Blaise Pascal: the probability of faith. Blaise Pascal and his famous "Wager Blaise Pascal: the genius who approached the heart of God"
If science inexorably led people away from God, there would not be a single believing scientist in the world. And if science inexorably led a person to the fear of God and worship of the Highest Mind, there would not be a single serious scientist in the world who would not pray and shed tears over the Gospel.
Instead, we see in history and modernity two great sets of thinkers and scientists. One set consists of those who add the salt of faith to learned food, and the other set consists of those who eat fresh food. These are those who do not need God either in everyday life - as a Helper, or in science - as a hypothesis (see the dialogue between P.-S. Laplace and Napoleon). It does not matter in which set there is a numerical superiority. In such a case, a couple of extra votes will not change the main conclusion, since both sets are large in number. And the main conclusion is that science does not lead to faith and does not lead away from it. She can help, push both in one direction and in the other, but the essence of the matter is not in her. There is something else in a person, different from the analyzing mind, where, in fact, faith is born and matures.
B. Pascal said that the heart has a different logic, different from the logic of the knowing mind. This same wonderful Pascal said that God comes to man not as the God of philosophers and scientists, but as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
People like Pascal are precious. They are needed if only to knock out the cardboard sword from an atheist debater when he motivates his disbelief with the banal attack “science has proven.” What science? What did you prove? I didn’t prove it to Pascal. Moreover, Pascal, using mathematical probability, proved the necessity of faith in Christ. If the meaning of life is to strive for good and escape from suffering, and if science is called upon to ensure or bring closer human happiness, then believing in Christ is reasonable and necessary, and not believing in him is insane and dangerous. See for yourself.
Let's say a believer makes a mistake. What has he lost? Nothing. He lived like other people, ate, drank, worked, rested. He only tried to observe the moral law, for which he was probably respected by those around him. Then he died, and that was it. That is, in case he was wrong. It disintegrated into primary elements, and, as O. Khayam used to say, “These handfuls of sand under our feet / Were formerly the pupils of captivating eyes.”
But what will happen if he was not mistaken? Then glory, the Kingdom, the community of angels, acquaintance with the best people in the world, the sight of Christ, rejoicing, peace of soul await him.
Now let's look at the unbeliever. What did he gain by consistently putting his worldview into practice? He did not torment himself with fasting and attending long services. He looked at sins committed by the flesh as a law of nature. He did not want to humble himself before God; moreover, he wanted to be proud of the glorious name of man. But I had to humble myself before my bosses and before the circumstances of my life. Of course, he did not accomplish great things, but he lived for his own pleasure. True, pleasure, too, was changeable. Illness and age, the discrepancy between the desired and the actual, everyday conflicts poisoned most of the possible happiness. But the man remained firm in his atheism. And now he died to disappear. How surprised he will be when disappearance runs away from him, and the colors of the world, on the contrary, become brighter! What would he gain by disappearing? Nothing. Not only would he not gain anything in comparison with a believer, but even in comparison with a domestic dog, he would also not gain anything, but would rather lose.
But his loss (if he is wrong) will be more than it is possible to bear. The loss will be such that you will involuntarily cry out in despair and gnash your teeth. So it is said: “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
So, of the two options “believe or not believe,” it is better to believe. You won't lose anything, but the gain may be unimaginable. It’s like playing roulette for a million with a large number of donated chips. This is said by a banal mathematical calculation.
And vice versa. An atheist gains nothing by becoming food for the worm and corruption. But if he loses, he will lose colossally.
Conclusion: science cannot prove the absence of God. On the contrary, adherents of unbelief are not familiar with the elementary laws of correct thinking. So let them not refer to science then. So they would say: “I don’t believe it, because my heart is callous,” “vanity is boring,” “I’m afraid to raise my eyes to God.” This would be honest, and therefore it would be a step towards future repentance and confession. And so – “science has proven...” It should be a shame.
