A/N: I'm not holding out much hope that this essay will be generally agreed with, given the subject matter and the stance I've taken on it, I've probably managed to offend the religious and the atheist alike. However, this essay was written for my Philosophy paper and I mean, come on, it's PHILOSOPHY! It's a concept that I find fun to think about, and my marker must have as well, because I did get good marks for it.

Even though I'm not a big fan of Philosophy (I'm more of a history girl myself) it was quite cool to write an essay which was ultimately the fancily worded product of my existential musings and get good marks. Go me! Having said that, you wouldn't catch me taking Philosophy again, after an entire term of my professor wanking on about "qualia" like it was the most complicated concept in the world, I REALLY wanted to shoot someone.

If there are formatting errors I apologise in advance, I copy/pasted the document from Word to Notepad before uploading, because my doublespace formatting (required for essays at my Uni) always seems to screw up with the whole Fictionpress upload process and I end up having to laboriously go through and reformat manually. All the footnotes were also removed in this process, but I included the bibliography in case anyone thinks I'm making up all my quotes (which I have been tempted to do from time to time, especially when contemplating and all-nighter in the library in order to obtain said quotes!) but these quotes are all genuine.

I hope you enjoy anyway...

---

The subject of the existence of God is highly debated. Pascal’s Wager, also known as the ‘Insurance Policy Argument’ provides a persuasive argument for the rationality of believing in God. Many have levelled objections to the argument, however Pascal’s Wager is nearly watertight.

Pascal’s Wager, invented by the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal , is an argument for the rationality of believing in God. Quite simply, the argument runs like this: it is more rational to believe in God as if you believe and God exists, you gain eternal life in heaven. If you do not believe and God does exist, you are punished with eternal life in hell. However, if you believe in God and he does not exist, then the same thing happens to you as what happens to those who believe he does not exist: you cease to exist . A rational person should choose the option with the most to gain and the least to lose. Therefore, Pascal’s Wager shows, you ought to believe in God, as the benefits are infinite and the risks are negligible.

The first objection that ought to be examined is the objection based around the risks: in gambling terms, the “stakes” for the Wager is the way you live your earthly life. T.J. Mawson writes in his book Belief in God that “the potential downside to Pascal’s Wager is that you may miss out on a few worldly pleasures…” To ascribe to the God that Pascal was referring to (the Christian God) one must back that belief up by a righteous and upright existence on earth. However, it is highly likely that one would have a fulfilling and satisfying life as a theist or a Christian, just a different one from the life you might live as an atheist.

The second argument that is often raised against Pascal’s Wager is concerning the matter of belief. Many state that belief and faith are something that the individual comes to of their own accord, they cannot be learned or forced. However, many debate this claim. Richard Gale writes in On the Nature and Existence of God : “Pascal recognises that belief is not, to use later terminology, a basic action, something that we do at will…and instead claims that it can be self induced by various basic actions. Pascal suggests that we learn how to do this by imitating the outward actions of those who cured themselves of disbelief.” William James also objected to the idea that one could engender belief in God by oneself, but Wallace Matson points out that “most Americans have some tendency to be theists; it is possible to cultivate the propensity in one…” and T.J. Mawson suggests that praying can be a form of self-hypnosis that can result in belief. The process of belief and learning to do so should not be a hard one, it just take willpower and dedication. Gale goes on to elaborate on the concept of “prudentially motivated belief” and in objection to the concept that “God would not reward with heaven someone who believed in him for only prudent reasons. Rather he would take great delight in assigning such selfishly motivated individuals to hell…” Gale says that “…what the person attempts to do by getting herself to believe is in effect to change her character, he network of values and motivations, so that she will eventually end up with a nonprudentially based belief in God. God should judge someone on the basis of how she winds up, not how she began…” Thus, I think that this objection to the Insurance Policy Argument rings hollow, that belief is able to be engendered, and that, provided one’s behaviour reflects one’s decision to abide by a theistic life, that the belief is sound.

The final argument to Pascal’s Wager that holds the most water is in regard to the probability of choosing the right God to follow and believe in. Pascal was writing from a Christian framework, his opinion was that the Catholic Christian God was the best god to place one’s wager upon. However, there are many different gods that are worshipped by mankind today, and there have been many other gods that have been worshipped in the past. The probability of choosing the right deity, in that light, is rather small. Even if you live a life strictly following the creed of one religion, you may still wind up in another religion’s hell. However, since we are talking about rationality, not debating the finer points of world wide religious doctrine, my opinion is that the major religions have essentially the same doctrine, and a pluralistic view of religion is the most prudent. Hans Kung relates a tale from a book called Eastern Religions and Western Thought that speaks of a king, who for his own amusement, gathers a group of beggars who have been blind from birth, and offers a reward to the man who can best describe an elephant to him. The beggars, setting hands on different parts of the elephant’s body describe the elephant in a variety of ways: as a tree, a rope, or a palm leaf, and eventually devolve into squabbling amongst themselves. Religion can also be looked at in this way, that they are each versions or pieces of the same story, needlessly argued over when the whole picture is more important. The parallels that can be drawn between the doctrines of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism are startling (indeed the Judeo-Christian religions share the same moral code of the Ten Commandments) and Mahatma Gandhi was quoted as saying “I believe in the Bible as the Gita. I regard all the great faiths of the world as equally true with my own…” . The Catholic Church has also passed documents to a similar end, in the Second Vatican Council it published: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these alien religions. She considers with sincere regard these modes of living and teaching, these precepts and doctrines, which even though they differ in many ways from those she herself holds and propounds, nonetheless often reflect a ray of Truth that illuminates everyone…” The startling parallels within the world’s religions are often overlooked by those devoted to their own cause, but in terms of placing a wager on which one is correct, it is rational to assume that if one follows the underlying tenets of the great religions of the world, that God would not regard you as a non-believer, and you widen your chances of choosing the right religion.

In conclusion, I find Pascal’s Wager very persuasive. The argument for the rationality of becoming a theist based on the gains and risks in the afterlife is potent, and in light of religious similarity, I believe that the objection to the Insurance Policy Argument based on the probability of choosing the right religion is easily overcome. While there is still a possibility that one might be wrong, and that God does not exist, what you stand to lose is negligible: a few simple and painless acts in this life to secure eternal bliss, with the result if you are wrong being the same as everyone else in the world: the cessation of existence.

Bibliography

Bendz, Fredrik,
Pascal’s Wager
. 1998

Gale, Richard M.
On the Nature and Existence of God
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991

Griffiths, Paul J.
Problems of Religious Diversity
Blackwell Publishers Inc. Massachusetts, 2001

Kung, Hans
Does God Exist
Vintage Books, New York, 1978

Matson, Wallace I.
The Existence of God
Cornell University Press, New York, 1965

Mawson, T.J.
Belief in God – An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005

Oppy, Graham
On Rescher On Pascal's Wager 1990