God does not play dice ...

A high-school friend who is a singer / songwriter shared a new composition with our class group yesterday. It's a very catchy jingle with its core theme in the chorus:

Is it one God or some religion

That everybody needs

Or do we shake those shackles off

And use reason as our belief

(Yes, I know, John Lennon raised similar thoughts a half-century ago, but recurring themes are part of the human condition; as is the questioning of belief which both my friend and Lennon have used to great musical effect.)

I'm an unqualified atheist.

I'm also deeply appreciative of religion. Religious beliefs give structure to our species.

Imagine world a where the majority of us were not held in check by the possibility of a divine consciousness standing in judgement of our actions?

But that aside, I'm a bit of an anachronism, because as Pascal's Wager proposes, it would be far more rational to believe in God than to not do so.

Blaise Pascal , born in France 1623, was a 17^th century philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and physicist. His personal influence in my life was that the first programming language I learned was named after him. (Almost no one uses it today but the first iteration of the Apple Macintosh operating system was written in Pascal.)

As a child, Pascal worked on conic sections. When he was 16 years old, he authored a significant work on projective geometry .

In 1642 (yes, at 19, he was still a teenager), he conceptualized a mechanical calculator and is today credited as co-inventor of those along with WIlhem Schickard .

He and Pierre de Fermat collaborated on probability theory.

(Yes, that's the person who gave us Fermat's Last Theorem , but we're not talking about him today. Nor are we talking about René Descartes who was also around at the same time.)

Pascal and Fermat were interested in probability theory for the best of reasons — they wanted to make money gambling.

Today, probability theory forms the core of modern economics. The entire insurance industry exists because of actuarial science which uses mathematics and statistics to assess risk.

Ironically, it was those roots in gambling that led Pascal to put forth his proposition that a rational person should believe in God.

Pascal's logic is simple: If God does not exist, such a person will lived their lives with minor sacrifices of some luxuries or pleasures caused by religious restraint. On the other hand, if God does exist, the believer stands to receive infinite gains in the kingdom of heaven rather than infinite losses by being condemned to hell.

Here's a table with the corresponding probability matrix.

	God exists (G)	God does not exist (¬G)
Belief (B)	+∞ (infinite gain)	−c (finite loss)
Disbelief (¬B)	−∞ (infinite loss)	+c (finite gain)

Pascal died in 1662 aged 39. For his sake, I hope he won his wager.

If he did, I expect I'm going straight to hell where I will meet most of my friends. So, I will take that as a win too!