Figuring the Odds

Many of you, when studying physics or math, may recall learning about Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, philosopher, physicist and theologian who lived from 1623 to 1662.

Pascal came up with a way of looking at “the God question” that is now called “Pascal’s Wager.” It basically argues that belief in God involves a high-stakes gamble.

Paraphrasing, here’s how Pascal describes the gamble, according to Wikipedia.

    · God is, or God isn’t. Reason can’t decide between the two.

    · You play a game … where heads or tails turns up.

    · You must wager. It’s not optional.

    · Weighing the gain and the loss in wagering that God is, estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing

    · There is here an infinity of a happy life to gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

    · But some can’t believe. They should then “study their inability to believe…and endeavor to convince themselves.”

For me, it’s basically saying that you have everything to gain, and little to lose, in belief in God.

I don’t believe most people searching for God would be attracted by this approach. Although I believe faith is rational – for reasons I’ve mentioned often in these blogs – reason can take you only so far. Let’s take the example of a famous modern-day scientist whom I’ve also written about often.

Human Genome Project

Francis Collins is an American physician-scientist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project from 1990 to 2003. It determined the base pairs that make up human DNA. It also aimed to identify, map and sequence all of the genes of the human genome.

Collins also was director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021.

He was an atheist for most of his early life, fiercely focusing on mathematics and the physical sciences. But as a young doctor, he was impressed by the calm and acceptance of death of many of his believing patients and wondered why some of his science professors were believers.

“I didn’t know about Pascal’s Wager – that there is much more to be lost by denying God’s existence than by accepting it – but it began to dawn on me that I had ignored the seriousness of getting an answer to the God question. If there was any actual evidence to support belief, if faith really rested on a foundation in reason, then I’d better find out about it,” he writes in his book, Belief. “Thus began a personal exploration, in my mid-twenties, of the rational basis for faith.

Why Order Exists

“As a scientist,” he wrote, “I was then and am now deeply invested in the idea that nature is ordered, and that science can discover it. But it never occurred to me to ask why order exists. Going even deeper, I had never really considered the most important philosophical question of all – ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’”

Though reason was important in his early examination of faith, it was his relationship with others – such as his dying patients – that brought him to faith, and to Christianity. In that later area, it was the British Anglican C.S. Lewis, writing in his famous book, Mere Christianity, that most helped make him a believer.

So many people have written off faith – believing it’s “old-fashioned,” irrational, anti-science, and inhumane – even though millions of people through the ages have shown otherwise. Through words and how we live – and even maybe appealing to Pascal’s Wager – it’s up to us believers to help people struggling with unbelief.