Gospel & Universe ✝︎ Saint Francis: Pascal's Wager 1

Pensées

Introduction - Pascal in a Larger Context - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, & Infinity

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Introduction

In his Thoughts / Pensées, Blaise Pascal (1623-62) makes an argument that’s often referred to as Pascal's wager.

Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. Let us estimate these two cases: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists. 

In the following three pages, I’ll argue that Pascal’s wager is provocative and influential, yet ultimately a counter-productive direction, since it leads toward the old division between believers and unbelievers and because it closes down our interest in the the world, rather than seeing it as a reflection of some greater yet elusive meaning.

I’l argue that refusing Pascal's wager isn't to reject Infinity. Rather, it's to reject the argument that there's only one way to reach the infinite. It’s to refuse to say that unless we ascribe to a particular doctrine about God we're nothing, our thoughts are nothing, and all the ways we hope to get to something, or to get to something more, are nothing. It’s also to reject the concept of a God who forces such a choice on us; one who will smite us if we use our free will to follow all possible truths; one who will say to us, Believe it, and only it, or else! In this sense, to reject Pascal’s wager is to reject a coercive and jealous God for a more elusive and inclusive notion of a God who has no interest in coercion and jealousy.

Pascal's wager might help the mind escape from an entrenched positivism that refuses to explore emotional, romantic, transcendental, and theological possibilities. But unfortunately, given the traditional Christian view of the saved and the damned, the wager can also be used as a way of downgrading philosophical inquiry and existential exploration, to bring back instead the old notion that all is vanity. While the writer of Ecclesiastes makes a powerful point about the greater universe and the insignificance of humanity, it remains defeatist and depressing to apply such a vision to the things we strive for: meaning, freedom, knowledge, progress, connection, compassion, etc.

What’s the point of using religion to make our ideals seem meaningless when they are the best things that can come of our lives — and when they in no way negate spirituality? At times, it may be that "in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow," yet one might add that it isn't the world, or our efforts in the world, that are in vain. I would argue that it’s the opposite: any philosophy is vain if it preempts or disdains our efforts to attain wisdom and knowledge. (This is an almost unavoidable conclusion, given that Ecclesiastes is praised as wisdom literature. Perhaps it’s best to say that wisdom literature is paradoxical at times, rather than it’s a vain waste of time to read Ecclesiastes).

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Pascal in a Larger Context

It’s not fair to treat Pascal’s argument as a philosophical treatise, since it was published posthumously in 1669, since it’s in the form of a fragment, and since it can be read as either an internal or an external dialogue. Yet it’s an important argument, both to theology and to agnosticism: first, many see it (or a variant of it) as a cogent and coherent argument against doubt and disbelief; second, many use it consciously or unconsciously, either as a fallback position or as a detour at the crossroads of theology and logic. 

Before starting my criticism of Pascal’s wager, I’d like to acknowledge that Pascal is a brilliant mathematician and thinker who straddles the line between Medieval certainty and Modern uncertainty. Few essayists get at the precariousness of our human condition with such poetic concision:

All that we see in the world is only an imperceptible line in the ample breast of Nature. No idea can get at the size of these spaces. (Thoughts 22: General Knowledge of Man / Pensées 22: Connaissance générale de l’homme. From the Port-Royal edition; translations by RYC)

Tout ce que nous voyons du monde n’est qu’un trait imperceptible dans l’ample sein de la nature. Nulle idée n’approche de l’étendue de ses espaces. 

This is our true state. This is what narrows our knowledge into certain limits that we can’t get past; we’re unable to know everything and unable to know nothing at all. We exist on a vast middle ground, always uncertain and floating between ignorance and knowledge. And if we think to go further, the object of our aim wobbles, and escapes our grasp; it evades us, and flees in eternal flight: nothing can stop it. This is our natural condition, and yet it’s most contrary to our inclination. We burn with the desire to find depth in everything and to build a tower reaching to the infinite. But the whole building cracks and the earth opens up to the abyss.

Voilà notre état véritable. C’est ce qui resserre nos connaissances en de certaines bornes que nous ne passons pas; incapables de savoir tout, et d'ignorer tout absolument. Nous sommes sur un milieu vaste, toujours incertains et flottants entre l’ignorance et la connaissance; et si nous pensons aller plus avant, notre objet branle, et échappe nos prises; il se dérobe, et fuit d’une fuite éternelle: rien ne le peut arrêter. C’est notre condition naturelle et, toutefois, la plus contraire à notre inclination. Nous brûlons du désir d'approfondir tout et d'édifier une tour qui s’élève jusqu’à l'infini. Mais tout notre édifice craque, et la terre s’ouvre jusqu’aux abîmes.

Also crucial to Pascal’s thinking is the concept that the only thing that can save us from the abyss that opens beneath us is God: “this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself” / “ce gouffre infini ne peut être rempli que par un objet infini et immuable, c’est-à-dire que par Dieu même” (from the fragment Souverain Bien 2).

