This is the third of three connected essays. You can read the first two here and here. (And please read the footnotes!)
I’ve presented a significant re-framing of Pascal’s Wager which leaves us with almost precisely the opposite of what Pascal intended. In this essay, I take issue with his claim that the cost of belief is trivial, and consider some perspectives on doxastic voluntarism (whether we can voluntarily choose to believe something or not.) But this might not be going where you expect.
To reiterate: I have tremendous respect for Pascal, and his Wager is one of the earliest documented examples of an expected value decision model. If a modern rebuttal is easy, it’s only because we have perspective and knowledge of global religious traditions that he did not consider in his explicit rejection of “false religions.”
For him, in France in the 17th century, there was One True Faith and no others were worthy of consideration. This allowed him to collapse the decision space to a binary solution, and his math (almost) works in that highly constrained space.
I would argue that there were other possibilities he really should have considered. He knew and debated Protestants but apparently considered they did not deserve a spot in the decision model. He also knew Jews and Muslims, so it seems he should have considered that the Wager was not a simple yes/no proposition.
Glaring as this is today, it’s not nearly as damning as his biggest error.
Nothing is Free
Pascal argues that the cost of belief is effectively nothing. Or to be more correct, he minimizes the finite costs and says they are insignificant against the infinite payoffs of the Wager.
To be even more precise, he then argues that any perceived costs are actually gains! Again, paraphrasing, he says that believers will live a happy and tranquil life while partaking of the sacraments. The only cost is giving up immoral acts and spending time in religious pursuits. Since this is what you should be doing anyway, what have you to lose?
This is a stunning, catastrophic error1. In fact, it’s an incomprehensible error that is only explainable by the author’s bias (or, in the language of the Reverend Bayes, his priors.)
Religion serves many functions. Perhaps the most important of these is that it holds societies together2. And that’s what religions do: they bind people together into groups with common goals. This easily devolves into “us-against-them”, as has happened throughout history.
Many violent conflicts have their root in conflicting religious beliefs. Roughly eight million Europeans died in the Thirty Years War during Pascal’s lifetime. The Crusaders did not live blissful, peaceful lives, as Pascal suggests. Neither did anyone involved in the Inquisition, nor did many in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
For a decade of my life, I commuted to work daily through and beside the smoking craters left by the Twin Towers in New York City—an enduring memorial to the dark power of religious conviction. I could well go on, but you get the point.
As for other costs, how many millions of dollars have been spent litigating anti-evolution lawsuits or on engraving religious statements in classrooms? How many scientific advances were forestalled because religious belief forbade certain lines of inquiry? Or effective medical treatments forbidden because of someone’s reading of an Iron Age scripture?
How about the cost in terms of freedom? Think of the women who are forbidden to wear jewelry or makeup, and those who might be killed for the transgression of being seen without their head covered.
How about joy? What of the believers who are told that dancing and music are forbidden? What is the sum total of joy drained from human lives by religions throughout history?
No, not all belief systems are guilty here. And, of course, many readers will say transgressions I have listed are examples of people having bad or incorrect religious beliefs. But many of those things are religions doing exactly what they should do, based on their own internal rules and structures.
In making an argument, we must consider both sides: Certainly, there are tremendous positive aspects to religion. What richness of art, literature, and music only exist because of religious fervor? How about the societies that have enshrined justice and morality in law and practice, in some cases largely due to the influence of and in service to religion? What about the individuals who find powerful meaning in religious restrictions, not finding them to be boundaries but rather joyful ties to place and community?
But there are, at least, significantly offsetting negatives to these positives. The cost of belief is real. It’s not nothing.
Belief and Integrity
Pascal asks, what have you to lose? I would answer, “Well, a lot and also intellectual integrity and moral fidelity.”
What happens if we believe something because someone told us we ought to? Is that even possible? Research has been done on this question. Though there are always concerns about the bridge between structured research and lived experience, the answer seems to be no, we cannot force ourselves to believe a thing.
We can act like we believe something or pretend we believe, but that’s not the same thing at all.
What about someone who inquires and then decides that belief is not warranted? A close childhood friend of mine did just that, spending a year reading the entire Bible twice, reading commentaries and other writers, and asking questions of religious people.
