And it is so much more interesting than you probably imagine, because to really understand this argument, as well as its flaws, you need to first understand the man who made it.

So today we're going to be looking at Blaise Pascal, a mathematical prodigy who had a night of fire, as he called it, a two-hour experience with the divine, where he became obsessed with the afterlife.

Imagine this man feverishly riding by candlelight as the world outside him is changing.

This is at the same time as Baruch Spinoza, who I covered just a couple weeks ago.

This is at a time when philosophy and science and rationalism is changing much of Europe.

But inside that tiny little room, Pascal is utilizing a different kind of reasoning.

A bet, a wager is being placed, not with dice, not with cards, but with eternity.

And Pascal was a genius, no doubt about it.

But like so many other geniuses, we see how close it was to madness.

Add in a spiritual experience, and you have everything you need for this greatest gamble.

This argument that has been used for centuries to try and justify faith, an argument so deceptively simple that even believers today throw it around like it's some kind of a trump card.

But was it really a winning hand, or was Pascal just bluffing?

So today for the agenda, I want to talk about Blaise Pascal.

I want to talk about who he was, what he accomplished, what his night of fire was, how it changed him, and what he was working on when he died.

Which is where we get the wager, by the way.

Then for anyone that doesn't know, I'll make sure that we understand what the wager is.

Then we will thoroughly cover why it fails.

And then we'll cover the legacy of this bet, and why it still remains today, and what it really says about faith.

So, though this topic, Pascal's wager, has been handled many times, I hope to bring something new to the table with it today.

But let's start with the man himself.

Again, so important to understand, he's born in 1623 in France.

A mathematical prodigy, he develops Pascal's theorem at just age 16, laying the groundwork for projective geometry.

He pioneered probability theory, which is ironic, as it is the same field that would fuel Pascal's wager.

He built one of the first mechanical calculators, contributed to fluid mechanics and pressure laws, Pascal's law.

And then later in life, again after his night of fire, he turns toward religion.

He abandons most of his scientific work at this point, and moves on to defend Jansenist Christianity.

It's a form of Catholicism that more closely resembles the Protestant Calvinist, hated by the Pope and the Jesuits.

And so Pascal makes an entire work dedicated towards those arguments.

Provincial letters, as they came to be known.

But it's not the only work that he was involved in.

He had this grand apologetic that he was not able to finish before he died, and it was published after his death.

It's called Pensee, and it is where we get Pascal's wager.

This just means thoughts in French.

You can read it for yourself and see all of the different ideas, again though very fragmented, about how he defended the faith.

And I think it's important to understand that this was a man who suffered greatly.

The torture of his genius, for sure, but also true chronic suffering from illness with a great amount of pain.

He becomes deeply obsessed with the idea of eternity and the afterlife, brought on by what I keep referring to as the night of fire.

That is what Pascal called it himself.

And it's mysterious.

It's something he never spoke about or publicly wrote about.

But we know about it because it was discovered after his death.

Hidden in the lining of his coat, he had it sewn in so that it would be literally close to his heart at all times.

A document that we now call the memorial.

It's a very brief and poetic and intense description of his experience, and I'm going to read it to you now.

The year of grace, 1654.

Monday, the 23rd of November.

Feast of St.

Clement.

Pope and martyr.

From about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight.

Fire.

God of Abraham.

God of Isaac.

God of Jacob.

Not of the philosophers and the learned.

Certainty.

Certainty.

Heartfelt joy. God of Jesus Christ.

My God and your God.

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything except God.

He can only be found by the ways taught in the gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul. Joy.

Tears of joy.

I have cut myself off from him.

They have forsaken me.

The fountain of living water.

My God, will you leave me?

Let me not be cut off from him forever.

You know, the kind of saying thing every wonderful, rational, logical person sews into the inner lining of their coat to keep next to their heart.

How do we not talk about this more when referencing Pascal's wager?

Spiritual experiences aren't proof of anything other than what our brains are capable of.

We don't know anything about this.

It could have been induced without any assistance.

His chronic illness could have driven it to him.

His obsession with eternity.

His fear of his eventual and soon coming end.

Maybe he took something.

Maybe he overdosed on something.

Maybe he was in a fasted state.

Maybe he was on a lack of sleep.

There's irony in here that we are going to get to when we refute the wager.

But understanding this about this man, I think, is incredibly important.

And again, this is the catalyst to three huge things.

He turns away from probability, except for this horrible wager.

Theory, physics, and logic.

To change his focus simply to theology.

He becomes a devout Jansenist, defending it against the Jesuits and the Pope.

And he writes Ponce, a defense of Christianity targeting skeptics.

By the way, this book is for us.

That we may be convinced.

Read it for yourself.

It does not.

It was intended clearly as an apologetic masterwork.

But Pascal died before completing it.

And the wager is the most famous of the many arguments that he lays out.

So, that is the man.

Let's cover the wager.

At its core, this is not an argument for the existence of God.

That's a misconception.

It's an argument about why you should believe even without proof or in the face of proof against.

It's an argument for blind faith.

