Madrigal 1

I. Introduction

The real test of worthiness of an idea, theorem, or methodology is not merely its apparent

rational cogency or emotional-aesthetic appeal, but whether and how it has worked or might

work in reality. Philosophically, one may consider the problem of induction, for example, and

find its compositional premises compelling, fascinating, and radical; this fascination should last

just long enough for us to realize that it is utterly facile in the face of a posteriori experience --

that thing which relays to us the indifferent demands of empirical reality and the necessity of

inductive reasoning to human functioning. Those who have been subjected to the many

disastrous "good ideas" of incompetent bureaucrats and idle managers -- nearly anyone who has

held a job and anyone who is familiar with twentieth century world history -- certainly has a

more visceral and immediate knowledge of the value and importance of pragmatism. For the

purpose of this paper, to evaluate something pragmatically is to evaluate its usefulness and its

practical or logical consequences.

It also seems natural that just as we are more concerned with the pragmatic functionality

of the engine of our car than that of the dashboard hula girl, the more important, fundamental, or

broadly relevant the belief, the more pragmatic our attitude should be toward it. As there are few

questions so fundamentally relevant and weighty as that of the existence of a deity and whatever

might follow from that deity's existence, it follows that we should also devote some time to the

exploration of the religious question from a pragmatic perspective. The primary aim of this paper

is just that: to explore the basic question of deism beginning from a pragmatic and agnostic

standpoint, starting with Pascal's Wager, and to see that, ultimately, pragmatic ethical and

intellectual considerations will lead us to Christianity -- nondenominational, or "Mere"

Christianity, as it might be called.

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II. The Wager

Pascal's Wager is the famous pragmatic argument of one Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a French

physicist and mathematician. It was discovered among Pascal's notes, which were intended to

eventually be used in a comprehensive defense of the Christian faith that was never completed.

Its basic formulation is thus:

1. God may or may not exist, but He is certainly so great as to be beyond human conception

and experience.

2. We must either believe or disbelieve in the existence of God.

3. If God exists, it is infinitely better to believe in Him than to not believe in Him.

4. If God does not exist, it is moderately better to believe in Him than not to believe in Him.

5. It is eminently reasonable to take steps to put ourselves in a position to believe that God

exists.1

I would supplement the above argument in this way:

The debate between theists and atheists is not settled; there exists a plurality of arguments

in favor of theism, which include the ontological, teleological, and cosmological arguments,

testimony of spiritual experience (made more compelling with supplementary discourse on

transposition), historical evidence of biblical events, and so on. There exists also a plurality of

rational arguments for atheism, which include the very significant problems of divine hiddenness,

evidentially unnecessary evil, religious plurality, and divine indifference.

1
Blaise Pascal, "The Wager", in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology 7th Edition, ed. Michael Rea and Louis Pojman
(Stamford: Cengage Learning: 2015), 572-573.
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This being the case, you will find, in any meaningful (i.e., scholarly) contemporary

discourse on the existence of God(s), the use of the semantics of probability and not those of

certainty. If all sides concede that there is a logical possibility of and a real nonzero probability

of the existence of deity, then, given that most historical conceptions of deity also include a

notion of reward or punishment for worship on a radical scale, it is eminently reasonable -- it is

pragmatic -- to err on the side of theism, which is to open up to the plausibility of divinity and

worship as earnestly as possible.

III. Objections to the Wager

Although I have heard and read several objections to Pascal's Wager, I find three most

commonly levied in its direction -- mainly from atheists -- which I name and recreate here in

their most common and succinct forms:2

(a) Objection from authenticity:

Religious worship based on pragmatic considerations is not true belief. It is a mockery;

further, faith is not supposed to be pragmatic, it is supposed to be "blind trust, in the absence

of evidence." 3

(b) Objection from doxastic involuntarism:

According to a widespread epistemic stance in psychology and philosophy, it is simply

not possible to choose to believe anything.

