Audio only:
In this episode Trent shows how many people misunderstand the most popular argument for belief in God.
Faithfully Taking Pascal’s Wager
Transcription:
Trent:
If you’re going to believe God exists, you need a good argument for God’s existence, right? Well, maybe not many people believe that the smartest thing to do is to just believe in God because that’s a safe bet named after the 17th century. Intellectual blaze Pascal Pascal’s wager is a pragmatic argument for belief in God regardless of whether God exists. But the problem with Pascal’s wager is that almost everybody gets it wrong. This includes critics of the wager, neutral educational sources about the wager and even Christians who try to use it as part of their case for believing in God. So in today’s episode, we’re going to see why the popular summaries of Pascal’s wager don’t work and why Pascal’s actual advice is good for any thoughtful person to follow. But before we do that, I hope you’ll subscribe to this channel because if you do that you have everything to gain and little to lose in being notified of our new content.
And please consider supporting us for as little as $5 a month@trenthornpodcast.com. Now before we talk about the wager, we need to understand Blaze Pascal, who was a 17th century mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and Catholic writer. His contributions to probability theory helped create modern economics and he also invented the first mechanical calculator later in life. He attempted to write a book on Christian apologetics, but he died in 16th 62. Before he finished the book, Pascal’s unpublished notes were collected into a work a few years later called Thoughts or Pene in French, one of the notes called the Infinite Nothing Note contains what we call Pascal’s wager when it comes to belief in God, Pascal wrote the following, let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is, let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing wager than without hesitation that he is. Pascal has much more to say on the subject, but since these are just notes, the original text is difficult to understand and it could be interpreted in different ways. The problem is that many people think Pascal is saying everybody should believe in God because that’s the smartest way to avoid hell. You can see this in neutral sources like this philosophy channel’s description of the wager.
CLIP:
Pascal’s thinking went like this, either God exists or he doesn’t, and reason will never give us an answer. So you must choose blindly to believe or not to believe in God. You can’t abstain from choosing. If you choose to believe in God and he exists, you get an infinite reward. Heaven. If you choose to believe in God and he doesn’t exist, you’re not really out much. If you choose not to believe in God and he doesn’t exist, you also don’t gain much. If you choose not to believe in God and he does exist, you get infinite punishment hell. Therefore the smart bet is to put your chips on God existing every time. Pascal argued that if there is the slightest chance that God exists, even if that chance is low, only a fool would bet against his existence given that the stakes are so high.
Trent:
You also see it in things like this video from an atheist named Brandon at Mindshift who I previously dialogued with on the issue of heaven, offering a comparable decision matrix and here’s the Christian channel, got questions.org summarizing the same outcomes but without a handy decision matrix. Now, there’s no shortage of attempted rebuttals of Pascal’s wager, but they only work because they imagine the wager to be a polished universal argument for belief in God. When you treat it that way, it’s easy to poke holes in it, but Pascal probably intended his wager to apply only to a very limited number of people who are in the best place to benefit from it. This is similar to how atheists try to debunk St. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways for Proving God’s existence with even Richard Dawkins calling the Five Ways Vacuous. Even though Aquinas wasn’t trying to prove God to atheists, Aquinas wasn’t giving a knockdown argument in this part of the Summa theologian. He was just giving novice theology students a quick refresher on common arguments for God’s existence. And when you realize the Summa Theolog was specifically written for beginners, it makes you want to drink a pint of beer to feel better about not being as smart as Aquinas thinks you should be. So to see the problem with modern rebuttals of Pascal’s wager, let’s take a look at the most common objection, the wrong hell problem. Here’s how branded and Mindshift puts it.
