# Lesson 1.8: The Ace of Spades

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409/lesson-1-8-the-ace-of-spades
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409/lesson-1-8-the-ace-of-spades.md
Podcast: [The Luxury of Virtue](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409)
Published: 2026-03-11T00:01:48+00:00
Episode link: https://zencastr.com/z/mP0k12V4
Audio file: https://redirect.zencastr.com/r/episode/69b0b0ec1bdac4c3cd9a7ec6/size/1682446396/video-files/64df8cc3b9f97166287697c5/f783cd33-b781-4671-a5a5-e3aa23aad710.mp4
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409/episodes/lesson-1-8-the-ace-of-spades
Duration seconds: 4091

## Resource

If we can't prove whether God exists, should we treat belief like a gamble—and choose the option with the best payoff? Topics discussed: * The philosophical dilemma of whether belief in God should be based on reason, faith, or skepticism. * Major positions on the existence of God: rational theism, fideism, deism, atheism, non-theism, and agnosticism. * The life and intellectual background of Blaise Pascal, mathematician, theologian, and pioneer of probability theory. * The historical origins of probability theory, including early work by gamblers like Gerolamo Cardano and Pascal's correspondence with Fermat. * The concept of expected utility and how decision theory evaluates rational choices under uncertainty. * The structure of Pascal's Wager, which argues that believing in God maximizes expected value because of the possibility of infinite reward. * Mathematical objections to the wager, including the Many Gods objection and the Zero Probability objection. * Psychological and ethical objections, including doxastic involuntarism, the moral integrity objection, and the Many Hells objection.

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## Transcript

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