Suppose that you have a friend who was raised Catholic (or at least Christian) but is now having doubts about whether God exists. You’ve given him a number of books about evidence for the Christian faith, but they haven’t really clicked for him. On the other hand, neither have arguments against Christianity. He feels torn between belief and unbelief, unable to resolve whether to be a Christian or an agnostic.
Your strategy of giving him more evidence doesn’t seem to be what he needs, so you wonder: Is there something else you can do, some way of helping him break out of his dilemma?
According to one of the most important apologists in the last 500 years, there is.
Short Life, Sharp Mind
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician who, in the most improbable manner, became the greatest apologist of his day. A child prodigy in mathematics, he wrote a number of brilliant papers solving mathematical problems. He became a follower of Jansenism, a seventeenth-century heresy that held, among other things, that Christ died not for all men but only for those who will be finally saved. When he was 23 years old, Pascal fell away from the rigors of the heresy and spent a number of years living a worldly life.
At 31, he experienced a profound mystical experience that convinced him to retire from the world. He ended up withdrawing to Port-Royal, a Benedictine abbey that was a hotbed of the Jansenist heresy. From there Pascal composed two major works, his Provincial Letters, which attacked and satirized the Jesuits, and his Pensées.
The Pensées (French, thoughts) were a collection of notes for Apologie de la Religion Chrétienne (Apology for the Christian Religion) that Pascal planned to write. He never got the chance. A malignant growth in his stomach spread to his brain, and he died August 19, 1662, at the age of 39. His notes for this unwritten work were published posthumously and, despite the fact that many are mere scraps that give little insight into what he was thinking, some are of such quality that they have made Pascal one of the most famous apologists in history.
Many of the Pensées are notes about traditional apologetic arguments, like fulfilled prophecy and miracles. But the most famous is a piece called Infinite—Nothing(no. 233), and it gave the world a distinctly non traditional argument now known as Pascal’s Wager.
This note represents Pascal at his most frustrating. He has a Major Insight, but he can’t figure out how to express it clearly or simply, so he makes several stabs at getting the idea down. The original piece of paper containing the note is a mess, with writing going in several directions, lots erasures, and corrections.
Because of the mess, it is notoriously difficult to summarize the Wager. Pascal gives at least three different versions of the same general argument, and philosophers have been driven nuts trying to give a precise account of what he was saying.
What They Did for Fun Before Television
To understand the Wager, one needs to understand a principle element in its development: gambling. Since seventeenth-century France didn’t have television, the Internet, or paintball, gambling was a major pastime. So major, in fact, that it helped push back the boundaries of mathematical knowledge. People wanted better ways of knowing which bets were safe and which weren’t. As a result, the foundations of game theory and probability calculus were laid. Pascal helped in this effort.
He realized was that game theory provides a means of practical decision making about important matters—i.e., money—when a person is uncertain of the outcome. The brilliant insight that lies behind the Wager is that some.aspects of this theory can be applied to other, similar matters about which one is uncertain. One such matter is religion.
Pascal realized that this reasoning might appeal to dissolute French gamblers in a way that traditional apologetics did not. In his day, an awful lot of Frenchmen had been raised Catholic but were tempted by agnosticism. Many, unreachable by traditional apologetics, seemed stuck between belief and unbelief. Pascal sought to reach them by taking one of their favorite pastimes and turning it in a spiritual direction.
You Bet Your Life!
Here’s one way of stating the Wager: Assume that you are torn between belief and non-belief in God based on the evidence. You have to pick one or the other, because belief and non-belief are opposites. Anything other than belief in God is, by definition, non-belief (typically agnosticism or atheism, if you were a seventeenth-century European).
If you are forced to choose between belief and non-belief and can’t decide based on the evidence, how can you resolve the situation? Pascal suggests that you look to your interests, just as you would in an uncertain situation where you had to take one bet or another.
So which is it? Belief or non-belief in God?
Since the options that Pascal is considering are (essentially) Catholicism and agnosticism, it is fairly easy to lay out how belief and non-belief affect your interests. Concerning happiness, he writes, “Let us 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.”
