In yesterday’s blog post I raised a question about thinking. We think all the time, habitually and without even being aware of it. I alerted the difference between knowing and understanding which is subtle but still worth noting. Our minds are precious tools allowing us to understand great things—for instance the very fact that we know things without even knowing how we know. Take my beloved theme infinity, we know that infinity is infinite without knowing how we know. That is interesting, and I recommend you give it some thought one of these days. 😉

Anyhow, today I want to touch upon a somewhat related issue, namely knowing vs believing. And I wonder which is the more reliable? Now, this is interesting. Normally we would say that knowing is the stronger. But is that really true?

Let us see. We know that we are here, that we are human beings, that the Earth is our home; we know about evolution, the cellular processes and the genetic progression; and we know that we did not start it ourselves.

All this we know, which of course comes to show that we know a lot. But what about belief then, what do we know about believing?

The 17th century prodigy scholar, Blaise Pascal, is among other things famous for his thought-experiment called The Wager, in which Pascal asks if we can know that God exists—and he concludes that we cannot. We can neither prove nor disprove it. He calls it a 50/50 bet and proposes a wager to sort it out, saying, - "let’s spin a coin and make our bets". And that is actually as close to knowledge as we can get in this regard.

But Pascal does not stop there. He goes on to advise us to bet for the positive outcome, in other words, betting for that God actually do exist. And he does so for rational reasons. He says that if we bet for God, and God do exist, we are in a good spot since we bet for the winning team, whereas if we bet against, we sort of lose either way since even if we are right, and God does not exist, our best gain is indifference, status Q, a knowledge that don’t take us anywhere. And thus, being forced to take either position, betting for is the rational choice.

Now, I am not a religious person. (Remember that the Infinity Principle does not require a creator since it is infinite.) But I am interested in the issue of purpose. Does life—does existence—does reality as such, have a purpose? Well, we don’t know. To be honest, we do not even know what we mean by such question. Personally, I honor the reasoning made by Blaise Pascal even if I don’t share his particular belief. I chose to believe in purpose, and with the help of Blaise Pascal, I do so for good reasons. When I chose to believe in purpose, even when I impossibly can know, at least not within this lifetime, I gain entrance to a more positive worldview. Thus I find believing worthwhile and in that sense superior even to scientific knowledge. (This was a little thought-excursion on the path of understanding that which we cannot know, I hope that was understood 😘)