Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pascal’s Wager is probably the most analysed apologetic argument in the history of apologetics. What has often been the case, however, is that this piece of Pascal’s Pensées has often been misinterpreted and taken out of the Pascal’s total apologetic work. For that reason, the Wager has been misappropriated and has undergone a battery of misplaced criticism. Taken in its proper context, the Wager is a beautiful vindication of the Christian faith, cleverly constructed to make the sceptic re-think his position and contemplate the importance of the Christian faith. Much confusion exists about the placement of this particular Pensées, and where it is situated in his overall apology (Pensées 418) lends itself to the challenge of what has become “the Many Gods Objection.” For that reason, I would suggest that Pascal’s Wager belongs at the very beginning of his Pensées, where the rest of the Pensées are an explanation for the reason Christianity is the most attractive belief. Postmodern philosophers have re-appropriated the Wager and made it fit their own philosophical and theological presuppositions playing in the hands of the “Many-Gods-Objection.” This paper describes the beauty of Pascal’s Wager in its proper context and expresses the erroneous postmodern appropriation of the Wager.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".