In other words, if you embrace belief in God and you are right, you get an eternity of happiness in heaven; if you are wrong you lose nothing, since you go to the oblivion that awaits you anyway if there is no God and no afterlife. Since the first option maximizes your interests, you should choose to embrace belief.
You have probably heard the flipside of this argument: If you choose not to believe in God and you are wrong, you get an eternity of agony in hell; if you choose not to believe in him and you’re right, you get oblivion again. Since you can avoid hell if God does exist but can’t avoid oblivion if he doesn’t, then once again you should embrace belief.
The “hell” version is probably the most common way of putting the argument, though Pascal himself doesn’t explore that side of it. I suspect it is more popular because, for most of us (given our sense of sin), the thought of unending pain is more of a motivator than the thought of unending bliss.
Let the Objections Begin
People have made objections to every argument for why you should believe in God, and you can bet that an argument as nontraditional as Pascal’s Wager has been subjected to a large number of objections. Some of these Pascal himself anticipated and provided answers for in the Infinite—Nothing note. Others he could not easily have foreseen.
Part of the problem is that we are working from an unpublished note he wrote to remind himself of the general lines along which he wanted to flesh out his argument. It wasn’t intended to be a fully developed, publishable version of the Wager.
Thus one has to work with Pascal to tease out the insight he is trying to express. I must confess to some occupational sympathy for him. As an apologist, I would be uncomfortable with the idea of people rummaging through my hard drives after my death and publishing my raw, unedited notes for books I had been thinking about writing. Should they do so, I at least would want the notes to be read in the most charitable light possible, since I didn’t get the chance to fine-tune my half-articulated arguments.
Certainly Pascal was on to something. The Wager has become one of the most famous arguments—or, more precisely, argument styles —for why a person should believe in God. It has provided comfort to a lot of people doubting the existence of God. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the most popular objections to the Wager.
The Many Religions Objection
Probably the most popular objection today is one that Pascal could not have anticipated. Unlike French people in the 1600s, we live in a world in which we are acutely aware of the variety of religious options. It is no longer a choice simply between Catholicism and agnosticism or—put more broadly—a choice between Western theism and atheistic agnosticism. Consequently, many people object to the Wager on the grounds that it doesn’t address other religious positions.
True. But to demand this of the Wager is to press it beyond the bounds Pascal intended. It was never meant as a decision procedure for deciding between all religious options, only between two.
Kept in its intended role, it (or some version of it) is a useful tool. In the nineteenth century, the philosopher William James wrote an excellent piece on Pascal’s Wager titled “The Will to Believe” (you can find it on the Internet). He points out that at any given moment we are only drawn toward certain options. He calls them “live options.” If belief in the God of the Bible and atheist-leaning skepticism are your two live options at the moment, then the Wager can help.
The Evil God Objection
Sometimes people argue, “What if God exists, but he will send people to hell if they believe in him—or, at least, if they believe in him purely because of the Wager? In that case, it wouldn’t be in your interest to believe in him.”
True, but do we have any reason to think that this is the case? The world doesn’t seem to be pragmatically perverse, such that seeking our good normally results in the opposite. As long as I don’t have any evidence that such an evil, damn-my-believers God exists, believing in him isn’t a live option for me. I’m not tempted to believe in such a God, and the Wager is only meant to help me decide between things I am tempted to believe. Again, the argument is being pressed beyond its role by adding another religious option.
The Evidence Objection
Many people note that Pascal’s Wager is a pragmatic argument rather than an evidential one: It does not argue that God exists, it argues that you should believe that God exists. Those who voice this objection maintain one should not believe anything without sufficient evidence for it. Since Pascal’s Wager gives us no evidence that God exists, one shouldn’t believe on its basis.
In “The Will to Believe,” James points out that there is a problem with the evidence rule, at least as Pascal’s critics are advancing it. If you really are in a situation where based on the evidence you can’t decide between believing and not believing something, then you have to make the decision based on something else. You have to make it because there are no other alternatives besides believing or not believing something, and you can’t decide based on evidence because of the situation you’re in.
At such times, James argues, one must make the decision based on something else, and the typical thing we use is what he calls our “passional nature,” which includes the desire to promote our own good.
