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  • Essay / Pascal's bet: To believe or not to believe in God

    How can someone believe in a “person” of whom they have no bodily knowledge? Can a person put all their faith in a deity that may not even exist? Religion has been a part of human existence since the dawn of time, but Christianity, formed less than 2000 years ago without being torn down, shows that there must be solid evidence for this religion. Christianity, the religion of Pascal and the basis of the Wager, is the largest religion in the world, with more than 2 billion followers, spread across approximately thirty faiths worldwide. Pascal's Wager means showing that being a Christian is more beneficial than not being a Christian due to less loss when humans have faith. Wager is philosophical apologetics, which is an argument for the existence of one or more gods. With this bet, Pascal wants people to realize the potential outcomes and how they affect them eternally. Since Pascal is a Christian at the time of writing the Wager, he calls for trust and faith that his Christian God is the God. Blaise Pascal wrote many books throughout his life, but one of them was published after his death, called Pensées. The Thoughts are a collection of small notes and thoughts that Pascal had during his life, they were collected after his death and collected and included in them was the Pari. Pascal's Wager is number 233 of Thoughts and explains how everyone can decide whether or not to believe in God, and the result of their beliefs because God exists or not. He says you have to choose a side, you can't be partial to both sides. With betting you have wins and losses, which Pascal explains in the Gamble: “You have two thirds of paper… implanted in minds as a test of mind against heart to understand rationality in humans. As we said before, rationality is about the mind, while faith is about the heart. If it were a struggle to find the reason to choose one religion over another, it would not be fully supported because finding the complete reason for the faith will not be finished, because "the heart has a reason that reason cannot understand” (Pascal 467). Works citedB. Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Articles 1973-1980, Cambridge University Press 1981, p. 94-100E. Mortimer, Blaise Pascal: the life and work of a realist, Methuen and Co 1959, p. 191-195F. Baird, From Plato to Derrida: sixth edition, Prentice Hall 2011, p. 464-469L. Burkholder, Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2011, p.. 28-31