Guest Column: Pascal’s Wager a losing bet either way?

Many theists offer “Pascal’s Wager” as a proof, not of God’s existence, but of the consequences of not believing in or rejecting God.

The wager was put forth by the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who argued that God’s existence cannot be proved or disproved through human reason.

Simply stated, it asserts that if you believe in God and he does not exist, you lose nothing, whereas if you correctly believe in God, you gain everything (i.e., eternal bliss).

But if you correctly disbelieve in God, you gain nothing, whereas if you erroneously disbelieve in God, you lose everything (eternal damnation).

It sounds simple – and simply unreasonable, since the problems with the wager are manifold.

How can a person will themselves to accept a belief in something that is evidentially false to them? Would not the wager subject those who believe in the wrong gods just as it would to disbeliefs in all gods?

Would this not leave a believer of other gods in the same predicament as the atheist? Why would God reward a believer simply for “wagering” or playing the odds?

Pascal’s first mistake was to attempt to provide a reason for faith. But once a reason is offered, it then becomes susceptible to scrutiny and even outright refutation. The answers to Pascal’s Wager have been known for centuries, and you would easily think of them yourself if someone had prompted you to wager that Brahma exists.

If we are reduced to wagering that God exists, we’ve already conceded that there is no useful evidence for establishing the existence of God. Thus, wagering on the existence of God betrays a tacit realization that the logical and evidentiary arguments designed to support the God hypothesis cannot withstand scrutiny, and simply fail to demonstrate anything convincingly, much less conclusively, thereby conceding the rationality of unbelief.

The wager is incapable of demonstrating the truth of any biblical claim, such as the penalty for unbelief or that a false belief in Christianity costs a person nothing.

The wager is no help to us in identifying which God exists; or how many gods exist; or whether any gods continue to exist; or whether there exists a personal God worthy of our worship, etc.

The wager ignores the possibility that a God exists who does not want to be worshipped, or who values intellectual integrity more than blind faith. If such a God existed, who would send people to hell for worshiping him, or for believing in him without evidence, then the atheist would be far better off than the theist in this case.

The wager ignores the possibility that a god from a competing religion might exist, such as the God of Islam, who threatens eternal damnation for anyone claiming that God has a son. Surely the atheist is no worse off than the Christian if such were to be the case.

The wager assumes that the chances of God existing are equal to the chances of his not existing. But if the chances of God existing are almost zero, as atheists believe, the wager is likely to persuade only those who already believe.

There are quite a few more problems with the wager that could be mentioned, but the literature on this subject is so widely published on the Web that it hardly seems necessary to exhaust all of them here.

The only point that really needs remembering is that if one wouldn’t accept the wager as a good reason to believe in an extra-biblical god, then one shouldn’t use it as a reason to believe in the biblical God, either.

If the logic of the “argument” does not hold up for those with competing religious ideas, then the logic must also break down for one’s own religious ideas as well.