Pascal's Bet: The Logical Argument to Believe in God?

A men as many of us, one day came to believe in God for a logical reason! Can you believe?

The concept that we are going to unravel in this article serves a purpose: demystify things that we blindly believe. In this case: overturn the myth that there are no logical reasons to believe in God.

Faith in the Father

Blaise Pascal as a french philosopher, theologian, inventor, physicist and mathematician, born in 1623. Lost his mother at the age of 3 and ended up being exclusively educated by his father, a mathematics teacher name Étienne Pascal. Such an event naturally influenced the little Pascal as soon as he took up the same areas of his father's knowledge, resulting in a dedication of much of his life to mathematical and physical concepts.

It was only when Pascal's father died in 1951 that he came to have a closer relationship with religion and thereafter began to formulate philosophical-theological theories. It turns out, however, that Pascal's logic/rational vein was already very strong at this point in his life, causing him to be reluctant to accept God's existence for lack of material proof and logical reasons to convince him.

It was then that Pascal, in one of those moments of genius, ended up formulating what became know as Pascal's Bet: the concept that we are going to focus on today.

Briefly, he evaluated the gains and losses that would come from belief/disbelief in the Catholic God. In a reasoning very similar to what he used to formulate the principles of what would become the game theory, he explained by text in section 233 of his posthumous book Pensées, which can be summarized:

Accordingly, therefore, to believe in God could lead to only two results: infinite gain, eternal life after death, heaven, all that we know; or a finite loss, the effort that religions demands during its life. Likewise, not believing in God would also lead to only two possible outcomes: infinite loss, punishment, hell, that whole story; or a finite gain, the pleasure you may have in life before death when you need not give up anything.

Thus, Pascal justified that, regardless of the existence or not of God, rational beings should believe in its existence because it is the one that offer, literally, the best cost-benefit, thus explaining for logical reasons the principle of faith. But of course this has raised a lot of controversy (and continues to rise!).

Now It Goes

Trying to please Greeks and Trojans (or should I say heretics and romans?), what Pascal was able to do was actually conque the antipathy of both sides.

Believers were annoyed by Pascal's attempt to rationalize faith, and especially his belief that "acting as if he believed in God" could eventually "heal men of unbelief."

In some lines of the same book, Pascal argues that by attending mass, reading the Bible and adopting other religious habits, men would end up believing in God and dicovering their own faith. He even suggest that he himself has fone through this process.

The Catholic Church, of course, disliked this idead of acting as if it believed, believing that it had already given enough reason for all men to believe in God. Pascal, however, had other plans and wanted to make the institution more affable so that other 'good men' would be interested in helping him in this self-imposed mission of proving through the reason that God exists.

Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it to be true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; which is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we msut make it kind, to make good men expect it to be true, and finally we can prove it to be true.

Meanwhile, the unbelievers mocked at Pascal's innnocent attempt to support the Catholic Church. Many devoted themselves to refuting his logical arguments. They presented alleged logical flaws in Pascal's reasoning as:

• Appeal to Fear Argument: a famous fallacy in which the person tries to prove the validity of an argument using fear; in the vast majority of the time, using threats such as: "Vote for my candidate, because the opposing candidate will bring the dictatorship back", "Respect your opinion, but you will suffer in life thinking this way" and even "It's better you have our insurance plan. What if some accident happens to you...". This, however, does not happen in the case of Pascal because there is no type of threat.

• Cost Argument: this reasoning relativizes the size of the finite loss Pascal suggests as the burden of belief in a God who may not exist. According to this argument, the cost of the habits that faith imposes are not so insignificant. This argument, however, is refuted by Pascal's own postulate, which is to assume that in the case of the existence of the Catholic God and the infinite gains in 'eternal life' would be incomparable with any possible gain within the finitude of earthly life.

• Argument of Dishonest Belief: this argument already holds that an omniscient God could not be deceived by those who only "act as if they believed" because it is a rational hypothesis of better value for money. Pascal, however, through his own belief that habit reveals faith, included in his postulate that this resource would be only the way for rational men to discover the faith that is already intrinsic to them. Likewise, there are arguments within the Christian faith that just as God is omniscient he is also benevolent and values the "way" and "sacrifice" that his followers make in life in an attempt to discover their faith.

• Argument of the various Gods: finally, a last argument widely used to refute Pascal's Bet is that of the multiple gods. Advocates argue that it points to a false dichotomy since in other religions like Judaism and Islam, belief in the "wrong God" is punished as or more severely than non-belief in God. Thus, there is the possibility that Pascal's table may be changed to something similar to infinite loss in the case of belief in the Catholic God that does not exist, changing the logical reason on which it is better to choose.

What's up? Did you put faith or whatever God wants?

Note: This article has no doctrinal intent