How To Be An Agnostic
The wager is usually taken to be something like as follows. If
God does not exist then, upon death, the individual will know
nothing of it. If God does exist then, upon death, the individual
will know it for a fact. Moreover, if they believed in God, the
benefi ts that come with faith will then be visited upon them.
So, it is better to act as if God does exist, and believe, than to act
as if God does not. The problem for the wager when presented
like this is that it makes faith out to be not only a calculation,
but calculated – an objectionable quality that undermines the
value of faith.
That, though, is a gross misrepresentation of Pascal. The fi rst
point to note is that he was a believer, of a particularly conser-
vative sort. Like Anselm, his refl ections only make sense when
that is borne in mind. In the Pensées, in which the wager text
is found, he is grappling with the unavoidable antinomies of
his faith – unavoidable because of the nature of God. In par-
ticular it is the undecidability of God’s existence – because God
is beyond human comprehension, and certainly beyond the
powers of human reason to prove – that interests him. What
then can reason say of believing, or not, in God?
He thinks that faith, if not founded on reason, should, none-
theless, be as rationally justifi ed as possible. This is where the
wager comes in. What he argues is that the position of believing
in God makes more sense than the position of not believing in
God, since although both positions are adopted in the face of an
uncertainty that reason cannot overcome, the believer in God
wins an infi nite prize. His argument, then, is aimed not at con-
verting the atheist but rather at the lesser task of calling their
rational certainties into question which includes the assump-
tion that theism is less rational than atheism. Using mathemati-
cal probability theory, which he takes to be something both he
and his opponent would agree is suffi cient for good reasoning –
though clearly not for good belief – he hopes to unsettle the
atheist.
The argument has other benefi ts for it allows Pascal to make
some interesting observations. For example, if the sceptic is