CLIP:
It is a false dichotomy. It offers what seems to be the only two options while completely ignoring the thousands of other gods or the fact that even within Christianity there are mutually exclusive ways to believe in this God, or at least to act out that belief. Pascal should have known this better than anyone as he was fighting for a very specific sect within Catholicism, which was supposed to be this one true perfect encapsulation of the religion. We have a rigged casino here. You either bet on the Christian God or you bet on nothing at all, but again, thousands of gods and thousands of conceptions of even this God each with their own afterlife and punishment and rule and reward system. This is of course the only defeater you need
Trent:
Or as Homer Simpson says,
CLIP:
And what if we pick the wrong religion every week? We’re just making God matter and matter testify,
Trent:
And this objection would work if a person had no knowledge of different religions and just randomly picked Christianity to prudentially avoid hell. But in late 17th century France, there were really only two games in town when it came to religion, Catholicism and non theism. Pascal was concerned about his fellow countrymen who were attempted to leave Catholicism for atheism or agnosticism or who had already done so. His audience were people on the fence between the two belief systems, and so Pascal gave them a pragmatic reason to choose Catholicism if they were truly undecided on which view is true. Like Pascal, his audience was aware of pagan tribes and even Islam, but they did not consider these to be serious contenders for the one true religion. Just as most people today don’t consider ancient Greek gods to be serious contenders for the ultimate foundation of reality, even though we have more knowledge of other religions today and in the West, we live in a more plurals society.
A person could still research the question of religion and come to see Christianity or even Catholicism as the only viable alternative to atheism. And so their decision to believe or not is truly a binary wager or choice between two options. For example, the famous agnostic Antony Flu who later converted to deism admitted in a debate with a Christian that the evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity or consider the well-respected atheist Graham Oppi who said of Catholicism that while acknowledging it has its share of puzzles and problems, OPPI still admits that the official theology of the Catholic church IE about the best developed version of traditional western theology, this theology has been worked on by countless extremely intelligent people over a period of nearly 2000 years. If you’re in the position of trying to decide if you should be a Christian or an atheist, then Pascal would say that if you are truly undecided, then you have relatively little to lose and an infinite amount to gain. If you believe so, why not just believe? Well, maybe it’s because you can’t just believe at the drop of a hat. This is called the inability to believe objection, which says the wager is a non-starter because you can’t choose what you believe. Here’s how Alex O’Connor puts this objection.
CLIP:
You still got a pretty big problem on your hands and that is the fact that you can’t choose what to believe in. To illustrate my point, imagine I asked you to start believing that Australia does not exist. I want you to believe that Australia is not there. You can tell yourself that Australia doesn’t exist. You can tell your friends and family that it doesn’t exist. You can ignore photos and videos and you could never book a holiday there, but could you really believe that Australia doesn’t exist when you know the contrary to be true?
Trent:
It’s true. You can’t choose to believe things you already know to be falsehoods because in those cases you’re trying to overrule a very strong belief with a much weaker belief, and so the weaker belief is always going to lose, but in many cases, two beliefs have equal evidence for them and so you can will yourself to accept one over the other if one has practical benefits. For example, a depressed philosophy student might believe there is equal evidence for and against nihilism or the view that life is meaningless, but maybe he wants to be happy so he decides to just live as if life had meaning because that will make him happier. Odds are his beliefs about nihilism being false will catch up to his actions of living a life with meaning and purpose. Remember, Pascal’s wager isn’t meant for everybody. If someone is convinced God is a delusion, then they’ll need to be convinced of agnosticism before they can accept Pascal’s wager and choose between non theism and Christianity.
The wager is ideal for someone who wants Christianity to be true, but just isn’t convinced yet that it is true. Pascal says that we do many things in life like undertake sea voyages or engage in battles without certainty of the outcome because we know the risk of not doing these things incurs greater losses, and Pascal says, you can change your internal beliefs about something by acting like the belief is true. CS Lewis offers similar advice using the decision to be friendly. As an analogy he writes, when you’re not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do very often is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get equality and reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. Now the moment you realize here I am dressing up as Christ, it is extremely likely that you’ll see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretense could be made less of a pretense and more of a reality. Another common objection is called the mercenary objection. It says God won’t reward someone who believes in him simply to avoid punishment or to cash in on heaven through some kind of wager. Christopher Hitchens put the objection this way,
CLIP:
The fantastically cynical God who’s also a bloody fool, a nasty and cynical person who’s also so thick that he would be fooled by me saying, tell you what? On the flip coin that you exist and I need a break. I’ll say I believe in you says, oh, I’m really impressed. Now you’ve just undergone a moral transformation
Trent:
As you already saw with the inability to believe objection. Pascal’s target audience are people who are truly agnostic and want Christianity to be true. They aren’t like the selfish mercenary hitchens critiques. Instead, they’re more like the father who asked Jesus to heal his son even though the father had some doubts because he asked Jesus if he could do anything to please that pity on him, to which Jesus points out that nothing is impossible for those who believe. The Father then honestly asked for Jesus’s help saying, I believe help my unbelief. Also, Pascal did not envision the wager as a cynical way to avoid hell. In fact, Pascal never mentions hell or damnation in this part of the penne. Instead, he’s more worried about losing infinite happiness than gaining infinite punishment. This shows that Pascal is talking about someone who sincerely loves the good and doesn’t want to miss out on it.
