She corrected herself by saying Pascal didn't say we had nothing to lose, but that in comparison to infinity it didn't really matter. I posted this on her first Pascal post as a comment, but I'll post it here again for everybody else to see:


As for the other bit about Pascal, dealing with infinity, I can go over that more in class, but it's basically probability theory.

The way you calculate if you should do one thing or another is like this:

You take the percentage of the thing happening times the benefit you get and then compare that to the probability of the other thing times the benefit of that, so for example:

Let's say there are two games I can play at the circus. In the one game, I have a 10% chance of winning $100. In the other game, I have a 50% chance of winning $10. So which one should we play? We calculate like this--

Game A = 1/10($100) = 10
Game B = 1/2($10) = 5

So by probability theory, we should play game A every time.

With god, Pascal says the possibility (or chance) of god existing is unknown basically, so x. The cost is also hard to measure, but it's finite, so let's say maybe for a whole life of church-going it would cost you $26,348 (randomly). But the benefit is infinite. SO it breaks down basically like this:

Believe = x(infinity)
Don't believe = 1-x($26,348)

It's 1-x for the second case because x is the probability god exists, and so 1-x is the probability he doesn't exist, but as long as x is not 0, so even if it's only 0.000001 probability, that times infinity is still infinity, so it always makes more sense, even mathematically to believe in god.

Does that make sense?