Book Synopsis: Pascal's Wager

I suppose what makes the book “Pascal’s Wager” (2006) by James A. Connor a great read is not the story of Pascal’s life -- his life was short and he died at the age of 39 -- but rather in how the book’s author made Pascal’s contribution to science nearly four hundred years ago still very relevant in today’s modern theoretical physics.

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician in the 1600s known for his work on probability theory. His mathematics on risk management and decision theory led to today’s insurance industry, racing forms, Powerball jackpots, investing, management science, and other undertakings where unknowns are mixed with the knowns to forecast future outcomes. In short, wherever gambling is involved.

Take for example, the coin-toss. Common sense tells us that the more times a coin is tossed, the closer you’ll get a 50-50 result of heads and tails.

Say, for example, you’re a gambler. The first 10 tosses yields 8 heads and 2 tails. You would then be tempted to bet on tails for the rest of the game thinking that tails will now have to catch up. This is what is called the gambler’s fallacy. A great many bets have been lost this way.

Because with each toss -- regardless of how many times the coin has been tossed -- there is always an equal chance of getting a head or a tail. True, after a large enough number of tosses, the result will approach 50-50. But there is no cosmic law or divine providence ensuring that will happen. And by then, the gambler would have bet a hundred or maybe a thousand times for all we care and have already lost an enormous sum of money before tails catches up on heads.

Pascal came up with a solution for his gambling friends where, for example, two gamblers decide on 20 coin tosses for a pot of money but had to stop abruptly (maybe the cops arrive) after just 10 throws. Pascal calculated the probabilities of future throws so that the two gamblers may then split the pot of money fairly based on who’s ahead.

Pascal also made contributions to society as the inventor of the first public transportation system (so common folk who owned no horse carriages could travel like the rich do). His proof of the existence of the vacuum -- used to drive pistons and steam engines among other practical, everyday things -- paved the way for modern quantum physics. In short, according to the book, counting all his contributions to science and society, you cannot walk 10 feet today and not encounter something influenced by Pascal’s work. Pascal, some say, invented the modern world.

Metaphysics was in full vogue during Pascal’s the time. Like Galileo and other intellectuals of the time, Pascal was devoutly religious. He belonged, however, not to mainstream Christian thought but to a radical, orthodox, and somewhat extreme Christian sect called “Jansenism”.

Jansenism taught the doctrine of “efficacious grace” which says that God has already determined who goes to heaven and who does not. It matters not what one does in life. You may kill someone but if God has chosen you to be saved you will go to heaven regardless. All sinners are already abandoned by God. And only a select few have been determined by God to ascend into heaven. An abandoned sinner, however, can still saved but only if some “efficacious grace” occurs in his lifetime. Such efficacious grace, according to the Jansenists, occurred in the lives of the apostle Paul and St. Augustine.

Pascal’s belief in efficacious grace -- or Jansenism in general -- may, however, simply be his objection to the Catholic Church’s practice of penance. Pascal and the Jansenists simply did not believe that a priest had the power to absolve a person from his sins and in so doing allow the sinner entry into heaven. Pascal believed that the power to change one’s destiny rests with the individual. And so because of his anti-Catholic beliefs, like Galileo who he met in his lifetime, Pascal, too, was declared heretic and his book was banned from publication by Rome.

But what sets Pascal apart from other well-known men and women of science and religion is that he had a profound mystical experience that may only be described as divine and similar to what Mother Theresa, St. Francis of Assisi, the apostle Paul, and even Gautama Buddha may have experienced.

Pascal was a sickly person since childhood and so often stayed alone in bed. On the night of November 23, 1654, perhaps in prayer or meditation we would never know, he had an upwelling of happiness, beauty, and perhaps truth. He never told anyone of this experience. Instead he wrote down his thoughts on a piece of crumpled parchment and pinned it to the inside of his clothing. When Pascal died eight years later, a servant found the stuffed note in his garment.

Pascal’s was also a time when the existence of God was being questioned by many intellectuals. Knowing that God’s existence cannot be proven through reason, and having spent much of his time in the company of gamblers, Pascal proposed a way of settling the dispute. His proposal is what is known today as “Pascal’s Wager”.

He said that there were only two choices: believe that God exists and not believe that God exists. And there were only two possible outcomes: God existed and God did not exist.
If you wagered on God’s inexistence and God turned out to not exist, you are correct and you win. But you gain nothing.

If you wagered on God’s inexistence and God turned out to exist, you are incorrect and you lose. And you also lose your chance at eternal life.

If you wagered on God’s existence and God turned out not to exist, you are incorrect and you lose. But you lose nothing.

If you wagered on God’s existence and God turned out to exist, you are correct and you win. And you also gain everlasting life.

Therefore, probabilistically speaking, one should wager as if God existed.

The argument had its critics even during Pascal’s time. Voltaire rejected it as "indecent and childish.” Indeed, it sounds too simplistic and may even confuse one who is already on the path of introspection.

Pascal suggested his “wager” in 1654. Yet even today, parallels in modern physics may be traced back to it as the book’s author did.

Einstein is well known for having said that God does not play dice. He said this when a fellow physicist, Heisenberg, discovered the truth about the electron. We may know an electron’s position but not its momentum, or vice versa. It’s just impossible for us -- or even God if He existed -- to know both because the mathematics behind nature does not allow for it. Einstein disagreed. He remained “convinced that He does not throw dice.” The laws of nature may be complex but Einstein believed they are not outside human comprehension.

Einstein's "throwing dice" is one parallel that the book’s author drew with Pascal's "wager". Another concerns the debate on Intelligent Design (ID) versus Darwin’s Evolution.

ID proponents assert that the human body’s complexity cannot possibly have evolved on its own. They liken it to throwing parts that make up a clock -- screws, springs, hands, face, casing, glass, dials, motor, etc. -- into the swirling waters of a swimming pool and then somehow over time assembled themselves into a clock. It just cannot happen.

Evolutionists, however, argue that given a long enough passage of time -- and the Universe has had 14 billion years so far -- anything can form, even intelligent life. In other words, given a very large number of things, anything is possible. Throw enough darts and one dart will eventually hit the bulls-eye. Throw a pair of dice enough number of times and a pair of sixes will eventually roll. Oppress a large enough number of people and one would surely stand up and fight.

But would a large enough number of monkeys typing away randomly on typewriters sooner or later produce a Shakespeare-quality masterpiece? ID proponents would say never. Evolutionists would have to say yes. Maybe not in this universe, but in another of an infinite number of parallel universes.

Some physicists today theorize that there may be other universes besides ours. Some have no life because the conditions are not right. And since we’re here observing our universe, then our universe must have evolved with the right parameters to produce life. We may never be able to prove this theory, but we cannot rule it out either.

In the end, the author contends that what all this may come down to is what is known as “Occam’s Razor”. It states that given two possible explanations, one should always pick the simpler one.

Intelligent Design or Evolution? Parallel Universes or God?

Whether it matters or not, the choice is left for each of us to make. And with reason lacking the verve to tip the scale unequivocally to either side, we may as well be throwing dice. In that regard, Pascal, then, was way ahead of us.