Pascal's Wager: A Cruel Finitude

Blase Pascal (1623-1662), was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor who, after his conversion to Catholicism, paradoxically professed rational agnosticism and (to him at least) reasonable faith. In his Pensees, he demonstrates with math-like arguments the futility of trying to understand the cosmos: “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199). We hang short-sighted between two abysses, the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small. What can we do then, he asks, “but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end?” (199) It's impossible, Pascal says, to know “a hidden God” (427) immune to philosophical proofs such as argument from natural order. If God exists, He is infinite. Just as the last number of an infinite series cannot be known to be odd or even, so God cannot be known by finite beings. He “is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us.” So does God exist? “Reason,” Pascal declares, “can decide nothing here” (418).

Given this rational agnosticism, how can belief in God be reasonable? Pascal’s answer is his Wager, which claims to produce a Kalashnikov evidence for belief in God out of uncertainty. Pascal argues that, given a forced wager between two unknowns—two roads, say, diverging in a yellow wood—it is reasonable to select the gamble with the higher probable payoff. On the question of God’s existence, believing that you don’t know (even if you truly don't) isn't an option because it's a subset of not believing in God. You must, according to Pascal, make a leap of faith one way or the other, and a leap affirming God’s existence is infinitely more lucrative. If you believe in God and he does in fact exist, you reap infinite (eternal) rewards in Heaven, but, if he does not, you suffer only inconveniences during a finite life. Infinite trumps finite. It is stupid to bet on mere finite convenience and the hollow honor of having guessed right. Calculating cost/benefit as if religion were a casino game, Pascal concludes that, given any chance whatsoever that God exists, the payoff for believing that he does is infinitely greater than the payoff for not believing, so any reasonable person will choose to believe in God (418).

Pascal’s Wager, is seductively cold-blooded and rational, a convenient prop for believers to shore up their confidence with: “I have faith, but even if I didn’t, I ought to, because not believing is illogical.” The Wager’s logical form also makes it an a attractive club to beat nonbelievers on the head with, but the club is spongy with wormholes if inspected closely. Most obviously, its simple form assumes that belief faked for personal gain isn’t a fake. If  “reason can decide nothing here,” agnosticism is undeniable. Is it even possible to will ourselves into believing something we know there is no evidence for? Surely, believing that a thing is true is quite different from acting on the assumption that it is, which is easy enough? Pascal acknowledges this problem and advises unbelievers to act as if they believed, become hypocrites in the hope that their actions will generate genuine belief. But how possible is that? Suppose that God bet you eternal bliss against a nickel you couldn’t believe the sky was orange? You might sing every Sunday in the choir of the Orange Sky Church—time well invested if it worked—but would such performances trick an omniscient gambler who knew that every time you looked up between white clouds, you saw blue? Would Pascal’s hypocritical tactic really work, and, even if it did, wouldn’t its affirmation of God’s existence be tainted with dishonesty? Wouldn't it be fraud?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making binary decisions without knowing outcomes. We do this when we get married or cast a vote in a two-party system, any time our choices are either/or. Coming to a Y in a yellow wood, we choose a road, but choosing a road isn't the same thing as believing our chosen road is true, the other false. Practical choices are often made on so little available evidence that they are essentially random. There's no dishonesty in winging it on faith, hoping for the best with a leap into the unknown, but this can be done (and often is) without actual belief. 

Deliberate positive thinking seems to me a benign policy in daily life. I selfishly try to think well of people until they prove otherwise because I imagine that the expectation of good faith tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. People like to be liked. They tend to trust those who trust them and love those who love them. On the other hand, paranoia invites persecution. I willfully act for selfish (even hedonistic) reasons as if the world is good because I hope that my actions will tend to make my slice of it more likely to be better. This is a wager, but it differs from Pascal’s in that it is acted on without belief. It is “as if," and might not satisfy Pascal’s omniscient God.