As we’ve seen, Pascal recommends that to help a person better believe in God and genuinely engage in the wager, they should act like a Christian which will result in a moral transformation at least in the person’s external actions, and then before they know it within their internal disposition or heart as well. He writes endeavor then to convince yourself not by increase of proofs of God but by the abatement of your passions, you would like to attain faith and do not know the way you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you and who now stake all their possessions. 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, et cetera.
Even this will naturally make you believe and deaden your acuteness, but this is what I’m afraid of and why, what have you to lose. This is also good advice for a Protestant who is on the fence about converting to Catholicism. What do you have to lose? If you say My salvation? Then that would show you aren’t saved by faith alone because you apparently also have to do the good work of not being Catholic in order to be saved, but that very fact disproves sofie or justification by faith alone, and so it further confirms the truth of Catholicism and justifies converting to it. This reply to Hitchens also answers some Christian objections to using Pascal’s wager in evangelistic context. Here’s an objection from got questions.org.
CLIP:
As an apologetic evangelistic tool, the wager seems focused on a risk reward outlook. Jesus labeled obedience as evidence of a love for Christ according to Pascal’s wager. One is choosing to believe and obey God on the basis of receiving heaven as a reward. If our obedience is primarily motivated by the reward of heaven and avoidance of hell, then it’s just a means of achieving our own desires rather than a heart expressing faith and obedience out of love of Christ.
Trent:
First, the apostles routinely called people to conversion by appealing to their individual desires to gain heaven or avoid punishment for sin. In Acts chapter two, Peter convicted the crowd of their sins and then told them to repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Paul and Silas baptize the Philippian jailer and his entire family because the jailer asked them, what must I do to be saved? Our Lord also told people how to receive a reward in heaven. Second, we shouldn’t condemn the good of someone who seeks God simply because he doesn’t want to be punished in the afterlife. Someone doing this isn’t a heartless conman. It’s usually someone with a broken heart. You see sorrow for sin is called contrition, and contrition is perfect if the sorrow comes from a genuine desire to love God and not sin against him.
Contrition is imperfect or called attrition if the sorrow is just over the punishment related to sin, but this isn’t a bad thing. In the wake of the Protestant reformation, the Council of Trent taught quote as to that imperfect contrition, which is called attrition because that it is commonly conceived either from the consideration of the turpitude of sin or from the fear of hell and of punishment. It declares that if with the hope of pardon it exclude the wish to sin, it not only does not make a man a hypocrite and a great sinner, but that it is even a gift of God. Now, the council says attrition is not sufficient itself apart from the sacrament of confession to ordinarily achieve the forgiveness of sins, but it is a starting place and it’s not something God will rebuke. It’s a way of setting someone onto the complete path of conversion to Christ.
The Catholic philosopher Peter Craved also offers some thoughts on this concern related to Pascal’s wager. The wager can seem offensively venal and purely selfish, but it can be reformulated to appeal to a higher moral motive. If there is a God of infinite goodness and he justly deserves my allegiance and faith, I risk doing the greatest injustice by not acknowledging him. The wager cannot or should not coerce belief, but it can be an incentive for us to search for God to study and restudy the arguments that seek to show that there is something or someone who is the ultimate explanation of the universe and of my life. This means the wager is appropriate for someone who is on the fence about Christianity being true, but knows they have violated the moral law and cannot stand before the moral law giver on his own merits. Finally, one common objection is that you lose more than you think in becoming religious, and so it’s not a safe bet.
After all, Pascal anticipates this objection and writes the following Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You’ll be faithful, honest, 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’ll 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 in response. Modern atheists usually double down and say, but what about ma poisonous pleasures? Here’s an atheist named genetically modified skeptic offering a few examples of the pains of being religious.
