Betting on God

You have probably hedged a bet you couldn't settle: packed an umbrella under a clear sky, or said a quick prayer before an exam just in case. This question asks whether that kind of reasoning can reach all the way to God. Blaise Pascal, a mathematician who helped found probability theory, made the case in notes published in 1670, eight years after his death. Reason, he argued, can't settle whether God exists, so you are forced to bet, and the stakes are lopsided: wager on God and you put a finite life on the table for a chance at infinite gain; wager against and you give that chance up. Pascal knew belief can't be produced by an act of will. His advice to someone persuaded but still unable to believe was to go through the church's rituals as believers do, until habit did the rest. Diderot answered in 1746 that an imam could make exactly the same argument, so the wager can't tell you which god to bet on. William Clifford went further in 1877 with the story of a shipowner who smothers his doubts about an aging ship, sends her to sea with a load of emigrants, and collects the insurance when she sinks. He is guilty, Clifford said, not because the ship sank but because he had no right to believe she was safe; no belief, on his view, is exempt from the duty to fit the evidence. William James replied in 1896 that when evidence can't settle a question and the choice is live, forced and momentous, holding out for proof is just another way of choosing. Yet James had no patience for the wager offered cold. Were he God, he remarked, he would enjoy keeping out believers who arrived by that calculation. Ingmar Bergman's knight in The Seventh Seal (1957) wants what no wager can give: he plays chess with Death to buy time, pleading for God to show himself. Could you believe something because believing it is the better bet, and if you could, would it count?