ABSTRACT
The first argument of this type that we shall consider is probably the most famous: Pascal’s Wager. Pascal was a seventeenth-century mathematician, a Jansenist who himself believed in God for reasons quite other than those put forward in his Wager. He was also the friend of some gambling aristocrats, who persuaded him to lend his mathematical talents to calculate the odds of certain combinations of cards turning up in play. He thus became interested in the question of what the rational course of action is when the costs, benefits and probabilities of the outcomes of different courses of action can be calculated in advance.