There is Aristotelian logic, which does not allow contradictions. Don't meddle with her where the miracle is. For example, in the area of the Gospel. There the Virgin gives birth to a Son and remains a Virgin. There God incarnates, the dead are resurrected, five loaves feed five thousand people. Obviously, some other world entered “this” world, and the laws of another world “pushed out”, gently pushed aside the usual immutability of life. People lived and lived, and their parallel lines never intersected. God is in heaven, we are on Earth, Euclid is right: parallel lines do not intersect. Suddenly the page turned and Lobachevsky’s geometry began. It’s not just that the lines intersected - God descended to earth. The two worlds united inseparably, but also unmerged. And the usual laws of the world began to recede, showing that the “King not of this world” was nearby.
Is there such a science that would think boldly, contrary to the visible world? Eat. This is mathematics. She is also the queen of science. She often has smart things at her fingertips that you can’t touch. None of us have seen or will see zero. “Nothing” is neither imaginable nor depictable. And mathematics operates with zero as usual, like a housewife with a needle and thread.
As soon as we start talking about infinity, miracles begin. Any mathematician will prove to you that at infinity a part of a set is equal to the whole, that an infinite straight line is a circle with an infinite radius. Conversely, a circle with infinite radius is an infinite straight line. Even I could prove this. And this means that as soon as we introduce into science one of the attributes of God - infinity, we are immediately able to conduct a conversation in the language of science, very close to the language of faith. The smiles of skeptics are already erased from their faces when they talk about the fact that God has one nature and three Persons. Yes, gentlemen. Aristotle remained outside the door, and we enter the sanctuary of mental contemplation, where no one is surprised by either God-manhood, or Ever-Virginity, or the unity of the Trinity. Or rather, he is surprised, but does not deny, but contemplates.
So does science make it difficult to believe? Can you kill with a kitchen knife? Is it possible to crack nuts with a microscope? All this is possible with a life vector directed in the wrong direction. The mind, like a calculating machine, will obediently carry out calculations in both sinless and thieves' schemes. It is important that the mind be controlled by the heart, which (according to Pascal) has its own logic. And it is important that this heart prays. Then there will be nothing to fear. Or rather, there is always something to be had. But the grounds for fear will (to put it mathematically) tend to zero.
This happened when Blaise Pascal (mathematician and philosopher) and his friends shared opinions in one of the squares in Paris. Pascal's friends, freedom-loving people, did not recognize the existence of God. Pascal knew this, and also that they all loved to bet. And he said the following: “I bet you can prove mathematically that it is more profitable to believe in God than not to believe.” "How is this possible?" - asked colleagues. “It’s very simple,” Pascal answered. “If you are an atheist, then you can have everything that a believer has: family, health, principles, etc. As an atheist, you can continue to argue that no one can prove to you, that God exists. So, when both you and the believer die, the result is a draw between you. What one had, the other had. So, if you are right with your atheism, it is a draw, and "The same fate awaits both. However, if the believer is right, when you find yourself together again, after God's judgment, you no longer have the right to count on an equal share." “Consequently,” concluded Pascal, “if I bet on God and God exists, my winnings are infinite. If I bet on God and God does not exist, I lose nothing. If I bet against God and God does not exist, I gain nothing.” and I won't lose. If I bet against God and God exists, I'll lose everything."
To justify the internal attitude towards religion, Pascal proposed using game theory based on probability theory. He reasoned:
God exists or not. Which side will we lean on? Reason cannot solve anything here. We are separated by endless chaos. On the edge of this infinity, a game is played out, the outcome of which is unknown. What will you bet on?
What to place your life's bet on - religion or atheism? To find an answer, Pascal suggested that the chances of God existing or not being there are approximately equal, or at least finite. Then two options are possible:
1. Living without faith is extremely dangerous, since the possible “loss” in the case of the existence of God is infinitely great - eternal torment. If it does not exist, then the price of “winning” is small - unbelief gives us nothing and does not require anything from us. The real gain of the atheist choice would be a reduction in the cost of religious rituals.
