First read "Pascal's Wager" here, specifically Section 233. This is an excerpt from a larger work, Penseés, written by Blaise Pascal (published posthumously in 1670), and translated in 1931 by W.F. Trotter. All the quotations below are from Section 233 of the above work.
Blaise Pascal attempts to use reason to persuade us to choose faith in God: he supposes that any reasonable person would choose to wager in favor of faith. Yet the way he states his famous wager – that when we wager in favor of belief we sacrifice nothing and gain everything – ignores the real sacrifice one must make in order to turn away from agnosticism and accept as true the far-fetched myths of monotheistic religion: one’s reason. So he hopes our reason will lead us to embrace faith, which requires that we give up our reason.
Pascal’s main argument takes the form of a wager: we must bet that God exists because we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. As Pascal puts it: “Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked… Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He is.” The potential penalty for failing to believe is either eternal torture in Hell or soul death (Pascal does not explicitly say this, though it is implicit in his wager: if all were automatically granted heavenly eternal life after death, there would be no need for faith, and no need for the wager), while the sacrifice for choosing faith is negligible. Since our eternal souls are potentially at risk, and it costs us so little to wager in favor of faith, and we have so much to gain (eternal life) if Christianity proves true, any reasonable person must choose belief in God; reason leads us directly to faith.
Yet Pascal acknowledges that reason is the very thing we must sacrifice in order to embrace faith: “when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life…” So in order to accept the wager we must give up reason, but also we give up nothing. Pascal never acknowledges how momentous this sacrifice really is. Reason may well be an agnostic’s most cherished tool, the defining feature of his personality, the very thing that separates man from beast. Pascal argues that we must give it up, yet he misunderstands what this actually means to someone who cherishes it so dearly: he argues that giving up reason is the equivalent of giving up nothing. Speaking to the agnostic, Pascal says, “at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.” Pascal, himself a philosopher (this is what astounds me) thinks that when we abandon reason we sacrifice nothing of importance, a mere trifle. The truth is this: asking a science-loving agnostic to give up his reason is like asking a religious fanatic to abandon his faith: it is asking someone to abandon what is most precious to him, what defines him; it is the very lens through which one views his world. For an agnostic, reason is not nothing, it is everything.
Pascal bolsters the power of his wager with a moral argument, which is also designed to persuade the reasonable person: faith increases one’s moral goodness, and so it is good even if God turns out not to be real. A believer, through her faith, transforms herself from a sinner ruled by her passions into a new person who is “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful.” Simply by becoming Christian, one becomes a better person. In fact, abatement of one’s passions is a backdoor to faith: “Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured… it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.” So by faith we avoid Hell, become better people, and escape the grip of our passions; by escaping the grip of our passions (our stumbling blocks) we can achieve faith and thereby avoid Hell. It’s such a simple process, a perfect circle.
These arguments are riddled with weaknesses. First, Pascal does not actually offer any arguments in favor of God’s existence. Instead he begins by simply assuming that Hell is a likely penalty for non-belief. Pascal never offers proof that this outcome is likely, but accepts it a priori. One could just as easily make up another scenario that is just as likely (“unless one believes that stars are fireflies trapped in a giant black net, one will be transformed into a firefly upon his death”), and then apply Pascal’s wager to that new scenario (“to avoid this outcome we all better wager that the stars are fireflies”). This objection becomes clearer when we apply it to a competing religion such as Islam: Pascal’s logic demands that we also wager that the Koran is the revealed word of God, since that scenario is just as likely (or just as far-fetched) as the Christian myth of Christ’s divinity. So which religion do we wager on? Must we choose Christianity simply because Pascal did? He offers no logical reason for why we should wager on one religion over another. Second, Pascal’s wager plays on one’s fear and self-interest as motivators (choose faith to avoid Hell), which taints the moral argument. How will faith make us more selfless if we choose faith for selfish reasons; or honest/sincere if we pretend to believe when we don’t really; or humble if we think that simply by making the correct wager we become worthy of eternal salvation; or steadfast if, cringing, we embrace faith only out of fear of pain? Pascal’s argument doesn’t create a path away from selfishness, but instead embraces selfishness as the ultimate faith-maker. Pascal’s moral argument disintegrates further when we acknowledge that Christians are in fact ruled by the passions. They might express their passions in uniquely Christian ways (perhaps via ecstatic communication with God, or hatred toward sinners, or religious wars and pogroms, or glorious imaginings of the endless pleasures in store for us once we finally reach Heaven), but the passions still run the show. Pascal argues that passion is the “stumbling-block” that keeps agnostics out of Heaven, but Christianity has no problem with passion, as long as the passion exhibited aligns with church dogma; the true stumbling-block – the thing that prevents agnostics from embracing faith – is reason.
