Pascal’s Wager Made Easy (Part 2)

Now that you have a simple way of presenting Pascal’s Wager in conversation, you need to be prepared for objections. I’m going to offer what I think are the top ten. They fall into three general categories though. I’ve deliberately made these responses brief so that they are easy to remember for use in conversation. Check out my YouTube channel here and here, as well as the recommended reading for those who want more depth. I’ve drawn heavily on the work of Dr. Michael Rota and Dr. Liz Jackson.

Psychological/Moral Objections

• Objection 1: You can’t force yourself to believe in God, so you can’t choose to wager.
  • Response: This is a straw man because the Wager doesn’t ask you to believe in God. It asks you to commit. Commitment doesn’t necessarily include belief, but it does include actions that you can do while remaining honest. Actions like going to church, forming friendships with religious believers, reading and studying sacred scripture and praying. Prayers can be conditional to remain honest though, like “God if you are there, thank you for this and please help me with that…”

• Objection 2: The Wager is immoral because it is taken for selfish reasons and tries to use God as a means to an end, but that won’t fool God.
  • Response: First, you don’t have to take the Wager for selfish reasons. You can take it to bring joy to God, help others in the most important way possible, or even because it is a potential moral duty. Second, even if you commit for selfish reasons, that can be an initial step on a journey to real faith and a purer love of God.

• Objection 3: It’s wrong to believe on the basis of expected value instead of on the basis of evidence. You risk becoming ensnared in an illusion.
  • Response: If the evidence is roughly balanced, it makes sense to pick a strategy on the basis of expected value. Just reflect on the coin flipping analogy. Also, there are risks of self deception both ways- commitment or non-commitment. No matter which way you choose to live your life, non-rational factors do influence what you believe to be true.

Pragmatic Objections

• Objection 4: The cost of commitment is too high. Think about the consequences of mistaken religious commitment for a martyr.
  • Response: The Wager should be taken on a case by case basis. Perhaps it applies to some but not all. Your job is to figure out if it applies to you though. As you consider the possible negatives in your own case, try to correct for your natural human bias to overestimate the impact of difficulties. And remember, it’s rational to face a high risk of great cost to avoid an even higher risk of greater cost.

• Objection 5: If you choose the wrong god, then every time you go to church you’re making the real God madder and madder. So maybe it’s better to remain neutral.
  • Response: Many religions prescribe the same kinds of actions- helping the poor, tithing, prayer, etc. So even if you practice the wrong religion you’re still taking a lot of actions prescribed by the real religion. Imagine you have two children and you invite both of them to your 50th wedding anniversary. One child comes with a gift he thought you’d like but was mistaken. The other ignores your invitation and says you don’t exist. Which is the better child?

• Objection 6: You wouldn’t turn your wallet over to a mugger who promised to return it with ten times the original amount, so you shouldn’t take The Wager.
  • Response: Your credence in the mugger’s claim should be low, which isn’t analogous to the version of the Wager I offer where the odds are 50/50 like a coin flip.  If he raises the amount he promises to return then your credence gets even lower. There are structurally similar cases to the mugger’s offer though that many would accept, like paying a large amount of money for a risky new medication to treat a life-threatening illness. So the person raising this objection would need to offer an additional argument showing why The Wager is more like the mugging case than the medicine example.

• Objection 7: There are many worldviews with infinite rewards and consequences besides Christianity, and the Wager doesn’t give us any way to choose between them, so it is useless.
  • Response: This is often considered the strongest objection to the Wager. If infinities are being considered though, virtually any religious commitment is equally bad or more advantageous than no commitment at all, so one should practice a religion. “But which one?” the objector asks. “The Wager doesn’t show us.” Well, actually the Wager tells us to practice the one that seems most likely to be true. To figure that out, you need to look at the evidence.

• Objection 8: Any action you take has some chance, no matter how small, of leading to belief in God, whether that is prayer, eating a burger or tying your shoes. When you multiply each probability by the reward though (infinity), it turns out all strategies have an equal expected value- infinity. So then why go to church, pray, read scripture, etc.?
  • Response: It is widely accepted among mathematicians that not all infinities are equal and commonsensical thought experiments reveal this. Imagine you had two eternal “heavens” before you to choose from, both offering the same reward, but neither guarantees you will get the reward. In the first heaven, the probability of you getting the reward is 0.000001. In the second heaven, the probability of you getting the reward is 0.999999. Clearly you should prefer the second to the first, even though both promise an infinite reward. One ought to prefer the worldview with greater credence, other things being equal.

Biblical/Theological Objections

• Objection 9: Paul says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).  This goes directly against a crucial premise in the Wager, that living a devout Christian life is beneficial even if Naturalism is true.
  • Response: Understanding the context of this passage answers this objection. First, the apostles and recipients of this letter to Corinth faced severe this-worldly costs, unlike the average person living today in a country with religious freedom. It doesn’t follow that since it was bad for them in their context, it is bad for us in our context. Second, Paul’s thought is not, “if naturalism is true then Christians are of all human beings most to be pitied.” Rather it’s more like “if we are wrong in our believing/preaching then we are committing blasphemy against God, putting us outside the true religion and suffering much in this life, which is a lose-lose.” He didn’t even speak to the possibility of no religion being true.

• Objection 10: Salvation is up to God’s will alone. So a person’s choices/actions can’t have an effect on whether he or she attains salvation. But the Wager says our choices/actions can increase our chances of attaining salvation.
  • Response: Those who hold to monergism can still think it’s within the human being’s power to resist God’s saving grace. If that’s the case our choices/actions can have an effect on whether or not we attain salvation. But even if you think grace is irresistible, you can still say that ones choice to commit to God in the way the Wager recommends is a result of God’s grace, just as a Calvinist would say that ones choice to have faith in God is a result of his grace.

Recommended Reading

Michael Rota, Taking Pascal’s Wager pgs. 52-79.

Elizabeth Jackson & Andrew Rogers, Salvaging Pascal’s Wager. Pgs. 59-84.