pascal's pink triangle
in perusing a story about a British bookmaker that has placed odds on the existence of god, the last paragraph caught my attention:
The French philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that although God's existence cannot be proven through reason, it makes sense to have religious faith since a person has everything to gain – an "infinitely happy life" – and nothing to lose by doing so.
i guess ol' Blaise never heard of Proposition 8. then again, he apparently called marriage "the lowest of the conditions of life permitted to a Christian". zing! what a cutup. seriously, though, nothing to lose? as if religion had never deprived anyone of freedom or choice? as if no one ever committed evil deeds in the name of god? perhaps it is because i am a product of a significantly more morally-relative era, but even looking at it from a logician's point of view it would seem a hard statement to defend. and indeed, it seems there have been numerous criticisms lobbed at "Pascal's Wager" over the years. then i started reading more of his quotes, and he seems to have had a pretty bleak opinion of human nature and the prospects for happiness in this mortal coil (cf. "Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak" or "How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!").
of course, i meant this entry to be just a toss-off and it has instead started me down a path of late-night reading and existential thinking that leads to a very tangled set of intralocutions. Pascal was interested in attacking certainty, and i am finding that commodity in short supply now. in the interest of sleep and mental peace, however, i will sum it up by noting that when i saw that they were giving 4-to-1 odds on god's existence, my first thought was "yeah, that seems about right" and now i'm not sure whether that means i'm more or less predisposed to the concept and and how much hedging of my bets needs to be done to ensure that i don't lose my metaphysical shirt.