Betting Love in the Sacred Casino

Even if we accept the possibility of a God that dispenses an infinite jackpot for belief and withholds it for disbelief, Pascal’s Wager--his argument that it is infinitely more lucrative to believe in his God than not to--is reasonable only absent the possibility of another God offering the opposite payoff. Here are some possibilities: (1) a God who rewards reasonable disbelief and punishes gullibility or (2) a God who insists that we make specific theological choices (such as Baal vs. YHWH, Catholic vs. protestant, Christian vs. Muslim) and rewards only the correct choice. The possibility of even one such Being creates an opposing infinity and invalidates Pascal's Wager. 

Belief in a generic supreme being also seems not to be enough. The priests of Baal (who competed with Elijah to call down fire from heaven and were slaughtered for it) believed their god was more powerful than Elijah's Yahweh, whom Pascal identifies with the true God, so if all that is required is belief in a supreme being, the priests of Baal qualified in spades by believing on a god even greater even than Elijah's Yahweh. They were destroyed, not for disbelief in a supreme God, but for worshipping him by the wrong name and rituals in the wrong temple.

Pascal’s life and writings make it clear that his pose of agnosticism in the context of the Wager is disingenuous. For him, the issue was settled. In 1654, before he wrote any of the Pensees, he had a revelation that, for him, settled beyond all doubt the existence of the Christian God. He recorded this revelation on a paper sewn into his clothing and found there after his death: Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars. Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. God of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. “Thy God shall be my God.” The world forgotten, and everything except God (913). His wager rests logically on the premise that the God revealed to him in fire, the God of Catholicism, is the only possible source of salvation. Pascal seems to have assumed that an ordinary skeptic in 17th century Paris—imagined as a libertine—would agree that there were only two real choices: the established Christian church and hedonistic atheism.

A good many of the the Pensees are devoted to arguing that Christianity is the sole religion worthy of belief but for reasons that few religious scholars today would take seriously. For example, Pascal dismisses Islam as not supported by miracles or prophesied by Jewish scripture (243), but even a cursory web search exposes this sectarian claim is rejected by Moslems—even if made in good faith given scholarship in the 1600s. Pascal claims that Islam offers a vulgar afterlife of sensual pleasure (149), reading a wide range Christian language as figurative, but failing to extend this courtesy to the Prophet's Paradise (218). The Judeo-Christian God is privileged because He is attested in “the oldest book in the world” (243), Pascal says, but the deciphering of hieroglyphics and cuneiform has yielded scriptures more than a millennium older than the Torah, centuries prior even to its discredited authorship by Moses. The scriptures of the Jewish God are authoritative, he writes, because Moses wrote only a few generations after the creation (296). The Genesis stories are scientific fact. Ignorant of most world religions, Pascal dismissed them as “not for clever men” (219) as if that proved they had no chance of being true.

The God of Truth, whom scientist-theologians like Newton studied in the Book of Nature, may be conceived as rewarding an honest search through the evidence of the world. Such a God might well reward reasonable doubt of his existence and punish as blasphemy inauthentic belief—belief on a basis that the "believer" knows might be false. Belief on faith might be an insult to the God of Truth. You may dismiss this vengeful God of Truth as an sophistic construct to defeat the Wager, but Pascal opens himself up to it by claiming that his Wager is valid “even though there were an infinite number of chances, of which only one were in your favor” (418). Surely, the God of Truth has at least an infinitely tiny chance of existing alongside Baal, Krishna, and Zeus, so His infinite reward would balance the God of Belief’s. Pascal overplays his hand. To justify a Wager, his God must be more than just a droplet in a fog of maybes. He must seem likely to exist. And many worshippers of the Father of Jesus Christ believe that he is a God of Love and, as such, wouldn't torture good people just because of their honest doubt.

