Pascal's Wager [SEP] named after
Pascal's wager
Pascal's wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). It posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not.
Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains
the wager.
Many criticisms have explained that the wager has been used as a supposed theory of the necessity to believe, although that was never Pascal's intention. As Laurent Thirouin writes: 
To be put at the beginning of Pascal's planned book, the wager was meant to show that logical reasoning cannot support faith or lack thereof, Pascal's intended book was precisely to find other ways to establish the value of faith, an apology for the Christian faith.
Criticism.
Criticism of Pascal's Wager