What loaded questions!  Years of thought, and I must summarize them in so limited a space.  But I will try.

I agree with you that it is an interesting way to look at life—I have marvelled at the thought ever since I first read about it.  Ever since the mere suggestion was hinted to my mind I have wondered many a time, could it really be that we are all just wild gamblers, our lives being given to us as what we are forced to wager?

The context for the thought is the short yet amazing life of Blaise Pascal, a scientist who lived a mere 39 years in the 1600s.  Despite the genius of his scientific work, the most remarkable parts of his life were only discovered after he died. First a servant found a poem sewn just inside the breast of his jacket he died in, a poem which he apparently wrote to recount an experience he had with God that changed his life forever.  Also found after he died were fragments of some sort of magnum opus he was planning to publish as a book (these fragments have since been collected and published under the name Pensees, French for “thoughts”).  On one of these fragments was a thought that has rattled the wits of many thinkers ever since.  It is his famous wager argument.

He writes it as a dialogue between him and an unbeliever, and so as to say he will be only using human reason, accessible to all, he begins by saying, “Let us now speak according to natural lights.” 

Pascal has already written before this dialogue that whichever way reality is, whether we have a soul or do not, whether there is a God or not, is truly astonishing.  So here he writes:

“Let us then examine this point, and say, “God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.” 

Someone may say that that they have good reasons to not believe in God—yet another may say he has good reasons! So which is it? The Reason is confused. Think of all the variables that must be sorted in order to figure out if God exists! All the scenes of human interaction throughout time, all the thoughts there ever could be, the depths of space—because of this, “an infinite chaos seperates us.”  But Pascal’s unbeliever thinks that perhaps because of this we ought to not wager at all (Pascal first, unbeliever in single quotes):

“Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. ‘No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.’

Pascal responds simply:

“Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. ‘That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.’”

In a very roundabout way Pascal then says that even if we were only betting to win three lives we should still wager—but in actuality there is an eternity of happiness we are wagering for.  Continuing on, his counterpart concedes the point, but says he is incapable of choosing to believe, and then Pascal answers this and takes us to the end:

“‘I confess it, I admit it. But, still, is there no means of seeing the faces of the cards?’ Yes, Scripture and the rest, etc. ‘Yes, but I have my hands tied and my mouth closed; I am forced to wager, and am not free. I am not released, and am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?’

True. But at least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. ‘But this is what I am afraid of.’ And why? What have you to lose?

Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

‘Ah! This discourse transports me, charms me,’ etc.

If this discourse pleases you and seems impressive, know that it is made by a man who has knelt, both before and after it, in prayer to that Being, infinite and without parts, before whom he lays all he has, for you also to lay before Him all you have for your own good and for His glory, that so strength may be given to lowliness.”

So there Pascal, with piercing honesty, explains how he thinks the world is simply one large casino.  All men play to win happiness, and if this is so, we ought to wager our lives that God is.  We must wager since we cannot reach a conclusion based on reason, which is paralyzed in the face of so many variables.

Soren Kierkegaard was a thinker who lived in the 19th century and became upset with the church in his country, the Danish church, for being too complacent and unenthusiastic about the gospel.  In response to this he wrote a work called “Either/Or.”  In it he explains that either Jesus really did walk out of the tomb on the third day, and this should affect us in the radical way that it did his disciples, producing in us true joy in life and daily love for each other and God, death having been truly conquered, or it is not true, and is therefore of no importance. 

C.S. Lewis, writing in just this past century, says it most simply: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” 

But these are recent thinkers—this line of thought started with Paul, writing to the church in Corinth twenty years after Jesus died: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”  Everything hinges, then, on whether Jesus was raised from the dead.

Whether Jesus rose from the dead or not, it is clear that his disciples believed he did, for it was their bold streetside testimony in Jerusalem is what started what is now called Christianity.  And from those first ears hearing the message down to ours, the question has stood—either Jesus rose from the dead and is the risen lord of life, having conquered death so that we may now have life in his name, or the whole thing is false, no more true than a bedtime story, and the idea that he did rise is the most enormous fraud on record.   

Today there are scholars that make the case that the historical evidence implies strongly that the resurrection happened.  Others argue to the contrary, that there is not good evidence.  So which shall we choose?  It is here that we find we must wager our lives one way or the other.  Most people answer this question by gradually accepting the assumptions of those around them, and therefore wager their lives without any conscious awareness of the fact. 

Many do not like this way of looking at things, thinking it seems insincere, or that it is weird to think life is a bet, and I agree.  I think consideration of life as a wager only makes sense in context of the rest of the variables in the discussion, so that it is not the only element.  The great back-and-forth dialogue in our minds about meaning is the context in which the wager idea should be considered. 

And I find it helpful—for if you wonder and search, is Jesus really Lord?, and you always find just enough evidence to almost convince you, but never so that it is completely convincing, you then think how weird it is that we have something that would be almost right, like we have an entire idea that was this close to being the truth of everything.  And if it does seem so very close to being true, perhaps in the end it is true, and the reason that God has not simply revealed it to us decisively and convincingly is because if he did we would not have the option to choose to love him, since we would be coerced into relationship with him by the overwhelming evidence given to us.  God gives enough light for those who want to be in relationship with him to believe, and enough darkness to confuse those who do not want to believe.   

How amazing this all is!  It is truly extraordinary that this consideration is before us.  For it is true—I know people who do this very thing, they look to Jesus and choose to give up their lives for him.  This being the case, the question is then laid before us.  And it is true—when I think of it, I do think that Jesus rose from the dead on that first easter morning, and from this one fact everything is changed.  Because of this I count myself a disciple, a person who follows him, and loves him, and tries to obey him (with much failure), for he is everything if he really did rise from the dead.  And as I continue life with Jesus, I find more and more how full of grace he is, loving and kind, and that as Pascal said, the joy we have in this life, and that which is to come in the next, is so great that when we consider it next to our brief, trite lives we realize it is an infinite good ”for which you have given nothing.”

That is the history of the thought, as it has echoed down to us today where the present generation of humans is faced with the options of how to live life just the same.  And what will we do?  We can look at the people around us, and see how they have chosen to live their lives, and that is their bet.  My friend Alex put the idea in my head to write a story about it.  And lately I have realized anyways that simply stating conclusions does not make people think as much as a recreation of the experience of the idea.  Here Mr. Jones is the one experiencing the idea for the first time, which is why the dealer remains nameless. 

Sorry if that was lengthy and you already knew a good deal of it; but that is the context for thinking of the story, and what my eternal gamble is.