HoP 485 Liz Jackson on Pascal's Wager

Peter Adamson· Host0:00

[instrumental music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Pascal's Wager with Liz Jackson, who is associate professor of philosophy at St. Louis University. Hello, Liz.

Liz Jackson· Guest0:32

Hi, Peter. Thanks so much for having me on.

Peter Adamson· Host0:35

Yeah, thanks for coming on. It's exciting to have an expert on this topic. You've published a lot about it, and we're going to look at some of the things you have to say [chuckles] about this, but not all of them- Oh, definitely ... by any means. I presented the wager in the previous episode, but just to make sure we're all on the same page, can you give us a quick overview of how it's usually taken to work?

Liz Jackson· Guest0:55

Absolutely. The way I often like to present it is in contrast to maybe the more familiar arguments for God's existence. So people might have heard of ontological argument, or the cosmological argument, or the fine-tuning argument, design argument. These arguments really mean to provide evidence for the existence of God. They raise the probability that God exists. Their conclusion is often just, you know, God exists, or there is a God, or something like that, right? And so these arguments are instructive, I think, for understanding Pascal's Wager because Pascal's Wager is not an argument that concludes just that God exists, and it actually isn't meant to give evidence that God exists