‘If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing
- but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you will have
lost everything. Therefore it is foolish to be an atheist’.
At face value there is so much wrong with this argument - namely, that
it makes no mention of which particular God this applies to; that one cannot
choose what one believes; and that even if one could choose one's beliefs, a
person that tried to strike up a belief in God through this artificial method
would not impress God much at all.
But Pascal meant something better and more profound than that; and in
his Pensees - sections of which are, in my view, among the best Christian
writings of the last 2000 years - Pascal lays out his wager not as a trivial
each way bet, but as an encouragement to pursue Christ, and think intelligently
when doing so.
Pascal never intended his wager to be about God as an undefined concept,
He meant it to be about Christ, and he understood better than most that Christ
wants every part of us; He wants to live inside of us and help us fulfil our
potential, and He wants to make us more like Him. He did not die on the cross
for us to make a half-hearted appeal - He died and rose again so that we could
experience the spirit of Christ within us, so that we could fully imbibe all
that the divine has to give us
In Pensees, Pascal had the following to say
about belief in God if it turns out God doesn't exist: "But what harm will come to you from taking this course? You will
be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, doing good, a sincere and true friend”.
This can be taken as a comment about those who profess belief as much as it can
those who don’t, because Christianity has virtually nothing to
say to the man who is happy to acknowledge it as part of his daily background
but makes no attempt to grow in Christ.
Thus it is probably better not to believe at all
than to adopt an indifferent sycophancy which merely hopes in the end for a
divine hand-out (this is suggested with Christ’s words in Revelation 3 about
the dangers of being 'lukewarm'). After all, those who live their lives by this
principle are no closer to the genuine rewards of Christianity than those who
passionately repudiate it.
Given that we humans believe only what seems sensible to us (we cannot
force ourselves to believe something if it doesn’t seem right), and that we
infer from experience, from perception, from feelings and (hopefully) from
rational enquiry, I am inclined to believe that Pascal’s wager was a kind of
self-fulfilling prophecy - which reads: behave as though you believe in Christ
and you will gradually start to become more Christ-like – and when you do He
will start to reveal more of Himself to you.
In other words, Christianity is the one offer we have from all the holy
books to test the strategy of God by having the guts to try to emulate Him. Further,
its genius shows it to be the very life force that will best give you fullness
of life – and it is presented as self-affirming by having two complementary
forces; one part shows the divine presence through our choosing to have a
relationship with God, and the other shows the divine presence by our having to
courage to try to live up to the standards and fail. To that end, Pascal's
wager is like an invitation to the start of a journey of which you can only see
the first few steps.
Whoever wants to save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it
be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?
Matthew 16:25-26
A few years after I became a Christian in my early twenties, a
realisation occurred to me about the genius of Christianity: the Christian
qualities are such that even if the supernatural claims of the faith turn out
to be false, we should still choose the Christian way anyway, because it is the
best thing in the world.
The genius is in the presentation and in the seduction of the power of
what faith does - it involves the understanding that Christianity presents us with the best
and most blessed way of living your life - therefore if you live that way you
are made better off because of it anyway, and will begin to understand why it
is true. To that end, a development of Pascal's wager is betting on the best
way to live your life, and in doing so dovetailing the pursuit of the truth
with the truth itself thereby being assimilated into your life in the process.
Now
instinctively this might sound anathema to an unbeliever, but only until you
begin to see that actually Christianity is a remarkable thing it itself. One of
the many reasons I believe in Christ is because all the good and great things
in the world - even things that have no direct connection with Christianity -
can be had as a Christian, and all of the bad and undesirable things in the
world - by which I mean things that human beings generally all agree are bad - are
things from which Christianity says it's best to distance oneself.
Consequently,
then, one of the ingenious qualities of the Christian faith is that even as an
unbeliever one can connect oneself to any of its positive qualities and at the
same time constantly enjoy things that are of benefit to oneself and humankind
anyway. That is a sense in which one can wager that Christianity is the truth -
live as though it is and you'll soon start to realise that it is.
Perhaps an analogy will help
I
was just trying to think of an analogy for my above comment about the rewards
of mirroring Christianity. Here's one. Suppose you meet a young man, unapprised
of matters of the heart, and you want to tell him what being deeply in love
with a beloved is like. Up until now, he only knows what casual dating is like,
so you set about explaining to him what the joys of love feel like. Then a few
months later he starts dating a girl he really likes, and he gets all the warm
tingly pleasures, feelings of fondness, but hasn't quite mastered how to take
his nascent love to an even deeper, more profound level, and is not even sure
if all the effort is worth it.
