Taking Pascal's Wager

Faith, Evidence and the Abundant Life

Michael Rota

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899999
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

- WORLD Magazine's Best Books of 2016 Short List- Christianity Today's 2017 Book of the Year Award of Merit - Apologetics/EvangelismSince we can't know with absolute certainty that God exists, each of us in a sense makes a bet. If we believe in God and are right, the benefits include eternal life. If we are wrong, the downside is limited. On the other hand, we might not believe in God. If we are right, then we will have lived in line with reality. If we are wrong, however, the consequences could be eternally disastrous. This was the challenge posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal over three hundred years ago. But Michael Rota contends that Pascal's argument is still compelling today. Since there is much to gain (for ourselves as well as for others) and relatively little to lose, the wise decision is to seek a relationship with God and live a Christian life. Rota considers Pascal's wager and the roles of uncertainty, evidence and faith in making a commitment to God. By engaging with themes such as decision theory, the fine-tuning of the universe, divine hiddenness, the problem of evil, the historicity of the resurrection and the nature of miracles, he probes the many dynamics at work in embracing the Christian faith. In addition, Rota takes a turn not found in many books of philosophy. He looks at the actual effects of such a commitment in three recent, vivid, gripping examples—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jean Vanier and Immaculée Ilibagiza. Like Pascal, Rota leaves us with a question: What wager will we make?

- Part One -

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UNCERTAINTY
and
COMMITMENT

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- 1 -

A Curious Offer

Imagine that one day you receive a phone call from a fabulously wealthy individual—an eccentric billionaire known for spending his money in odd and trivial ways. He makes you a curious offer. You are to determine the religion you think most likely to be true and then practice that religion devoutly: attend religious services, read the sacred scriptures of that religion, pray as that religion prescribes and live out the religion’s moral teachings. And he asks you to do this for the rest of your life. His part of the bargain will be to place $10 billion in an escrow account, to be deliverable on your death to whatever persons or causes you have named. You can leave the money to your family, or to a charitable organization, or to scientific research, or any combination of the above . . . whatever you think best. If you choose not to enter into the bargain, he adds, he will be using the money to hire tens of thousands of artists to paint millions and millions of mediocre oil paintings of his pet dog, Scout.

Of course if this actually happened to you, you’d be a mite skeptical. But imagine that after due diligence you became convinced that this was no joke. And the billionaire clarified that you did not have to lie or otherwise misrepresent yourself in order to fulfill your side of the bargain. If, for example, you chose Christianity as the religion you thought most likely to be true, you would not have to recite the creed during the liturgy if you did not believe it. And your prayers could be conditional, as in “If you’re there, God, thank you for this, and please help me with that.” An odd offer, to be sure, but also in all probability the only chance you’ll ever have to direct $10 billion of wealth to persons or causes you care about. So what would you do? Would you accept the offer?

Perhaps the fact that the payoff is mere monetary gain gives you pause. Good for you; to trade one’s religious devotion for money would be base. But remember that you can name whatever beneficiary you’d like, including charitable organizations that work with the poorest of the poor. You can trade your religious devotion for food for the starving, or education for impoverished children in the developing world. On board yet? Say that the billionaire adds that he doesn’t want to make this offer if you already happen to be certain, or almost certain, that God does not exist. His offer is only for people who can say of some particular religion that there is at least a decent chance that it is true.

Now consider an alternative scenario. Suppose that, from the get-go, the billionaire had offered you a different bargain: the payoff is not a guaranteed $10 billion, but a 50 percent shot at $100 billion. That is, suppose the billionaire’s side of the bargain is to put $100 billion in an escrow account. Then, after your death, a fair coin will be flipped. If it comes up heads, the entire $100 billion will be given to your named beneficiary or beneficiaries. If tails, then we’ll have a lot of pictures of Scout. Would you accept this offer?

Hold on to that thought.

The overarching question of this book is the question of whether there is good reason to make a serious commitment to living a Christian life. In part two we’ll take a tour of the evidence for Christianity. But before that, the question to ask first is, “How much evidence would be required to make a Christian commitment reasonable?” As I’ll try to show here in part one, a serious Christian commitment is recommended by reason even if there is as little as a 50 percent chance that Christianity is true. In other words, if you are willing to grant that Christianity is at least as likely as not, then it is rational for you to commit to living a devout Christian life. Indeed, if you’re in ordinary circumstances, it is irrational for you not to.1

Pascal’s Wager

The argument I’ll give for this conclusion has its roots in the reflections of seventeenth-century polymath Blaise Pascal. Pascal made important contributions in mathematics, probability theory and physics. His work on fluid mechanics was instrumental in the later invention of the hydraulic press, and he himself designed and built one of the first mechanical calculating machines, an early precursor to the digital computer. (Interestingly, the principles used in the machine are still employed in many automobile odometers.) Pascal was an inventor, an intellectual and a scientist. He was also a deeply religious man. At the age of thirty-one he had a powerful mystical experience of God. He described the experience in a note and stitched the note into his coat, keeping it close to him. He evidently transferred the paper note (together with a cleaner copy he put down on parchment) from coat to coat for the rest of his life—a servant found them after his death.

