Allen Hajek formulates his “Many Gods Objection” against Pascal's Wager. In his opinion, Pascal's Wager does not exhaust the relevant options regarding whether there is a Christian God or not. In this paper I shall defend Pascal's Wager against this objection.
Hajek's objection to Pascal's wager can be reconstructed as follows. Hajek points out that (1)Pascal's either-or proposition is an oversimplification.
(2) We could derive an infinite degree of expected utility from more than one religious option.
(3) According to Pascal's Wager, we can either choose only one Christian God or not choose one Christian God
(4) This is because expected utility is derived when we multiply the payoff by the probability of the likelihood that the payoff will occur (Hajek 67).
Failing to recognize that the method of the Pensees is moral, anthropological, and political rather than metaphysical is one of the worst ways in which Pascal can be misunderstood. One must not read the wager and other such fragments as though Pascal. is trying to demonstrate God’s existence. Pascal is not interested in metaphysical speculation, and he repeatedly rejects scholastic proofs and proofs from nature. His philosophical arguments touching on religion do not focus on the actual truth or falsity of the objects of belief but, rather, the practical effects of belief for life. Pascal, therefore, does not pretend to be able to demonstrate rationally whether or not God exists. Nevertheless, he is firm that belief, disbelief, or non-belief has practical implications for our ethical, social, and political life, that is, for our attitudes about what
He does not seem to believe that God is ever apprehended rationally. God is known, if at all, as a sort of pre-rational intuition, much like the knowledge of space, time, number, and so on. Unlike these, however, knowledge or intuition of God is a matter of faith and, thus, a gift rather than a necessary, a priori component of our mental structure. Pascal’s concern for the practical effects of belief without any of the grand pseudo-science of metaphysics. Pascal entertains the notion that human beings can know God intuitively, in the same way that they can know that numbers are not finite.
Approaches to the wager have diverged greatly. Many of these accounts have tried to examine the wager in isolation from the rest of the text, as though it were a complete argument on its own, fully formed and self-contained. While I Perhaps the strongest case for reading the wager in this way is that Pascal himself opens the fragment with a direct reference to the orders: Our soul is cast into a body where it finds number, time, dimensions; it reasons about these things and calls them natural, or necessary, and can believe nothing else.
The body is connected with our natural intuitions and the esprit de finesse (which is the basis for judgment in political life), the mind reasons and builds on these natural necessities and our belief or will submits to the necessary authority. Pascal’s argument takes a dialogue form, presenting itself in a series of stages discussed by a believer and his interlocutor. To begin with, the interlocutor finds himself in a position of independence from the question of God. This can be expressed either as passivity or as ignorance. Hence, when the question of belief or disbelief in God’s existence is posed, the interlocutor’s first reaction is to deny the need to make any choice at all, endorsing non belief instead.
This is a defensive position one that wishes to put off any sort of commitment, and it is justified in the name of reason: “No, I will not condemn them [believers] for having made this particular choice, but any choice, for, although the one who calls heads and the other one are equally at fault, the fact is that they are both at fault: the right thing is not to wager at all.” (Pascal 63). The believer makes it clear that this is not an option.
There is no choice between critical engagement and retreat into the un-self critical past, because once the question is asked it cannot be unasked. It concerns a matter of fundamental importance for any human being. Unlike questions about the existence of ghosts or extraterrestrial life - or, indeed, even the motion of the planets - the matter of what happens after death cannot seriously be set aside: Beginning. Dungeon. I agree that Copernicus’s option need not be more deeply examined. But this: It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal. (Pascal 62).
That most of human life is given over to distractions from the fact of mortality bears negative testament to this. Once the problem is posed, our diversions are also revealed for what they really are. They cease to do their job, and uncertainty colors all of our actions. Before, we constantly addressed the question of death, denying it through diversions. That need has not changed, but now the diversions are not longer able to do their job, and we are forced to take up the matter directly. Pascal fears that circumstances, such as the rise of the reductive universal geometric rationality and the emancipation of the acquisitive self, are making it impossible recognize this need directly, putting it off and obscuring it by focusing on comfort and the health of the body as the highest human concerns. Nevertheless, it is still possible to push people toward a recognition of the need to search for self-knowledge, a need which is bom out of an acknowledgement of weakness. He writes, “I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him, and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve those who seek with groans.”(Pascal 66)
It is precisely to the extent that we can break away from our distracting attachments to everyday objects that we can begin to ask questions about existence in earnest. In the absence of any compelling philosophical solution to the emptiness of life, diversion is better than despair. For Pascal, it is not a reasonable objection against Christianity that the truth is obscure. Indeed, since Christianity teaches this very thing, the claim that God cannot be easily seen is an point in favor of Christianity, not against it. One could only object in this way after having made every effort to search for the truth of the Christian faith.