While Pascal thinks that reason (which to him means a clear-eyed approach to his wager) will lead one to faith, reason is actually a one-way ticket away from faith. Asking tough questions – for example, why a perfectly-good God would allow evil to flourish in the world, or why God never reveals Himself, or why good people must go to Hell, or why stories in the Bible (such as the creation myth) do not stack up against more recent scientific evidence – only damages faith. When we ask these questions of religion, the end result is not typically an enhanced level of faith. The best way to enhance one’s faith is to avoid asking these questions to begin with, i.e. to allow one’s power of reason to wither so that faith can replace it.
As the philosopher Louise Antony pointed out1, religion itself is only too aware of the dangers posed by reason. In Catholic school Antony was taught as a young girl that “the questions had been put into my head by the devil, and that, indeed, the whole world had been mined with dangerous ideas, ideas that could threaten my faith if I indulged them” (Antony, 142). What a convenient way to do away with difficult questions, as well as any scientific theory that contradicts scripture (such as the theory of natural selection): simply claim that the devil planted these questions/theories to trick us so we wind up in Hell. Many religious myths center around the lesson that humans should face severe punishment for seeking knowledge. Antony recounts that in these myths, “Prometheus is sentenced to eternal torment, Pandora releases pain and sadness into the world, and Adam and Eve, with all their descendants, must toil and suffer” (Antony, 151). Whenever humans attempt to use reason to understand the mysteries of the universe, God punishes them for their insolence. Knowledge and reason belong only to God; when man first attempted to possess these things, that was Original Sin. All this mythologizing makes sense: religion does not want us to use our reason because reason destroys faith. These myths are no more than cheap tactics and expedients that attempt to deprive man of his faculties so he remains completely in the dark and at the mercy of church dogma, fearing so much for his own salvation that he is willing to accept Pascal’s fear-based wager: spend your life pretending to believe something your reason tells you isn’t true, in order to avoid an outcome your reason tells you won’t come to pass.
What is ironic about all this is that Pascal attempts to use reason to convince us that we should abandon reason, that reason is the enemy. He states his argument in such a way as to appeal to a reasoning and self-interested mind. But the end result of all his arguing is that we, atheists and agnostics, must abandon our beloved reason in order to save our immortal souls. He offers a reasoned argument that demands we reject reason. He wants to put reason on a kamikaze mission, hoping that by implementing reason he can destroy reason.
Our reason, our senses, our instincts, our scientific observations, and our knowledge of the inherent contradictions baked into the Christian story of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God shout at us that there is something wrong, something obviously untrue, about Christian doctrine. The dogma appears to us as a whole series of lies and contradictions wrapped up and presented to us as a black or white choice: choose the lies and save your soul, or choose reason and perish. But since Pascal attempts to use reason itself to convince us to go along with his wager, in essence he asks us to use reason just one final time: following Pascal’s line of reasoning should be the last time in our lives that we use reason. He threads a needle, hoping that our reason can simultaneously produce faith and convince us never to use our reason again; going forward our quest for truth must be guided solely by faith. Reason, if applied more broadly than Pascal intends, corrupts faith; reason shines so brightly that it can reveal all the cracks and flaws in religious dogma. Therefore once we have made the wager, we must never think too hard about it (or about science or religion) again. Once reason delivers us to faith, its purpose is served; we must leave reason at the dock, cast off the lines, and sail away with faith toward eternity and immortal life, never to return. Or perhaps more aptly: we should be like Lot abandoning Sodom (reason); if we look back even once, we (and our faith) will die.
Pascal knows reason isn’t nothing. That’s why he uses it as his primary tool in his attempt to argue we should abandon it forever. Pascal tells us that any reasonable person should wager in favor of faith, but in reality Pascal doesn’t actually wish for us to use the full power of our reason, because that would cause us to question and ultimately reject church dogma. If we wish to truly respect reason, then our duty is to fully embrace our power of reason, regardless of the consequences to our faith. That being said, though Pascal discounts the importance of (and perhaps misunderstands the point of) reason, he surely understands the mind of Man. Fear and self-interest are great motivators in this big, scary world; Pascal gets this, and so crafts a wager that appears rational on the surface but really just plays on our deepest fears. Wouldn’t most people choose the expedient answer (the answer that pacifies our fears and doesn’t demand that we think too hard), rather than the answer that requires us to embark on the arduous journey to the summit of reason (which might alienate us from our community, and lead us to the conclusions that there is no loving God watching over us, no purpose to the universe, no salvation awaiting us)? Yes, Pascal might employ sketchy reasoning, but he certainly understands what makes people tick.
Notes
- The following quotations are from “For the Love of Reason” by Louise M. Antony, from Philosophers without God: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony (Oxford University Press, 2010), which was reprinted in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).