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Pascal and Laplace: Probabilities of the Divine and Divine Probabilities


 

Pascal's Wager is the opportunity for a mathematician turned theologian to justify their view of cosmic order in the mathematical ways they've come to know.  What's the pay off if you're right and what's the pay off if you're wrong.  If the pay off for being right far outweighs that for being wrong, should we out of principle take the wager?

Ask Laplace and we have a different framing.  Now probability has replaced the divine role so the aspect of choice has been eliminated.  Probability no longer informs a bet on divine order, divine order is a subsidiary part of probability.  Laplace's famous demon is not an impossible gambit on an all-controlling deity as popularly assumed, but a thesis that cosmic order can be predicated by sheer mathematical analysis.  Pascal's world still contains Christian state law, but Laplace's does not.  How do we culturally bind people without such moral institutions?



It turns out fairly easily.  We don't need to get to Galton to see statistical laws of population organization in action.  One of Laplace's examples is the then recent innovation of vaccines, one of the many social goods that arrive from mass action.  This is not the mass action of church-going, of finding legitimate community in a common and regular space.  No space is needed, purpose is individualized, communal relations are replaced by a threshold of independent behaviours.

Pascal with time came to ask differently how he could order his life - had he lived a century and a half later, there may not have been such a tension between the Pascal of geometric and cosmic spirit.  A gambling approach allowed him sufficient reason to find an alliance with his world, just as it did for Laplace over a hundred years later.  The question remains of who's gambling, is it you or is it someone else?  Either way the laws of probability will follow through their logical outcome.

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