Pascal is a poet of the vast obscurities, able to combine religion and skepticism in a way that inspires many people who want to make the leap from a Godless existential perception to an essentialist vision. He sees the type of alienation Sartre writes about three centuries later, yet finds in God an antidote: He vanquishes the deep abyss of ignorance and chaos with the infinite effulgence of His truth and order. 

It’s as if Pascal foresees Sartre’s chestnut-tree root (from the section, “mercredi, six heures du soir,” in Nausea, 1938) and puts this existential symbol of alienation and absurdity into the epic story of Christian redemption. In Pascal, Sartre’s unnerving black symbol is instead a root that supports and nourishes the Tree of Knowledge, which makes all humans fall into the Abyss of Error, which allows them to rise, through Jesus, to the Heavens. Or, his God’s goodness blasts the evil root from the ground and we find ourselves walking in a garden somewhere in the sky, where no snaky root or underground horror unsettles the ground beneath our feet. Either way, Pascal’s God deracinates the problem of alienation and of all those other disturbing words that start with A: absurdity, anomy, angst, and above all atheism.

Yet one word that starts with A, agnosticism, remains largely outside Pascal’s ken. Rarely does he confront the full measure of agnostic doubt. When he starts to confront it, he ends up side-stepping it or conflating it with disbelief or chaos. This is understandable, given Pascal’s moment in history, when the discoveries of evolution, neurology, and genetics were centuries away. Nor were the philosophers of Seventeenth Century France in a position to assimilate the radically different concepts of God presented in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Daoism.

In Pascal’s France, the religious choice was to believe in the Western concept of God or not to believe in it. Few people contemplated a return to the old pagan belief systems. Neoplatonism was still a powerful idea, yet Augustine had already integrated Plato into early Christianity, and Aquinas had already integrated Aristotle into Medieval Christianity. The complexity of Hinduism and the subtlety of Daoism were very little known and very poorly understood. For instance, the main Sanskrit texts were translated only in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is key to the historical context -- and limits -- of his wager, since in it God operates in the tradition of a jealous and anthropomorphic God who gives Grace only to believers, whereas these concepts are very (and at times) antithetical to questioning in the Vedas, the many paths in Yoga, and the doubts and speculations of Daoism.

Also, in Pascal's Seventeenth Century, science and medicine were in their early stages. While the scientific method was clearly understood, and while Pascal was a mathematical genius, scientific doubt was yet to yield the type of convincing explanation for human existence which was later furnished by evolution, neurology, and genetics. In astronomy, Pascal could be aware of Galileo’s Dialogue (published in Italian in 1632, in French in 1634), yet he couldn’t be aware of Newton’s Principia, which was published in 1687, 25 years after his death. Science opened a huge area for doubt, which ranged from being open to religion to rejecting it entirely.

Pascal’s wager is based not on a range of global religious and advanced scientific options, but on a far simpler choice between belief in the Christian God and belief in a world with no other convincing theologies or deep truths.

To the agnostic, Pascal prefigures the so-called Christian existentialists, who leap from the material to the spiritual. Agnostics understand why others might take this leap, but they would take it as an experiment, and if they liked their new position as believers they would no longer call themselves agnostics or existentialists. They would see themselves as existentialists before the leap and essentialists after the leap. Existentialism and essentialism aren’t easily conflated or hyphenated, much less put next to each other as if they belonged together. They may merge momentarily yet they finally remain separate, unless one can imagine a state of being in which one doubts and believes at the same time. Agnostics can’t see how this would work apart from schizophrenia, since once one doubts something one cannot believe in it whole-heartedly at the same time — and traditionally religions demand that the believer isn’t half-hearted about belief. I look into this question in Existential Essentialism: A Contradiction in Terms; here, my point in regard to Pascal is that existentialism doesn't lead to belief nearly as simply or as logically as he argues.

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Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, & Infinity

Pascal's thinking is fresh and original, full of humour, lyrical possibility, and dreadful angst. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to be influenced by the angst, his yawning abyss, and the possibility that we're nothing. In this state we'll grasp for anything, especially for a doctrine which tells us that if we identify completely with our lowly sinful nature, we can reach the highest heights of infinity. This is a tempting way to think, especially if we're burdened by thoughts of war, environmental damage, secular confusion, democratic negotiations that seem to go on forever, and all the other slings and arrows that our flesh has made us heir to.

When these arrows strike us, we’ll grasp for anything to stop the barrage that seems to come at us from the very skies. Yet isit wise to think of the skies as the judge, punisher, and forgiver of all our woes? Wouldn’t it be more practical to devise some shield from the arrows, and move from the open field? Wouldn’t it be a better tactic to gather the troops on the outskirts of the field, find a way around the flanks, circle around the source of our woes, draw our bows and pick them off one by one?

Pascal seems to have gotten it backward: instead of seeing ourselves as nothing and God as a very specific Something, one might see the multiplicity of the world as an almost infinite number of reflections — and selections! — of that Something, each sliver of light an opening, leading us from anonymity to communion. In this sense the French ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity might be raised into the apse.

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Next: ✝︎ Pascal 2: It Isn’t Necessary to Wager

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