Pascal does not believe that Christianity’s learned detractors have done anything like this. Their objections are based on a cursory examination of the bible or a debate with some ecclesiastic. This is not simple negligence; it amounts to a deep confusion and dishonesty. The status of God’s existence is important because it determines every aspect of how we are to live. Those who doubt sincerely, Pascal believes, are to be pitied, because they suffer and spend their lives seeking peace with all their strength. Those who dismiss the question lightly are dishonest and shallow because our state of present misery is an objective fact, which remains true whether or not God is thought to exist. Those who do not believe, therefore, cannot suddenly find the world a happy and just place. On the contrary, for them, the world is a wretched place, and since God does not exist, our existence is also finite, unredeemed, and unjustified.
According to Pascal, any honest person will find this state of affairs intolerable and try to escape it however he can. Once more his approach is not an appeal to abstruse cosmological or metaphysical arguments. He simply appealing to self-interest. If the skeptical interlocutor is willing to accept that his only chance at happiness is in taking the search for God’s existence seriously, then he will be open to the wager
Even though Christianity is not founded on rational or mathematical proofs, and that, while it cannot therefore be either proven or disproven rationally, it still concerns a question of deepest practical importance about which a choice must be taken. The rest of the fragment consists of a brief discussion of the implications of belief, specifically how it is to be cultivated, given the weakness of reason. By expanding the wager beyond this specific part, the wager’s critics have taken its role to be much greater than it is.
The wager shows that the act of belief is not irrational. That is, if the object of belief is something desirable and the stakes are finite, commitment to the bet is reasonable. The two conditions - about the desirability of the object of belief (our need for greatness) and the finite nature of the stakes (our present wretchedness) - are given independently and only summarized in the core text of the wager. It is entirely dishonest to write as though these arguments are given only in this part of the work. If a critic wishes to understand the broad justification of the wager and its position in the whole of Pascal’s text, he ought to examine the sections in which these are set out. If he wishes to confine himself to the wager, then he ought to do that.
But he should not pretend that he is doing the latter, when he is actually doing a very incomplete version of the former. The core argument is not, therefore, meant to be taken in isolation from the rest of the work. There is no point at all in presenting the wager without a prior argument which forces Pascal’s interlocutor to acknowledge his present weakness and his intimations of greatness. From these sections, it is clear that Pascal’s inquiry as a whole has much more to do with inducing his readers to recognize the weakness of their reason and to feel the desire for wholeness and completeness, than with finding rational arguments of any sort True religion cannot be concerned merely with corporeal things because these are limited, and the human mind yearns for and knows something higher than this. At the same time, religion cannot be the intellectual worship of the God of philosophers because the outward world humbles the claims of reason to know all things. A religion with genuine insight into our situation on earth will understand that we are both more than nothing and less than everything. It will raise us up when necessary and humble us when we become too proud. It will, in short, grasp both our greatness and our wretchedness: Without recognizing this as the necessary first step, the wager is bound to look hopelessly incomplete.
Together, the pieces form a more complex and controversial argument, but one which cannot be waved away so easily. I cannot know that I am wagering something finite against something infinite unless I already have some picture of my situation in those terms. Since, according to Pascal, Christianity is the only religion which has grasped man in this way, it is the implicit precondition of the wager and the only candidate for belief. Put otherwise, another religion, with a different understanding of the whole nature of man, would never have led me to wager in the first place and, so, cannot be the outcome of a successful bet either. It is not reasonable, therefore, to object by saying that, since it does not prove a specific belief, it can safely be rejected. The part of the text containing the wager is not trying to prove the Christian religion or another, nor, on its own, is it trying to establish the utility of belief. (Pascal has said that no rational proof of the Christian religion can be given, and the wager, based on probability theory, is nothing if not a rational proof.)
The point of the wager is to demonstrate what reason can show us about belief, and the outcome of the experiment is that it cannot show us much. The emphasis is not on how powerful reason is, but how weak. To be sure, mathematical method can tell us that, given the presuppositions of a view of the world based on greatness and wretchedness, it is not irrational to believe. But, as we have argued, these presuppositions are given by empirical, not rational means (in the strong sense that “rational” would have for a 17th century reader of Descartes. Even more significantly, there is a huge gap between that rational determination and actual belief. The most important part of the order of Pascal is not the wager, as has generally been thought, but the habits and routines of submission which make up the practice of belief.
Works Cited
Pascal, Blaise. "The Wager." 2015. The Norton Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Norton, 2015. Print.
Hajek, Alain. “Pascal's Ultimate Gamble.” The Norton Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Norton, 2015. Print.
