On consciousness: Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this.

Pascal, while a fine logician himself, was mainly an irrationalist when it came to religion. He, like Rousseau later on, felt that the emotions and intuition were a superior form of knowing to all others, particulary when it came to knowing God: " It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason"

Yet, Pascal is most famous for his wager, which is a thoroughly rationalistic argument for believing in god. Unlike previous arguments for placing faith in God, Pascal made an end run around the question of proving God's existence. The wager is not an argument for supporting the existence of God. Rather, it is an argument that it doesn't matter if God exists at all - because when one places faith in God, one can never lose, only win. The only mistake a person can make it so choose to not believe. His wager is as follows:

PASCAL'S WAGER The is a rather famous logical argument for the pragmatic benefit of believing in god as opposed to defending his actual existence. As such, it is intriguing because it is intended to gain believers without having to solve the impossible problem of offering proof of God's existence.

Therefore, Pascal's wager is alluring in its simplicity. It's really an attack on'agnosticism' (in the colloquial sense that agnosticism equates with "being undecided") , for it states that the requirement of certainty is a false one. It states the following: Either God exists or he does not. If he exists and you are a beliver, you "win" everlasting life. If he does not exist and you are a believer, nothing is lost, because you gain or lose just as much as the non believer. However, If he does exist and you are not a believer, you lose out on eternal life. Of the four possible permutations:

Belief	God exists	believer is saved
Non Belief	God exists	non believer suffers hellfire
Belief	God does not exist	believer does not suffer more than non believer
Non Belief	God does not exist	non believer does as well as believer

There is no place where a non believer benefits over a believer and in no case does belief ever bring harm. Therefore, logically, one should be a believer in god, if for no other reason than that atheism cannot ever benefit a person regarding the afterlife.

This argument is specious, for many reasons. I will list several:

1) One does not accept truth because of the possible rewards. One accepts truth because of the evidence. Therefore, Pascal's dictum is invalid. Pascal intended his wager to circumvent frustrated reason. As such the wager is not an intellectual argument for belief so much as it is an attempt to extort belief through fear and greed by way of moral cowardice. Yet even if the wager were granted at face value, it would only establish the desirability of belief, "not provide grounds for belief itself. Pascal recognized this limitation and argued that one should use ritual and church attendance as a way to "deaden your acuteness," and eventually attain belief.

2) Pascal's wager does not tell us which god to follow. It only presumes one should be a christian because Pascal was a christian. One could be a believer in a christian god and still suffer hellfire from Allah or Zeus. Therefore Pascal's wager commits the false dichotomy error and is invalid.

3) Pascal's argument does not offer proof that disbelief in God means one is banished to hell. It is only, again, an assumption in some religions, such as christianity. Since this premise is unfounded, this argument is invalidated.

4) Pascal is wrong to claim that atheist does not benefit from his decision, if god does not exist. A person accepting a false religions DOES have a lot to lose - you lose your own ability to make choices, as well as fail to appreciate the world in a different, perhaps relativistic manner. (See secular humanism for more.) If God does not exist, and there is no afterlife, we should be devoting our energies towards extending lifespan, and this requires a scientific, not a theistic, worldview. We also have reams of historical documents showing that theocratic systems have brought about the greatest miseries in history. Clealry, one has a lot to lose by being a believer, and accepting false tenets from false religions.

5) As any believer will tell you, having faith is not an easy choice to make. One logical argument is unlikely to convince anyone.

6) Lastly, I will surprise some by making an appeal to morality and faith. In a religious vein - doesnt this religion ring hollow? Does God really want his followers to come to him out of fear or desire for reward, and no other reason? I would maintain that even religious people would reject Pascal's wager for this reason. Therfore, it is likely that atheists, agnostics and theists can all agree that Pascal's wager is a vast oversimplification of a very difficult decision.

In my view, Pascal's wager fails on the fronts of logic, morals, and faith.

Here are some pithy quotes from Pascal:

