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This day in history: Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and writer died on this day in 1662. He was also a Catholic theologian who gave us what is called Pascal's Wager. This wager is: A rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).
Christianity Today explains it this way: Imagine you are drowning at sea. Certain death awaits you. But then you see a lifeboat floating towards you. A voice tells you that it may well be rigged to explode if you climb on board. There is no way to know whether this is true or not. What should you do? The logic of Pascal's wager is that you might as well swim to the boat. If you do not, you will die anyway so you lose nothing except the effort taken to get to the boat. If you get to the boat and it has no bomb then you have survived, which is an infinitely valuable outcome to you.
Pascal's wager charted new territory in probability theory, marked the first formal use of decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism.
The stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius expressed a similar sentiment long before Pascal which can be summed up as follows: If the gods exist and they are good, they will look kindly on you for your attempt to be a moral person.
If the gods exist but they aren't good, you shouldn't have believed in them anyway, morally speaking.
If the gods don't exist, then you will have lived a virtuous and honest life, which is good in and of itself.
The Christian apologist Arnobius of Sicca (d. 330) stated an early version of the argument in his book Against the Pagans, arguing "is it not more rational, of two things uncertain and hanging in doubtful suspense, rather to believe that which carries with it some hopes, than that which brings none at all?"
Wager aside, Philosophers over time have come up with many arguments for the existence of God. The Western tradition of these arguments started with Plato and Aristotle who gave us the cosmological argument for God (which is an attempt to prove the existence of God by the fact that things exist and must have a cause).
St. Anselm gave us the ontological argument which argues that because we can imagine a perfect being like a god, ergo, there must be a god.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine of Hippo all used a variation of the Teleological Argument, or, the Argument from Design (Complexity implies a designer. The universe is highly complex. Therefore, the universe has a designer.)
René Descartes argued that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful.
John Calvin argued for a sensus divinitatis, which gives each human a knowledge of God's existence: "That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity [sensus divinitatis], we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead…. …this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget."
There is also the argument from beauty, the argument from consciousness, the Rational Warrant argument, and arguments from testimony and personal experiences.
There are also arguments from miracles and arguments from authority. For instance, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormonism, asserts that the miraculous appearance of God, Jesus Christ, and angels to Joseph Smith and others and subsequent finding and translation of the Book of Mormon establishes the existence of God.
Islam asserts that the revelation of its holy book, the Qur'an, and its unique literary attributes, vindicate its divine authorship, and thus the existence of God.
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