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Since retiring from software engineering, one of my pursuits is to read All The Things, and Pensées ended up near the top of my personal list of Things. After reading the introduction and discovering what Pensées actually is, I was burdened with an aspiration I had never before conceived: be so influential that scholars go through my notes and spend a couple of years translating my cryptic scrawls to publish a book by me after I’m dead.
However, I’m not sure I’d want that book to be the near sum of my legacy. Blaise Pascal was a 17th century mathematician and scientist who got a whole unit of measurement named after him despite dying at thirty-nine. Sadly, for most people who don’t work with pressure gauges or dead programming languages, the first encounter with Pascal1[1] is Pascal’s wager.
Briefly: Pascal’s wager states that if you believe in God and are wrong, you are no worse off, while if you don’t believe in God and are wrong, you spend eternity in Hell, so it only makes logical sense to believe in God.
Being an atheist who studies and used to engage with religious apologetics, I hate Pascal’s wager more than any other philosophical argument I’ve encountered. It’s pithy, easy to argue, even has a cool name from a dead guy who was very smart. Its substance has wormed deep into apologetic cant, becoming an inevitable speed bump on the road to agreeing to disagree. Modern atheist apologists probably bring it up even more often as a straw man to set on fire. I’m not going to bother reiterating the retorts to it,2[2] because I’ve been at this for so long the inevitable counterarguments are more tedious to my ear than the argument itself. So it was gratifying to read Pascal and discover he’d probably feel the same way about the whole situation.3[3]
Pensées is unfinished work, and gives more insight into Pascal’s thinking and approach than I suspect he would want us to have. His presumed target audience was educated libertines, or as the introduction puts it, “a person well versed in the social graces, familiar of the world of the great and its pastimes, such as hunting, gambling, dancing, and tennis,4[4] sufficiently informed about the discoveries of contemporary science … priding himself on being a hardheaded rationalist.” Pascal would likely have polished his arguments considerably for such an audience.5[5] The work as we have it makes it clear that Christianity in its most Jesus-centric form is axiomatic for him. It is the truth around which all argument revolves, and though he intends to organize his various proofs into a theological argument with mathematical structure and vigor, he didn’t get the chance.
Though it’s impossible to know if and where the wager would show up in a final draft, it presents on its own merits as an opening to a far lengthier—and in my opinion more persuasive—critique of living without belief in Christ. Furthermore, as far as the notes had any order at all, the collected series of notes that starts with the wager goes on to say the argument won’t convince anyone.
Despite these being the rough substance of a book seeking to provide a rational defense of Christianity, there’s a thematic throughline that reason alone cannot get you to God. Ultimately, your heart and your desperate misery6[6] must lead you to Christ, and the scriptures are intentionally vague so as to screen out people who cannot find God in their heart. There is subtlety and precision in his explanations, and he makes an effort not to confuse theological narrative with formal logic even as he applies them to each other. I expect a finished book would have been compelling, and frankly, modern apologists could learn a lot by reading what we’ve got.
Instead, from a half-ordered pile of notes, the wager gets yanked out and peddled through conversations in the exact manner Pascal knew would do no good. It is the obvious conclusions of probability in the argument that Pascal wants to use to demonstrate there must be something else going on with nonbelievers, and better arguments have to be made.
In positing Christ as axiomatic, Pascal boxed himself into a dichromatic investigation. In the Christian-dominated world he lived in, and that we still live in, that’s expected, but it limits the logical power of arguments. Atheists considering the nonexistence of God as axiomatic handicap their arguments in the same way, and late-stage atheists stop doing it for that very reason. The problem is we do not exist solely on a line between these poles, so any argument reliant on the polar relationship is exposing its belly to the spectrum of reality surrounding it. I think Pascal grasped that and was trying to work his way out of this trap. Pascal’s wager, as presented by Pascal, is acknowledgement that the axiom of God alone is insufficient.
So next time somebody asks why Pascal’s wager is unconvincing, mention that Pascal didn’t think it would convince.
1 And the only common encounter that requires inferring a human connected to the name.
2 Except this one: A common reply is, “Well, what if another religion is true and decides to punish you?” Well, Christianity turns out to be A+ choice for this particular bet, since a lot of other religions send you to the same place no matter what. In the more popular, old-timey persuasions, Hades and Helheim aren’t so bad, though good luck with that feather if Anubis is punching your ticket. Judaism is just back to dust, or possibly zombie. Hinduism is roll a new character. Most of these also don’t care what you believe, so if you really need to threaten eternal torment for wrongthink, Christianity is the only serious contender.
3 Though he has some pretty troubling things to say about Jews so we wouldn’t be friends.
4 Right here in River City.
5 And not titled his book Thoughts.
6 He was not a happy person.
