Much of the contemporary analytic discussion of Pascal’s Wager has focused on technical questions about how to express Pascal’s Wager formally in a decision-theoretic framework and what to do with it when that is done. And that’s interesting and important stuff. But a remark one of my undergrads made today has made think about the Wager more existentially (and hence in a way closer to Pascal, I guess). Suppose our worry about the Wager is that we’re giving up the certainty of a comfortable future secular life for a very unlikely future supernatural happiness, so that our pattern of risk averseness makes us reject the Wager. My student noted that in this case things will look different if we reflect on the fact that we are all facing the certainty of death. We are all doomed to face that hideous evil.
Let me expand on this thought. Suppose that I am certain to die in an hour. I can spend that hour repenting of my grave sins and going to Mass or I can play video games. Let’s suppose that the chance of Christianity being right is pretty small. But I am facing death. Things are desperate. If I don’t repent, I am pretty much guaranteed to lose my comfortable existence forever in an hour, whether by losing my existence forever if there is no God or by losing my comfort forever if Christianity is right. There is one desperate hope, and the cost of that is adding an hour’s loss of ultimately unimportant pleasures to the infinite loss I am already facing. It sure seems rational to go for it.
Now for most of us, death is several decades away. But what’s the difference between an hour and several decades in the face of eternity?
I think there are two existential ways of thinking that are behind this line of thought. First, that life is very short and death is at hand. Second, given our yearning for eternity, a life without eternal happiness is of little value, and so more or less earthly pleasure is of but small significance.
Not everyone thinks in these ways. But I think we should. We are all facing the hideous danger of eternally losing our happiness—if Christianity is right, because of hell, and if naturalism is right, because death is the end. That danger is at hand: we are all about to die in the blink of an eye. Desparate times call for desparate measures. So we should follow Pascal’s advice: pray, live the Christian life, etc.
The above may not compel if the probability of Christianity is too small. But I don’t think a reasonable person who examines the evidence will think it’s that small.
