Pascal's Wager Rejected: Now What?
After an intense and enjoyable conversation about Jesus with a grad student who claimed to be an atheist, I cited Pascal's seemingly wise words as my closing argument. I asked, “So do you want to choose Jesus because if you do and we find he doesn’t exist, you will have lost nothing?”
This twenty-something intellectual paused long enough to do more calculations than I can do in a day and replied, “No. That would be crazy.” She simply reached and batted my attempted slam dunk into the stands. And I thought, “Now what?”
Blaise Pascal was brilliant, so I borrowed his wisdom in that situation. He was a 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician. In the science and math world, he's famous for writing an essay on conic sections at 16. He later worked on the foundations of calculus before Newton’s time. “Pascal’s Law” is about atmospheric pressure. He also built the first computer, which can be seen in a Paris museum, a calculating machine. Did I say he was a smart cookie?
In philosophy and Christianity, he's famous for his arguments breaking down barriers to believing in God.
He didn’t think nature or logic could prove God’s existence. He thought we could only know God through Jesus. But as a masterful philosopher, he forged a barrier-breaking set of questions known as “Pascal’s Wager.” It does the heavy lifting for intellectual seekers, or so I thought.
The Wager says that we should live our lives as if God exists because if he doesn’t, we lose nothing, but if he does, we gain everything.
A believer can use the Wager and state to a skeptic, “If I’m right and you’re wrong, in the end, you lose everything (getting hell and all that goes with it), and I gain everything (getting heaven and all that goes with that). If you happen to be right (there is no God) and I’m wrong (believing there is a God), in the end, you gain nothing, and I lose nothing.”
Pascal thought if people didn’t believe in God but lived as if there was a God, they might come to faith along the way. This Wager could move them in that direction. It seemed like a good bet to me to throw the dice and choose to live as if there is God, but it didn’t to my friend.
She was a post-graduate student who'd grown up in and around the church. She had tasted the bitter fruit of religion, but she'd never known a relationship with Jesus. Her education had removed any questions she might have had about the reality of or need for a god. She was kind to let me and everyone else believe what we wanted, and she wanted the freedom to do the same. She didn’t mind, however, exploring ideas.
As my offer to choose Jesus rattled around in the bleachers after she smoothly rejected it, she explained why the Wager was riskier to her than I admitted. She said, “If I live as if there is God and in the end, there is not, then I would not have lost ‘nothing.' I would've lost my entire life.”
It took a while for me to understand her logic, but after a few passionate paragraphs, I got it. She thought that what God asks of us in the practical, the things we “can’t do and the things we must do,” as she said it, requires the removal of all true fun and the addition of many burdensome sacrifices.
And that was the word for her understanding of Christianity—“sacrifice.”
She wasn’t opposed to sacrificing. It was costing her a lot to get an education. But she thought the benefits received for the sacrifice of Christianity were not worth the cost.
My friend had found one of the flaws in the French man’s Wager. You don’t lose “nothing” when you follow Christ. You must lose everything.
Jesus clearly said that we'll know him only when we die for him (Luke 9:23; 57-62; 14:25-33). We must give our lives to his control before we experience the abundant life flowing from his control (Matthew 10:39).
She was right.
You can’t just choose to believe there is a God and expect that you're a follower of Jesus (James 2:19). That isn’t what makes a Christian. Christ-followers follow Christ, and we receive salvation by surrender and sacrifice.
She'd wisely caught a mistake in the Wager. But she also made one.
As she spoke about sacrifice and how following God’s ways would be too risky, I saw her flaw. It was one that many make.
She thought something about God and his ways that I worried about before I became a believer, something farther from my thoughts now than my dream of inventing something to present on Shark Tank is from my actual ability.
She believed that if God exists, he and his ways are not good.
She believed God is a bully who asks us to do things we don’t want. He's a spoilsport who keeps us from imbibing the thrills of life.
If she were to follow God, in her mind, she would be sacrificing all that's happy and exhilarating in her life. She believed the sacrifice would be of the good to get the not-so-good. That's a fatal mistake.
1 John 1:5 states this:
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.
That's core stuff. It's the foundation of real and rugged Christianity. It's what God revealed about himself in history. It's the message the apostles declared after being with Jesus, who was God in the flesh. It's who God is.
He is light. He is not even close to being like darkness.
He's good. He has no bad in him and never does what isn't good. He is love (1 John 4:8). And he only does loving things toward us, demonstrated by the sacrifice of his son for us (1 John 4:9-10).
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. (A. W. Tozer, in The Knowledge of the Holy)
When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the ‘natural’ response, once all ‘inward’ hindrances are removed, will be to do ‘everything I [Jesus] have told you to do.’ (Dallas Willard, in Divine Conspiracy)
When we truly see how good God is, we don’t see our sacrifices as costly compared to the life they lead to.
If skeptics believe that God, if there is one, isn't good, then they'll never seek him. Why would they?
If superficial Christians believe that God isn't truly good in what he requires and where he leads, then they'll not serve him or seek to grow to be like him. Why would they?
Our duty as Christians is first to know God's beauty, loveliness, and goodness for ourselves. And then to help others see him for who he is.
Visions of the good God will arouse our love response.
So, we should look at God, be with him, listen to stories about him, consider his fascinating thoughts and intriguing ideas, and see his sacrificial actions of care and invigorating invitations to adventure. We'll find our love and desire for him increasing as we do. And that alone is wonderful.
But then we can present him persuasively to our skeptic friends, letting them dwell on him who defines good.
If they will, we might be able to convince them to follow him, but there'll be no need for a Wager or a slam-dunk closing argument. God’s goodness will be good enough.