He came to the conclusion that he simply did not believe any of it and did not see much of the historical Jesus in modern Christianity.
Of course, many readers will wonder if he approached the subject “in the right way”. There will be other suspicions—was his heart hardened? Was he deceived by Satan? Or, if you’re a Calvinist, maybe he was just one of the billions that God predestined for damnation in the eternal, random cosmic lottery.
But surely you must admit that this happens—intelligent people think and then some decide they simply do not believe.
Or what if someone would like to believe but simply finds he or she cannot do so? Then what? Ah, Calvin3 is smiling and nodding offstage—his God has a plan—it’s just that that plan is for a big chunk of humanity to burn in hell for eternity. Dommage.
Fake it Till You Make It
I know many readers will respond to me “well, you just have to believe it. You just gotta have faith, man.” But can we really play games with belief, and would we dare to do so if the judge is an omniscient God? Wouldn’t He see through that trick and not be impressed?
Yes, forcing belief has been a favorite tactic of many missionaries from different faiths. We can try to do it others or try to do it to ourselves. But we should ask the same question a child would ask: Is this okay? Is this right?
Is it honest to believe something only for the benefit you will get? Even if you could do so, does motivation matter?
Wouldn’t an all-knowing God see through your fakery right away, or untangle the unjust motivations for even sincere belief? Couldn’t belief be punishable by God (probably by spending an eternity in hell), if the only reason a person believes is for a reward4?
The End of Logic
Let’s be precise. Pascal’s Wager is a very specific and restricted formulation. If there were only the choice of believing in God or not believing in God, and if the eternal reward/eternal punishment dichotomy holds, the conclusion of the Wager is valid.
But the entire premise is wrong.
Everything is wrong.
There are far more options than simply believe or do not believe. Many belief systems have exclusive (only they are right) soteriologies (explanations of how one is saved). Logic is powerless to tell us what we should believe, and the choice does matter.
In addition, inauthentic belief is probably not even possible. And, if it were, a just God could reasonably condemn someone to hell for doing so.
But, here’s the thing—the real thing: In a stroke of enduring genius, Pascal began all of this with the observation that logic was powerless.
Remember that? Did you catch that?
His Wager remains one of the earliest and clearest expositions of how to apply a certain kind of logic to a certain kind of problem. In the Wager, everyone thinks they are looking at a logical argument. It walks and talks and looks and sounds like a logical argument. It wears the clothes of logic. Logical people love to play games with it, as have I. But if we think that’s what it’s about, we missed the point.
Pascal began by reminding us that he was not really talking about logic at all.
A certain kind of magic trick happened, right in front of our eyes.
Pascal’s Fire
There’s maybe a little bit more you should know about the man Blaise Pascal. He was rather ambivalent to religion for much of his life. Contemporaries reported that he not only corresponded with Fermat about gambling problems, but that he did a fair bit of gambling himself. He liked to have fun.
His father broke his hip, an event which resulted in Jansenist physicians living with the family for a few months. During that time, he had conversations with them, read their literature, and became interested in the intellectual aspects of religion.
He called this a conversion experience. But, truth be told, it didn’t take very well. He soon found himself enjoying the pleasures one might have found in 17th century Paris and was deeply engaged in “worldly pursuits”.
On the evening of 23rd November 1654, around 10:30 PM, he was home alone, preparing for bed. In the dark of that night, something happened.
Two hours later, he grabbed a pen and a piece of paper, and began to write:
The year of grace 1654.
Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement...
From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight.FIRE.
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob,
Not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD…
Pascal took that piece of paper and sewed it into the lining of his jacket, where it remained, unknown to the world. It was only discovered upon his death. Nowhere else did he write of this experience. As far as we know, he never spoke of it to anyone.
His contemporaries report a profound transformation in his life that year, and, from that point until his death eight years later, he largely devoted his considerable intellect to the defense of religion. He also adopted ascetic practices, limiting food and sleep, avoiding pleasures he had previously enjoyed, and helping the poor, often giving alms anonymously.
This was his second conversion experience. And it did not fade.
Other Ways of Knowing
So, what really happened here? Pascal saw God. Pascal had a mystical experience.