I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

On writing: When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. The French thinker, mathematician, and scientist Blaise Pascal has been credited not only with imaginative and subtle work in geometry and other branches of mathematics, but with profoundly influencing later generations of theologians and philosophers, and is considered one of the greatest minds in Western intellectual history. Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand on June 19, 1623, and his family settled in Paris in 1629. Under the tutelage of his father, Pascal soon proved himself a mathematical prodigy, mastering Euclid's Elements by the age of 12. At the age of 16 he formulated one of the basic theorems of projective geometry, known as Pascal's theorem and described in his Essai pour les coniques (Essay on Conics, 1639). In 1642 he invented the first mechanical adding machine. Pascal proved by experimentation in 1648 that the level of the mercury column in a barometer is determined by an increase or decrease in the surrounding atmospheric pressure rather than by a vacuum, as previously believed. This discovery verified the hypothesis of the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli concerning the effect of atmospheric pressure on the equilibrium of liquids. Six years later, in conjunction with the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, Pascal formulated the mathematical theory of probability, which has become important in such fields as actuarial, mathematical, and social statistics and as a fundamental element in the calculations of modern theoretical physics. Pascal's other important scientific contributions include the derivation of Pascal's law or principle, which states that fluids transmit pressures equally in all directions, and his investigations in the geometry of infinitesimals. In 1647, a few years after publishing Essai pour les coniques he suddenly abandoned the study of mathematics. Because of his chronically poor health, he had been advised to seek diversions from study and attempted for a time to live in Paris in a deliberately frivolous manner. His interest in probability theory has been attributed to his interest in calculating the odds involved in the various gambling games he played during this period. At the end of 1654, after several months of intense depression, Pascal had a religious experience that altered his life. He entered the Jansenist monastery at Port-Royal, although he did not take orders, and led a rigorously ascetic life until his death eight years later. He never published in his own name again. The Jansenists encouraged him in his mathematical studies, which he resumed. To assist them in their struggles against the Jesuits, he wrote, under a pseudonym, a defense of the famous Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, the famous Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters), in which he attacked the Jesuits for their attempts to reconcile 16th-century naturalism with orthodox Roman Catholicism. His most positive religious statement appeared posthumously (he died August 19, 1662); it was published in fragmentary form in 1670 as Apologie de la religion Chrétienne (Apology of the Christian Religion). In these fragments, which later were incorporated into his major work, he posed the alternatives of potential salvation and eternal damnation, with the implication that only by conversion to Jansenism could salvation be achieved. Pascal asserted that whether or not salvation was achieved, humanity's ultimate destiny is an afterlife belonging to a supernatural realm that can only be known intuitively. Pascal's most famous work is the Pensées (published 1670), a set of deeply personal meditations in somewhat fragmented form on human suffering and faith in God. In the Pensées he attempted to explain and justify the difficulties of human life by the doctrine of original sin, and he contended that revelation can be comprehended only by faith, which in turn is justified by revelation. "Pascal's wager" expresses the conviction that belief in God is reasonable on the ground that there are no rational grounds either for belief or disbelief, so belief is not less reasonable than disbelief; but this being so it is wiser to gamble on the truth of religion since this policy involves success if religion is true and no significant loss if it is false. He had admirers both Roman Catholic and Protestant, including John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who praised an essay he wrote on the psychology of conversion. Pascal died at the age of 39 from a combination of tuberculosis and stomach cancer. "The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men."

"For, in fact, what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up."

"Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything. For it is far better to know something about everything than to know all about one thing."

"One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better."

"I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God."

"Descartes useless and uncertain."

"The vanity of the sciences.--Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences."

"The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy."

"Some vices only lay hold of us by means of others, and these, like branches, fall on removal of the trunk."

"Nature diversifies and imitates; art imitates and diversifies."

"Weariness.--Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair."

"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?"

"When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing."

"We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses."

"We do not require great education of the mind to understand that here is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy."

"The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion."

"Plato, to incline to Christianity."

"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created, etc.; that original sin should be, and that it should not be."

"But you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

"Other religions, as the pagan, are more popular, for they consist in externals. But they are not for educated people. A purely intellectual religion would be more suited to the learned, but it would be of no use to the common people. The Christian religion alone is adapted to all, being composed of externals and internals. It raises the common people to the internal, and humbles the proud to the external; it is not perfect without the two, for the people must understand the spirit of the letter, and the learned must submit their spirit to the letter."

"Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only."

"Immateriality of the soul--Philosophers who have mastered their passions. What matter could do that?"

"Things have different qualities, and the soul different inclinations; for nothing is simple which is presented to the soul, and the soul never presents itself simply to any object. Hence it comes that we weep and laugh at the same thing."

"When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated, as in a ship. When all tend to debauchery, none appears to do so. He who stops draws attention to the excess of others, like a fixed point."

"We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness. This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive wherefrom we are fallen."

"We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow-men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone. We should therefore act as if we were alone... we should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth."

"All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc., are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true."

"Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."

"True nature being lost, everything becomes its own nature; as the true good being lost, everything becomes its own true good."

"If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?"

"Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us."

"The knowledge of God without that of man's misery causes pride. The knowledge of man's misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery."

"Without Jesus Christ man must be in vice and misery; with Jesus Christ man is free from vice and misery; in Him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Apart from Him there is but vice, misery, darkness, death, despair."

"Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves."

"I see many contradictory religions, and consequently all false save one. Each wants to be believed on its own authority, and threatens unbelievers. I do not therefore believe them. Every one can say this; every one can call himself a prophet. But I see that Christian religion wherein prophecies are fulfilled; and that is what every one cannot do."

"That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it."

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"This religion taught to her children what men have only been able to discover by their greatest knowledge."