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Pascal on Belief and the Religious Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
At the end of his celebrated wager argument, Pascal advises the sceptic to whom it is addressed to take up a religious way of life in hope of thereby cultivating religious beliefs he does not presently hold, and this because of the immense advantage to him of believing. Many who have shown some sympathy with the wager argument or the understanding of religious belief on which it is based have found this advice, if not silly and dangerous, at least uninstructive. William James, for example, whose philosophy of religion has striking similarities to Pascal's, objected that the advice is unsound because the sceptic has no reason to believe that religious practice will have its promised result. The tone of James's discussion and the fact that he misrepresents Pascal's advice as a simple belief in the efficacy of ‘masses and holy water’, however, suggest that his rejection of it ran deeper than the force of this objection. In fact, the context of his remarks indicates that he regarded this part of Pascal's wager as a particularly clear example of the cases in which to base belief on volition is ‘simply silly’. Even one as sympathetic to Pascal's thought as Donald Baillie seems troubled by the advice. On the one hand, Baillie does not rule out the possibility that some cases of doubt or disbelief may be adequately treated by a measured dose of religious practice.
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References
1 The Will to Believe (London, 1897), p. 6Google Scholar. It may seem that I am misrepresenting James in view of what he says about Pascal on p. 11. Though I admit some ambiguity, his comments on p. 11 do not go very far in answering the implied or stated criticisms on p. 6, from which I would conclude that his remarks on p. 6 are representative of his real assessment of Pascal's advice.
2 Faith in God and Its Christian Consummation (Edinburgh, 1927), pp. 135–139Google Scholar.
3 Pensées, 233. References to the Pensées will be to the edition of Brunschricg, Leon, Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal (Paris, 1914), XII, XIII and XIVGoogle Scholar. English quotations are from W. F. Trotter's translation, available in a number of editions. All quotations in the following paragraph are from pensée 233.
4 Ian Hacking distinguishes three forms of the wager. For an analysis of this third form see his article ‘The Logic of Pascal's Wager’, American Philosophical Quarterly IX, 2 (April 1972), pp. 189–190Google Scholar.
5 Pensées, 245.
6 Brunet, Georges, Le Pari de Pascal (Paris, 1956), p. 7Google Scholar, translated and quoted by Hazelton, Roger in ‘Pascal's Wager, The Heritage of Christian Thought (New York, 1965), p. 110Google Scholar.
6a Of course, this is not to say that the philosophical discussion of the wager argument is misguided or useless; indeed, quite the contrary. But, on my view, Pascal makes a number of important points in the dialogue in which the wager is presented that are not dependent on the validity of the wager itself. As I hope I make clear below, Pascal's advice to the sceptic to take up the religious life is one of these; and thus, I have eschewed any discussion of the growing and valuable body of literature devoted to the validity of the wager.
7 Pensées, 252.
8 Ibid.
9 Some pensées (e.g. 98, 252) refer explicitly to the situation in which a particular set of religious beliefs is also the prevailing social custom, but these are all descriptive in tone. Others, in which ‘coutume’ is not used, strongly suggest that the coincidence of religious belief and social custom tends to foster indifference (e.g. 260 and Pascal's short essay ‘Comparaisons de cretiens’, Oeuvres, X, pp. 407–418Google Scholar). When Pascal speaks of the importance of coutume for religious belief (e.g. 245, 252) he seems to have in mind not social custom, but the consistent practice of the religious life.
10 Pensées, 99.
11 Pensées, 250,251.
12 Pensées, 282.
13 In his essay ‘Faith and Belief’ (Faith and the Philosophers, ed. Hick, John (London, 1964), pp. 3–25)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and later in the last chapter of his Lectures, Gifford (Belief (London, 1969))Google Scholar, H. H. Price develops an argument for the importance of religious practice for the religiously inclined agnostic which is strikingly similar to Pascal's advice and may be read as a defense of its basic point.
13a There are of course other arguments one could marshal in defense of Pascal's advice that do not rely on the notion of habituation or which entail a view of religious belief other than (though not necessarily inconsistent with) Pascal's. In his essay ‘Faith and Belief’, H. H. Price commends meditative practices to the conscientious seeker (in fact, ‘assuming the role’ of a religious believer) as a means of experimenting ‘with the possibility of being quite a different sort of person’, (p. 19) Price's brief discussion is suggestive of some important but subtle relationships between religïous practice and what psychologists call personal identity. A discussion of these would surely be germane to Pascal, since his advice to the sceptic to take up the religious life is really an invitation to try to be a different sort of person. Moreover, this discussion would undoubtedly have a bearing on an understanding of happiness and of the ways in which a man may be induced to try a new way of life in the hope of finding true happiness. However, since the notion of personal identity is exceedingly complex and not an explicit part of Pascal's thought, I have chosen not to explore Price's suggestion in the course of this paper.
14 Pensées, 254, 255, 260.
15 Pensées, 260. Though coutume is not mentioned explicitly, Pascal is denouncing the sort of unconsidered acceptance or rejection of belief that he thinks is its result. See also ‘Comparaisons de crétiens’.
16 This is certainly true of Price's, H. H. classic essay ‘Belief and Will’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXVII (1954) pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and of what is perhaps the most recent defense of this position, Pojman, Louis, ‘Belief and Will’, Religious Studies XIV (1978), pp. 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Pensées,233.