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 LMU in Munich. Online at Historyof Philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Pascal's

wager with Liz Jackson, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. Hello, Liz.

Hi, Peter. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming on. It's exciting to have

an expert on this topic. You've published a lot about it, and we're going to look at some of Hi, Peter. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming on. It's exciting to have an

expert on this topic. You've published a lot about it, and we're going to look at some of the things

you have to say about this, but not all of them by any means. I presented the wager in the previous

episode, but just to make sure we're all on the same page, can you give us a quick overview of

how it's usually taken to work?

Absolutely. The way I often like to present it is in contrast to maybe the more familiar arguments for

God's existence. So people might have heard of the ontological argument or the cosmological argument

or the fine-tuning argument, design argument. These arguments really mean to provide evidence for the existence

of God. They raise the probability that God exists. Their conclusion is often just, you know,

God exists or there is a God or something like that, right? And so these arguments are instructive,

I think, for understanding Pascal's Wager, because Pascal's Wager is not an argument that concludes

just that God exists, and it actually

isn't meant to give evidence that God exists either, but you could still classify it as broadly a

theistic argument, but instead of giving evidence that God exists, it concludes that you ought to

wager on God or you ought to believe in God. We'll get more into what exactly wagering might look like. But it basically says,

look, given a certain kind of cost-benefit analysis that I'll explain in a second, it's your

best bet to wager on God. So this isn't trying to convince the hearer, you're the listener,

the person you're talking to that God exists. It's just saying, this is your best bet given

the setup. So maybe I'll say quickly what that setup. It's just saying this is your best best given the setup.

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