That word is a bit of a problem in the English language. It’s often used in the meaning of “deluded, confused thinking, especially when confounded by occult ideas”. The pejorative use of the word goes back to the Enlightenment and was hardened in the 19th century. This is the only use of this word that many modern readers know.
Language is such an exquisitely beautiful weapon.
But it has an older meaning that is very different: a “mystic” is someone who has direct, experiential contact with Divinity, or ultimate reality. The word comes from the Greek mystikos (“hidden”) and has a long history in Christian (and, for the record, Islamic and Jewish) mystical theology. When I use this word, this is what I mean. Always.
It was a mystical experience that allowed Carl Jung to reply, when asked by a BBC interviewer if he believed in God, “I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.” (BBC, 1959)
A mystic has no use of belief. They know.
People have been having similar experiences through all of history. There are some commonalities to this experience.
For one, we can’t talk about it5. The rational mind is almost completely powerless within the experience, and can’t make much sense of it after the fact. Nothing that happens fits into words. (We use the word ‘ineffable’ to describe these experiences.)
When people do attempt to talk about mystical experience, they typically say things that sound pretty dumb to educated ears. Sometimes they write beautiful poetry and intriguing imagery, but sometimes it ends up sounding like nonsense. Sometimes sense is nonsense and nonsense is not.
To skeptical ears, it always sounds like nonsense, though. As Kahlil Gibran said, eyes that are used to seeing in the dark aren’t much use in the light. Neuroscientists point out that there are brain state correlates to mystical experience, and so they dismiss the whole thing as an epiphenomenon of some weird brain chemistry. Some reductionists would reduce you to a meaningless epiphenomenon—the fact you think you are not an illusion is an illusion.
For thinkers who see no possibility beyond logic, this type of experience clearly lies outside, so it can only be delusion, and error—foolishness. Carl Sagan worries at his sputtering candle. Meanwhile, the Native American Elder knows Coyote laughs and goes right on creating universes.
Pascal, on that night in November, was thrust into an encounter with the sacred. This type of irruption is dangerous. It can destroy everything. People are not okay after it. When the sacred intrudes on our everyday experience, we’re likely to find nothing is the same ever again, and that we are not the same ever again. Nothing was ever as we thought, anyway.
Look again at the note sewn into Pascal’s jacket. (Here’s the full text.) On the surface, it’s incoherent and laughable—the guy could barely complete a sentence. What a fool! Why is a grown man writing like a child? But he carried this scrap of paper with him for the rest of his life. And his life was never the same after that night.
Nothing is what it appears to be. The Wager is not an example of logic put to work in a prudential argument, as the scholars and philosophers tell us.
It’s an aftershock—the trembling, tentative reach of a great mind shattered. An intellect trying to stretch across the dark night between reason and revelation, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Trying.
It is the effort of one man to carry Fire back in his hand.
That works about as well as you’d expect.
He did the best he could, but infinity will not fit into the finite. It’s just not possible.
The logic of the Wager doesn’t work. (And you should stop using it in your memes.) Focusing on the logic misses the point. It misses the Fire.
I will allow Pascal the last word, again from Les Pensées:
Our soul is thrown into the world of body, where it finds number, time, dimensions. It reasons about this, and calls it nature, necessity, and can’t believe in anything else. Joining unity to infinity doesn’t increase it, any more than adding one foot to an infinite line lengthens it. In the presence of the infinite, the finite is annihilated and becomes a pure nothing. That’s what happens to our spirit in the presence of God…
My original line was “My answer to this is simple: what the actual fuck?” This survived several drafts, but in the end, I decided to err on the side of civility. The original sentiment stands, however.
One etymology of the word, coming through St. Augustine, is that it means “to re-bind”. (The root ligare is connected to words such as ligature.)
John Calvin (1509-1564) was a theologian who developed the doctrine of double predestination: God decides, from the beginning of creation, both who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. The usual answer (from Calvinists) to why an all-good God would create such an apparently abhorrent system is first, that God is inscrutable, and then that God made creation in the way that would greatest glorify Himself. Calvinism is the basis of Puritanism, modern Presbyterianism, and is at the root of some strains of modern American Evangelical thought. Astute readers can probably infer my opinion from the supreme effort required to keep this footnote from becoming a rant.
I’m about 250 years late. Diderot beat me to this point.
No, it’s not Fight Club.