The Wager Blaise Pascal's Wager

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. This argument isn't used as proof of Gods existence, it is a way to explain why it is beneficial to believe in God to maximize ones self-interest. Here is The Wager: The first is either the existence or the nonexistence of God. Reason does not decide the actual decision whether it is …show more content…
Pascal believes that you are supposed to make a decision off of faith not reason, “But towards which side will we lean? Reason cannot decide anything” (Pascal, 481). You must also have to make a choice to believe or not, you can’t stay in between. He believes that when one could never know which truth is right one must pick the choice with the greatest expected utility. You have to play out the odds. The best choice in this case is to believe that God does exist because it will have the greatest expect utility for oneself. Pascal believes that because of all of this we should take the risk and believe in the existence of God. The justification that Pascal uses is that we can neither prove god's existence nor know his nature because we are finite and he is infinite and we would reason about something that isn't known to us. Pascal starts off his essay by stating that, “If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible…He has no affinity to us.” (Pascal, 78). An infinite distance separates the finite from the infinite. He mentions that we as humans are stuck between infinities, those infinities being one at the beginning of our life and the other is then end of our life. This being said