INTRODUCTION 463
there, then, no rational basis for making the Christian commitment? In the selection
given here, Pascal appeals to the bon vivantsof Paris by asking them to consider faith
as a wager. If you bet your life on God and you turn out to be right, you have gained
eternity. If you are wrong and there is no God, what have you lost—except the possi-
bility of “those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury”? But, if you bet your life
against the reality of God, you gain little if correct, but lose eternally if wrong.
Some critics have argued that Pascal’s Wager hardly seems like faith at all—that
it is a “calculating and self-regarding attitude” and is “profoundly irreligious.”*
Others have claimed that the wager leads not to Christianity, but to any religion with
a great reward for belief and a great penalty for disbelief. Still others argue that the
most reasonable choice is to avoid wagering at all until the evidence is clear. (See
the suggested readings that follow.) However, to be fair, Pascal never claimed the
wager was the wayto faith or that it provided the meansfor proving Christian truth.
His two goals were to show that while being suprarational, belief is not irrational
and one mustdecide. As Pascal put it,
Do not then reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing
about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice...The
true course is not to wager at all.”
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you
choose then?There is little consistency in the numbering of different editions of the Pensées.
The translation and numbering used here are by W.F. Trotter.
The best general introduction to Pascal remains J.H. Broome,Pascal(London:
E. Arnold, 1972). Other general studies include Émile Cailliet,Pascal: The
Emergence of Genius,2nd edition (New York: Harper, 1961); Morris Bishop,
Pascal: The Life of a Genius(1936; reprint Westport, CO: Greenwood Press, 1968);
Jean Mesnard,Pascal,translated by Claude and Marcia Abraham (University, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 1969); Alban Krailsheimer,Pascal,Past Masters
Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Hugh M. Davidson,Blaise Pascal
(Boston: Twayne, 1983); Ben Rogers,Pascal(London: Routledge, 1999); and
Nicholas Hammond, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Pascal(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003). More specialized studies include F.T.H.
Fletcher,Pascal and the Mystical Tradition(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954); Jan
Miel,Pascal and Theology(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1969); Robert James Nelson,Pascal: Adversary and Advocate(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981); Sara E. Melzer,Discourses of the Fall: A Study of
Pascal’s Pensées (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); Nicholas
Hammond,Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s
‘Pensées’(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Charles Sherrard
MacKenzie,Blaise Pascal: Apologist to Skeptics (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 2008). For discussions of Pascal’s wager, see Nicholas Rescher,Pascal’s
Wager: A Study of Practical Reasoning in Philosophical Theology(Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985) and Jeff Jordan, ed.,Gambling on God:
Essays on Pascal’s Wager(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994).
*John Hick,Philosophy of Religion,4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 59.