Wrestling with Religion

I have been dead forever--or for 13.8 billion years if you count time from the Big Bang. I am alive now, of course, but I was dead less than a century ago, and don’t miss all of those oblivious eons. According to actuarial tables, I can expect to be dead forever again in about ten years. My longest reasonable expectation is a bit more than double that, and it overlaps with likely dementia and disability. At most, my life expectancy is one billionth the time I've  already spent comfortably dead, so why I should take health and safety precautions for a reward so trivial: a fifth of a lifetime and an infinitely smaller proportion of my inevitable death-time? Healthy behaviors are a game of diminishing returns, especially since many risky indulgences tend to kill or disable us slowly. It may take years, even decades, for fat to clog arteries, smoking to kill lung tissue, alcohol to destroy the liver, or speeding to kill. Most people die from only one of these (if not from someth...

At the risk of beating a dead Pascal, I want to challenge two assumptions in his argument that belief in God is infinitely more lucrative than unbelief. One is that the main motive for unbelief is the unbeliever’s concupiscence (often sexual desire but not limited to that). People disbelieve so they can be free to misbehave. Another is that unbelievers benefit in a finite way by liberating themselves to pursue to unbridled pleasure. Pascal himself contradicts these elsewhere when he says that Christian belief  makes a person “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend" (418). Anything that deprives a person of this is hardly a benefit, even a finite one. I doubt, however, that these benefits actually proceed from belief, having read extensively in newspapers, autobiographies, and popular fiction from the 19th-century South, where the existence of God, sin, heaven, and hell were taken for granted. Belief in God was well-nigh universal am...

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 beli...

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 limi...