If I am on my deathbed and can’t wait for more evidence to tip the scales—or if I am at any other point where I need to move on and think about something else—it is appropriate for me to embrace belief on the grounds that I want to go to heaven.
I would take matters a step further and argue that our passional nature’s desire for good does constitute a form of evidence. Our passions—our desire to eat, to sleep, to move around, to flee danger—are oriented toward our good. Given the way of the world, if we never ate, slept, moved around, or fled danger, we’d die. Thus our passions tell us something about the way the world is. They are a kind of indirect evidence about it.
Given that, and in the absence of decisive evidence to the contrary (like reason to think that there is an evil God who damns his believers), there is no reason not to trust my desire to go to heaven when it tells me to seek God. In the same way, there is no reason not to trust my desire to eat when it tells me to seek food. The presumption is that both passions are oriented to my good unless proven otherwise. And they both provide indirect evidence about the world I live in: One where both God and food exist.
This covers the situation envisioned by Pascal’s first presentation of the Wager, where someone feels the evidence for God and against God is even. What about the other form we looked at, where someone feels the evidence is against God’s existence?
Here the evidence objection has more plausibility. There is a better case to be made that one should stick to the evidence and ignore game theory considerations when the evidence strongly points to one bet rather than another.
Let’s suppose that the objection succeeds to the point of showing that it is not rational to believe in God for any non-zero chance that he exists. It may be possible to revise the Wager in such a way that it is still serviceable.
Mr. Spock might go around calculating the mathematical probability that the God of the Bible exists, but ordinary people don’t. Instead, they develop a “gut feel” for the evidence. As a result, some people might feel that the evidence is sufficient to make belief in the Christian God reasonable even if they do not feel it is sufficient to require belief.
For such people, Pascal’s revised version of the Wager might be appropriate. In this case the argument could tell you: As long as you feel that the evidence makes it reasonable to believe in the Christian God, let your best interests tell you to go ahead and make the leap of faith to becoming a believer.
This corresponds to the way things are, anyway. While Catholic theology holds that it is possible (for at least some people) to prove with certainty the existence of a God by natural reason, it is different when showing that this God is the God of the Bible. Miracles and fulfilled prophecy provide motives of credibility to believe in the God of the Bible, but there remains a gap that must be bridged by a leap of faith.
The Hypocritical Believer Objection
Some have objected that God wouldn’t want people to believe in him just because they want to go to heaven. That would make them hypocrites. Several replies are in order:
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- Then why did the apostles go about telling people to believe in order to gain salvation? Self-interest is clearly presented as a motive for belief in the apostolic message. It’s okay to believe in order to be saved.
- Pascal isn’t encouraging hypocrites who merely go through the motions of the Christian life. He’s urging people to really and sincerely become believers in God.
- Our greatest good is to be united with God by the beatific vision, which is the essence of heaven. Seeking our greatest good thus consists in seeking union with God. There is no separating the two.
The “I Can’t Control My Beliefs” Objection
The hypocritical believer objection seems to be motivated by the fact that often our beliefs don’t seem fully under our control. That is what prompts the image of someone merely going through the motions of the Christian life without really committing to belief in God. What may one make of the objection that for many it does not seem possible to control our beliefs?
Pascal anticipates this objection when he writes, “You would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound [in unbelief] like you and who now stake all their possessions [on God’s existence]. These are people who know the way which you would follow and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having Masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.”
For those who find an emotional barrier to belief in God, Pascal recommends doing things that will overcome this barrier: Act on the assumption that God exists and strive to live the Christian life as sincerely as one can. Eventually the emotional barrier may melt, and you may realize that you really do believe in God.
The Cost of the Christian Life
Of course, many don’t want to live the Christian life because of the cost—like giving up the pleasures of being a dissolute French gambler.
Pascal anticipates this and has two responses. First, he points out that these costs are nothing compared to what you stand to gain. Even if there is a tiny, finite cost in this life (or even if it costs you this life as a whole), that is still nothing compared to the infinite life of bliss you stand to gain.
Second, Pascal argues that you aren’t really losing anything. Even in this life what you will gain by being a Christian outweighs the self-restraint you must show, leaving you better off even if there were no heaven.
He writes, “Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.”
