“God is, or He is not,” wrote Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. But which side to choose? His wager, as it was known, went something like this: weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. . . . If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. Heads or tails. In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter so much what we believe. Danish physicist and Nobelist Niels Bohr once hung a horseshoe over his doorway. Appalled friends exclaimed that surely he didn’t put any trust in such pathetic superstition. “No, I don’t,” he replied with
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