Truth We Are Capable Of: Pascal's Wager & Reality

"Let us examine this point of view and declare: 'Either God exists, or He does not.' To which view shall we incline? Reason cannot decide for us one way or the other: we are separated by an infinite gulf. At the extremity of this infinite distance a game is in progress, where either heads or tails may turn up. What will you wager? According to reason you cannot bet either way; according to reason you can defend neither proposition. So do not attribute error to those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it." -Blaise Pascal

Pascal’s Wager is a defense of theism and Christianity first formulated by Blaise Pascal in his unfinished book Pensées (published posthumously in 1670). Pascal claims that every human is faced with a choice to believe in God or not, and he argues that wagering on God’s existence is infinitely more reasonable than wagering against it. If the Christian God is real then he rewards infinitely those who wager on his existence, but he punishes infinitely those who wager against his existence. If God does not exist, then nothing significant is lost by either the believer or non-believer, and life amounts to nothing and ends in oblivion. Therefore, the decision to wager on God’s existence is infinitely more rational than wagering against it.

Pascal's Wager is the best defense of Christianity I have ever encountered, but this is not a popular opinion. Even many Christians mock the Wager by claiming it reduces faith to a matter of selfishly trying to trick God into thinking one believes in him. However, Pascal’s Wager is not meant to carry non-believers all the way to Jesus (at least not on its own). It is meant to demonstrate the motivational foundations undergirding theism and Christianity. The Wager is a kind of memetic weapon to disarm atheists and agnostics who claim Christians are merely superstitious. [1]

Pascal asserts that reason does not carry one to God. Humans are tiny stupid creatures with innumerable "blind spots" in logic and understanding. The amount of knowledge any one human can accumulate during the course of their lives is absolutely microscopic in comparison to the amount of facts existing inside and outside the cosmos. If the amount of knowledge existing in the physical universe is a hundred million times greater than what you currently know that means a hundred million more of your minds could exist without having any overlapping information with the original you (hypothetically). Internalizing this fact leads to the terrifying realization that the factors capable of destabilizing your current conclusions about life are incredibly numerous. For example, if you believe that gravity, a force that effects literally everything in life, is a law of nature, all that's necessary for that "truth" to be disproved is a single relevant fact hidden in the hundred million minds that contain the rest of the universe’s knowledge. [2] 

Gravity can seem pretty irrelevant when compared to some of the more horrifying things you might be wrong about. Among the more terrifying philosophical monsters hiding in the proverbial closet is solipsism. Solipsism posits that nothing exists outside your own mind. Everything you perceive outside of yourself, all the people you love, all the sights you see, are just projections of your own imagination. Hugging your friend is really just hugging some aspect of your subconscious. A form of this idea was presented in Christopher Nolan's film Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character almost loses himself inside his own dreams. The average person spends six years of their life inside dreams, and they usually cannot disprove the reality of that dream while still dreaming. Solipsism suggests that life is a kind of dream you have not woken up from. Only after death can you realize the unreality of this life. Solipsism, because it is founded upon pre-logical assumptions, cannot be disproven. Solipsism should always be hovering in the dark corner of your mind reminding you that everything you believe could be false. Instant humility. 

The bigger problem is that possible alternative realities do not stop with solipsism, they can be multiplied almost infinitely. The Matrix movie series, for example, presents another version of reality that would be hard to disprove if one was inside it. In fact, unbeknownst to most viewers, the series’ conclusion leaves it ambiguous whether or not the main character ever actually escapes the matrix into true reality. Movie watchers are so incapable of discerning reality that they cannot even prove whether the character escapes from a simulated reality created by a human director from inside their own reality.

The rise of technology, and the creation of virtual realities and other simulations, has led philosophers and deep thinkers into a question that has not often been considered by humanity: What if this world is not base reality? What if we are experiencing a simulation created by a superior being operating from the real reality? Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and space entrepreneur, recently made public comments about the statistical chance of us living in base reality being "one in billions."

