DE Weekly: Pensées, Reason, & Pascal’s Wager
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 8, 2025.
Pensées, Reason, & Pascal’s Wager
Existentialism has arrested the thoughts of readers because the questions it poses are fundamental to our existence. Joining all questions into one, readers are forced to ask themselves, “Who am I, and what is my fate?”
Centuries before the existentialist authors we normally think of came around, a French philosopher and Catholic theologian named Blaise Pascal lived and wrote on the same existential questions.
Pascal, who lived in the mid-seventeenth century, is perhaps most famous for his posthumously published collection of writings titled Pensées (French for Thoughts).
In his Pensées, Pascal explores topics such as the human condition, a robust defense of Christianity, and our search for meaning in life.
His thoughts highlight two sides of the same coin that is the human condition: the great joy of having existed and the inescapable misery we all experience in life.
Included in his Pensées and likely the one idea of Pascal most people have heard of before is a philosophical argument which has come to be known as Pascal’s wager.
Pascal’s wager is an argument that posits as humans, we engage in a gamble regarding the existence of God and our belief in God, a gamble that ultimately defines our life and our fate.
Pascal contends through logical reasoning that, if we are rational beings, we will live according to the fact that God exists, and we believe in him.
The reason for this lies in the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, believing in him incurs only a finite loss (we may forgo some physical pleasures and luxuries during our life), but if God does exist, we incur infinite gains and losses; believers gain everything in Heaven, and non-believers lose everything in Hell.
We are faced with a choice, an existential gamble.
Do we wager that God exists, or that He does not exist?
If God does not exist, we lose nothing either way; our belief or unbelief may cause us only finite losses in life.
If God does exist, we stand to gain or lose everything, in this life and the next.
Since the potential gain from belief is infinite and the potential loss from belief is merely finite, Pascal argued, the rational choice is to believe in God.
Blaise Pascal’s argument for believing in God is a pragmatic one. He weighed the pros and cons and came to a conclusion he felt good about. It’s an argument that inspired generations of philosophers to come.
Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and Christian theologian, expounded a similar idea we call today “Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith,” arguing a closely related idea.
Since Kierkegaard (considered by some to be the first existentialist philosopher), all authors associated with existentialism have focused on largely the same ideas and problems.
Existentialism focuses on our total, radical freedom in this world; we are thrown into the world and forced to make meaningful choices without a clear idea of the answers to our questions.
Our human condition is one of uncertainty: that our existence might be meaningless, the existentialists argue, is absurd and necessitates responsibility for one’s choices. Every choice we make in such an existence truly matters.
I’m not sure that a wager similar to Pascal’s exists for the existentialists, many of whom were self-proclaimed atheists.
After all, in the absence of God, who and what truly matters? Toward what end––in light of what kinds of gains and losses, finite or infinite––do we turn our face?...
…That of an undefined meaning? That of worldly value? That of what others tell us we must?
I will attempt to proffer an existentialist wager of my own: your life either has inherent meaning or it does not: weigh the gains and losses and act accordingly.
At the end of the day, many of the existentialist authors themselves operated under a similar frame of existence.
Some wrote that life does have meaning, and it is up to us to find it and grasp it.
Some wrote that life does not have meaning, and it is up to us to create our own, to grasp it and to share it.
Although most of the existentialists would deny Pascal’s divine solution to such a question, I believe they would accept his pragmatic approach; they accepted our extreme responsibility for our own choices and espoused “revolt” against our condition so that we might improve it and make something meaningful of it.
No one answer is readily available to us. The rational and the irrational combine simultaneously to confuse us and to call us to action.
What do you want to be true? What will you do in the absence of a predetermined truth?
“You can neither worship, love, or trust in a merely probable God.” –– Cardinal John Henry Newman
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
As I wrote, Pascal inspired centuries of philosophers who followed him. Kierkegaard and his Leap of Faith is one such example. Stay tuned next week for more…
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