Now
here's where you can tell him how to take the path that will edify and enrich
him. In order to find out what a deeper love is like, he is going to need to
practice things that are at first quite alien to fledgling minds, but once
practiced, soon reveal themselves to be the epitome of human delights. For a
deeper love with his beloved, he will need to learn how to forgive wrongdoings,
master contrition, perfect the art of putting the beloved before himself, and exercising
patience, kindness and understanding at a level he hadn't previously comprehended.
And although the path won't
be entirely smooth - we are all flawed humans, after all - what he'll find is
the more he tries to imitate love, the more he will feel like he is love, and
the better the self will be in becoming. In wearing love's shoes, which seem
tight at first, he will begin to find himself fitting into them more
comfortably, until he hardly even notices he has shoes on. The most comfortable
shoes are, after all, shoes you hardly notice you are wearing. In imitating
love, he will begin to co-opt its fundamental qualities, and that is analogous
to what imitating Christ is like.
As some of you
may know, there is a very famous book series that captures this sentiment. Picture
the scene; it’s C.S Lewis’s Narnia tale The Silver Chair – the protagonists are
under the thrall of the Green Witch – stuck in her underground domain they are
getting desperate, and they begin to doubt the power of the more heavenly world
above. At this point Puddleglum the
marsh-wiggle gives the following speech:
'One word, Ma’am. All you’ve been
saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know
the worst of things and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any
of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we
have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and
moon and stars and Aslan himself. .Then all I can say is, in that case, the
made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this
black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a
pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re
just four babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a
game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m
going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any
Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there
isn’t any Narnia. So we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the
dark to spend our lives looking for Overland
The upper world is Aslan's world, which of course
represents what Christ drives us towards in a relationship with Him. Just like
Pascal’s wager, Lewis in stating what we could call ‘Puddleglum's Wager’ -
which is saying that even if Jesus isn’t God it is still a better life pursuing
the world envisaged by Christ. It is a probabilistic venture based on the
wisdom of Christ even aside from the supernatural – and it calls for a courage
that many find difficult, because it asks us to ‘be perfect’ even without the
entrusting support of the supernatural.
The quintessence of its magic is in another
altogether unexpected form; roughly this; ‘Don’t worry if you cannot believe
that there’s a God’ just believe you have the courage to act as though there is
one, and by your failing to live up to the standards you’ll increase your
probability of belief’. That really is the genius of Christ – and shows
precisely His coming to earth just once was more than enough for humankind to
fall at their feet and believe. With
this, you can see why Christ assured everyone that for anyone who asks it will
given to them -
"Seek and you will find; knock and the door will
be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and
to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."
Puddleglum's speech also touches
on the ontological argument posited by Anselm and Descartes, and develops it
along the lines of this: if Narnia does not exist, then fiction is more
stupendous than reality - and as fiction cannot be more stupendous than reality,
Narnia must be real. To translate that into Christian thinking, if
Christ's claims are not based on Him being the truth, then Christ's fiction appears
to me to be more stupendous than any truth out there.
I personally know of no better way to live, or no greater standards to
which I’d want to adhere. I’m on Jesus’ side even if there isn’t any Jesus to
lead the Christian world. If I’m guilty of making a play-world, then all I’ll
say is this – I fancy that the play-world into which I’m immersed and to which
I’m committed licks the other ‘real’ world hollow.
There may be some who object on Paulian grounds – citing his epistle to
the Corinthians as evidence against this wager – “And, if in this life we have hoped in Christ only, we
are more to be pitied than all men”
(1 Corinthians 15:19). But there is no
reason to suppose that this contradicts the wager. What St Paul
We are even told of a dying
of the self, which in prospect sounds unsettling. If it turned out that there
was never a resurrection, then the trials, tribulations and ridicule to which believers
were subjected by others would have been a history of experiences with no
ultimate reward. That is why the talk from St Paul of ‘pity’ comes into it. To deny the
power of the wager would be to deny that what Christ taught was not a template
that is good in itself, when most clearly it is.
In recognising the
Christ-like template as the best we can achieve, the wager is twofold; if
Christianity is true then our acting as though it is true by reflecting Christ
will provide the best chance of our seeing its truth. If Christianity is false
then Jesus still represents the pinnacle of ethical thinking, and remains the
model on which we should base our worldview.
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