Whilst staring at the stars the other day I entered into a reflection about Pascal’s Wager.

The wager in brief posits that reason is insufficient to prove the existence of God and thus provides no rational justification for belief, but this is a problem about the limits of reason, and not a negation of God. In the absence of reason then Pascal suggests that living one’s life as though God exists is possibly infinetely more rewarding (if said God does turn out to exist) as opposed to infinite recriminations if one lived life as though God didn’t exist only to discover that one is wrong.

There is a plethora of criticism attached to Pascal’s Wager from almost every philosophical position regarding God.

I personally think the Wager is often misunderstood or misinterpreted for specific philosophical ends. However the Wager is by its simplicity open to such attacks.

What is the wager? Well it certainly isn’t an attempt to prove the existence of God. God is merely a probability.

It is however two other things (other than an exercise in probability); firstly it is a proto-existential work (and is increasingly identified as such) for it attacks certainty and celebrates choice, secondly it is an ethical proposition, for if we expand the idea of ‘living as though God exists’ then we are making statements about what type of life ‘God’ wants us to live.

The first element is frequently neglected by Pascal’s critics (more of which in a moment). The second element is the main focus of such criticism.

Without going into any great detail the ethical element of the Wager leaves different people (theist and atheist alike) with a bad taste in their mouths. For even though Pascal was rejecting certainty and the role of reason in proving the existence of God, and even though God was reduced to a conceptual possibility, the promise of reward and its inverse the threat of punishment (the main ethical theme of the wager) is de facto heavily loaded with Judaeo-Christian assumptions about the nature and intention of God. However in his rejection of reason there is no attempt to validate or justify these assumptions.

One attempt may be suggested, an ontomystical justification. i.e. revelation. One may say that the assumptions that one has about God are based on revealed messages either personally recieved or generally read in scripture. This justification however collapses under the weight of cultural relativism, why should one revelation (i.e. Judaeo-Christian) be any more valid or acceptable than another (i.e. Hindu)?

The answer of course is that other than through cultural conditioning, there is no reason why one set of revelations should be more relevant than another.

This reflects another criticism of the Wager, that religious belief is not explicitly a conscious choice.

Yet this does not seem to me to completely kill the wager off. All it does is reflect the limitations of it. It is if you like a closed wager, it only works and its conclusions are only valid if one accepts the various underlying assumptions contained within it and just as importantly if one aspires to achieve the most desirable end result.

This last bit, the desire to achieve the most desirable end result smells a lot like utilitarianism and the felicific calculus. (1.How strong is the pleasure? 2. How long will it last? 3. How likely or unlikely will it occur? 4. How soon? 5. How often? 6. Or not. 7. How many will benefit?)

Dawkins in the God Delusion posited an anti-Pascal wager, which goes as follows “Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.”

It does alas bore me, only because it says nothing that Pascal hadnt actually considered himself. Also the anti-wager again is a closed system, its conclusions work best when one accepts certain assumptions, and its most desirable end result (a better fuller life). Needless to say the latter, the most desirable end result relies upon the assumptions being acceptable in order to be desirable. In Dawkin’s case (without doing a deep analysis) one of the assumptive areas is that God-probability is minimal therefore maximal Godcentric-activity is a disproportionate use/waste of time.

I’m not however an enemy of the anti-wager. The anti-wager works just as well as the wager, as does any number of variations on the God-theme. In fact the wager can probably be rewritten and reformulated in any number of ways if one plays around with the necessary assumptions.

And this diversity is rather good. It reflects the existential character of it that is so often ignored.

It was the Utilitarian character of it that struck me most in my early reflections, or rather its Utilitarian and Hedonistic applications. If one rejects Pascal’s necessary assumptions his wager simply doesnt work (nor is it desirable). And it is quite possible a la Dawkins to formulate a different wager that is based upon a different set of ethical values and assumptions and desirable outcomes.

Whatever way it has no bearing upon the existence or non-existence of God (who remains in the wager game simply a probability). It does however belong to the field of ethics and existentialism and as such is probably worth a lot more attention than it gets.

I was originally going to call this post “Bentham’s Wager” to reflect the Hedonistic alternatives (life’s too short, live life to the full; eat, drink and be merry for tommorow we die; be prepared for you do not know when the hour will come, etc.) But I settled upon calling it Babe Ruth’s wager after the bachannalian and iconic Baseball player, who once when asked to expound upon his philosophy of life, and sport, declared:

“I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.”