Blaise Pascal's Argument For God Analysis

Improved Essays
In this essay, I will argue that Blaise Pascal’s argument for the wager can be falsified. He says that “one ought to bring oneself to believe in God because it is rational to wager or bet ‘that God is’”. The wager Pascal discusses encompasses the idea of finite and infinite gains and losses. According to Pascal, if you gain, you gain all and if you lose, you lose nothing. This concluding that one must wager to believe or not. I will offer an explanation of why he believes it is rational to wager that God exists. I will then argue that although rational, Pascal fails to perceive the nature of belief thus proving his argument is useless. According to Pascal God is infinitely incomprehensible, meaning that there are no good arguments for whether God exists or not. He says that God either exists or he doesn’t and reason cannot determine whether he does or not. Finite is unable to understand infinite and thus we will never be able to understand the true nature of God. We must wager to believe or not, it is not an option. Pascal says that if one believes in God and he does exist you gain everything, whereas if you believe in God and he doesn’t exist then you do not gain anything and you may even lose some finite good, such as happiness. On the other side, if you do not believe in God and he does not in fact exist you do not gain or lose anything. Therefore, Pascal would conclude that it …show more content…
This paragraph will serve as a rebuttal to the previous paragraph on the basis of Pascal’s argument for the wager. He would say that the bible cannot be a valid reason behind belief because how does one write about a matter that is “infinitely incomprehensible”. Pascal would believe that evidence cannot support one’s belief in God, a belief in God must simply come from the possibility of infinite reward that you could receive from wagering that God in fact

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    The presence of a sort of tension between faith and reason has been innate to humans since people first started to question what the true purpose of life is. The existence of this separation could be clearly viewed by looking comparing Athens and Jerusalem, with Athens representing truth through reason and philosophy and Jerusalem representing truth through insights of revelation and purity of soul. Therefore, faith and reason have always posed tension by their proximity and their constantly juxtaposing views. Many view these two concepts as complete opposites, that reason is proven by fact and that faith cannot be proven. However, some philosophers have described how faith and reason can actually come together to come to the truth and how faith can be an extension of the reason that works to reach a higher truth.…

    • 1716 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rene Descartes the father of modern philosophy, a philosopher known to believe things to be true until it was proven otherwise. In these meditations Descartes had complex opinions. In the case of Descartes in meditations a greater individual than him existed. Descartes’ claim insisted with the existence of the idea of God to the real existence of God. To support his argumentative opinions, Descartes points two distinct arguments that were utilized by “Augustine in the fourth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century” (Shouler).…

    • 1137 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this paper I will explain and evaluate two popular arguments regarding the existence of God, A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God by Robin Collins and The Inductive Argument from Evil Against the Existence of God by William Rowe; then I will discuss how the conclusions are not compatible with one another due to the conflicting structure of the conclusions as well as how one cannot accept both conclusions without compromising one of the arguments. First I will explain the basis of Collins’ argument, which is one of the most frequently used arguments in favor of theism. In A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God, Collins centers around the observation of how finely tuned the physical constants of the universe are to the ability for any form of life to exist, if any of them were to change even the smallest bit then no life would possibly be able to develop not to…

    • 1636 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    James and Pascal’s defences of faith in some of their most famous arguments, specifically Pascal’s, devalue faith by making faith selfish, providing an obvious out to faith, and making the decision of faith into a gamble, oddly, his devaluation of faith does not hurt his argument, it makes it easier to convince the skeptics. To prove that Pascal’s argument devalues faith and to understand why it doesn’t negatively affect his argument, it’s necessary to understand the whole argument. His argument can be split into quite a few premises. He starts with the possibility of God, which is the main idea of his argument. Basically, it’s possible that God does exists, and it’s also possible that God does not exist, something nearly everyone agrees on.…

    • 1025 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this essay I first outline Pascal’s wager to the existence of God and then evaluate his argument. Pascal argues that one ought to wager “that God is” because “[i]f you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing,” and that given this, one can bring oneself to believe in God. I argue that one cannot truly bring themselves to believe in God. Pascal’s argument is set up in three parts. The first part accepts that God is infinitely incomprehensible.…

    • 818 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Pascal's Wager Essay

    • 1056 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Pascal’s wager is, in the Theist 1 culture, a wager for God. Instead, this wager has been used as the opposite. The wager is actually one of three from a French man named Pascal, author of Pensées, who claims these wagers are proof of God’s existence. Pensées is translated into the word “thought” from French. The book is a collection of notes Pascal wrote down.…

