Kingston Philosophy Café

At 19:30 Kieran Quill will lead a discussion of Pascal's Wager.

Pascal's wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). It posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not.

Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).

Historically, Pascal's wager was groundbreaking because it charted new territory in probability theory, marked the first formal use of decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism and voluntarism.

John von Neumann, perhaps the top mathematician of the 20^th C, and one of the inventors of game theory, reputedly converted to Roman Catholicism on the strength of this Wager!