His classic work Penses (“Thoughts”) was published posthumously. In his later years, he transitioned from science to philosophy and theology. He was a child prodigy, made many significant discoveries/inventions, and died very young at 39. I was hardly surprised to find out that Mr W knew of the famous “Pascal’s Wager.” I was familiar with Pascal as the French philosopher, inventor, and mathematician of the late 1600s. Mr W had pointed me toward a minuscule hint of light visible through a hairline fissure in his cold, hard walls. At least I have come across a point of meaning we can explore further. If you gain, you gain all if you lose, you lose nothing.” Blaise Pascal (1669) 1 “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. It was a look of subdued terror, muted by years of cultivated emotional numbing, as is required in the institution where he was sent to die.
” Mr W looked intensely at me with these last words. what if they’re right? You know, about God. Mr W continued: “So you see, the only conclusion I can come to with reason is. Because lifers have a lot of time to think about life-what sustains it, what stops it, what odds favor our personal “wagers” for happiness. Not an uncommon state for me when listening to “lifers.” Why? That’s easy. But this does not necessarily preclude that there may be some type of higher order being. I have been a man of science all my life. Now I’m not a particularly religious person. But I do have a reason not to kill myself. You see, I don’t really have anything to live for. He explained his circumstances with the articulate vocabulary of a professor.Ĭonsequently, when I asked him, “So what has been keeping you alive all this time?” His reply was prompt and exacting: “That’s easy. With great certainty, I would wager that he was the most intelligent hatchet murderer I had ever met in my life. He had been in prison for about 6 years of his life sentence for killing a person with a hatchet. Interviewing Mr W in the prison inpatient unit, I discovered a most unusual individual who suffered from, among other things, a rather serious depression. Mr W had been sent to the inpatient unit because the correction officers (COs) had observed him giving away possessions and isolating himself socially. ” And you make your psychiatrist extremely nervous. Cold, hard walls surrounding a bunch of angry people. He had a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Then finally I did get one life-anchoring factor-and fortunately it carried enough weight, in Mr W’s mind, to tip the scales in the favor of life. In searching for protective factors, 2 I needed something. A staggering number of risk-enhancing factors towered over the two of us. So far, my suicide risk assessment was grossly one-sided. After an examination of this literature, I conclude with a brief discussion of noncanonical versions of the wager, including Jeff Jordan's Jamesian wager.The fear of eternal damnation. Recent authors have pressed (or responded to, as the case may be) moral objections, epistemological objections, objections relating to infinite utilities, the many Gods objection, and objections to the expectation rule, among others. I then review contemporary formulations of, attacks on, and objections to Pascal's wager (section 4). Recent discussions of the role of the wager within Pascal's overall project of Christian apologetics are also examined (section 3). After an introduction to the elements of decision theory needed to understand the wager (section 2), I discuss the interpretation of Pascal's reasoning in the Infini rien fragment of the Pensees, in which he presents several versions of a wager-style argument. Unlike more traditional arguments for the existence of God, Pascal's wager is a pragmatic argument, concluding not that God exists but that one should wager for God that is, one should live as if God exists. Pascal's wager is an argument in support of religious belief (and religious practice) taking its name from the seventeenth century polymath Blaise Pascal.
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