Waging War on Pascal's Wager

Abstract

Pascal's Wager is simply too good to be true-or better, too good to be sound. There must be something wrong with Pascal's argument that decision-theoretic reasoning shows that one must (resolve to) believe in God, if one is rational. No surprise, then, that critics of the argument are easily found, or that they have attacked it on many fronts. For Pascal has given them no dearth of targets. Virtually all of the Wager's critics have directed their campaigns against its premises. Other authors have rallied to its defense, buttressing those premises. I will argue that they are fighting a lost cause: developing arguments byJeffrey (1983) and Duff (1986), I will contend that the Wager is simply invalid. This motivates a search for reformulations of the original argument that are valid, while upholding its spirit. I will offer four such reformulations, each of which finesses the decision matrix of the Wager, and in particular its problematic invocation of infinite utility. Yet these reformulations fall too, albeit for a different reason. This, in turn, might prompt advocates of the Wager to conduct another search for still further reformulations. However, I will argue that such a search is likely to be futile. When we examine what is at the root of the failure of the original Wager, and of the reformulations that I offer, we realize that their failures are symptomatic of a deep problem that any variant of the Wager must overcome. I will present a dilemma for all such variants, and conclude that their prospects for success are dim.