The average Church of Christ Baby Boomer might feel like dismissing these speculations about reality with a huff and claiming the skeptics "just have too much time on their hands," but the advent of the technological age and the real numbers behind these speculations are too significant to ignore. The age of innocence and naiveté, when we could just drift along with our parochial assumptions about life's "common sense truth," is over. You might not care about the technological deconstruction of reality, but the technological deconstruction of reality cares about you... and it definitely cares about your phone obsessed grandchildren.

The question of reality is relevant even to Christians. The universe we inhabit is seriously flawed in fundamental ways. Entropy is slowly dismantling our cosmos one atom at a time. Our universe’s expansion radiates out from a single point and thus proves that everything physical had a definite beginning before which nothing existed. The Bible attributes religious meaning to these unsustainable "glitches" in our present reality. God, and other superior beings, seem to operate from outside our reality and under different rules. 

We need to deeply consider the fragility of what we call "reality." If we make slightly different foundational assumptions about our world then all our calculations, all our "truths," will be thrown into the air until reordered within a different psycho-social worldview (that new generations will then internalize as subconscious "self-evident" truths).

The implication of solipsism is our inability to know. [3] We cannot know whether we have embraced an accurate set of foundational assumptions about reality ("first principles"). Part of Pascal’s Wager is his recognition that "reason cannot decide for us one way or the other," God cannot be reached by human reason. The gulf between our microscopic amount of knowledge and the total number of variables in the cosmos is immense. Ultimately, humanity is left at the edge of a cliff looking down into a black abyss. One might imagine Gandalf standing on the bridge battling the Balrog and descending into the chasm to fight it. He emerges as Gandalf the White, but he does not initially know that resurrection is his fate. Humanity is looking into the darkness, we can either remain over the abyss and starve to death while aimlessly wandering the proverbial abandoned Mines of Moria, or we can willingly jump into the dark and possibly receive a glorious salvation from our inevitable starvation. [4]

Solipsism has not "done its job" if it has not led one into the abyss. Solipsism is the crushing nihilism of the goblin filled mines destroying all possibility of intelligible thought. It strangles the ability to act with confidence until one first chooses to have faith in a set of seemingly arbitrary first principles that allow one to begin to act. The leap of faith is the beginning of action (and thought is a kind of action). You cannot know that 2 + 2 = 4 until you first make the leap of faith that the symbol "2" represents an abstract idealistic value equivalent to two hypothetical impossible objects (no two objects are actually equal). The arbitrary belief in an unrealistic "2" is the first faith step in the discovery of mathematics as a tool. Almost all humans choose to have faith in "2" because they have wagered that believing in it is more valuable than not believing in it. "2" is useful, so there is little reason to refuse to believe in it. In the same way, Pascal asks those who are still lost in the crushing nihilism of the Morian mines to take the leap of faith into theism. Why would you refuse to believe in God when the alternative is the slow horror of a meaningless life leading to eternal death? 

It might be objected that wandering around in a horrible dark mine waiting to die is still not as bad as committing suicide by leaping down into a chasm of certain death. This would be a very reasonable objection if it were not for the fact that evidence has been left suggesting that leaping into the chasm will lead to life. The primary piece of evidence is that one man already jumped into the abyss and emerged as a glorified immortal. This event is well attested by numerous witnesses who dedicated their lives to telling those still lost in the mine about it.

The necessity of the leap of faith is also manifested in one's ability to love other people. Without wagering on some version of reality, one is left lost in a world in which everything is possible but nothing can be practically true. The possibility of stable love is destroyed without faith because every other being may or may not be conscious depending on what one believes about reality at the moment of interacting with them. Without faith, reality is collapsed into a randomness orbiting an individual. Ultimate selfishness arises because nearly the only stable fact becomes the existence of a person’s appetites. Even the process of writing and speaking would be undermined by the unreliability of other minds. Why would I bother to write in an intelligible way if I only believed in my own mind?

Many have objected to Pascal’s wagering on Christianity by claiming he does not take into account the existence of alternative religious possibilities. They say that making Pascal’s Wager is a poor application of game theory because one still has to sort through the thousands of religions that claim to offer religious truth. The witnesses who claim a man jumped into the mine’s abyss and emerged immortal are not the only people wandering around Moria claiming to have a solution to people’s lost condition. There are competing claims. Pascal anticipates this, however, and argues that when one seriously analyzes the other major religious options none of them are actually serious alternatives.

