Pascal’s Wager, put in its most famous form by the brilliant French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, is one of the most common and one of the most logically flawed arguments used by evangelists. It is properly conceived as an argument for belief in God rather than as an argument for the existence of God. In essence, it goes:

1. Either God exists or He does not.
2. If there is no God, whether you believe in God or not, all that occurs after death is oblivion.
3. If there is a God, and you believe in God, you go to Heaven.
4. If there is a God, but you do not believe in God, you go to Hell.
5. By statements 2-4, if you approach belief as a wager, betting on God’s existence is a win-draw proposal: either you gain eternal bliss or end up with oblivion like all other betters.
6. By statements 2-4, if you approach belief as a wager, betting on God’s nonexistence is a draw-lose proposal: either you end up with oblivion like all other betters, or you suffer eternal hellfire.
7. Thusly, belief is the superior choice from a wagering perspective.

The reason why Pascal’s Wager is so pathetically fallacious should be obvious upon a little examination. There are two ways to look at the argument, each with its own problems: assess statements 1-4 as assumptions, 5-6 as inferences, and 7 as a conclusion, or else assess 1 as an assumption, 2-6 as inferences, and 7 as a conclusion.

In the first approach, it rests entirely upon four assumptions that are highly contestable. Premises 3-4 are essentially a statement of Christian belief, which means the only people that will accept them are Christians. Thus, the argument reduces to “if you are a Christian, then belief in God is superior from a wagering perspective,” a rather superficially silly tautology that results in an argument that only convinces the convinced. Further, premises 2-4 commit the fallacy of bifurcation: they state that there are only two possibilities when there are in fact more. In this case, it posits that either the Xian model is true or the secular humanist one is. However, many other options come to mind. For instance, if Allah is supreme, then both the believing Xian and the atheist are doomed to eternal hellfire.

In the second approach, inferences 2-4 derive information from nowhere, thus violating information entropy. All that is assumed is that God either does or does not exist. This says nothing about whether God is benevolent to those who believe in Him and condemning of those that don’t, or whether there is a God who rewards the skeptics and punishes the sheep, or whether there is a God who rewards all, or any number of other possibilities. Because of this, inferences 2-4 are not logically connected to assumption 1, thus causing a non sequitur.