A  Christian friend of mine told me he never identifies himself as Christian to a stranger because the stranger would hear this as a profession of bigotry. The term Christian has been so hijacked by racist, misogynist, authoritarian, fundamentalist, hypocritical, homophobic, xenophobic, nationalistic, mammonist, uncharitable, cocksure sectarian evangelists that calling yourself Christian is associated in many circles with professing narrow-minded conservatism—as in the phrase “Christian opposition to X,” where X is pretty much anything none of your business (that speck in your neighbor’s eye) or any movement that expands current policy in the direction of the Golden Rule--that cares for the sick, welcomes strangers, loves enemies, or feeds the poor.

I know people who were either raised in this cruel brandof theology—bred in the bone—or raised without religion and taught that the Biblical God is a Bigot-in-Chief in the sky. Because their “God” is antithetical (in my view and theirs) to Christian charity, the only way they can follow the Lord—barring a miraculous rebranding in their brains—is to deny Him until the last cock crows. So, I ask myself, if they live moral, loving lives, which side of the Wager have they taken? I am reminded of the parable of the two sons (Matthew 21: 29-31), both ordered by their father to work in his vineyard. The first says no but shows up anyway, while the second says, “I will, sir,” but does not work. Which one, Jesus asks rhetorically, did the will of the father?

In 2018, Noah Feldman (not a Christian) defended televangelist Robert Jeffress from charges of bigotry after he preached at American Embassy in Jerusalem that Jews can’t be saved, that Mormonism is a heresy, and that Islam is pagan. Jeffress also claimed that homosexuality is a deadly sin. Feldman points out that these theological positions--including the doctrine of no salvation outside of the church—were almost universally held in past centuries of Christianity, so they are orthodox theology, not bigotry, even if people today disagree with them. Tradition is, at the very least, a mitigating circumstance. but at some point ruthless, exclusionary theology must become the kind of bigotry that drives high-minded sons to answer no even as they toil in their father’s vineyard.

In John 14:6, Jesus says that nobody comes to the Father except through Him, so there is scriptural warrant that only Christians can be saved if we take this passage as authoritative over conflicting ones such as Matthew 25:31-46, which promises salvation to the charitable who never knew Christ. In John, Jesus is the incarnate Word, the coeternal force underlying all creation, over and above the flesh-and-blood rabbi. Can seekers be saved through the eternal Word without necessarily locating him in first-century Judea or pronouncing his name correctly? Doesn’t his trinitarian personhood transcend a name and region? Of course, there’s no need for ordinary Christians to go there. They know the name and geography. But I would ask how they feel about being saved if non-Christians are not. Anybody born in Oman will almost certainly be Moslem, so if only Christians are saved, it’s mostly dumb luck, choosing your birthplace wisely. 

It may not be bigotry to passively accept orthodox teachings. But what if I rejoice that I am one of the chosen and you aren’t, if I fail to mourn your presumed state while I appreciate my own, my own unmerited accident of birth? Such a lapse contradicts the Great Commandment that I love my neighbor as myself. And who is that neighbor. Whose welfare should matter to me as much as my own? The Parable of the Good Samaritan says that he is a follower of a foreign cult (Luke 10:25-37).

Jesus may set an impossibly high standard here, but he calls me to at least try to transcend what W. H. Auden describes as the craving of “the normal heart” for “Not universal love / But to be loved alone.” Christianity may be an antidote to Auden's "error bred in the bone" (58-59), but all too often, I think, it is the opposite: a badge of privilege, correctness, exclusion, and self-love. Theological doctrines are words, debatable, but if I deploy them unlovingly against others, preening myself as God’s favorite, I become the son who answered, “I will, sir,” and did not obey. Christian in name only. The letter of James proclaims the inadequacy of mere belief, saying that even devils in hell believe in God. "Faith without works is dead" (James 2:26).

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. "September 1, 1939)." The Collected Poetry, Random House, 1945, pp. 57-59.

Feldman, Noah. "This Isn't Bigotry. It's Religious Disagreement." Bloomberg., 16 May 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-16/robert-jeffress-s-christian-beliefs-don-t-make-him-a-bigot

Pascal, Blase. Pensees. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Books, 1995.