I believe Pascal’s claim still stands even after three centuries of newly accumulated knowledge about world religions. When seriously analyzed, there are really only two world religions: Abrahamic religion (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and paganism (Greek, Aztec, Wicca, African animism, Chinese ancestor worship, etc). Everything referred to as "religion" in 2019 falls into one of these two categories. Technically, one might add a third category, "philosophy," but there’s a reason it’s labeled differently because it usually does not make the same kinds of spiritual claims. There is probably no form of paganism that offers the kind of salvation that Christianity offers, and there are very few forms of paganism, if any, that claim to be exclusivist (as in "you must choose this religion to the exclusion of all others"). Why would you wager on paganism if it neither offered salvation nor claimed you must follow it to "be saved?" Christianity is a better wager because by wagering on it you can cover yourself from an exclusivist religion and still be spiritually OK if paganism turns out to be true. Paganism is not a good wager because it does not make itself a zero-sum option.

For example, your aunt (representing paganism) says: "I'm going to leave you twenty thousand dollars in my will," and your uncle (representing Christianity) says: "I'm going to leave you twenty thousand in my will if you mow my grass every weekend without exception." If your aunt asks you to mow her grass during the only time you have available to mow your uncle’s grass then you would be obligated by cold profit driven logic to tell her you were already obliged to mow your uncle's grass because his inheritance is the only one at risk of being lost. The problem with paganism is that you can still inherit its benefits without helping it, but you can only inherit the benefits of Christianity, and avoid its punishments, if you abandon paganism. Thus, you should be led to wager on Christianity because neglecting it has massive consequences, while neglecting to wager on paganism does not have any major consequences. Furthermore, all of paganism's benefits are encompassed within Christianity, so why would you invest in a system that has nothing extra to offer? Paganism is more irrelevant than it is false. Paganism is just a waste of a wager from Pascal's perspective.

A more serious challenge comes from the other two Abrahamic religions Judaism and Islam. Judaism, however, falls under the same irrelevance that paganism does when viewed from Christianity. Judaism is an ethnic religion whose rules and regulations are directed to the Jewish race. Gentiles living under Christianity follow the Noahic Covenant given to mankind after the flood and worship the one true God, and they are therefore recognized by Judaism as righteous gentiles. [5] So why convert to Judaism as a gentile if you can be saved as a Christian? Islam is not a serious challenger to Christianity because it lacks even the most basic elements of believability. Mohamed said received revelations from an angel while alone in a cave, but he never backed his claim with miracles, and his followers authored a supposedly perfect book that simplistically contradicts the basic facts of other holy books it claims were inspired. Islam is not even internally consistent. 

Another argument for Christianity, in opposition to other realities or religions, is that even if solipsism is true your mind has still placed Christianity at the center of history and thought. When you say the year is 2019 you are saying that it is two thousand and nineteenth years from Christ's birth. Most of the world now acknowledges this dating system as default. So, even if you wanted to believe that your mind was the only conscious thing in existence, you would still have to acknowledge that your mind placed the Christian narrative at the center of your created fictional history. Why did your mind, or the creators of this simulation (or whatever other assumptions you might make about reality) choose to make Christianity the dominant logical religion to wager on? You might protest that Christianity was not always the predominant religion, but that is irrelevant from the perspective of someone who has lived their entire life in a reality in which that is true (everyone alive today). As far as solipsism is concerned, those "people" who lived in the year AD 500 are just creative back story. 

