Pascal's Wager: A Faith-Based Sucker's Bet

By David Gleeson for American Chronicle

August 23, 2006

If you are skeptical of the supernatural, as I am, you will sooner or later be confronted with an “argument” sometimes referred to as Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal was a 17th century French mathematician who formulated this rationale for taking belief in God seriously:

“If atheism is right, we [Biblical literalists] have nothing to lose by believing. But if we’re right, you [the atheist/agnostic/skeptic/heathen] have everything to lose.” (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

This rationale is a favorite among present-day Christian fundamentalists, although, as with most Christian apologetics, it is difficult to understand why. I’ll briefly document four reasons why I think this is such a poor argument.

Spiritual Laziness Pascal's Wager, taken literally, paints the religious in an extremely unflattering light. It reduces faith to nothing more than an insurance policy, a cosmic hedging of the bets. It is spiritual laziness taken to the nth degree. “I believe in [insert your god here] because I’m taking no chances.” If the religious community is populated mainly by believers of this caliber, then theism is definitely on the road to oblivion.

False Dichotomy This is a common logical fallacy. President Bush commits it twice weekly, at least. “Either it’s moral to take a human life or it isn’t.” Or, “You’re either with me or against me.” Such black-and-white arguments fail to take into account the middle ground, a middle ground that often dwarfs the extremes. Pascal’s Wager assumes either atheism is the truth or Fire-and-Brimstone-Christianity is the truth. But there are other possibilities. Consider this perfectly valid alternative: God exists, but it is a god that rewards persons of intellectual fortitude, people who desire knowledge over dogma and reason over blind faith. Those who spend their lives wrapped in a cocoon of fear, who never bother or are too stubborn to use their “God-given” intellect, are summarily punished. In this view of the world, certainly one that is as possible as the fundamentalist Christian view, Pascal’s Wager is flipped on its ear. The skeptic is suddenly the one with nothing to fear. As a matter of fact, skeptics have nothing to fear in any world view save one. Whereas Pascal’s Wager paints us as reckless gamblers counting on “heads” rather than “tails”, we are in reality assuming we haven’t picked the one tainted grain of sand in the Sahara or the one poisonous drop of water in the Pacific. Regardless, if it turns out that the universe is governed by a deity who would eternally torture someone for an honest intellectual error, then no one is safe from this psychopath. Which leads me to …

Malevolent Theology I have a hard time understanding why anyone would believe in, let alone worship, a god who would damn to Hell those who have the audacity to use their intellect to come to the conclusion that He doesn’t exist. Is this god so petty, so jealous, so desperately in need of exaltation that rejecting Him brings a sentence of eternal torture? I simply refuse to entertain the notion of such a malevolent theology, and I can't imagine why anyone else would, either. It is far more likely, of course, that this unjust god is a human invention, one that serves a dual purpose: reassuring true believers that they will spend eternity in Heaven (of course) while their enemies (conveniently) are sent off to Hell. While I find it difficult imagining a universe governed by this type of malicious deity, I have no trouble at all believing that flawed humans, driven by fear, intolerance and hate, are capable of inventing such rot.

Intellectual Bankruptcy Or, drawing the wrong conclusion. Or, counting the hits and forgetting the misses. The statement “If atheism is true, I have nothing to lose by believing” is all those things and more. Consider: If atheism is true, there is no God, no Heaven, no Hell, no life before birth or after death, no soul, no spirit – no human essence at all other than the living entity contained within body and brain. Life is now, this reality, and nothing more. You’ve got 70 years plus or minus a few to enjoy it, and then it’s over for good. Given this, what could possibly be worse than spending this precious little time wallowing in intellectual stagnation and succumbing to wishful thinking? Skeptics (and, incidentally, many mainstream theists) are freed of a ton of baggage. We enjoy life rather than obsess about death. We see the world as it truly is, not how we wish it to be. We accept rather than reject the evidence nature reveals to us, even if that evidence makes a mockery of our conceits. Our world, our universe, is boundless, alive, infinite in majesty and scope. It is a world far more spectacular and awe-inspiring than the one inhabited by the small and petty god of Pascal’s Wager.

“Faith,” says Dan Barker in Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist, is “intellectual bankruptcy.” I cannot imagine anything worse. Nothing to lose? When you’ve chosen the path of ignorance over knowledge, hatred over love, fear over tolerance, guilt and sin over joy, and blind-faith irrationality over reason, you’ve lost everything.

[Well, I think David Gleeson certainly nailed that ‘argument’ to the wall…]