2
I have notably excluded the common objection that God would "see through" someone "acting" in accordance
with Pascal's Wager; this is because this objection is either a blatant strawman or an egregious misunderstanding
of Pascal's argument as reconstructed above. There is nowhere implied an attempt to deceive any God.
3
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 198.
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(c) Objection from multiplicity:

There are nearly an infinite number of belief systems and worship traditions; there is no

way to know which is correct.

IV. Defense of the Wager and the Winnowing of Multiplicity

In response to (a), the objection from authenticity:

First, as one who began this investigation with abject humility and no conception of

proper worship, I must remark upon the irony of professed atheists revealing that they have a

conception of what "true worship" is -- it seems that only one who holds religious beliefs or

strong preconceptions about what religion should be could make such a distinction.

But indeed, as a pragmatist, I would find it unreasonable to accept any religion which

demands of me so-called blind faith. Yet by spending less than ten minutes on Google, I find it

seems that there is quite a long tradition of evidential and pragmatic pursuit of faith in at least the

Christian tradition, stretching all the way back to the life and times of Jesus himself, as

evidenced by the story of doubting Thomas. In John 20:24-29, the Bible says that Thomas

demanded stronger proof than the testimony of his fellow disciples regarding the resurrection,

and Jesus provided it, going so far as to tell Thomas to put his hand into Jesus' side wound.

Although Jesus admonished Thomas, this still is not the word of a tradition that demands blind

faith.

Additionally, that a pragmatic fear of God should be the beginning of faith is not

proscribed by the Bible, either, as told in Proverbs 1:7. I quote directly: "The fear of the LORD is

the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction."

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As someone who is exploring the question of faith from a pragmatic perspective, I can

understand this in the following way: if worship is in-itself a good thing, and also produces good,

then the means by which you arrive at a desire to worship and follow the commands of God are

not entirely relevant. One might make an analogy to nutrition. If eating healthy is good for you,

then does it matter whether you arrive at a desire to eat healthy by "authentic" means or out of a

fear of obesity, heart disease, and cancer? Not particularly.

To continue with the analogy, if you are obese and have not found nutritional arguments

compelling when weighed against body positive or health at every size advocacy group claims,

perhaps a strong dose of fear in the form of heart palpitations or agonizing joint pain is necessary

to open yourself up to the possibility that eating healthily and living a good lifestyle could be

beneficial to you. It is only when you begin to live that lifestyle, which includes making friends

that live healthily and encourage you, that you come to understand and internalize the truth of it

phenomenologically -- perhaps the conclusions of Pascal's Wager have the same "opening-up"

function for an open-minded agnostic.

In response to (b), the argument from doxastic involuntarism:

Though I will defend Pascal on this count, I must note that Pascal is not offering the

wager as a proof of God's existence and a reason to believe, but positing a pragmatically-oriented

gambit which is impossible to avoid. This is a nuance which is often lost, but as my goal is to

find a particular system of worship anyway, it is a useful exercise.

The veracity of doxastic involuntarism is promulgated often as though it is absolutely

ubiquitous when it is not. For many atheists, the mere existence of well-educated agnostics and
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theists is proof positive that reason does not have the universal claim on us that they wish to

believe it does, and that doxastic voluntarism must have some degree of validity.

Additionally, we can re-use the example of the obese person mentioned above; it was not

the information that changed, or the arguments, or the evidence, but a desire to be healthy that

originated within the subject (a product of their internal psychological agency, not newly

discovered reasoned arguments) and their social context that eventually altered their beliefs.

Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, in a 2014 paper on social epistemology and

doxastic involuntarism, Mark Douglas West wrote:

"...individuals join groups for instrumental reasons which all, ultimately, involve the

desire for well-being, or eudaimonia. Groups provide social knowledge and cues to

behavior, and that group knowledge is at least in part the linkage to the eudaimonia which

groups provide. The turn to a group involves a desire to change behavior; the desire to

change epistemologies, or ways of knowing, need never appear. The alcoholic wants

to stop drinking, not to learn a new mode of knowing; yet they come to have both."4

This is an example of recent philosophical literature that indicates that we can in fact alter

our "ways of knowing" by opening ourselves up to new social contexts and means of interpreting

information -- unintentionally opening up the plausibility of Pascal's Wager as a means of

grounding faith in the face of doxastic involuntarism.

