Although it has some defenders, the argument has, over the years, been slated on a number of grounds. Critics include Voltaire and Diderot, nearer to Pascal’s own time, to more recent thinkers such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book Skin in the Game was cited by Giles Fraser in a recent article. Some argue that even if it works, it doesn’t answer the question of which religion to follow. Others, like Taleb, say it encourages the wrong kind of belief – faith without commitment, with no “skin in the game”. In short, it fails to be a persuasive proof of the need for faith.

The only problem is that Pascal never meant it to be that.

Suggested reading

Why God needs skin in the game

By Giles Fraser

Most of its detractors (and many of its defenders) make a very common mistake. They take it as an attempt by Pascal to convince unbelievers of the benefits of faith. But it isn’t.

As with any text, the Wager needs to be understood in the context of the work as a whole, as well as the fairly long section in which it is laid out. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and physicist working at the cutting edge of scientific questions in his own age. He was also a deeply religious thinker. The Pensées were the notes Pascal made towards a book addressed to a very particular audience – a work that was never finished due to his early death.

Many think he had in mind the sophisticated “cultured despisers of religion” in France in the 17th century. Pascal knew many such libertins, who enjoyed philosophising, drinking and gambling. When he was younger and less religious, such friends would urge him to use his mathematical genius to work out the odds on bets they were thinking of taking on. Many of them were influenced by the hugely popular philosophy of Pascal’s older contemporary, René Descartes, thoroughly convinced of the power of human reason to master the world; some had gone beyond Descartes to argue that Christianity was illogical and therefore no rational person could believe it.

Suggested reading

More understanding of Christianity is useful but it's no substitute for more Christians

By Melanie McDonagh

Pascal’s beef with Descartes was that he didn’t understand people. Descartes’ idea of the thinking self (“I think therefore I am”) suggested that humans were entirely rational beings, motivated by and capable of cool level-headedness, making decisions on strictly logical grounds. Pascal thought this was nonsense. For him, our anxieties and desires are more powerful than our rationality. As he puts it in one vivid image:

“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

Our fears and emotions are more powerful than our rationality, our longings more influential than our logic.

So when it comes to the Wager, the whole piece is designed not to persuade these sophisticates to believe, but to reveal the reasons why they don’t believe. The argument really runs like this: “The wager on belief is a bet you have to make – you can’t choose not to – either God is real or he isn’t. And you say that you don’t believe on strictly rational grounds, but do you really? You like a bet, right? OK, then look at the odds on belief. If you bet on God not existing, you don’t actually risk losing much. But if you bet on God existing, you stand to gain a huge dividend.

So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But we both know that you don’t. Why? It’s not because you are being rational: it’s because belief is inconvenient; you would rather there was no God; it costs too much, and you just don’t want to believe.”

As Pascal puts it at the conclusion of this section of the Pensées: “At least get it into your head, that if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so.”

It’s not that reason has no place – in fact Pascal argues that to exclude reason altogether is as big a mistake as to think that it is only reason that dictates our decisions. Yet only when we realise how it is our desires that influence what we choose to believe can we begin to make progress.

Suggested reading

Why has secularism got religion in its sights?

By Giles Fraser

The Wager was never meant as a cold, logical argument for belief in God. It is, in fact, the opposite: an argument designed to show that we are not the purely logical, rational beings we sometimes think we are.

For Pascal, God cannot be known simply in our minds, as the conclusion of a cogent philosophical argument, but by the heart and soul: “It is the heart that perceives God, and not our reason.” If, then, we are caught between our logic and our desires, how do we get out of this dilemma? For Pascal it is only by making the first step – by taking the risk, not of abstract belief, but of costly commitment: as he puts it “You want to be cured of unbelief? Become like one of those who now wager all they have … They behaved just as if they did believe.” For Pascal, there is no such thing as cost-free faith. Faith means sacrifice. The way to salvation is, in fact, only found by having skin in the game.

These days, the drinking and the gambling are still as prevalent as ever (just watch any advert at half time while watching sport on TV). When it comes to philosophising about God and belief, we are more likely to be influenced by Richard Dawkins than by Descartes. Those who follow that path tend to claim on strictly rationalistic grounds that science and faith cannot live together, that reason rules out religion.

Yet Pascal and his Wager remind us not only of the compatibility of scientific exploration alongside religious faith within an extraordinarily fertile mind but also that we are more complex than the rationalists would have us believe. Pascal’s Wager does not try to prove Christianity, or indeed any religion.

