The Rationality of Faith

According to Franklin (1998, 109) Pascal"s (1952) wager
and Leibniz"s theory that this is the best of all possible
worlds are latecomers in the Faith-and-Reason tradition.
Yet they have remained interlopers; for they have never
been taken as seriously as the older arguments for the
existence of God and other themes related to faith and
reason. Yet Pascal"s wager is of interest for historians of
probability and decision theorists for its first instance of
explicitly decision theoretic reasoning in print and its
invocation of infinite utility. Moreover, it is of interest for
psychologists for its discussion of voluntarism and for
philosophers of religion and theologians as a putative
proof that belief in God is an obligation of rationality (Hajek
2000, 1). Furthermore, as decision theory and the mathematics
of infinities are flourishing and have advanced
rapidly over the last couple of years (McClennen 1994,
115; Sobel 1996, 23; Vallentyne 2000) and as belief in
God has grown over the last terrorist attacks and religions
have multiplied over the last decades - just look at the new
world religion of the Bahai"s -, it might be worthwhile to
look at Pascal"s wager to get a new evaluation of the
situation.