Reimagining Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal. From Getty Images.

Note: Today’s essay is a postscript to a recent piece for

The Republic of Letters

. It’s not necessary to read the earlier essay to follow my meditation today, but it might add context and depth.

One of the biggest surprises of 2025 is that I’ve spent a good bit of time lately thinking about Blaise Pascal. This is by way of Karen Armstrong’s wonderful A History of God, particularly her chapter on the Enlightenment, where she shows how seventeenth-century rationalism increasingly reduced God to narrow terms that were then easily refuted by science and by reason itself.¹ As an atheist for much of my adult life, I saw the Enlightenment as my North Star: the period when superstition was replaced by investigation, the foundation upon which scholarship and every other structure of meaning that I thought of as reliable was built.

But of course the Enlightenment didn’t stop slavery and might even have enabled colonialism. And none of the systems that rationalism built — not democracy or research universities or public health campaigns — have been able to withstand sustained assaults from capitalism and populism. One of rationalism’s greatest achievements, technology, has now proven itself to be a Golem that cares no more for humanity than the emperors of old.

Even the free press, itself the fruit of the Reformation, has devolved into another capitalistic enterprise. Whenever I see a new establishment journalist hanging out a shingle on Substack (Terry Moran is one of the latest), I see little more than a person with a large platform cashing in on it. Indeed, the distinction between journalism (a collective enterprise that requires collaboration between reporters and editors to maintain its integrity) and newspreneurship (a private enterprise with many conflicts of interest built into it) is disappearing by the day.

As a result, we find ourselves at a crux not unlike the one Pascal faced in the mid-seventeenth century: a time when, per Armstrong, “[t]he old ‘proofs’ for God’s existence were no longer entirely satisfactory, and natural scientists and philosophers, full of enthusiasm for the empirical method, felt compelled to verify the objective reality of God in the same way as they proved other demonstrable phenomena.” Few thinkers of that period were openly atheistic, but Pascal was one of the first to anticipate the conclusions that radical empiricism would eventually reach, and this is largely the subject of his Pensées.

I’ve always thought of Pascal’s famous wager as rubbish. It’s much more nuanced than this, but the idea is that if it’s a toss-up whether God exists, it’s better to wager that he does. Because if the believer is proven wrong, they lose nothing, and if the atheist is mistaken, they lose everything. As Christopher Hitchens and others have pointed out, the premise would be laughable to an omniscient God who cares at all about sincerity. To think that you could simply hedge your bets in that way would require imagining God as a clueless parent who believes everything you say, even when you’ve been out partying all night.

Besides, Pascal’s wager is just a more logical-sounding spin on the idea of hell as a gun held to humanity’s head: believe, or else. I’ve never had much respect for anyone who would knowingly feign faith or who would convert purely out of fear of hellfire. That’s not conscience, that’s cowardice.

There’s been a recent adaptation of Pascal’s wager among conservatives like Jordan Peterson, who don’t seem terribly interested in religion itself but are keenly interested in the civilizational byproducts that faith, morality, and discipline have ostensibly produced in ages past. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is another such figure. Once a Muslim, she joined the atheistic ranks for a time before recently converting to Christianity on these very “civilizational” grounds. I find myself equally repulsed by these arguments, because they seem disingenuous, co-opting a religious tradition for certain cultural benefits without seeming to care much about the core of belief.

But Armstrong has caused me to take another look at Pascal. Even though I still find his wager questionable as a justification for faith, I have more sympathy for what motivated his conversion and subsequent meditations in the Pensées.

In fact, I found myself thinking something very similar to the following passage near the beginning of this year.

Here’s Pascal:

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

What Pascal is describing later hardened into Social Darwinism and its literary cousin, Naturalism. American writers like Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce consistently depicted the individual as an insignificant mote drifting through an indifferent universe, powerless to resist the overwhelming forces without and the animalistic drives within. “The Open Boat” is perhaps the most iconic crystallization of naturalism. Thomas Carlyle captured the feeling earlier in Sartor Resartus: “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.”