What it does tell us is that when deciding on the deepest questions of life and existence, we need to be mindful not just of our logic, but of whether we are simply convincing ourselves of what we would quite like to be true. As Pascal himself says: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

It’s all too common for people of faith to treat those without as inferior. The best of them will champion interfaith dialogue, bringing the world’s religious believers together in common cause. But the atheists are another tribe, somewhere underneath, not invited to the interfaith party. We don’t even get a slot on Thought for the Day.

Here at UnHerd, Giles Fraser recently wrote a lengthy vicar-splaining article explaining how atheists think. He had the brass neck to dismiss atheism – and its billion adherents – as “an illiberal creed that does little to advance the cause of human flourishing”. If he’d said the same about Judaism, Islam, or even Zoroastrianism, there would have been outrage. But it seems we atheists don’t mind being insulted.

Radio 4’s Sunday programme recently described us as “people with no beliefs” – suggesting they’ve never met an atheist, let alone had a conversation with one.

As a confirmed, even devout, atheist I have more beliefs than you can shake a stick at. Central to them is my belief that there is no God. And it’s that central, overwhelming conviction that human existence is without intrinsic purpose or meaning that motivates my life. I believe the idea of ‘No God’ is as powerful as the idea of ‘God’.

Further atheism

There's more to atheism than the dim-witted Dawkins brigade

By Giles Fraser

With No God, it is clear that this is all we have. There is no after, or before. We have not earned it at its best any more than we deserve it at its worst. We exist, and we live out every day our lives on what the astrologist Carl Sagan called “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.[1. Carl Sagan, October 13, 1994, speech at Cornell University]

Like him, I see the fragility of our lives and the extraordinary circumstance of our even existing in the vast nothingness of space, as a reminder of “our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known”.

With No God, there is no meaning to attach to suffering, just a sharp imperative to stop it wherever and whenever possible. There is no palliative assurance that it is part of God’s plan for millions to die in pain and poverty, just an obligation to act before they do. There is no hope of an afterlife to bring peace to the kind or punishment to the cruel, just the urgency of justice in the here and now. And there is no surrendering to a higher power to resolve my faults or failings, only my own agency, and my own responsibility.

Further atheism

Are we ready for an irreligious future?

By Douglas Murray

When there is only the human, it is only the human that can change our lives.

One of the greatest articulations of a moment of apostasy was written by the Victorian poet Arthur Clough. Easter Day, Naples, 1849 chronicles an overwhelming, catastrophic loss of faith, as it suddenly dawned on Clough that “Christ is not risen”. Bereft of his God, Clough enjoins us to “eat, drink and die, for we are souls bereaved”.

Like Fraser, he sees life with no God as an essentially narcissistic experience, medicating the loss of meaning with the hedonism of gluttony. But the poem then gives advice to the readers it constructs. To the women: “Go to your homes, your living children tend / Your earthly spouses love.” To the fishermen: “Mend the old nets ye left to roam / Tie the split oar, patch the torn sail”.

These are not, in fact, the pursuits of narcissistic hedonists. Caring for family; feeding the village: these are noble pursuits in the service of our community. They are the only way to satisfy our human desire for purpose, in the absence of a God. Whereas those motivated by faith can find meaning in prayer, or perpetual contemplation of the divine, we atheists have no such channels open, and must find purpose in our actions.

Fraser is wrong. Atheists contribute in their millions, every day, to “human flourishing”. And unlike those with religious motivations, they do so without a hope of eternal reward. Of course, there are plenty of selfish and cruel atheists, just as there are those who use religion for immoral purposes. But even those whose religion motivates them to do great works of charity, are not better than the atheists who do good. It is surely more impressive to help others in a world with No God, than it is to help others in a world with God on hand to give out the reward of eternal life.

Faith tells us there is something beyond the here and now that matters, and matters more. It is perhaps the most successful technique humans have developed for tolerating the horrors of human existence, which atheism leaves intolerable. No wonder religion seems to be good for our mental health: it alleviates the guilt if God is in charge. That’s why religion can, and has been used, to make the case against progress, the case for accepting horror instead of challenging it.

For billions of people, faith adds meaning to their lives. But the assumption that there is no meaning in atheism needs to end. Pew Research Trust has shown that, even in the deeply religious US, atheists are the most likely to feel “a deep sense of wonder about the world”. We’re the ones most overwhelmed by our transcendent luck in being here: no one put us here to serve their purpose. With No God, there is no-one to blame, and no one to hide how close we are, in every moment, to oblivion.

With No God this fragile little world of ours is all we have. Let those with faith live in faith, but don’t ever tell me atheism is a moral vacuum. As Clough said, religion means “setting affection on things above”. Atheism, by contrast, is a way to set affection on the things below, the things around us every day, the human rather than the ineffable. There is no next world: just this one. So let’s stop screwing it up.