Blaise Pascal’s Wager                                                                                                                 Section 8

Connor Lange

  

    For my research report on Blaise Pascal's Wager of God's existence, I dug up some interesting facts about him.  He was born in the year 1622 in Clermont-Ferrand, France.  When he was only a year old, he had fallen victim to a strange illness.  His mother and father, Eitenne Pascal and his wife Antoinette Begon suspected the illness to do with witchcraft.  When Blaise Pascal grew older, Pascal learned the languages of Latin and Greek by his father.  In Pascal's later years of being a teenager, he had constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction.  Interesting enough, Pascal also invented the syringe.  Pascal was considered a child prodigy.  Pascal enjoyed gambling and developed an addiction to gambling, but later the concept of gambling would serve a meaning in his wager.  Pascal had a lot of fascination in the topic of religion, but in fact he was not the first to create his own wager theory.  There were two men that had come by with the wager idea before him.  Pascal was a Theist, but had an open mind to the idea of God's existence and the idea of an after-life.  Theists generally think that prayer tends to bring someone into contact with God, in which someone is likely to notice, recognize, and believe in God's existence.  Pascal laid the foundation for the modern theory of probability, later formulated into what we know as Pascal's principle of pressure.  Blaise Pascal had many difference thoughts going into his wager, but he focused on the wagers of an afterlife.  He based his wager off of rational thinking versus religious beliefs.  Pascal did much thinking about the fifty/fifty possibility of the outcome after death.  He weighed the options before him, whether there was a heaven or hell as the Christians believed.  He had concluded his rational thinking, that the infinity gain for believing in God outweighed the choice of not believing.  Blaise Pascal stated, "May God never abandon me," as his last words before his death.  Pascal did not provide evidence to God's existence but made a big impact of the way some people would think about God's existence.

 

 

 

 

 

Blaise Pascal Power point Presentation