Of course, as I’ve noted, Pascal describes a God that is “infinitely incomprehensible” with “neither parts no limits,” so it is impossible to know anything about Him. But then out of nowhere—well, out of orthodox Catholic theology, the relevance of which to God, if any, is infinitely unknowable according to Pascal—he comes up with a God he seems to know a lot about, a God who rewards and punishes on no basis but their answer to one question, despite the fact that that he, if he exists, has hidden all evidence as to the right answer. Everything hinges cold-bloodedly on the trick question of God's existence, however defined. This is a strange creature indeed—yes, a “creature” because Pascal has created him with unGodlike “parts and limits,” an anthropomorphic head shrunken from the "infinitely incomprehensible"—and not a very savory creature at that.

Pascal’s finite God, the judge who punishes or rewards, is, like the Church’s, modeled on human tyrants. He is modeled on the YHWH of Moses, an all-powerful king and tribal war god whose seat was carried before the Israelites in battle and who rewards his people with the death of their enemies. Far from transcendent, the God of the Pentateuch has a seat in Holy of Holies of the Temple and reveals his presence at precise GPS locations with Moses in the wilderness. Moses' God is finite within a polytheistic system and does not claim to be the sole god, but merely the greatest one and the patron of Israel. The First Commandment allows that gods other than YHWH exist (indeed, David, His “son,” puts a household idol in bed to trick Saul). Such gods exist but must not be worshipped by the Twelve Tribes “before Me.” They must be secondary. The Lord of early Hebrew scripture—who, incidentally, nowhere in those scrolls promises eternal bliss—is alien to Pascal’s unknowable infinity but seems to be the source, via Christianity, of the jealous king who lavishly rewards loyalty and offers bribes for human affirmation. Actually, there has been a radical shift between Moses' God, who demands physical obedience to tribal law--morality and worship--and Pascal's God, who seems content with a mental affirmation. Unless you take one orthodox form of Christianity as normative (as Pascal did), there is no basis for conflating the incomprehensible God in the Void--the infinity about which we can know nothing whatsoever--with Moses' jealous Dispenser of tricks and treats.

Indeed, if Pascal’s God exists, taken literally, the high road might be to reject Him. Pascal presents him as a power whose sole basis for withholding torture is your vote for him. Viewed in human terms, He is a narcissistic egotist writ huge, and any offered bliss is suspect for that reason. Would you buy a used car from this superman? Obviously, most of us lack the courage to resist a tyrant who tortures all opposition, so most of us, if convinced by Pascal’s Wager, might indeed cave and “believe." But is that the moral choice? Eternally worshipping a bully who has brain-washed us (via Purgatory) into experiencing monotony as bliss sounds very much like life in the Matrix—a drugged, false state, less Heaven than Hell. God-as-Jealous-King throws bliss in doubt. 

I recall Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, who hears about Heaven and Hell from Miss Watson, the old-maid sister of the Widow Douglas. After nagging Huck for being a normal boy, she describes “the good place” where people do nothing all day but play harps and sing—but more ominously as the place where she expects to be. On that basis, Huck decides he won’t “try for it,” especially after being told that his friend Tom is going elsewhere. Hell is more attractive than Miss Watson’s churchy Heaven: “All I wanted was a change. I wasn’t particular.” Twain tightens the screws of irony later in Huckleberry Finn when Huck decides to write a note betraying his friend Jim into slavery, a move that he understands to be "good” because of the slavery culture he was raised in, and is horrified at how close came to going to hell for “stealing” Jim. But then, after recalling his loving connection with Jim in one of Twain’s most lyrical passages, Huck holds his breath and says to himself, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” And he tears up the note. 

Before I close, I need to acknowledge that those who affirm a anthropomorphic, jealous, judgmental God-king, do not speak for all of Christianity, and we may misread these metaphors by extending them beyond their intended range, making false analogies. A metaphorical “king,” for instance, who is a symbolizes the way that the world is experienced is not open to the same objections as a human monarch. Here, there may be no tyrant open to charges of cruelty and injustice, but a structure of experienced reality interpreted metaphorically as like a king in limited ways. The words reward and punishment may be “as-if” terms not taken literally to imply some spirit-boned boss-man of inconceivable dimensions doling out perks for loyalty. But unsavory connotations do carry over. Religious language may best be read as metaphor—evocative story and poetic imagery pointing to things that are not literally expressible. However, Pascal’s cold-blooded reasoning seems to project a negative image of God as tyrant.