Discussion - Reprise

Blaise Pascal; June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662, was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He invented a mechanical calculator. Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. There is so much more. Wiki him. This was a remarkable man.

One of my favorite blog moments, the post that contained this discussion of Pascal's Wager also contained another poem that I like very much. I am reprising Pascal tonight and we will see what tomorrow brings.

This poem is written in gratitude to Blaise Pascal, who pointed out that belief in God cannot in the end be buttressed by reason. This was not a new claim in Pascal's time, but what came next was. If not by reason, then perhaps we shall approach God in the form of a wager thus, if you choose to believe in God you may gain much and lose little. If you choose that you do not believe, you risk much and what you can gain is doubtful. The wager seems clear. Small risk in believing and much possible gain, that position sitting in an elevated position over the larger risk of disbelieving with no clear gain. Such a wager may not be palatable as an underpinning of belief. Many people have tried to refute it. Some have possibly succeeded.

For example, and a big one if you are a stoic or some other philo-soph - lover of truth, keeping integrity with truth may count for a great deal. Thus the risk of believing is increased greatly in the loss of truth if God really doesn't exist. However the wager cannot be reasonably denied in anything like the ease with which it can be stated. The wager was a groundbreaking philosophical point that no one had done before him. Pascal's Wager opened up probability theory (and Pascal developed a probability theory after making his wager), anticipated pragmatism and voluntarism as philosophical movements, and the wager was part of a group of observations that attacks certainty and thus his wager may be considerred the first work of existentialism.

Do not understand this wager as a reason to believe by itself. That is not how Pascal meant it at all. However, not everyone was pleased with Pascal. The wager was published posthumously and thus Pascal escaped all brouhaha. If you are interested in the replies that philosophers made and all that, just Wiki Pascal's Wager. It turns out there were forerunners of the wager in Islam and Hinduism. No one operates in a vacuum, nor does he have a truly original idea (in the sense that no one else ever thought of it.)

Discussion

You said, "Better to
Believe in God, risking there
Is no God than the other way."
I said, "Better to
Believe in the work, risking there
Is no satisfaction than not believing
Which guarantees no satisfaction."
God woke up at that, sang
"Boys will be boys.
And girls will be girls.
It's a crazy mixed up world."

January 9, 2009 3:37 PM

This poem first appeared in the May 31, 2009 post. This was a few weeks after my first heart event.