CLIP:
If you follow just about any given religion, you’re risking a guilt-free sex life. You’ve missed out on living a life that’s free of fear of judgment for thought crime. Everyone has thoughts that aren’t so great but that they don’t act upon, and that’s totally okay. It’s sad that anyone lives a life in fear of judgment for things that they thought but never acted upon
Trent:
First. As the younger generation would say, this is incredibly suss. What thoughts are you talking about that are bad, but hey, at least you didn’t act on them. No, it’s better to be a Christian who as second Corinthians 10, five says, takes every thought captive to Christ than to be some kind of gooner who spends his time fantasizing about things that are so evil. You can’t talk about them on YouTube, and when it comes to a guilt-free sex life, you’re probably talking about fornication and sodomy. Well, maybe those things aren’t all there cracked up to be. Studies consistently show that faithful married couples have more and better sex and more trusting relationships than unmarried people, and maybe a person will be happier when he or she rejects the world’s poisonous sexual pleasures. Here’s Sarah Stock on Jubilee pointing this out to a man who says that God has no problem with sodomy.
CLIP:
I think that love is willing the good of another person. Love is a hard action so you can have consensual sex with someone and that’s not them because participating in homosexual acts is inherently not loving because it’s damaging. How about this? Let’s not pretend to know God’s vision. How come 12 out of love of men you have sex with other men one or more times a week have problems where they are not able to control their bowel movements
Because when?
Well, why? If it’s healthy, if it’s perfectly healthy, and you know that’s
True and that doesn’t mean there are medical facts,
Doesn’t mean that I hate you. It means I don’t want you doing something that’s not natural and it’s not healthy and it’s not good for you or for society’s gay can’t reproducing medical reality.
Trent:
Genetically modified skeptic also says that one of the costs of being religious is that you can’t honestly inquire about the world.
CLIP:
You’ve lost The opportunity to live an intellectually honest life. Exploring science and philosophy openly and honestly is extremely rewarding for a lot of people. I’m one of those people, but unfortunately a lot of religions don’t allow their followers to do that. You’ve missed opportunities to receive evidence-based mental health treatment if you’ve ever received faith-based once you’ve wasted time receiving treatments that haven’t been proven to work, and you probably would’ve been better off if you would’ve received evidence-based treatments all the time.
Trent:
What’s ironic is that non-religious people are much more likely to be trapped in the rait jacket of things like transgender propaganda where they are absolutely forbidden to honestly state things like that. A human being with a penis is a man and not a woman. They also can’t freely inquire into the wrongness of these men using this falsehood to do things like disrobe in women’s locker rooms even when minors are present. I wouldn’t be surprised if genetically modified skeptic holds to this transgender dogma given that he says stuff like this about Christians who correctly say that some young people adopt transgender identities as part of a social trend and not as part of any biological condition.
CLIP:
Claims like theirs are influential even on powerful people who use the myth of rapid onset gender dysphoria to argue that transgender and gender nonconforming identities are undeserving of recognition and therefore protections under the law. This results in too many cases and their rights to public spaces, safety, accurate legal identification, and healthcare being stripped away.
Trent:
These kinds of buzzwords like access to public spaces usually refer to things like letting men into women’s locker rooms, or it refers to legally punishing people who use the correct pronouns. Betting on rational religion doesn’t seem like such a bad bet from this perspective.
CLIP:
You’ve wasted a ton of your time, whether in your religion you pray, you meditate or you attend services, or even all three, you spent tons of your time in life on those things when you could have been using them to do something more productive, and if nothing else, sleeping in on Sunday is pretty great,
Trent:
But empirical studies have confirmed that people who pray and meditate are happier and healthier than similar people who don’t. Being free from focusing on the ultimate ground of reality to make everything about you doesn’t lead to pleasure. It just leads to emptiness or turns into a nihilistic woe jack meme where you just squander life on a meaningless pursuit of pleasure or lazy resignation into the path of least resistance. Also, check out Gavin Orland’s recent video on the awfulness and unlivable of atheism. In fact, a recent Pew study has shown that in the United States, 36% of actively religious people say they are very happy compared to 25% of religiously unaffiliated people. You find this same happiness gap in many other countries, including Mexico, Australia, Japan, Brazil, and many other places where religious people tend to be happier than non-religious people. Now, I hope this episode was helpful for you, and if you like more resources on Pascal’s Wager, I recommend philosopher Elizabeth Jackson’s article Faithfully Taking Pascal’s Wager. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.