    • 1056 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Clifford and James are two philosophers who have contradicting opinions on whether having sufficient evidence is always necessary to believe in something. Where Clifford believes you cannot believe in anything without sufficient evidence, James believes that if the evidence doesn’t point in one way or another, it is justified to believe something based on our will. I will be arguing that James’ side is indeed correct. In James’ paper, he provides concrete evidence as to why his opinion is correct.…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In Montaigne’s essay An Apology for Raymond Sebond, he defends the work and philosophy of Sebond, which he defines as a “bold and courageous” defense of the Christian religion using natural, human reason, meant to counter atheists (Montaigne 491). Objections arose to this work, and the one Montaigne approaches more thoroughly is that Sebond is wrong overall in his defense of faith, and that faith is not necessary in the acquisition of knowledge about worldly matters (Montaigne 500-501). This argument Montaigne counters with numerous claims, but the one in question is this: man has no knowledge to speak of outside of the divine, as we have not been equipped to judge the world around us. It is worth pointing out that, while Montaigne spends…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In this paper I will explain and critique an argument known as Pascal’s Wager. I will explain the wager Blaise Pascal proposed to incline atheist and agnostics to believe in God. The Wager, “is not a proof of Gods existence” (Furman). I will give Pascal’s reasoning for explaining why choosing to believe in God is the best decision one could make. Pascal’s Wager is an argument given to atheist and agnostics to show them why believing in God’s existence is the right choice.…

    • 1632 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pascal's wager argument uses religious belief as a possible solution to an individual's personal benefits. Pascal argues more specifically how the advantage of believing in God greatly outweighs the effectiveness of not believing in God. Therefore, giving each individual good reasoning to believe in God. There are two explanations of reasoning for belief, or reasoning in order to execute some type of action. The first kind is prudential reason, this reasoning is used to persuade that you are better off believing something, rather than not believing it.…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pascal explains that a person should choose to believe in God because they may receive infinite benefits. He does not assume that god exists, but rather asserts that a person should place a bet on his existence. If a person believes in God, and God does exist, they may be infinitely rewarded in the afterlife. But, Pascal also acknowledges that there are drawbacks to believing in god’s existence. Through religious belief, a person is unable to engage in sins, leading to a possible finite cost.…

    • 730 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Ontological Argument and Pascal’s Wager The “Ontological Argument” was created by Saint Anselm; this argument is in support of God’s existence. His argument is one based on observation and reason not on empirical evidence and is spit in to three parts. The parts include why god exists, why god cannot be thought to not exist, and lastly why atheists are able to think that God does not exist. In the first section he begins with a definition of God that he believes everyone would be accepting of and that cannot be disputed.…

    • 1583 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Within the objection, it is proposed that the Christian “God,” the one that Pascal indirectly refers to, does not exist and that there is another god who punishes those who believe in the Christian “God” and rewards those who do not believe in the Christian “God.” The payoff for either god would be the same as discussed previously, where each of the possible gods is equally probable, than there is no reason to take the side of Pascal. Because there are many possible gods, there is no more of a reason to believe in Pascal’s God than any other god. There are many flaws in Pascal’s Wager that are identifiable. Such as, Pascal’s Wager only offers the belief in one God, whereas today there are thousands of gods and religions in the world.…

    • 758 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The evidential problem of evil determines the degree of how much evil must be a part of the evidence of God’s existence. While on the other hand the logical problem of evil is seen through our own eyes. It bares the question whether God is a perfect because of all wrong taking place in the world. Through these two problems it is hard to even imagine that God is perfect. Through Richard Swinburne’s theodicy (theodicy - an attempt to defend God's omnibenevolence in the face of evil) , one comes to find the case that initially escapes the evidential and logical problems…

    • 1073 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The existence of God, a topic discussed in both William Rowe’s and Robin Collins’ papers, but for two very different reasons. The argument of good vs. evil and the existence of an omnipresent, benevolent being such as God is a topic that many find very difficult to find answers for, and will continue to plague mankind for the rest of our existence. After reading the published works of Mr. Collins and Mr. Rowe, one may find it easier to formulate their own opinion. In the publication by Mr. Collins, he addresses the topic of atheism and theism in respect to physics.…

    • 784 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays