The gambler

Thinking not of Kenny Rogers here, but of Blaise Pascal. He said “belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”

We're up to the "Risk and Reward" chapter in Pinker's Rationality. 

"The theory of rational choice goes back to the dawn of probability and the famous argument by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) on why you should believe in God: if you did and he doesn't exist, you would just have wasted some prayers, whereas if you didn't and he does exist, you would incur his eternal wrath."

That's as reductive as a coin-toss. Does it really come down to just that? He exists or He doesn't? 

And how rational is it to bet on such a wrathful and needy god, here imagined as hellbent on the supplicant submission of the tiny unknowing creatures He is hypothesized to have created with such a propensity to irrationality and insecurity in the first place? Would that have been a rational creation? 

These are serious theological questions, for those inclined to wrestle with them. I'm more inclined to a dismissive response, of the sort Monty Python and George Carlin offer. Is it rational to think the creator and sustainer of life, the universe, and everything so desperately needs grovelers and tithers?

Is it rational to spend our precious few years here fretting and worrying in solemn terror about an ultimate reward, in the transcendental version of Let's Make a Deal?

Might it be more rational to get on with living our best lives here and now, ameliorating the conditions of life in the only home we've ever known, working to make the bet on humanity worth taking?William James the meliorist definitely thought so, and James the pragmatic pluralist thought Pascal was perfectly entitled to place his bet as he saw fit. 

James sees the wager for what it is, of course: the logic of "the gaming-table", as he describes it. But he is curious enough to wonder why a brilliant man like Pascal penned such an argument. He concludes that it made sense to the French philosopher and mathematician, in spite of the obvious objections, because Christianity was a living, genuine and momentous option for Pascal.

Seen in that light, the wager works like this. The panoply of Pascal's experiences and convictions were drawing him towards Christianity. But that weight of evidence "ran before" his rational mind, because Christianity demands real not notional assent. Moreover, as "the mere appreciation of syllogistic logic" cannot of itself decide the case, the wager was never meant to stand alone. (It was originally just a note in a private commonplace book.) What the wager represents is Pascal justifying his religious intuitions to his mathematic mind. It's one strand in the cable of his belief.

Understand the wager in this way, James concludes, and "instead of being powerless, [it] seems a regular clincher". It works for Pascal. It might for others. But it's never going to work for everyone. It doesn't work for James. But nonetheless, he respects Pascal's attempt to integrate his whole person into his desire – his will – to believe. Mark Vernon

We should also discuss some of Pascal's other notable pensees.  “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not"... "There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason”... “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"...  “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”...

Wouldn't Blaise be quaking, to see the latest images from the Webb telescope! 

I'm not. I think a more rational response, at least for temperaments like mine, is to greet that eternal silence with a human voice and a human spirit of adventurous curiosity. "Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe." I'm betting on a bold, benevolent, emergent rational intelligence in the cosmos. I'm betting it might even happen here.