The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [85]
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Price of Faith
WHAT WOULD YOU stake for a shot at eternity in heaven? Indecorous as it may sound, the proposition has excellent pedigree. It dates back at least to the seventeenth century, when the French mathematician, philosopher, and gambler Blaise Pascal jotted down a series of musings that came to be known as Pascal’s wager. An attempt to persuade people to believe in God, Pascal’s reasoning offered an interesting innovation over previous arguments for belief: it did not rely on proof of God’s existence. He proposed, rather, that it would make sense to believe even if it were impossible to determine whether God existed or not. The payoff of belief if He did was just too good to pass up. Were God not to exist, Pascal offered, one would lose little or nothing by believing in Him. Yet if He did happen to be, belief would lead to eternal bliss, while nonbelief would lead straight to hell. “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is,” Pascal proposed. “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”
In fact, belief does impose costs on believers, including dietary and sexual restrictions as well as many other sacrifices and prohibitions. Still, in Pascal’s view believing was the sensible choice. As long as there is a finite chance that God exists, even if only tiny, faith makes sense because heaven’s infinite rewards in the future would outweigh any finite costs today.
Pascal was a fervent Catholic. But he also was a man of logic and reason. He despaired of the byzantine attempts that had been made over the centuries to prove God’s existence. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, argued that there had to be an ultimate unmovable mover of all things that move. René Descartes pushed the so-called ontological argument, which stated that because Descartes could conceive of God, God had to exist. “Reason can decide nothing here,” Pascal wrote. “We do not know if He is.”
PASCAL’S GAMBLING ARGUMENT is not watertight. It omits that believing only to claim a future reward would likely be construed as corrupt. God might not be too pleased by such a pragmatic approach to faith. He could condemn mercenary believers to roast in hell anyway. The reasoning glosses over the fact that there are many religions, some of which have gods that punish believers in the other ones. The wager does not contemplate the risks of choosing the wrong faith. And Pascal’s logic would lose its power if the rewards of heaven were finite rather than everlasting. Perhaps most important, if you believe that God has no chance of existing whatsoever, the wager makes no sense at all.
But despite holes in the argument, Pascal’s reasoning amounted to a big leap for religious thinking. His wager pitched religion not as humanity’s only possible response to an omnipotent deity whose existence should not be in doubt. He proposed it as a tool for civilization to cope with an uncertain world. What’s more, he argued that faith’s rewards were valuable. Pascal probably didn’t think of it in quite this way when he proposed his wager in the seventeenth century, but he was setting up religion as a service for which we should, naturally, be willing to pay a price.
This is religion as catastrophic insurance: if it happens that God exists, faith would assure us a place in heaven rather than hell. The premiums are paid partly in money: charity, tithing, and the like. But the most onerous costs are the stringent rules believers must hew to, from fasting and prayer to avoiding sex out of wedlock. Such strictures constitute the main currency of belief. They are the price we pay for God’s grace.
We’ve come a long way since the seventeenth century. But scholars seeking to understand how religion managed to survive as an institution across the ages have arrived at an analogous conclusion. Religion may be portrayed as the