About God (part1): The Big Bet?

~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)

In Pascal’s Pensees the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher proposed a suitably mathematical approach to faith. In a formulation that has come to be known as Pascal’s wager he suggests we can look at the truth of the God of Christianity as a game of chance. When it comes down to it, he argues, “either God is or He is not.” The difficulty is that reason alone cannot get us beyond this point. We cannot argue conclusively either His existence or nonexistence. However, Pascal maintains it is an unavoidable choice–it is simply a matter of which way to choose. Because of its inevitability, “your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other,” he writes–both are equally legitimate options.

Pascal’s solution is to look at what is to be won and lost in the cosmic wager he proposes: “If you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing.” In other words, if God exists as we believe, we receive eternal life and all the promises of the Bible, and if He does not exist, we die. While that is the end of the story for us, it is what would have happened anyway. According to Pascal, while the odds of God existing may be only one in an infinite number of possibilities, we risk nothing by betting that way–and have everything to gain.

Christians have adopted and repeated the argument in a variety of forms since he first published Pensees in the 1660s. But the question remains whether his wager constitutes sufficient justification of and foundation for a credible belief in God. Doubt still nags us. As William James, an American philosopher writing in the 1890s, suggested, “you probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the language of the gaming table, it is put to its last trumps” (The Will to Believe).

It seems that even Paul, writing in the New Testament, was uncomfortable with arguments along the lines of Pascal’s. “If Christ has not been raised [the central tenet of Christian faith], our preaching is useless and so is your faith. … If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Cor. 15:14-19, NIV). For Paul, it is not good enough to conclude that if it is not true, we have not lost anything. The truth or otherwise of God and the claims of Christianity are of utmost importance.

Another problem James identifies in Pascal’s proposition is that we can equally apply it to any other formulation of belief–Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or whatever promise of eternal reward. Thus it can only be a clinching argument for a Christian God when the prospective believer has a preexisting tendency toward such a belief.

So we find ourselves back at the uncertain position in which we began, unable to argue our way forward. However, it does not have to be the end of our search for God or faith. “In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing” (James, The Will to Believe). Thankfully, the possibility of faith in God does not depend upon our ability to argue philosophy.

James argues for a freedom to choose: “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there would be an irrational rule” (ibid.). In addition, it is not irrational to believe in that for which rationality can provide no answers. Even then, we find evidence of God in our lives, in the world around us, and in history–“too much to deny and too little to be sure” (Pascal)–and it is always a matter of choice. But we respond not as a gambler but as a pilgrim on a journey toward truth.