The logic of the wager, though not too logical as you will see, is that there is either a God or there is not.

If you believe in said God, you have heaven to look forward to.

Infinite reward.

If you do not believe in this God and he exists, you have infinite punishment or hell to look forward to.

If you believe in this God and he doesn't exist, you've lost nothing, he says.

Maybe a small waste of time.

And just to round out the quadrant, if you don't believe and this God doesn't exist, there's no consequence.

It is neutral.

And so, the answer must be obvious.

It's meant to look like it's fighting with the same style as the skeptics.

Fighting fire with fire.

Logic with logic.

Reason with reason.

But one is greater.

It's framed as math.

This is a cost-benefit analysis rather than a question of truth or faith.

Therefore, it can appeal to the pragmatist or those doubting their faith.

Unlike traditional arguments for God, it requires no evidence, just risk calculation.

And many modern believers still use it, usually unknowingly.

We might take for granted in the skeptic community how much we are familiar with the term Pascal's Wager.

But Christians who will often utilize this as a last resort, again, act like they have a trump card here.

So let's talk about why it doesn't work.

And though there is much that can be said against it, I've narrowed mine down to six main points.

The first one is that it is a false dichotomy.

It offers what seems to be the only two options while completely ignoring the thousands of other gods.

Or the fact that even within Christianity, there are mutually exclusive ways to believe in this God, or at least to act out that belief.

Pascal should have known this better than anyone as he was fighting for a very specific sect within Catholicism which was supposed to be this one true perfect encapsulation of the religion.

We have a rigged casino here.

You either bet on the Christian God or you bet on nothing at all.

But again, thousands of gods and thousands of conceptions of even this God, each with their own afterlife and punishment and rule and reward system.

This is, of course, the only defeater you need.

If you're Pascal and you bet on the Christian God because it seems most reasonable to you for a ton of reasons that you probably had nothing to do with, like where you were born, how you grew up, what you were exposed to, etc.

And you die having made this wager so assured that there is no downside until you arrive at the gates of Allah and you find out that Islam is what is true.

Oops, the whole thing just fell apart.

But for fun, we're going to continue.

Pascal's safe bet here just became incredibly reckless.

Again, if you can get past your own bias about the God you believe in and you can just zoom out and look at all of history, all the gods that have ever been believed in or worshipped were feared.

Many different numbers are floating around there.

Some say 1,000, some say up to 10,000.

Let's stick with the lower number.

Let's stick with 1,000.

And there's only one true God, right?

Because they're mutually exclusive.

Not all are, but the Abrahamics are.

So just from, again, a probability factor here, what are the chances of you happening to be born in the right time and place where you believe in the one God out of the 1,000 gods that is the actual true God?

You might up your probability a little bit instead of 1 out of 1,000 because you might attribute things like a majority fallacy.

Well, look how many people believe in the Abrahamic God or in my specific Christian religion.

There's a whole host of other fallacies you can attribute that will make you feel more convinced that your God is the right God.

But that's what everyone who believes in their God thinks, by the way.

It's amazing how flawed the initial setup of the wager is considering how long it has gone on to be a successful argument.

And by success, I mean keeping people in the faith or convincing people to have faith.

I literally hear it at least once a week online here, probably more.

Number two, belief is not a simple choice.

You can't just will yourself into faith.

Pascal assumes that belief is like flipping a switch.

You decide to believe in God and then bam, suddenly faith is granted to you.

But belief doesn't work that way.

And we all actually know it doesn't work this way.

There's a thousand thought experiments that show it.

My favorite because it's so simple and stupid is the dragon in my garage.

Suppose I tell you there is an invisible, undetectable dragon in my garage.

I then say you should believe in it just in case because if you don't, it might burn you alive in your sleep.

Can you actually force yourself to believe that this is real just because you should based off the probabilities?

Because there's nothing to lose.

If you're wrong, so what?

It's cost you nothing.

Now, do you believe?

Of course you don't.

You either find it convincing or you don't.

I know that this is hard for believers to understand.

I'm not saying that sarcastically.

I really do understand that.

Belief requires evidence or at least personal conviction.

And if you believe in your God, in your faith, whatever it is, it is because you have one of those two things.

Again, it's redundant, but ask a Christian why they don't believe in Allah.

They'll give you reasons, evidence, even if they've never looked into it.

Maybe the reason is just because they first believed in Jesus.

And that religion states that there is no other God besides his father.

There is no other way to that God except through Jesus.

Therefore, by default, Islam cannot be true.

That's as much thinking as they've done to it.

They are personally convinced of this.

And if someone said, well, just believe in Allah anyways, it wouldn't compute.

You can't just bet on God if you don't actually believe in him.

I mean, again, so very simple.

There's a second part of this, and I can't remember if I put it in one of my points, but it's that fake faith wouldn't fool an omniscient God anyways.

Even if someone pretended to believe just to be safe, wouldn't an all-knowing God see through that?

How little do you think of your God that you think that this would work?

Surely God would prefer what I have, honest skepticism over insincere fear-based worship that is false.

Even the Bible itself says as much.