2. Living according to the canons of faith is not dangerous, although it is a little more difficult due to fasting, all sorts of restrictions, rituals and the associated costs of money and time. The cost of “losing” in the absence of God is small - the cost of rituals. But the possible “gain” in the case of the existence of God is infinitely great - salvation of the soul, eternal life.
In accordance with game theory, when making decisions in favor of one of the options for actions (bet, events) that occur with different probabilities, for comparison and quantitative assessment, you need to multiply the possible prize (winning, bonus, result) by the probability of this event. What is the assessment of the options under consideration?
1. When multiplying even the high probability that there is no God, by the small value of the prize, the resulting value is possibly large, but always finite.
2. When any finite, even very small, probability that God will show mercy to a person for his virtuous behavior is multiplied by an infinitely greater value of the prize, an infinitely greater value is obtained.
Pascal concludes that the second option is preferable, that it is foolish to grasp at finite quantities if one can acquire infinite ones:
What are you risking by making this choice? You will become a loyal, honest, humble, grateful, good-doing person, capable of sincere, true friendship. Yes, of course, base pleasures will be ordered for you - fame, voluptuousness - but won't you get anything in return? I tell you, you will win a lot even in this life, and with each step along your chosen path, the gain will become more and more certain for you and everything against which you bet on the undoubted and infinite, without sacrificing anything, will become increasingly insignificant.
Blaise Pascal: the genius who approached the heart of God
A crater on the Moon, a programming language, a university, and a scientific award are named after him. He was one of those rare people who show talent in both mathematics and literature. He was a great scientist and a true Christian.
Since childhood, Pascal stood out for his abilities in everything he devoted himself to, but most of all he liked mathematics. At the age of 19, Blaise invented a mechanical calculator, which became an important step in the subsequent development of computing technology.
At the age of 23, Pascal joined the Jansenist Christian movement and became one of its main defenders, calling on people to turn away from rituals and superstitions “back to the Bible.” In his “Letters to a Provincial,” he showed himself to be a talented logician and writer.
Having become a Christian, Pascal continued his scientific activities. He made a number of important discoveries in physics, mathematics, and mechanics.
At some point in his life, Pascal became interested in gambling. However, in the 31st year of his life, an incident happened to him, as a result of which he began to think. It so happened that the horses carried the carriage in which he was located. The animals died, but Pascal remained safe and sound. Convinced that it was God who saved him from death, Blaise began to look at his life differently. After this, “he had only one dream: he lived in order to turn people’s thoughts to their Savior.”
Much fuss has been made about Pascal's Wager, which is usually stated in a simplified form: “If you choose Christianity and it is false, you have nothing to lose. If you reject Christianity, and it is true, you lose everything.” Skeptics believe that this is too weak an argument for becoming a Christian. However, James Keifer explains that a bet is a conscious choice, not a coin toss. If you have found strong evidence for Christianity and have decided that union with Christ is a worthy goal in life, then the wisest thing to do would be to practice it. This can be compared to an athlete who trains to win, despite the fact that he cannot even be sure that he will win or that the competition will even take place.
Throughout his life, Pascal was not in good health, and in the end he fell ill with brain cancer. Pascal understood that he would soon die, but did not feel fear of death, saying that death takes away from a person “the unfortunate ability to sin.” Unable to read or write, he did charity work and occasionally visited old friends.
He was a brilliant scientist, logical and argumentative, an inventor and a writer - a genius who came close to the heart of God. Pascal won the bet.
Based on materials from origins.org.ua
If God exists and you bet on it, then you win everything; if it does not exist, but you believe in its existence, then you will not lose anything. This syllogism, known as Pascal's Wager, has been familiar to the world for more than three hundred years. But what is this - iron logic or the roulette game of an avid gambler? What is the significance of this bet, which for the first time allowed the idea that there might not be a God at all? Do we need a mechanism for rationalizing faith? Literary scholar and graduate student at Lehigh University Ed Simon talks about the history and background of Pascal's Wager, its significance, dubiousness and connection with modern times.
