Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LM online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode,

You Bet Your Life, Pascal's Wager. Imagine that God exists, but not the god of Christianity,

Islam, Judaism, or any other religion.

This god is perverse. He hates it when people believe in his existence.

Maybe because he's shy, or because he thinks it's ridiculous that people would believe in God

without sufficiently good evidence. So, when religious believers die, he sends them to hell

for an infinity of torment.

When atheists die, by contrast, there'll be bad news and good news.

The bad news is that they were wrong to be atheists because God does exist.

The good news is that atheists, and only atheists, get to go to heaven,

where they will experience an infinite and eternal reward.

Now, there isn't much, if any, reason to believe that this perverse god exists, but isn't it just possible that he exists? And given this possibility,

however slight, wouldn't it be better to be an atheist, just in case? After all,

is the only way to have a chance at that infinite reward, and to avoid the infinite

damnation reserve for those who have religious faith. When your religious friends invite you

to church, you'd better tell them that it just isn't worth the risk. This line of thought is a

topsy-turvy parody of Pascal's Wager, one of the most famous things to come out of the philosophical

and religious literature of the 17th century. The wager is proposed in Pascal's Ponce,

in a section that is really more a set of unfinished notes, it's been described as two pieces of

paper, covered on both sides by handwriting going in all directions, full of erasure's, corrections,

insertions,

and afterthoughts. The passage takes the form of a dialogue, in which Pascal is trying to convince

...