What'd be the Odds?
In Pascal’s Pensées, the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher proposed a mathematical approach to faith. In a formulation now 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, Pascal argues, “Either God is or He is not.” The difficulty is, reason alone can’t get us beyond this point. We can’t argue conclusively either the existence or non-existence of God.
However, Pascal maintains it is an unavoidable choice; it is simply a matter of which way to choose. Because of the inevitability of a choice, “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, we receive eternal life and all the promises of the Bible; but if God doesn’t exist, we die. That’s the end of the story for us, but that’s what would have happened anyway. According to Pascal, while the odds of God existing may be only one in an infinite number of possibilities, there’s nothing to risk by betting that way—rather, there’s everything to gain.
It’s an argument that’s been adopted and repeated in a variety of forms by many Christians since Pensées was first published in the 1660s. But the question remains whether Pascal’s wager constitutes sufficient justification of and foundation for a credible belief in God. There is a nagging doubt.
William James, an American philosopher writing in the 1890s, suggests, “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 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 Corinthians 15:14, 19).
For Paul, it isn’t good enough to conclude that if it isn’t true, we’ve 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 it can be equally applicable for any other formulation of belief—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim—or any other promise of eternal reward. Thus it can only be a clinching argument for a Christian God when the prospective believer has a pre-existing tendency toward such a belief.
So we are returned to the uncertain position where we began, unable to argue our way forward. However, it doesn’t 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,” says James. Thankfully, the possibility of faith in God is not dependent upon our ability to argue philosophy.
James argues to allow within logic the 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.” Put simply, it isn’t irrational to believe in that for which rationality can provide no answers.
We’re given evidence of God in our lives, in the world around us and in history—“Too much to deny and too little to be sure,” says Pascal—and it is always a matter of choice. We do well to respond to that choice not as a gambler, but as a pilgrim.
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