaining indifferent to Him--a propaedeutic to or preparation for faith rather than an inducement to it.

Consider the following aphorism:

Let us go on to examine the order of the world, and see whether all things do not tend to establish the two main tenets of this religion [Christianity]: Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the centre toward which all things tend. Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything.

Those who go astray only do so for want of seeing one of these two things [that there is a God, of whom all men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy]. It is then perfectly possible to know God but not our own wretchedness, or our own wretchedness but not God; but it is not possible to know Christ without knowing both God and our wretchedness alike.

And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind: not just because I should not feel competent to find in nature arguments which would convince hardened atheists, but also because knowledge, without Christ, is useless and sterile. Even if someone were convinced that the proportions between numbers are immaterial, eternal truths, depending on a first truth in which they subsist, called God, I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation (141).

Pascal offers here (and elsewhere) his anthropology: Christianity teaches man to know God and to know himself--to know God as the aim of his humanity, but also to know his humanity as incapable of reaching God in its present state. Man can gain either of these propositions apart from Christianity, but it is only in the knowledge of Jesus Christ--as the object of all things and the center towards which all things tend--that man is able to know God or himself truly, that is, unto salvation.

Aphorisms 189-192 establish the same fundamental claim, that apart from knowing Christ, apologetic efforts are fruitless:

All those who have claimed to know God and prove his existence without Jesus Christ have only had futile proofs to offer (56)

The metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact. . . (57)

It is not only impossible but useless to know God without Christ (57)

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness (57).

The Wager does not induce either knowledge of God (since it simply offers acceptance of His existence, not knowledge of it) nor knowledge of man's wretchedness, and thus not knowledge of Jesus Christ.  If offered as an apologetic, it would contradict Pascal's beliefs about proofs of God's existence and how man enters salvation.

However, Pascal offers a clue to understanding how the Wager might be understood. In the lengthy aphorism 427 in the section on indifference, Pascal chides those who make half-hearted attempts at Christianity before rejecting it, noting that God is as much the hidden God (Deus absconditus, cf. Is. 45:15) as the revealed God; a fact establishing:

[T]hat God has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him, and that he has none the less hidden them in such a way that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart, then what advantage can they derive when, unconcerned to seek the truth as they profess to be, they protest that nothing shows it to them? For the obscurity in which they find themselves, and which they use as an objection against the Church, simply establishes one of the things the Church maintains without affecting the other, and far from proving her teaching false, confirms it. (127-28)

In other words, Pascal believes the Revelation of God to be obscured from those who do not seek after Him with all their heart such that those who vainly reject God upon a whim are themselves a confirmatory proof that Scripture speaks truly. He goes on to say,

They think they have made great efforts to learn when they have spent a few hours reading some book of the Bible, and have questioned some ecclesiastic about the truths of the faith. After that they boast that they have sought without success in books and among men. But, in fact, I should say to them what I have often said: such negligence is intolerable. It is not a question here of the trifling interest of some stranger prompting such behaviour: it is a question of ourselves, and our all. (128)

From such sentiments, Pascal clearly does not consider the Wager to be the kind of thing one could venture his all upon in order to discover God and salvation. Yet he recognizes that many men are blinded to their own state, and many men fall into complacency, and charity demands some effort on their behalf:

Nothing is so important to man as his state: nothing more fearful than eternity. Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature. With everything else they are different; they fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honour is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell, a supernatural torpor that points to an omnipotent power as its cause. (131)

As for those who live without either knowing or seeking him [God], they consider it so little worth while to take trouble over themselves that they are not worth other people's trouble, and it takes all the charity of that religion they despise [Christianity] not to despise them to the point of abandoning them to their folly. But as this religion [Christianity] obliges us always to regard them, as long as they live, as being capable of receiving grace which may enlighten them, and to believe that in a short time they may be filled with more faith than we are, while we on the contrary may be stricken by the same blindness which is theirs now, we must do for them what we would wish to be done for us in their place, and appeal to them to have pity on themselves, and to take at least a few steps in an attempt to find some light. (133)

Perhaps Pascal's observations that many men are pretenders at seriousness and many others are earnestly indifferent lead him to contrive some simple means of goading them to awareness of the folly of their pretense and indifference? It seems to me that Pascal's Wager serves just such a purpose. When taken as a stimulus toward thinking about God and the afterlife rather than as a proof for the reality of God, the Wager might be the means by which the Spirit of God moves the heart of man to seek Him out rather than languish in blindness. At any rate, I think this view of the Wager does more justice to Pascal's work as a whole than viewing it as a conclusive proof of God's existence.