(Post #4 in a series about Pascal’s Wager. To start at the beginning, click here.)
It costs nothing
The man who challenged my non-belief by asking, “What if you’re wrong?” inadvertently drew attention to one of the big problems with all variations of Pascal’s Wager. He was savvy enough to understand that a simple counter-argument would be to simply turn the question around and ask him, “What if the believer is wrong?” So, without any prompting from me, he proposed that if he was wrong it would cost him nothing.
I expected that answer. Unfortunately it’s very misguided. Pascal himself admits that what you throw onto the gambling table is not nothing. He writes, “You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery.”
Since the existence of God is a truth claim, gambling incorrectly means potentially giving up the “true.” What about your reason and your will? Are you willing to risk those as well? If you wager badly, Pascal recognizes that your nature may be forced into error and misery. That sounds like pretty serious consequences for being wrong. How, then, does he conclude, “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing”?
What was he thinking?
Pascal is a hypocrite. He doesn’t really believe what he says—that these things are “nothing.” In fact, he states in the next paragraph that possibly, “…I may perhaps wager too much.” He smooths over this problem by concluding that it doesn’t matter how much is at risk since it all pales in comparison to the infinity of happiness that one stands to gain. So, Pascal himself doesn’t actually believe we are wagering nothing. To him, it just doesn’t matter.
Pascal’s assertion is that these things are relatively nothing. On the scale of the infinite, whatever we have doesn’t even tweak the needle. If the non-believer is right, though, and we only have one life to live, then the importance of these things reflects the very essence of our lives. The are not nothing. They are everything!
This is where my interrogator’s argument diverges from Pascal’s. What this gentleman meant was that even if there is no life beyond this one, these things are still of no consequence. This is certainly wrong from my naturalistic perspective, but it’s even wrong from his religious perspective.
The religious perspective
The Bible makes it clear that if you belong to God, your whole life is to be willingly sacrificed for the cause (Matthew 16:24, Romans 12:1, etc.). That’s not nothing. Jesus himself said repeatedly that there are costs to following him. Luke 14:28 is a parable that says before one builds a tower, one must first count the cost to see if he has enough to complete it. The meaning is clear about what that cost is. You could lose your family (v26)and your possessions(v33), and if you aren’t willing then you aren’t worthy. This concept is repeated many times in the Gospels and is mirrored in the behavior of believers throughout the New Testament.
If you lose nothing, you’re doing it wrong.
The reality perspective
That’s between you and God, of course. It makes no difference to me. I responded from a more earthly perspective. I pointed out that following a traditional religion means that someone is telling you who to love and how to love them, what you can do for a living and how much money you can keep, who you may oppress and who you must obey, where you must be and what you must do. You give up any chance of improving your world because your faith tells you there is only one way it can be. That’s not nothing.
I also pointed out that if you wish to know what is true, you need the tools of reason to help you separate fact from myth, yet religion specifically forbids you from using those tools. If you wager on God, you lock away any chance of knowing in this life whether you wagered correctly. You can only hope.
Pascal knew all this. He didn’t believe one could ever know for sure if there was a God, so he knew that a wager on God meant giving up truth. He knew it meant giving up reason and your will—becoming a slave to others. He knew that a wrong answer could easily trade knowledge and happiness for error and misery. Yet he tries to persuade us that we should still buy the myth, because all of this—all of this truth and goodness, all of this reason and knowledge and happiness, all of this that is the very stuff of life itself—is nothing. “…You lose nothing,” he says.
What a jerk!