Before you begin: this is not an argument that God exists — it offers no reason to think so. It is a fallback for one specific situation: when reason has left the question undecided and you have no warrant to lean either way. Only THEN, Pascal says, does the wager come into play, asking which way it is nonetheless rational to bet.
The numbered form is ours, after Pascal's Pensées (Lafuma 418 / Brunschvicg 233) — the words themselves are the philosophers', below.
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked … Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you … Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.
Source — Blaise Pascal, Pensées — the reply to "I cannot make myself believe"
Strip away the theology and it is a bet. Pascal says you are already "embarked" — you will live either as though God is or as though God is not, and even refusing to decide is a way of living as if not. So treat it as a wager and weigh the stakes.
On his accounting the stakes are lopsided beyond comparison. Bet on God and live accordingly: if you are right, the prize is "an eternity of life and happiness"; if you are wrong, you have lost only some fleeting pleasures. Bet against, and the numbers flip. When one side of a bet offers an infinite gain and the other a merely finite one, Pascal argues, only the infinite side is rational — "if you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing."
Two objections have shadowed the wager ever since. The first is the many-gods problem: the same payoff reasoning would recommend betting on any god who promises infinite reward, so why the God of Christianity rather than a rival deity — or a god who rewards honest unbelievers? The wager seems to prove too much, or nothing in particular. The second is that belief is not a lever you can pull at will: you cannot simply make yourself believe a thing because it would pay to.
Pascal anticipated the second. He tells the reader who wants to believe but cannot to "follow the way by which they began" — to act as if they believed, keeping the practices of faith, until belief follows and "deaden[s] your acuteness." To the modern eye that is either wise spiritual counsel or a recipe for talking yourself into things. Either way, keep the fence in view: even at its strongest the wager reaches a conclusion about how it is prudent to live, never that God is real. It belongs in this section as the argument that concedes the theoretical question and changes the subject.
Written for this library — not a quoted source. It reports how the premise is argued and answered; the philosophers' own words are above.
Accept the wager's payoff reasoning, and the many-gods objection follows it home: the same infinite-reward logic would recommend betting on any god who offers it, so the argument seems to justify too much to justify anything in particular.
Denis Diderot ("an imam could reason the same way"); the modern decision-theory critiques ↗
Refuse to treat belief as a bet, and the argument never gets going — but Pascal's rejoinder is that you are wagering whether you like it or not, since you must live one way or the other, and neutrality is not on the menu.
Pascal, Pensées (hosted below)
Accept that the payoff is infinite gain against finite loss, and what follows is living as a believer while the question stays undecided — a claim about how it is rational to act, not that God exists.
The modern revivals and their critics are under copyright, so we don't host them — the reading doesn't stop at the public-domain record. Follow it at the sources:
You have read the premise and the cost of each move. The library draws no conclusion. No objection to it is hosted here yet.