What is the definition of "logic" or "reason?" This is an important discussion surrounding these issues. However, I would assert that what we commonly call "logic" or "reason" is not the necessary first step to God. The will to live comes before humanity's logical faculty and drives people to wager on God. Jesus is the light, and God is the sustainer of life. If you have the will to live then you will take Pascal's Wager. If you have lost the spirit of life then you will choose to starve in the dark and sink into nihilistic apathy. There is a will to death, or a spirit of death, that possesses the person or society who chooses to "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." The person who chooses to wager on faith is driven by a pre-logical impulse to survive and thrive.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Jesus did not primarily appeal to logic in his effort to convert the Jews. Jesus could have astonished the greatest minds by infallibly proving the absolute logic of becoming his follower. He could have written a tome deconstructing every philosophy and religious idea opposing him. His chosen methods, however, were parables and signs. Jesus' healing signs were pre-logical in that they appealed to something deeper than academic reasoning, they appealed to humanity's desire to be saved from the human condition of slow death in the dark mines of despair. Coming to Jesus is not an accident of being born with a higher IQ and reasoning one's way to Christianity. Even the dumbest person can have a relationship, and loving God and one's fellow man is pre-logical (although logic certainly helps).

This discussion is also related to the questions surrounding modernity and postmodernity. Modernity is the deconstruction of traditional reality, and it results in a hyper-scientific reductionism that manifests culturally in hideous utilitarian concrete architecture and "art" composed of plane lines on a canvas. Postmodernity realizes that even if modernity's skepticism is valid it is still sub-optimal in that it denies so much of humanity's nature. Man, as a species, is not especially scientific or even primarily logical, therefore postmodernity can borrow premodern elements of traditional reality and utilize them in an ironic self-aware way, as if to say: "We know this element has been deconstructed, but it still has meaning to the human psyche and is therefore valid and useful." Pascal's Wager can be seen as the beginning of a postmodern theology in the sense that it allows for the deconstruction of almost everything before offering a new foundation upon which we can "ironically" reconstruct our entire faith and, eventually, society. [6]

Pascal’s Wager is routinely mocked and dismissed by both atheists and Christians, but it remains the greatest apologetic argument. Pascal's formulation is able to both recognize the incredible stupidity and ignorance of the human creature while simultaneously offering that creature a reason to embrace God. After everything has been deconstructed, after reality itself has been called into question, Pascal’s Wager remains lurking at the bottom, inescapable. As Pascal wrote under his Wager's text: "This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it." 

 

NOTES 

[1] I'm using the term "memetic weapon" as a way of saying that Pascal's Wager is an easily spreadable idea that attacks an opposing meme: "Christians are superstitious or unreasonable."

[2] You understood my point if you realized that gravity is theory rather than law.

[3] It is impossible to "know" in the ideal sense of the word. When we say we "know" something we mean that we have reduced the likelihood of the alternatives down to a level we find acceptable. Even seemingly obvious truths have related alternative theories or unknown facts that could hypothetically dislodge them from the position of truth. For example, I might claim the earth is round, but then a flat-eather asserts it is flat. I suggest space travel has disproven him via photographs, but the flat-earther counters that the photographs are fake. I say I know a man who has been to space and told me the world is round, but the flat-earther says he lied. I tell him the man is a Christian with a good reputation, but the flat-earther suggests even the most trust worthy people can be deceivers. I suggest ships disappear over the horizon, but the flat-earther claims it is an effect produced by the ocean. At some point, because of my finite status, there is a limit to my ability to disprove the flat-earther. I can never reduce the possibility that he is right to absolute zero. 

[4] I am imagining this scenario: People have wandered into the Mines of Moria and remain lost within without hope of escape. The exit bridge has collapsed leaving a chasm of black abyss.

[5] Judaism, with all its regulations, never applied to gentiles. So the religion is irrelevant within a gentile's wager calculations beyond its relevance to other options.

[6] I am using the word "ironic" in the sense of having self awareness of the falsehood of one's statement or action. However, I am implying a kind of post-irony in which one can both realize the deconstructed fact of the thing but move beyond it into true meaning (which then negates the original falsehood). For example, a teenager can ironically tell their parent that they love them while still actually meaning it on some deeper level.

[7] This is a footnote I have added to avoid having six footnotes (I avoid the number six because of its demonic associations in Revelation). However, I have already deconstructed this superstition, and yet I will still act upon it because I recognize myself as a superstitious being and suppose that God may hold me responsible for not acting on the superstitious conscience he created in me.