Transformed by faith

Abstract

Appealing to self-interest is a common way of justifying the rationality of religious faith. For instance, Pascal's wager relies upon the expected value of choosing the life of faith being infinite. Similarly, many contemporary arguments for the rationality of faith turn on whether it is beter for an agent to have faith rather than lack it. In this paper, I argue, contra Pascal, that considerations of self-interest do not make choosing faith rational because they fail to take into account the way the self is transformed by faith.