PASCAL’S WAGER

Blaise Pascal was a 17th century philosopher and mathematician who first posed the argument that one should believe in God because doing so carries a higher probability of a positive payoff than does rejecting belief in God.

Anyone not familiar with Pascal’s Wager can find detailed descriptions and discussion here and here.  But in brief, Pascal’s Wager can be summarized as follows:

• If you believe in God and are right, the reward is great.  You could qualify for eternal life.
• If you believe in God and are wrong, You will lose little.  You will simply have lived your one life.
• If you do not believe in God and are right, you will gain little.  Again, you will simply have lived your one life.
• If you do not believe in God and are wrong, the loss will be enormous.  You will miss out on eternal life and may be consigned to perdition.
• In short, there is little downside to believing in God, but there could be an enormous lost opportunity if you reject God’s existence.  Therefore you should believe in God as the rational thing to do.

In my view, Pascal’s wager doesn’t make sense for a number of reasons.  First, we cannot just arbitrarily believe something because we want to.  Set aside for a moment my view that we lack free will to choose or to change our beliefs by a voluntary act.  As I argued in an earlier essay, even if we did have free will, we would not have the ability to choose what we believe like we might choose a strip steak over grilled salmon.  As an exercise, try to genuinely believe that there is a Santa Claus who lives at the North Pole and who brings toys to children each Christmas.

Second, even if we could choose to believe in God because it is the “better bet,” what does it say about a god who would reward us with eternal life under such a condition?  Wouldn’t this simply be a reward for calculated, selfish behavior?  And what does it say about that god if he would deny eternal life to other individuals who, based on a careful and honest analysis of the evidence, did not believe in his existence?  Wouldn’t this make that god either naive, irrational, supremely egotistical, or, if nothing else, unfair?  Why would—how could—a rational individual believe in such a deficient god?

Finally, I believe there is another fundamental flaw in Pascal’s basic premise that there is little downside if you believe in God and are wrong.  Belief in the personal god of Christianity carries with it a commitment to certain other obligations and perspectives ancillary to belief in that god.  These include rules regarding personal conduct that result from the notion that this life is simply a prelude to an eternal afterlife.  They can also include acceptance of beliefs about the world that are inconsistent with a rational understanding of the nature of the world.  Such ancillary beliefs are not just personal to the person who holds them; they can limit the contributions that that individual might otherwise make to our knowledge of the world and to the betterment of humankind.

In my experience, the only persons who raise Pascal’s Wager are Christians who already have firm beliefs in their god’s existence.  Their argument often comes across as smug, as if it’s simply a matter of irrefutable logic.  But of course it’s not.  My sense is that the argument is more about reassuring those who already believe than about persuading nonbelievers to change their point of view.  After all, most atheists and agnostics have already considered Pascal’s Wager and rejected it for the reasons stated above.


© 2017 John M. Phillips