Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Fri, 9 Oct 1992 22:58:02 EDT
From:         JEK@NIHCU.BITNET
Subject:      Pascal's Wager

Ian Nelson mentions a writer who says something like, "If we cannot
know whether God exists, what do we have to lose by assuming that he
does?"

The writer in question is the Frenchman Blaise Pascal, a
mathematician and a pioneer in probability and game theory
(1623-1662), and his recommendation that we assume that God exists
is known as Pascal's Wager.

The earliest form of it that I know of is that of Cicero (in DE
NATURA DEORUM -- "On the Nature of the Gods"), who says (in
substance):

 > If I believe that there is life after death and my neighbor
 > believes otherwise, I have an advantage, in that there is a
 > possibility of my saying, "I told you so," to him, but none of
 > his saying, "I told you so," to me.

Granted the premise (that I love saying "I told you so!" and hate
hearing it), Cicero's argument seems quite solid.

Pascal says that, if Christianity is true, I stand to gain
infinitely by believing it and to lose infinitely by disbelieving
it, whereas, if atheism is true, I stand to lose at most a finite
amount by disbelieving it. It is therefore a sensible thing to
believe, regardless of the probability that it is true.

Pascal has been roundly criticized for this statement, partly on the
ground that he makes believing in God something one does for a
reward, and partly on the ground that he does not consider all the
possibilities. He assumes that after death either (1) Christians go
to heaven and atheists to hell, or (2) nobody goes anywhere. His
opponents say that there is at least one other possibility -- that
(3) the Power in charge prefers atheists to Christians, and that
accordingly atheists will go to heaven and Christians to hell. This
may be improbable, but it means that the bet is not one-sided (heads
I win, tails I break even), and therefore, contrary to Pascal's
original statement, we do need to consider the probabilities of
being right after all.  (Along the same lines, Raymond Smullyan has
pointed out that Cicero neglects to consider the possibility that
those persons survive death, and only those persons, who disbelieve
in life after death.  If this is the case, then those who disbelieve
are at an advantage, provided that their satisfaction at surviving
outweighs their chagrin at discovering that they were wrong --
unaccompanied, you will note, by the additional pain of being jeered
at by persons who were right.)

It seems to me that Pascal has been misunderstood, and that his
argument is somewhat different. He is NOT supposing that God says,
"I am confronting you with a question to which you must guess the
answer, and I will reward the right guess and punish the wrong one."
Instead, he is talking about love and friendship and trust.  If you
have a good friend, or a sweetheart, you have to decide whether to
trust that person or not.  If you trust your wife, you may learn on
your deathbed that she has been carrying on behind your back for
years.  If you decide not to trust your wife, and to divorce her
just so that there will never be a chance that someone will laugh at
you for letting a woman fool you, there is a chance that you will
realize on your deathbed that your wife was a true and loving wife,
and that you have thrown away her love for nothing. The question is,
which do you dread more?  Pascal is not talking about your chances
of getting an eternity of harp lessons, or escaping an eternity of
boiling in sulfur. He is talking about the love of God in Christ. He
is saying that Christ has offered you His friendship, and that you
can have a friend only if you are willing to trust the friend (not
an arbitrary requirement, but a statement of what friendship is). He
says, "The joy that I have in knowing that Christ is my friend is
such that, in order to throw that joy away by refusing to trust Him
on the grounds that it is possible that the whole thing is an
illusion, I would have to be crazy."

(I wrote a paper along these lines for my Philosophy of Science
Seminar, and my professor, Herbert Feigl, a staunch atheist, wrote
on it, "I don't like this at all. Your argument makes me extremely
uncomfortable. A+" May God lead him aright.)

 Yours,
 James Kiefer