On the evening of November 23, 1654, the brilliant polymath Blaise Pascal, while crossing a bridge, fell from his drawn carriage: the horses were frightened by the thunderstorm and bolted. They fell from a bridge over a stormy river, and the stunned Pascal remained on the road.
That night, a grateful thirty-one-year-old Pascal (who was brooding and still recovering from the death of his beloved father three years earlier) experienced a powerful mystical vision that lasted about two hours. After the vision, Pascal wrote on a piece of parchment: “Fire. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of philosophers and scientists... Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy... Eternal life in which they could know you, the one true God.” He sewed the parchment into the lining of his coat, and seemed to carefully transfer it into new clothes every time he changed them. He didn't tell anyone about this - a servant found the parchment in the last jacket Pascal wore, several years after his death.
Pascal could have died that day, and he was truly lucky that this did not happen. But he also believed he was lucky in other ways; This exceptional event made his mind so focused that all the spiritual writings he had written during the years of his father's illness crystallized. He believed that this incident had saved his soul, just as blind chance had saved his body on the bridge overlooking the stormy waters. Inspired by this experience, he placed luck at the center of his Christian apologetics.
In his theological masterpiece, Pensées, Pascal elaborated on one of his most famous concepts, born of an obsession with gambling instilled in him during his dissolute years between the death of his father and his conversion (Pascal was the inventor of the prototype of modern roulette). . From this strange marriage of luck and theology, Pascal created his dishonest and famous "bet" - an argument not to rationalize the existence of God, but to rationalize the belief in God.
Reflecting the skepticism of the times, Pascal argued that we are “not in a position to know whether He exists or does not exist.” Patristic churchmen and medieval scholastics poured out gallons of ink and yards of parchment to rationally prove the existence of God, but, anticipating the ideas of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared a century later, Pascal argued that such proofs were in vain. Between human ideas and true nature, he said, there is “an endless chaos that separates us.” But the mechanism of our personal faith can be eminently rational, and to prove this, Pascal took us back to the smoky gambling dens of his youthful indiscretion.
Pascal reasoned that life is a kind of “game” and that our belief in God, or lack thereof, is our bet regarding the ultimate nature of reality, and in this bet we can win or lose eternal life. Imagine that all of reality depends on the toss of a coin - on one side of the coin the phrase “God exists” is minted, and on the other: “There is no God.” The question Pascal asks is: “What are you betting on?”
The gist of his thought experiment was that if one bets on the existence of God, but He does not exist, then the bettor loses relatively little (perhaps some of the wine, women and songs that Pascal enjoyed during his turbulent years). However, if a person bets that God really exists and the coin lands on the same side, the player is rewarded with an eternity in heaven. On the other hand, if you turn out to be right that God does not exist, you gain little (again, a life of finite pleasures). If the bet that there is no God is wrong, then you will be punished with eternal damnation.
Pascal wrote:
“But there is eternal life and eternal happiness. Therefore, it would be stupid not to gamble the finite for the sake of the infinite, even if out of an infinite number of chances only one were on your side, not to mention playing with equal odds for and against.”
According to the philosopher, it would be irrational not to bet on God.
“If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you won't lose anything. Therefore, do not hesitate to bet that He is.”
You might think of this bet as some kind of medieval atavism, akin to speculation about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But this is not the product of some irrational past, far removed from modernity. I think - whether we find it convincing or not - Pascal's Wager was entirely modern and could only be the product of a world undergoing rapid intellectual change.
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In earlier cultures, Pascal's Wager would have served no purpose: men and women with archaic mindsets would have taken faith for granted (Historian Peter Laslett writes in The World We Lost: "All our ancestors were literally believers , at all times." Classicist Tim Whitmarsh, however, argues that Ancient Greece and Rome were a space for active atheistic possibilities). This is why the famous medieval proofs of the existence of God written by the scholastic theologians were not intended to convince anyone of the existence of God. They were written as rational expressions of God's delicacy and beauty—not to defend him, but to glorify him. On the other hand, Pascal proposed a rhetorical or psychological argument. Unlike the medieval evidence, his claim that it was more reasonable to believe implied that disbelief was a potential option.
