Following a profound religious experience in 1654? Pascal abandoned mathematics and physics for philosophy and theology. His work Pensees (1670), a classic of devotional literature, was published posthumously. It includes "Pascal's wager", his argument that belief in God is justified as a "good bet", regardless of any metaphysical uncertainty, because disbelief has great cost if wrong, while belief if wrong costs nothing. Pascal's wager suffers from the logical fallacy of false dilemma, relying on the assumption that the only possibilities are that the Christian god exists or that no god exists. The wager cannot rule out the possibility that there is a god who instead rewards skepticism and punishes blind faith, for example. Variations of this argument can be found in other religious philosophies, such as Hinduism. In his own time, Pascal was severly criticised by Voltaire.
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