Thinking to Believe

Blaise Pascal is most famous for his “Wager.” He wrote, “If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having, neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. [So] you must wager. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.”

Many Christians—including myself—have found Pascal’s Wager helpful when talking with unbelievers. But Pascal’s Wager is not without its critics. A while back Steve Ares sent me a list of quotes by, or about atheists that included two criticisms of Pascal’s wager. For example, Alan Dershowitz wrote, “I have always considered ‘Pascal’s Wager’ a questionable bet to place. Any God worth ‘believing in’ would surely prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.” Dershowitz’s complaint implicitly critiques Pascal’s assumptions about God’s identity. Pascal’s Wager assumes the identity of God to be that of the Christian God; a God who is concerned that people believe in and follow Him. If the God who exists is not the Christian God, however, then He or They may prefer an honest agnostic like Dershowitz said. Of course Dershowitz himself is betting on that, and I don’t think it’s a very safe bet! He hopes God doesn’t care simply because he doesn’t care.

In Pascal’s defense his Wager is found in his Pensees, which was aimed at the happy agnostic who did not consider the question of God’s existence worth considering, and was not convinced by traditional proofs for God’s existence. It was a pragmatic argument for belief in God. Pascal argued that belief in God is pragmatically justified because we have everything to gain and nothing to lose for holding such a belief. He reasoned that if we believe God exists and He does, then we will experience infinite gain minus finite loss. If we believe God exists and He does not, we will experience finite loss. If, on the other hand, we do not believe God exists and yet He does, we will experience finite gain minus infinite loss. If we believe God does not exist and He in fact does not exist we will experience finite gain.

Dave Matson is the bearer of Pascal’s second criticism. He wrote, “ ‘Belief’ is not something you can turn on and off like a spigot. No person can truly ‘believe in God’ unless the evidence convinces his or her mind. If you don’t believe me, try believing that the stars are holes punched into a heavenly dome, with the light of heaven shining through. Pascal’s recommendation is inherently impractical.”

What do we make of this? In Pascal’s favor I think the logic of his Wager is unassailable. Belief in the existence of God is clearly the safer of the two bets. In favor of his detractor, however, an unbeliever who is persuaded by this logic will be little better for it. He may be persuaded that placing his bet on the existence of God is the safer of the two bets, but he will be unable to do anything about it. As Matson pointed out, beliefs are not something we have power to change at will. While one may be persuaded by Pascal’s argument, belief in God will not follow. I can no more give up my belief in God than I can my belief that the person I call my mother actually gave birth to me. Likewise, an atheist who sees no reason to believe in God cannot generate that belief just because he is convinced that it is the safer thing to believe. In Pascal’s defense, however, his Wager was not an argument for the existence of God, but for belief in God. The reasons for which one should believe in God are a separate question.

Contra Matson I would argue that the knowledge of God is evident to all on some level, even in the absence of any rational evidence. This is what Paul was talking about in Romans 1 and 2. He argued that all men know God exists through the witness of creation and conscience (general revelation), and even have some basic knowledge about what this God is like. While this knowledge is available to all men, and known by all men to one degree or another, we purposely suppress it, or we are fooled into believing it is false. This leads me to my next point.

While the universal experience of the witness of creation, conscience, and/or the Holy Spirit is often rejected because one’s will is simply bent toward rebellion against God, sometimes it is rejected because an individual has been given intellectual defeaters to those witnesses, and those defeaters stand in the way so that the witnesses are not taken seriously, preventing the individual from being open to the working of the Spirit in their lives. If we can remove those defeaters an individual may be willing to accept the message of those witnesses. This is what apologetics do: remove those defeaters by overcoming the intellectual objections with truth, thereby facilitating the path towards faith. Apologetics do not cause belief in God, but merely remove the barriers that have been erected in the face of that knowledge. As J. Budziszewski wrote, “The knowledge of God belongs to us already; these arguments are not its source, but only responses to objections.” Indeed, one does not need to hear rational arguments in order to know there is a God—that knowledge belongs to them already. But rational arguments may help clear the smoke of deception, showing how the reasons they have been given (or have given themselves) for denying the existence of God are faulty and ill-founded.

