ABSTRACT
William James and Blaise Pascal both offered pragmatic arguments for believing in the existence of God. This chapter examines faith and pragmatic reasons, and looks at the role our emotions and passions might legitimately play in religious belief. The seventeenth-century French thinker Pascal agrees that there is not sufficient evidence to justify belief in God on epistemic grounds. Pascal's argument was intended to convince us that the pragmatic reasons for belief in God are overwhelming, but the argument assumes that people can compare some pretty inscrutable expected utilities, and the possibilities seem too complicated for that to be feasible. Pascal thinks of deciding whether believe in the existence of God as a sort of a gamble. The chapter discusses a major objection to Pascal's wager. W. K. Clifford agrees that to act on an ill-founded belief is even worse than to hold the belief but not to act on it.
