If you're going to believe God exists, you need a good argument for God's existence, right?

Well, maybe not.

Many people believe that the smartest thing to do is to just believe in God because that's a safe bet.

Named after the 17th century intellectual blaze Pascal, Pascal's wager is a pragmatic argument for belief in God, regardless of whether God exists.

But the problem with Pascal's wager is that almost everybody gets it wrong.

This includes critics of the wager, neutral educational sources about the wager,

and even Christians who try to use it as part of their case for believing in God.

So in today's episode, we're going to see why the popular summaries of Pascal's wager don't work and why Pascal's

actual advice is good for any thoughtful person to follow. Before we do that, I hope you will

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Now, before we talk about the wager, we need to understand Blaise Pascal, who was a 17th century mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and Catholic writer.

His contributions to probability theory helped create modern economics, and he also invented the first mechanical calculator.

Later in life, he attempted to write a book on Christian apologetics, but he died in 1662, and he also invented the first mechanical calculator. Later in life, he attempted to write a

book on Christian apologetics, but he died in 1662 before he finished the book. Pascal's unpublished

notes were collected into a work a few years later called Thoughts, or Pensays, in French.

One of the notes, called the Infinite Nothing Note, contains what we call Pascal's wager. When it comes to belief in

God, Pascal wrote the following. 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. Pascal has much more to say on the subject,

but since these are just notes, the original text is difficult to understand, and it can be

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