Pascal’s Strike.

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal opined that although the probability of the non-existence of God may be substantial, even more, significant is the asymmetry of the punishment for a wrong guess. It is better to believe in God because you have won eternal bliss; it doesn’t matter if you are wrong. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in God and are proved wrong, you will be eternally damned; it doesn’t matter if you are right. The decision is to be made by a man without a brain. Believe in God!
But there is something fundamentally strange in this argument. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of decision. At least, it is not something I can choose to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and recite the Nicene Creed; I can decide to stack Bibles that I believe every word of that creed. But none of that will make me feel it if I don’t think it.
Pascal’s wager can only be an argument for pretending to believe in God. And God, the belief in whom you act, had better not be of the omniscient kind, for he will overlook the deception. The ridiculously absurd idea that believing is something you can choose to do is delightfully mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; in it, we encounter the robot Electric Monk, a labor-saving device that you can get “to do and believe for you.”
The deluxe model advertises itself as “able to believe things even Salt Lake City wouldn’t believe.” But why do we so readily accept the idea that the only thing to do if we want to please God is to believe in him? What is so special about faith? Isn’t it likely that God will also return the favor, generosity, or humility? Or seriousness? What if God is a scientist who credits the honest search for truth as the highest virtue? Didn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he died and found himself face to face with God, and the latter asked him why he didn’t believe in him. “There wasn’t enough evidence, God, there wasn’t enough,” was Russell’s (I would almost say immortal) reply. Wouldn’t God have more respect for Russell’s bold skepticism (or the proactive pacifism that had already made him the First World War II) than Pascal’s cowardly caution? We cannot know which way God is going, and we don’t even need to know that to reject Pascal’s wager. We are talking about a chance, remember, and Pascal did not claim that his wager was about anything other than very distant prospects. You would bet that Would God value dishonestly feigned faith (or even honest faith) more than natural skepticism?
And then, suppose the god you meet when you die turns out to be Baal; suppose this Baal will be as jealous as his ancient rival Yahweh was said to be. Wouldn’t Pascal be better off if he had not bet on any god as the wrong god? Doesn’t he discount the absurd number of possible gods and goddesses,’ logic of Pascal’s wager? Pascal was probably joking when he proposed his bet, as I’m kidding when I reject it. But I have met people in question after a lecture, who have gravely stated Pascal’s wager is an argument in favor of belief in God, so it was correct to air it briefly here.
Finally, is it possible to propose some anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant some slight possibility of the existence of God. Nevertheless, one can still say that you will have a fuller life if you bet on this non-existent god than you would have if you bet on an existing one and had to waste your precious time glorifying him, sacrificing to him, fighting, and dying for him, etc. I am not going to elaborate further on this question here. Still, readers should keep it in mind when we proceed in later chapters to the evil consequences resulting from religious views and the observance of religious precepts.