Pascal suffered from ill health, dying at only thirty-nine. In his final years he was drafting a work of apologetics. The disorganized fragments that were his notes for the project were published posthumously and quickly became a classic, Pascal’s Pensees (French for “thoughts”).2 In one of those fragments Pascal gives an argument not for the theoretical conclusion that God exists but for the practical conclusion that one should live a devout Christian life. The argument is addressed to those who aren’t sure whether Christianity is true or false, and has come to be known as Pascal’s wager. To be precise, the fragment contains the seeds of four different arguments in support of religious commitment.3 The strongest version comes down to this: It is rational to seek a relationship with God and live a deeply Christian life because there is very much to gain and relatively little to lose. In chapter two I’ll present a strengthened and expanded version of this argument. If Christianity is indeed true, then by committing to live a Christian life one brings great joy to God and all others in heaven, raises the chance that one will be with God forever, raises the chance that one will help others attain union with God, expresses gratitude to God, and becomes more aware of God’s love and more receptive to his help in the course of one’s earthly life. On the other hand, if Christianity is false, the person who commits his or her life to Jesus’ teachings has still lived a worthwhile life, striving for moral excellence and experiencing the benefits of religious community (benefits that contemporary sociological research reveals to be significant).

Pascal’s pragmatic argument in support of religious commitment has had its share of critics. Thus the famous English philosopher G. E. Moore: “[Concerning Pascal’s claim that] in our state of doubt, we should decide for that belief which promises the greater reward, I have nothing to say of it except that it seems to me absolutely wicked.”4 Voltaire thought the wager was “somewhat indecent and childish. The idea of gaming, of losing or winning, is quite unsuitable to the dignity of the subject.”5 In much the same vein, an earlier French critic had complained: “I lose patience listening to you treating the highest of all matters, and resting the most important truth in the world, the source of all truths, on an idea so base and puerile, on a comparison with a game of heads and tails more productive of mirth than persuasion.”6 More recently, Christopher Hitchens sees Pascal’s theology as “not far short of sordid,”7 remarking that “Pascal reminds me of the hypocrites and frauds who abound in Talmudic Jewish rationalization. Don’t do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who’s counting?”8

Are these objections fair? Mathematician James Franklin suggests that Pascal’s actual view is often replaced with an unflattering caricature of the wager. Franklin contrasts these two views:

What Pascal said. You have to choose whether to accept religion. Think of it as a coin toss, where you don’t know the outcome. In this case, if you lose—there’s no God—you have not lost much. But if you win, there is an infinite payoff. So, you should go to Mass, and pray for faith [Franklin’s paraphrase].

Pascal caricatured. Being base and greedy, we want lots of goodies in this life and, if possible, the next. So we are prepared to give up some pleasures now, on the off chance of a lot more later, if our eye to the main chance makes it look worth our while. Since the loot on offer is infinite, even a small chance of raking it in makes it worth a try to grovel to any deity that might do what we want.9

Franklin makes a good point. Pascal’s argument is often interpreted in the worst possible light. Still, there are legitimate objections to consider, even when Pascal’s reasoning is interpreted fairly. It may be that it is immoral to allow any considerations about cost and benefit to affect what we believe. Perhaps a respect for truth requires that our beliefs be determined by evidence and evidence alone. Second, we must consider whether the costs of committing to God are simply too high. And perhaps the most common criticism is that Pascal illicitly assumed there were only two options to consider: atheism and (Catholic) Christianity. The many gods objection, as it’s often called, contends that the multitude of possibly true religions makes trouble for Pascal.

In chapters three and four I’ll elaborate on these and additional objections and respond to them. But first we need to lay the basic argument out on the table, in more detail and with greater precision. In order to give the strongest argument possible, I’ll set aside the analysis of Pascal’s text and instead develop a Pascalian argument in my own way.10 Just for the sake of having a handy title, I’ll refer to my argument as “the wager,” or even “Pascal’s wager,” but this title should be taken merely as a reference to its original inspiration, not as a claim that I am providing a verbatim reproduction of Pascal’s thought. Indeed, the wager I’ll present takes advantage of cutting-edge work in philosophy and psychology and recent sociological data unavailable to Pascal, and it is therefore able to greatly improve on his rather sketchy note. Since it’s impossible to explain the wager clearly without using some concepts from decision theory, that’s where we’ll begin.

Decision Theory

Decision theory is about how to make good decisions in circumstances of risk or uncertainty. Three concepts are especially important: states, strategies and outcomes. A state is a possible way things might be (it will rain today, or it won’t rain today); a strategy is a possible action the decider might take (bring my umbrella, or leave it at home). An outcome is a situation that results when a given strategy is taken and a certain state is actual (e.g., the situation of being stuck in the rain without an umbrella). In order to assess the suitability of the various available strategies, the decision maker attempts to form a judgment about how valuable the various outcomes are.

For example, suppose I offer you a bet. I ask a trusted third party to flip a fair coin but not to tell us whether it lands heads or tails. Then I ask you to decide either to play (that is, participate in the bet) or pass. If you choose to play, it will cost you one dollar, but if you play and the coin has come up heads, you will get your dollar back, and I will pay you two more dollars, so you will be up two dollars. If you choose to play and the coin comes up tails, however, I will keep your dollar, so you will be down one dollar. If, on the other hand, you choose to pass, no money will change hands either way. Would you take my bet?

I bet you would. Decision theory allows us to say precisely why the bet is favorable for you. There are two possible states for you to consider: it could be that the coin has come up heads, and it could be that it has come up tails. At the time you make your decision you don’t know which state is the actual way things are, but you do know that it’s one or the other. Next, there are two possible strategies you can adopt: play or pass. Corresponding to the four possible combinations of these states and strategies, there are four possible situations that may result—these are the outcomes: (1) you play the game and the coin is heads, and so you win two dollars; (2) you play the game and the coin is tails, so you lose one dollar; (3) you pass and the coin is heads, so you neither gain nor lose; and (4) you pass and the coin is tails, so you neither gain nor lose. In considering the question of what to do, the decision maker is invited to evaluate the outcomes. That is, the decision maker attempts to estimate how valuable the various outcomes are. In this case, the monetary value of outcome 1 for you is two dollars, for outcome 2 it is minus one do...