Kevin Guilfoile: Pascal’s Wagering. A must-read for all philosophy majors and philosophy refugees.
His favorite system was a Cosmological Regression. This meant he pocketed half his winnings every time he proved God necessary and eternal, increasing his bet on the next argument by 50 percent. When the house could prove God didn’t exist (say, with the assertion that a necessary being is logically absurd since whatever we can conceive as being existent, we can also conceive as being non-existent), he reduced the wager to his original five-livres and began again. As the months passed, occasional losses were always offset by large windfalls – most memorably the Sunday he cashed in an unlikely parlay: ‘God is a being that which no greater can be conceived,’ AND ‘A being which exists in reality is greater than a being which exists only in the mind,’ SO ‘It is impossible for God to exist only in the mind.’
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