bannerbckground

The Sure Bet

 

God is, or He is not.

-- Blaise Pascal

What are the odds that God exists, and how would you bet if your life depended on the outcome? According to the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, the answer is obvious. When the outcome is uncertain, you weigh the consequences and choose accordingly. If you choose to believe in God and he exists, you win. If you choose not to believe and it turns out God exists, so much the worse for you. On the other hand, if God doesn’t exist, you are no worse off, whether you believed in him or not. As far as Pascal was concerned, choosing to believe is the closest thing you can get to a sure bet.

If nothing else, Pascal’s famous wager may have helped put an end to a particular philosophical conceit known as the ontological proof. Philosophers with nothing better to do would think up arguments for the existence of God, based on reasoning alone. St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 11th century, is generally regarded as the first to try his hand at this exercise. Anselm reasoned that if God were the greatest thing that could be conceived of, then he must exist in reality as well as in the mind, since if he existed only in the mind, there would be something greater in reality than God – a logical contradiction. Pascal’s contemporary, Rene Descartes, came up with a similar argument based on God’s perfection.

Pascal swept all such reasoning aside by declaring flatly that God’s existence could never be proved. Either he existed, or he did not -- so where does that leave you? Whatever you might think of this as a theological proposition, Pascal was breaking new ground in an altogether different intellectual realm. His wager is regarded as the first application of what is now called decision theory, which is concerned with making the best choice when outcomes are uncertain. Pascal was a mathematician as well as a philosopher, and along with Pierre de Fermat is credited with laying the foundations of modern probability theory. More to the point, he and Fermat had taken an interest in games of chance. Pascal’s friend, the Chevalier de Méré, had gotten cleaned out playing a certain dice game and turned to Pascal for help in improving his odds. An exchange of letters between Pascal and Fermat ensued, and the Chevalier de Méré learned when to place his bets.

Pascal’s novel contribution to theology was to recast the question of God’s existence as a betting proposition. His argument is reasonably straightforward; however, it involves numerous assumptions that have come under challenge. For starters, there is the issue of how one chooses to believe. To many of Pascal’s critics, belief is not a matter of choice: either you believe in God, or you do not. Even if you accept Pascal’s logic, how do you will yourself to believe in God, merely because it is a safe bet to do so? And wouldn’t God see through any going-through-the-motions sort of belief merely to cover a bet?

Then there is the question of exactly what kind of God you choose to believe in. Pascal, a devout Catholic, assumed that the God you choose to believe in is the one he believed in. But what of the God or gods that Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or even Protestants believe in? Would not the same logic apply to any and all? What if you bet on the wrong god? Voltaire, as skeptical as Pascal was devout, dismissed the wager as “indecent and childish” and declared that it proved nothing. He may not have been a practicing Christian, but he practiced what he preached. He later refused entreaties to make a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, apparently unpersuaded to the end that it was his best bet.

We come finally to the most critical assumption of all: Why do we need to choose between belief and unbelief? Pascal makes the wager mandatory, without providing a convincing rationale for doing so. The implicit assumption is that unbelievers will be punished for their lack of faith, and there is some scriptural support for this position. Jesus himself is quoted in the Gospel of Mark as telling his disciples, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.” But did Jesus really say this? Many biblical scholars believe the last dozen verses of Mark’s gospel, which include this saying, were not part of the earliest gospel manuscripts and may have been tacked on later. Certainly it is hard to square this sentiment with the Jesus who prayed while dying on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”* Why would Jesus ask forgiveness of those who had unjustly condemned him to death and yet not forgive those who merely lacked faith?

There is something monstrous in the notion that God would condemn those who, for whatever reason, are unable to believe. The God I believe in would never force such a choice upon us. He is a God of forgiveness, which fundamentally alters the terms of the wager. If I choose to believe, and God exists, so much the better. But if I don’t believe and God exists, I am forgiven. With Pascal’s wager, it is never smart to bet against the house. But with a God of forgiveness, all bets are off.

Mark 16:16
*The authenticity of this verse (Luke 23:34) has also been questioned.

Home

www.godwardweb.org
© Copyright 2004-2020 by Eric Rennie
All Rights Reserved