The famed Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, makes the case that belief in God is justified apart from any rational justification. He writes:

It is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the most part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000 to cease believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I can collect. But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted to, I couldn’t-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just divest myself of it. … Clearly I am not under an obligation to have evidence for everything I believe; that would not be possible. But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to accept belief in God only if I accept other propositions which serve as evidence for it?[1]

And again:

As I say, he [Daniel Dennett] seems to think one could be a sensible believer in God only on the basis of some argument, something like one of the traditional theistic arguments. But why think a thing like that? Why think you need an argument to be rational in believing in God? There are plenty of other things we rationally accept without argument–that there has been a past, for example, or that there are other people, or an external world, or that our cognitive faculties are reasonably reliable. Moreover, one lesson to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume and Reid is that there probably aren’t any good arguments for these things–but we are still perfectly rational in accepting them. Couldn’t the same be true for belief in God?
…
Here Dennett seems to assume that if you can’t show by reason that a given proposed source of truth is in fact reliable, then it is improper to accept the deliverances of that source. This assumption goes back to the Lockean, Enlightenment claim that, while there could indeed be such a thing as divine revelation, it would be irrational to accept any belief as divinely revealed unless we could give a good argument from reason that it was. But again, why think a thing like that? Take other sources of knowledge: rational intuition, memory, and perception, for example. Can we show by the first two that the third is in fact reliable–that is, without relying in anyway on the deliverances of the third? No, we can’t; nor can we show by the first and third that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is. Nor can we give a decent, non-question-begging rational argument that reason itself is indeed reliable. Does it follow that there is something irrational in trusting these alleged sources, in accepting their deliverances? Certainly not. So why insist that it is irrational to accept, say, the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit unless we can give a rationally conclusive argument for the conclusion that there is indeed such a thing, and that what it delivers is the truth? Why treat these alleged sources differently? Is there anything but arbitrariness in insisting that any alleged source of truth must justify itself at the bar of rational intuition, perception and memory? Perhaps God has given us several different sources of knowledge about the world, and none of them can be shown to be reliable using only the resources of the others.[2]

I do not agree with everything Plantinga says here^[3], but he has elucidated a point that all those involved in the defense of the Gospel must keep in mind: most people come to believe in God apart from any rational justification for those beliefs (more will be said about this in a later post). Contra Matson, then, rational people can believe in God in the absence of rational evidence. This does not make evidentiary apologetics unnecessary; rather it explains their proper role in bringing unbelievers to faith. Apologetics do not generate belief in God, but they can facilitate it.

I think Dershowitz and Matson are being a little hard on Pascal, because Pascal did not leave people to contemplate his Wager without offering any reasons to believe in God. He was persuaded that belief in God was rational, and even offered arguments in favor of faith. But this should serve as a lesson for us. Reciting Pascal’s wager without his evidentiary support will do little to help some unbelievers. We need for them to see both the wisdom of the God-bet as well as the evidentiary basis for making the decision to place their bet on God.

On Tuesday April 18^th Senators Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid co-wrote a piece for the Times Union regarding abortion and contraception. Here is an excerpt:

We believe that it is necessary for all Americans to join together and embrace policies that will reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, decrease abortions and improve access to women’s health care.

There is no question that the rate of unintended pregnancy is too high in the United States. Half of the 6 million pregnancies each year in this country are unintended, and nearly half of these unplanned pregnancies end in abortion. It doesn’t have to be this way. Most of these unintended pregnancies — and the resulting abortions — can be prevented if we eliminate the barriers that prevent women from having access to affordable and effective contraception.

Only senators could say so much wrong in so little space!

First, I find it schizophrenic that abortion-choice advocates like Clinton will champion abortion rights on the one hand, and yet want to reduce the number of abortions on the other. If abortion does not take the life of an innocent human being we should no more want to reduce the number of abortions than we want to reduce the number of tooth extractions. The reason some abortion-choicers want to reduce the number of abortions is because deep down they know abortion is morally wrong. At the end of the day the only sure way to reduce the number of abortions is by making it illegal.

Can you think of any other Constitutional right where even advocates of the right want to reduce the number of times it is exercised? As Jivin Jehoshaphat once wrote, “It obviously doesn’t work for many of the rights we consider foundational. Imagine someone being a champion for the right to free speech yet saying that we should work to reduce the number of nonviolent protests. Or a champion of voting rights working to reduce the number of votes that are cast in a given election. Both situations are absurd.”

Secondly, what barriers to receiving affordable and effective contraception are Clinton and Reid talking about? How hard is it to buy a condom from the local drug store or Wal-Mart? Getting the Pill is as easy as walking in to a Planned Parenthood clinic. People choose not to use contraception.

Thirdly, both senators are perpetrating the myth that there is a tandem between increased access to contraception and a decrease in abortion. It sounds logical, but is not necessarily supported by statistical data.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute recently released a report on contraception in America. They ranked each state according to its efforts to help women obtain and properly use contraception. The three categories against which each state was measured were service availability, public funding, and laws/policies. California was ranked first in the nation for their superior contraceptive services, and New York was ranked fifth. What’s so ironic about this is that these two states also have among the highest percentages of abortion per pregnancy in the nation (NY = 2^nd highest with 31%; CA = 6^th highest with 26%). If greater access to contraceptives is the key to significantly reducing the number of abortions, why is it that the states with the greatest access to contraception are also the nation’s greatest abortion mills?