The most compelling objection to Pascal's Wager for many people is objection (c), the

objection from multiplicity. Note that within objection (c) is no disputation of the validity of

deism, strictly speaking -- only the contention that the Christian deity is not necessarily the

4
Mark Douglas West, Doxastic Involuntarism, Attentional Voluntarism, and Social Epistemology," Social
Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3, no. 5 (2014): 45.
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correct one. So we may begin with the valid assumption that there is some deity. While it is

worth noting that Pascal himself addressed those who would use this objection, citing their

intellectual laziness in refusing to investigate each religion on its own merits, I will briefly make

the pragmatic case for Christianity.5

If we begin from deism, and accept Pascal's Wager insofar as it may be valid up to the

point where we encounter a multiplicity of deities, we do have the means to pragmatically

whittle down the competition. First, we can eliminate all the pagan and polytheistic Gods which

by their own mythologies are capable of deception or untruth; it would not do to worship a God

which is not all-good or all-truthful, since they could freely renege on any promise of reward for

worship. According to Numbers 23:19, however, the Christian conception of God -- the

Abrahamic God -- is all-truthful. Additionally, it is only this traditional conception of God which

offers the infinite bliss or torment which provides the greatest weight in Pascal's Wager in

addition to being all-good and all-truthful. Finally, we can remove religious traditions that do not

concern themselves with deity or deism, such as Buddhism; they are irrelevant in terms of the

wager.

If we have narrowed it down to the Abrahamic religions, however, it remains to be seen

why Christianity and not Judaism or Islam. I posit that the faith which has produced the greatest

human flourishing and superior moral progress should be the religion of choice for the

pragmatically-minded and earnest faith seeker. According to the 2015 United Nations HDI or

human development index, which is a composite statistic measuring life expectancy, education,

and income per capita indicators and is one of the few quantitative measures available which

describes human flourishing, the entirety of the top 10 and many of the other high ranking

5
Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensees, (New York: E.P.Dutton & Co., Inc., 1958), 64.
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nations are countries which are majority Christian or which have been historically Christian until

very recently with the advent of widespread secularism.6 For the evidence-minded pragmatist in

search of the Abrahamic religion which seems to lead to human flourishing, Islamic countries

pale miserably in comparison -- Saudi Arabia, the most wealthy and influential Islamic state, by

contrast, is known to "arbitrarily arrest, try, and convict peaceful dissidents. . .human rights

defenders and activists are serving long prison sentences for criticizing authorities or advocating

political and rights reforms." Saudi Arabian law permits honor killings, the death penalty for

homosexuality, and severe punishments for those suspected of sorcery. 7 Additionally, women in

the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia are forbidden from "obtaining a passport, marrying, traveling,

or accessing higher education without the approval of a male guardian." There are Islamic

countries which have better records, but none of them pass muster by contemporary Western

standards of morality -- Israel, the only majority Jewish state, also has many human rights issues

and is also relatively low on the HDI.8

V. Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to provide an account of and defense of Pascal's Wager and

its implications. Additionally, I have attempted to show that the objections commonly levied

against Pascal's Wager are insufficient, but do provoke the seeking of a means to arriving at

nondenominational Christianity as the rational and pragmatic worship-system of choice -- which

I have also attempted to provide. With further and closer study of the theological sects of

Christianity and the holy text of Christianity itself, it might be possible to learn which (of the

6
"Human Development Report," United Nations, accessed May 2016, http://hdr.undp.org/.
7
"Saudi Arabia," Human Rights Watch, accessed May 2016, hrw.org.
8
"Israel/Palestine," Human Rights Watch, accessed May 2016, hrw.org
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many) path is most valuable and eminently true, but this is perhaps a task for a later date, after

true belief and spiritual experience has been given time to blossom.