The great French historian Lucien Febvre, in The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century, explained in detail why "atheism" was conceptually impossible until relatively recently. There was no such word as “atheist” until 1502 in Latin, 1549 in French, and 1561 in English. The word "materialist" did not appear until 1668, and "freethinker" until 1692. The word "agnostic" was not used until the 19th century. And while it is true to argue that concepts can exist before there is a term to describe them, it is noteworthy that even when the word "atheist" was used in the 16th century, it was always used to describe others, and not to indicate the author's positions.
Moreover, the word "atheist" in those ancient times meant something different from what it means today; atheists were those who denied the “correct” understanding of God, not those who believed that the universe could only be understood in materialistic terms. Apart from a lost and most likely apocryphal anonymous pamphlet from the 12th century called "The Treatise of the Three Impostors" (the impostors meant Jesus, Moses and Muhammad), there was no openly declared atheism until the 18th century. Before this, when the possibility of atheists existed was for fun, they loomed more like a theological Boogeyman, so there was a seeming shortage of real atheists.
Thus, we can say that Pascal's Wager came about when the time was right. David Wootton says that the early modern period saw "an epistemological rift, a conceptual caesura" that allowed for the possibility of unbelief. And where there is the possibility of disbelief, there is a need for arguments to strengthen faith, something like Pascal's Wager. Pascal's wager was neither scientific nor anti-scientific - both the wager and science were products of the same modernization impulse.
I don't remember the name of this argument, and I'm not sure of its authorship. so let it be Pascal's wager. It goes something like this. Man, you're not stupid, right? Let's look at faith in God. If everything is true and God exists and if you believe, all kinds of eternal life with bliss awaits you. If you believe, but there is no God - well, what have you lost? yes, in general, nothing. Man, there’s nothing to think about here - either you get a huge win, for one of your lives - well, let’s say - a thousand lives. or if you lose, you get the same life, you don’t lose anything. Man, it's a safe bet. You're not a fool, you know what to bet on, right?
I have no idea of seriously considering this argument and philosophically deciding “who is right here.” However, I looked at myself and realized with surprise that I - of course, this is understandable - would choose the option where there is no faith. This is obvious to me, and I began to think - why is it obvious to me that the choice should be like this. This is what happens.
If there is no catch and this is indeed the situation, then I can easily be forced to choose faith. But without coercion, if you don’t push me. I - on my own - will choose disbelief. To make it clearer, it is better to translate this into its original form so that it ceases to be a metaphor. So, a choice is offered: either I choose to have my bet returned to me a thousand times more, or I choose not to receive anything. My bet just comes back, I don’t lose anything. Of course, if I really need money - I have debt, a family, etc. - it is easy to understand that I should take a lot of money. But this is precisely coercion, outside of this bet. But here I am free, I have no debts and I freely manage my bet. What then? Then it is obvious to me that they are trying to buy my vote. For some reason, someone needs me to choose the bowl where the bet increases a thousand times. I can see that there are separate bowls, choices, right and left, and separately someone distributed the winnings in this way. Why should I play along? I - of course - will take the choice where I just get my bet returned without winning. Because it’s interesting that they tried to force me not to choose. In short, if you are given lined paper, write across the lines.
Of course, this does not prove anything about God. There is only one thing here - someone came up with an argument about the benefit of faith. Personally, this argument seems to me to work against the value it is supposed to protect. The very structure of this metaphor is such that I will choose against the intent of this metaphor.
And I'm interested. And you? Am I so strange - or are there many like that? Is this a commonplace - and a lot of people would choose against winning a thousand times - or vice versa, all normal people would, of course, choose winning? These are completely different things - accidentally finding something, receiving it as a gift and winning a thousand times more than you bet in a win-win bet.