By Satyaraja Dasa
The seventeenth-century mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal formulated a pragmatic argument for justifying belief in God. Which is worth the risk of error, Pascal questioned, belief or non-belief? It is wise, he said, to “wager” on the existence of God, for the alternative, to put one’s faith in faithlessness, is an inferior bet. And, more, if one believes in God but is eventually proven wrong, one loses nothing. But if one believes and is proven right, one gains just about everything. And what if one disbelieves in God and is proven wrong? What if one lives an atheistic life and then finds out there is a God? That’s going to be trouble for sure. Most philosophers think Pascal’s Wager is the weakest of all the traditional arguments for believing in the existence of God. But Pascal thought it was the strongest. After completing his construction of the full argument in his work Pensees, he wrote, “This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.” This declaration was a rare moment of certainty for Pascal, one of the most skeptical thinkers of the modern era.