Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits are not available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or “wager on,” God. This chapter distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, it turns to the epistemic–pragmatic distinction and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, it covers outstanding objections and responses.

The final chapter provides an exploration of where this outsider’s look at atheism leaves us: Is agnosticism a good option, and how should we go about seeking truth on whether or not there is a God?

To confront the climate crisis, we need to hedge our bets against the risk of climate change. We must be willing to spend some money now in order reap a larger benefit that will take many decades to deliver. This is similar to the philosophical concept of Pascal’s Wager, where one bets a finite resource for a potentially infinite reward. But estimating how much we should spend now is not easy; attempts to estimate this amount – the “social cost of carbon” – produce a wide range of numbers. We may need to accept that there is going to be radical uncertainty in any numerical estimate. Nevertheless, we can use climate models to quantify the risk of climate change as best we can, while taking into account the different types of uncertainties. Often, risk assessment requires numerical probabilities, but these are not always available for uncertainties associated with climate prediction.

Blaise Pascal’s Pensées hint at a temporal description of soul and mind, and were deeply influential upon subsequent pioneers of the developmental idea. On the one hand, using spatial analogies drawn from geometry, Pascal considered the most important aspect of the individual’s interiority to be ‘Order’. On the other, Order was a temporal phenomenon because it had to manage the movements of interiority over time, which otherwise had a ‘lunatic’ unpredictability. The political theory of absolutism, which Pascal approved, arose in order to control this. Pascal believed it was possible even for the predestined elect to lapse or degenerate, and initiated the focus on time as a ‘counterweight’, a way of pushing back against this. His account of the power of the individual will in relation to God’s operation of that will marks the start of a resemblance to the account of ‘nature versus nurture’ in modern psychobiology.