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I once listened to a lecture by a brilliant Franciscan, and I'm sure my paraphrasal will horribly dilute the gravity of his remarks...

He began with the popular definitioin of Faith as the suspension of logic...attributing to that which cannot be proven, all the weight, veracity and credibility of that which is proven.

Most persons, whether or not they believe, can agree on this as a working definition of faith...even those who may ridicule the faithful who believe things without proof, can agree on what faith is. By doing so, They acknowledge that contentions can be generally divided into the, "Proven," and the, "Unproven." (As an aside here, we must also acknowledge that the act of, "proving," is a uniquely human function, and therefore subject to error; which implies that the blind acceptance of, "proven," postulates may be as faulty as the blind acceptance of the, "unproven!")

For those of us who choose to believe in moral absolutes, universal truths, "things..self evident," and, "inalienable," we must do so without proof, and if in the greater scheme of things, they do in fact exist, those of us who choose to believe in them are...correct. If, in the greater scheme of things, they do not exist, and there are no universal laws or moral constants, then what we choose to believe matters not, and by definition is no more right or wrong than any other person's belief! The flip-side of this coin is of course, if they do exist, and we choose to reject them, well...

Which brings us to Pascal's Wager, which is attributed to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a French mathematician and philosopher. Pascal was one of the first to think about the mathematics of probability. He drew upon his work on probability in order to formulate an argument that is supposed to show that it is rational to believe in God (and irrational not to do so). Essentially, he argues that it is a better bet to believe God exists than to believe God doesn't exist.

Pascal states that there are two possibilities concerning God's existence: either God exists or God doesn't exist. He then notes that there are two possibilities concerning whether you believe God exists: either you believe God exists or you don't. That makes for four possible combinations with very different outcomes associated with each combination. Pascal adds that we have no way of proving whether or not God exists, so we can't make any claims about which of the possible outcomes is likely.

I put the outcomes in this table, hopefully the HTML works:

God Exists		God Doesn't Exist
You believe God exists	Heaven	Slight loss
You don't believe God exists	Hell	Slight gain

Pascal points out that there is only a slight gain from living as if God does not exist even if that is the case, because the world has ways of appling consequences to actions with or with out God. For example, promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases.

Therefore, declared Pascal, it is better to bet on God.