If there’s anything that I dread, it’s having to memorize something.
Also, I really resent being challenged by an older male, especially Christian. By this I am referring to a religious challenge, which I can generally handle. But it has been imprinted on me that the older male knows more and is someone to be deferred to, especially in spiritual matters. It doesn’t always happen that I feel like a deer in the headlights just because someone is asking me a bunch of questions. I can explain why I don’t believe in gods. But I’ve never had someone come up to me and, knowing I am an atheist, just say, “What about Pascal’s Wager?” It put me off stride. Mostly because, as I said, I hate memorizing things, and while I had studied Pascal’s Wager and rejected it (many times), I had not prepared a defense; and in this case, it was an older, intelligent, Christian, male friend who was asking me.
Hell, I rejected the validity of Pascal’s Wager even when I was a Christian. It’s basically a logical magic trick as far as I’m concerned– it’s too easy, and anything that seems too easy is suspicious to me. And when someone throws me an argument that seems suspicious, I am never sure how to respond, especially when it is someone that I generally respect and when the topic is one that I am not ready to debate.
So Pascal’s Wager makes the claim that it is only logical to believe in God because if you do believe and he doesn’t exist, then you don’t lose anything. But if you do not believe and he does exist, then you go to Hell.
So here I am, ambushed (in a well-meaning, friendly debate sort of way) by an argument that sounds suspicious to me and I can’t articulate why. Plus, my friend is a pretty smart guy and I was surprised that he thought Pascal’s Wager was so good when I had thought it was weak at best. So that threw me off, too.
I start by trying to make my friend define God, and he evades this (I don’t remember how he did this, the clever bastard).
I end up agreeing, for the sake of argument, that it’s a 50-50 chance that there is a God– which I totally think is false, but I could not come up with a reason off the top of my head (see above about memorizing things). So then, my friend asks simply, “Why not believe?”
“You’re assuming I could just make myself believe,” I say.
“Oh, but you can make yourself believe; it’s easy,” my friend says, and something about cognitive dissonance.
I get more suspicious and I say, “even if I could make myself believe, I still don’t have a reason to believe– or a God to believe in, technically.”
“Just any God,” my friend says, and I say “fine, just any God.”
“But why,” I continue, “Would God want me to be a hedge-betting fence-sitter? How is that what God wants? Why would that get me out of Hell?”
But at this point my friend starts to look a little frustrated. I think it’s because he thought it was a simple argument, but I wasn’t buying his premises (or lack thereof), and he thought the math was easy. So, why not believe?
To him, this was like a game where there are 50 cards, 1/2 red and 1/2 blue, and you’ve got a 50-50 chance of guessing the right color of a card you pick at random. But then you learn that you have to bet your life on being correct, and if you bet your life on blue but it turns out to be red, you are tortured forever; but if you bet your life on red and it’s really blue, you just fall asleep forever and never wake up. So obviously, red is the only logical bet. Anything else would be basically insane.
To me, it’s more like a game with a hundred cards, but God is holding all of them. I ask him to show me the cards so I can understand my odds better, but he refuses. And then tells me to guess which card he’s holding right now. And then he disappears forever. But I know I have to guess the right card before I die or else he will torture me forever. So I can choose: either guess a card and hope it’s right, or say to myself, “That’s can’t be right. The odds are too low of me picking the right card, I can’t believe God would do that to me! It’s much more probable that I dreamed the whole thing.” And then! I have another dream (?) where someone tells me, “There’s a trick to beating God at his game! All you have to do is say, ‘That one,” and it counts for all the cards and God won’t torture you forever!” And when I wake up, I have to choose between saying “That one!” or “I need to quit eating Chinese food before I go to bed.”
Got it? Good!
At this point the conversation took a turn because I started to talk about evidence as opposed to faith, so we started talking about how we could quantify and test God (or, more accurately, test the claims of religion).
But back to Pascal. There’s only one thing his Wager assumes, and that is this: that the sort of God we are talking about will send everyone to Hell who does not believe in him. That is counter-intuitive enough to need some supporting evidence and make God’s existence less likely. If he sends people to Hell for being bad people, that makes sense, and then we wouldn’t need to believe in him. But let’s take Christianity, and this God who cannot forgive the sin of disbelief even though there is no way to prove his existence. Going into a bit more detail, we see that we all have the sin of disbelief or doubt because of Adam and Eve’s sin. So not only are we punished (eternally) for something they did, but God directly caused them to do it because he is knows everything and therefore knew they would do it, and he made them curious and doubting regardless. There was only one way this could go for Adam and Eve, and now everyone has to make this Wager that God will be impressed enough by our response to the mere threat of Hell (again without evidence).
Do you know how much everything in me rebels against the idea of a God who will torture me eternally because I can’t believe he would be willing to torture me eternally?
Enough to make me call myself an atheist, that’s how much.
Now, just a God related to no religion, a watchmaker God who doesn’t do anything or Spinoza’s God who does not exist outside Nature and Physics, is easy to say, “Fine, I can see how maybe that exists,” but there’s no point. He won’t be offended if I don’t confess, he doesn’t demand any worship or acts if I do believe, so I can get on with my life. It’s more-or-less atheism with a touch of agnosticism. That’s close to the 50-50 sort of God.
But the one who knowingly sets in motion a chain of events that will damn my soul to eternal suffering– that makes me suspicious. And when I get suspicious, I only want to say two words: “prove it.” At this point statistics don’t convince me, and “Why not believe?” is not the right question. The right question is, “Why believe?”
Because there’s still the problem of Hell and why God would condemn me to it; and if free will is so great, why would it send me to Hell; and if there is free will in Heaven, can people there sin and get sent to Hell; and if not, why couldn’t God make this world with no free will and just populate Heaven without making Earth at all?
Let me just say here that I’m sure you can come up with an internally consistent answer. But the more explanations there are, the more unlikely it is– unless you have evidence. And not just evidence that your religion’s claims can be verified, but evidence that your God is real. Because if he’s not real, and I believe in him just in case, and if he puts me in Heaven just because I was afraid to go to Hell, I’m not sure that’s the sort of God I want to be spending eternity with.
Think about it.