The idea of an indifferent and even hostile universe is fairly terrifying, and the only way to face it with much fortitude is as a bourgeois. It’s one thing to stare down death and nothingness stoically if your belly is full, your streets are in good condition, and your basic needs are met. It’s quite another to face this prospect from a position of poverty or abject powerlessness. Or even from a more modest position of instability. Earlier this year, having just gotten my feet under me as a single father, I struggled to reckon with an authoritarian president, a whipsawing economy, eroding trust in all the civic pillars that rationalism built, and the looming threat of AI upending the future of work as we know it — not just for myself, but for my three kids. It’s not an unreasonable question in circumstances like that to ask where your strength and resilience come from, what your sources of truth really are.

Increasingly I’ve found it untenable to say that reason alone, or human institutions of any kind, are worthy of my trust. Universities have sold their academic integrity to NIL deals, administrative bloat, marketing, and mandatory trainings. Mainstream health policy has been unduly influenced by Big Pharma for decades, but we’ll be reaping the whirlwind from cuts to the NIH and NSF and the CDC for at least a generation.

Monetizing web traffic has had disastrous consequences for truth in media. Clickbait led to alternative facts, which then led to establishment journalists rejecting curation itself, claiming that editors stifled their natural voices. Most of the standards by which I taught college students to evaluate information for reliability no longer apply — not because the method is outdated, but because the institutions that helped define authority have crumbled so thoroughly that it no longer matters much whether a website has a .com, .org, or .edu domain. Not to mention the deluge of content written by AI.

I was once struck dumb when a contractor I’d hired claimed that the Flint water crisis was a hoax because a guy on a cruise had said so. But now I have complete sympathy for his position: it’s increasingly difficult to know who and what to believe. Somehow the idea of rewinding to the Enlightenment and running the tape of modernity again doesn’t seem adequate to address the state of the world today.

All of this brings me back to Pascal’s dilemma, if not necessarily to his wager. I am not a professional philosopher or theologian, so this is assuredly an inelegant framing, but I’ve often thought about how both secular and religious explanations for Creation go back to an ex nihilo moment. The majority of believers around the world have no quarrel with the Big Bang as an act of creation; the main difference with rationalists is the question of what came before (if there was a “before”). Since there is no empirical basis for a conclusion either way, that void is filled by a choice: belief in God or nothing. And at that point it’s less a question of what is objectively true than which explanation, and subsequent worldview, produces the best fruit and the most truth in me as an individual.

Humanism is a blip on human history. Some of that tradition is for principles I hold dear, such as equality, freedom, and dignity, but much of it lodges arguments against religion that I now find petty and hollow.² Most of those critiques have been lodged against extremism by believers as well. Karen Armstrong explains that for thousands of years, God was an idea, “a symbol of a reality which had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation.” Many people who devoted themselves to seeking God in that rigorous way observed a private practice that made no demands of others. But many of them were also abolitionists, suffragists, and scientists who joined hands happily with Marxists while drawing from a deeper spiritual well.

I find little motivation in the ideas of paradise or hell, which drive Pascal’s wager, but belief in a power greater than the chaos currently ruling the world has begun to hold fresh appeal. Not as a retreat from or denial of that chaos, but as a firmer foundation from which to resist it. Not as an abnegation of personal responsibility, but as an embrace of discipline and commitment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez captures the idea:

The Truth

The fundamental question to me is not what price I might pay in the afterlife for my belief or doubt or what “civilizational” goals might be achieved. It’s what price I might pay or reward I might gain in daily living for the two decades or so I might have left. Will I wake each day with anger and fear, focusing on the ruins of democratic institutions around me and the wasteland awaiting my children, as rationalism has often caused me to do? Or will I greet my days with gratitude and humility, resolved to spread mercy and love while joining hands with others as I’m able?

That is a different kind of wager.

Joshua Doležal

writes

The Recovering Academic

.

1. Armstrong: “Instead of seeing the idea of God as a symbol of a reality which had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation, it was increasingly assumed that God was simply a fact of life like any other…. [A]s Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith.”

2. Critical thinking requires doubt and some measure of negativity to avoid dishonest brightsiding, as I explain in this homage to Barbara Ehrenreich. But I’ve found diminishing satisfaction in skepticism and cynicism as I approach the half century mark of my life.