Wrestling with Religion

Even if we accept the possibility of a God that dispenses an infinite jackpot for belief and withholds it for disbelief, Pascal’s Wager--his argument that it is infinitely more lucrative to believe in his God than not to--is reasonable only absent the possibility of another God offering the opposite payoff. Here are some possibilities: (1) a God who rewards reasonable disbelief and punishes gullibility or (2) a God who insists that we make specific theological choices (such as Baal vs. YHWH, Catholic vs. protestant, Christian vs. Muslim) and rewards only the correct choice. The possibility of even one such Being creates an opposing infinity and invalidates Pascal's Wager.  Belief in a generic supreme being also seems not to be enough. The priests of Baal (who competed with Elijah to call down fire from heaven and were slaughtered for it) believed their god was more powerful than Elijah's Yahweh, whom Pascal identifies with the true God, so if all that is required is beli...

Blase Pascal (1623-1662), was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor who, after his conversion to Catholicism, paradoxically professed rational agnosticism and (to him at least) reasonable faith. In his Pensees , he demonstrates with math-like arguments the futility of trying to understand the cosmos: “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199). We hang short-sighted between two abysses, the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small. What can we do then, he asks, “but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end?” (199) It's impossible, Pascal says, to know “a hidden God” (427) immune to philosophical proofs such as argument from natural order. If God exists, He is infinite. Just as the last number of an infinite series cannot be known to be odd or even, so God cannot be known by finite beings. He “is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limi...