An Empty Wager?

"'You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have... They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile.' - 'But that is what I am afraid of.' - 'But why? What have you to lose? But to show you that this is the way, the fact is that this diminishes the passions which are your great obstacles...'" (near end of 418, p125 common ed; #233 for Brennan, I'm guessing).

At the risk of stealing someone's post, I'm going to pose a question about Pascal's wager. Namely, can someone who wagers for God's existence truly have faith and truly be happy, by Pascal's own standards?

Now, at first glance it seems that he thinks happiness is to be won. "Here there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won" (418, p123).

However, it seems that the content of one's belief might be reduced to a simple choice faced with risk, a succumbing to fear (of hell) and not love (of God), or an essentialy orthopraxic concept of faith in which one just goes through the motions. This last option is what is addressed by my quote, which comes near the end of the wager discussion. There is a footnote on the word docile, and I quote, "That is, the unbeliever will act unthinkingly and mechanically..." (p125). Now, this footnote may or may not reflect the sense of that line - I think it's a bit hazy. I think it depends on how much Pascal requires one to invest in the choice/wager. But if it is right, and Pascal acknoweldges this unthinking activity as the result of taking the wager, how does this type of mindless practice square with the more nuanced descriptions of faith that he has given in other pensees? The wager seems to cheat the more reason-heavy portraits of faith to get them to the results of the heart-heavy portraits of faith, without the God given content of the heart-heavy portraits of faith with an annihilation of thinking at the end. A suave move, but is it legit?

Furthermore, the wager does not make use of revelation or references to Christ. This omission is problematic because he had previously informed us that Jesus Christ was the only way to God, and that those who came to know God without Jesus both forgot their elevated and heavy discourse and doomed themselves because of their pride. He echos this sentiment in the reading for today with his words on arguments for God's existence from nature: "Such knowledge, without Christ, is useless and sterile... I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation" (449, p141, (556)).

But yet, Pascal was so excited about his wager. "How these words fill me with rapture and delight! -" (418, p125). And the last sentence of my first quote suggests that perhaps the wager = the Machine. "Write the letter about removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine, how to prepare it and how to use reason for the search" (11, p4, (246)). What then, is the point of the wager, and what does Pascal hope to accomplish by it? To what kind of 'faith' is he trying to sway people who love logical games? Perhaps it is simply a starting point to get peoples' big heads out of the way. Or perhaps what needs to be gotten out of the way is the passions, and while he might draw a distinction between his common claim that man cannot remove all passion and simply reducing harmful passions, there still remains the question about how passions could be reduced by an intellectual wager.