340 years after it was published in Pensées (Blaise Pascal's major philosophical contribution treating human suffering and faith in God), Pascal's Wager continues to be an oft cited argument, at least on the part of the average believer, for belief in a supreme creator being and a cosmology consisting of a heaven to reward some people and some type of hell in which to punish others.  Within the context of what might be called mainstream Christianity, both in Pascal's place and time as well as our own (or at least my own), the prevailing assumption was and is that this reward-punishment system was based on faith.  Those who are faithful (those who believe in God even though there may be no empirical evidence of his existence) goes the reward.  Those who do are unfaithful, who do not believe, receive punishment and all this in some either predetermined, or not, post-humous trial and judgement set up and carried out by God himself.

Pascal was perhaps as rational a man as they came.  He was a brilliant mathematician and a philosopher.  He realized even then, centuries ago, that the evidence was ultimately stacked against God's existence; reason by itself could neither account for nor justify belief in God.   Hence the wager, Pascal's way of determining whether or not he should believe in God based on the desirability of outcomes for various possible afterlife scenarios.

For those who may not know, Pascal's Wager goes something like this:

1) If you believe in God you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.       You gain everything (eternal bliss in Heaven) if you are right, you lose nothing if you are wrong.

2) If you don't believe you have everything to lose and nothing to gain.  You still get no afterlife reward if you are right, you lose everything (eternal pain in Hell) if you are wrong.

3) Therefore, logic dictates that belief in God is the best bet because the worst case scenario for the believer, nothing, is the best case scenario for the unbeliever. 

To the believer this seems obvious.  Criticism is almost as old as the wager itself, however, and to the skeptic it is based on a number of assumptions that may be entirely incorrect and can at the very least be easily challenged.  These assumptions seem so obviously flawed that many skeptics are forced to wonder how and why a believer would even propose the wager today in any seriously attempted conversion dialogue.

One of the most often refuted assumptions is that if you believe in God and are wrong you lose nothing.  Many would argue that you actually lose a lot in this scenario.  What about losing your entire life to blind faith in something that doesn't exist?  How about living your entire life waiting for an afterlife that never was?  Think of all the fun you may have missed by adhering to outdated morality:  Great parties, wild and promiscuous sex, illicit drug use, exploring spiritual possibilities outside of the contained box of the religion with which you were raised.  

What about the joy and magic of the discovery of real mysteries, real explanations rather than a life wasted believing literally in mythological and allegorical explanations? What of the sheer pleasure of having the free will to decide for oneself what is right and wrong without fear of eternal retribution, the freedom to use the rationality some god supposedly gave us without fear of being eternally condemned for thoughtcrime.    

This brings us to another assumption that gets under the skin of many skeptics and this is the assumption that is most important for our purposes here.  It is the idea that if there is a God it rewards blind faith and punishes rational thought. 

Many would argue just the opposite.  If an omnipotent and omniscient creator God exists would that God not be rational, even ultimately or omnirational, however we may want to define such a term?  If this God created humans and gave us our inquisitive and rational minds, does it not follow that it would want us to use that rationality to explore the curiosities unfolded by the higher critical thinking capabilities bestowed upon us by this God? 

Would such a God actually punish rationality and reward the casting off of reason in favor of a self-imposed slavery to doublespeak, sheepish obedience, and blind faith?

Clifford A. Pickover in his book, The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience, takes this assumption that God rewards faith and uses the common criticism discussed above to cleverly reinvent Pascal's Wager. Pickover first presents, in table form, the wager as presented by Pascal with the assumption that God rewards the faithful and punishes those who are not.  

Table 1                                                                                                                                                                                                      God exists                            God doesn't exist                         You believe                           Eternal bliss! (4)                Death is final (2)    

 You don't believe               Eternal pain! (1)                 Death is final (3)                

The number to the right of each outcome represents the desirability of that outcome relative to the others, under the assumption that God rewards faith and desires that we have faith.  When you believe and God exists you get eternal bliss.  Given the assumptions made by Pascal and most believers, this is the most desired outcome and so it is worth four points.  On the other hand if God exists and you don't believe, this is the worst outcome because you suffer eternal pain in hell.  Therefore this outcome is scored a one.  The two outcomes in which God does not exist are more neutral outcomes for Pascal.  However, Pickover gives believing in a God that doesn't exist a lower point value than not believing when God doesn't exist in order to reflect the skeptic's idea that you do lose at least something by wasting your life on blind faith in a non-existent God and an afterlife that will never materialize.

Drawing from this criticism of the assumption that God wants us to have blind faith, Pickover re-presents Table 1 based on the alternative assumption that God prefers and rewards reason and rational thought over blind faith, even if that rational thought leads one to conclude that God does not exist.  This re-worked table appears as follows:

 Table 2                                                                                                                                                                                                   God exists                            God doesn't exist                    You believe                         Punishment for                     Dead wrong (2)                                                                                credulity! (1)

You don't believe              Reward for rationality!      Dead right (3)                                                                                 (4)                                                                                                 

In this reinvented wager, the best bet is not believing!  If God exists and you don't believe you are rewarded because God knows that there is little or no rational and empirical evidence of his existence so far as our evolution and scientific-technological advances allow us to discern.  

On the other hand, believing in God is actually the worst bet!  If God does exist you are punished for your credulity because God intends for us to use the rational minds it gave rather than blindly believing what some book or priest or other purportedly holy person or thing tells us.

This is the wager that I prefer.  I refuse to believe that any kind and loving God would punish us for using the mental faculties with which it endowed us.  If such a cruel trickster God does exist, it is not a God I want to associate myself with, let alone worship.