Analysis: Pascal's Wager And Loss

Pascal’s Wager and Loss Pascal argues within Pascal’s Wager, that we should wager in the belief of God. The strongest support given by Pascal for this claim is his third premise, in which he states, “if you gain, you gain all;if you lose, you lose nothing”. I will argue that this argument fails because there is much more to lose with this wager than Pascal leads us to believe, such as free will, and a question of existentialism that would be hindered by the following of religion brought upon in this way. Pascal’s Wager is made through three premises, a conclusion, and a guide to believing once you have wagered towards His existence. The first, in which Pascal tells us that if there is a God, he is infinitely incomprehensible to us, and

As stated earlier, this third assertion states that “if you gain, you gain all;if you lose, you lose nothing”. This premise involves an underlying distinction between the infinite and the finite. Pascal says that God is infinite in premise one, and this implies that we, humans, are finite. From that, by believing in God, we receive infinite benefits, and if we do not believe, there is a finite loss within our mortal life, which relative to the infinite gain, is nothing. I would tell you that this distinction, between the infinite and finite, is false. If we assume that humans have free will and a quest for self discovery through the question of existentialism, this would all be hindered by the acquisition of religion in this way. This is true because Pascal states that it is not enough to wager one way or the other, but we must also make ourselves believe in order to reap the benefit. This concept of achieving a genuine belief through his outlined steps, eliminates the path that we may have otherwise found ourselves on if we hadn’t have bought entirely into the wager. This loss of free will and falsification of your path to self discovery, whatever that