For more than a century now, people have been intrigued by the comparison AND the contrast, of
Pascal and William James, of the wager for God on the one hand and the “will to believe” on the other.
It recently occurred to me that the relationship between the two philosophers and their views in faith is akin to that between the new 2020s moon program and the 1960s Apollo moon shots.
One point that us very clear is that William James didn't think his views had much in common with Pascal's thought experiment. His famous essay on the will to believe brings up Pascal only to dismiss him, saying (in close paraphrase here: if I were God I would take special pleasure in cutting off from eternal salvation those who had gone to mass and taken communion based on a cold-hearted casino-like calculation, because the idea of betting on God is so cut off from the essence of what faith means.
And yet, as generations have noted, there is a great similarity. James like Pascal believes that it is both right and proper for the human will to enter into matters of brief, that there are circumstances of appropriate rational belief that are NOT coerced by evidence and need not be.
So … how can we picture clearly to ourselves the difference AND the similarity? We can do this, I submit, by thinking of Pascal as Neil Armstrong, and Wiliam James as the administrator of a 2020s-style NASA.
What the new missions want to do is not just to GET to the moon, but to integrate the moon with the earth, to create a permanent station that will be tied to the earth economy, as well as serving as a way in which humans can learn about the cosmos well beyond us and, in time, from which we can launch missions to Mars.
Armstrong just wanted to get there and back on a schedule (“by the end of this decade.”)
Likewise, James wants to tie the will into a general account of how humans form beliefs, act upon them, and over time develop better ones. WIll/faith is part of the epistemological global economy.
For Pascal, it is just a way to implore the persistently secular to come to the right result on a this-ticket-only basis. To get them to mass. To plant a flag.
