Pascal’s Wager: The Rigged Bet of Christianity

Gambling is a Sin

Even before my conversion to Christianity, I was aware that the metaphor of wagering belief in God was inherently corruptive in its phrasing - at least in the common understanding of calling atheists to belief on the justification of Christian faith being a rational bet to make. For it is disingenuous to claim to believe in God when you’re only pretending to do so for personal benefit, such is not true belief. It’s ridiculous to assume that this superficial charade of fake belief would be capable of tricking an omniscient God, and that someone is able to ‘game’ God’s will. To make a wager on the existence of God on the calculated risk for the benefits of an eternity in heaven is to ensure that you’ve lost the bet; I don’t want to make any strong theological claims on who gains salvation and under what conditions, but I’m fairly confident that attempting to manipulate God for self-serving ends can probably be safely said to not be conducive to salvation under most religious traditions. Pascal himself noted that obviously only genuine belief was valid, and hence gave advice on how to make atheists emotionally resonate with God to be capable in making the bet. Even if true belief is required, that doesn’t mean one can’t use the wager as the catalyst to transform themselves into genuinely believing. Although it is interesting that one must abandon the concept of the wager to follow it, I am suspicious of the idea that one could cleanly separate themselves away from the thinking which led them to take the wager, even after true conversion.

I think this fundamental idea of ‘gaming God’ is part of a hubristic thinking which forms much of the popular modern understanding of religion. The forgiveness of sins is one of the most predominantly misunderstood parts of Christianity, encapsulated in memes that one can commit the most horrific acts in life, but by asking for forgiveness on their deathbed then all is forgiven. The forgiveness of our sins is twisted into being a ‘get out of jail free’ card for facing the consequences of your immorality; ignoring the fact that approaching God for forgiveness disingenuously undermines the entire relation of faith which underpins such blessings. It’s important to note you can genuinely repent at the end of your life; the thief that was crucified alongside Jesus was blessed upon having faith in Jesus' capacity for grace. But if you’ve lived a lifetime of disregard and uncaring for having sinned, how likely are you to be able to genuinely repent for a lifetime of misdeeds on the day of your death? I intentionally call this thinking hubristic, because it is precisely this form of prideful deceitfulness which people are claiming they believe they can get away with when discussing when making such claims. When I practised Taekwondo, a common saying is that you cannot cheat your exercise, because you will not get strong by pretending to do them. Yet people think they can get away with an assortment of immoralities and deceits, and this will not come through in their character. People are truly deluded into believing that they can do whatever they wish now, because they’ll get their act together ‘when it matters’. People believe they can game God because they don’t take seriously the consequence of their actions and way of thinking on who they become.

Christianity is a Certain Bet

The bet of Pascal's wager relies on a comparison between the inconvenience of being a Christian in this life, compared to the infinite benefits it grants in the next life. But I think it’s more profound to reverse this assessment, by suggesting that we can have our cake and eat it too. For the certainty of my Christian faith is based on the idea that even if I’m wrong in my wager for the next life, that my bet would have paid off tremendously in dividends in this life. That even if God was proven beyond a doubt to not exist, it would remain preferable to hold on to faith in Jesus, for the belief is beneficial regardless of reality - or more truthfully, its significance is one which transcends the facts it derives from. One of the things which I believe is poorly communicated about Christianity is that it’s something which is experienced, and these experiences are concrete observable proofs that there is something significant occurring, and faith isn’t merely belief in an abstract set of factual claims. This is important to me, as such was the foundation for my conversion to Christianity from non-belief. I started feeling the comfort of God when I joined in prayer, I was emotionally awestruck by the significance of the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross, and I experienced the power of God’s forgiveness after I had disgraced myself with sin. It was these experiences which I couldn’t deny nor explain which is the basis of becoming a Christian, which importantly were all real-world everyday experiences. And everyday I am better off now for having belief in God. Emotionally I am very joyous in prayer, and the inherent optimism in faith is an optimised way to gain happiness - religious faith essentially incorporates some of the best mental-health advice directly into its structure without intention to have done so. But more importantly, Christianity makes me a better person. Having the figure of Jesus who I can refer to when driven by emotion to drastic action is invaluable in forcing myself to reconsider my desires from an external perspective. It makes my conscience more vivid, and much more unwilling to let me get away and justify things that I know are a sin. And attending church weekly essentially is a constant re-reminding and drilling down to be loving to other people. To have become Christian is a blessing in this current life, the promise of an eternity of heaven is a bonus.

When I discuss my experience of conversion, many secularists are quick to try and rationalise it: that the joy I find in Christianity is merely the ecstasy of hope. Whilst being nonsense on the front that it was the experience of God’s love which led me to conversion; I cannot see how praying for guidance from a God I genuinely didn’t believe in could have been a source of much hope without some extreme external pressures. The idea that Christianity offers comfort to people is an absurd idea which has a disproportionate amount of support. Christianity, if anything, promises nothing but utter bloody suffering - and you only need to see Christ himself to understand such. I only realised the depths of suffering after watching a short of Jordan Peterson explaining why “you cannot write a more tragic story” than Christ’s life: killed by the long-torturous murder by crucifixion, having knowledge that such painful suffering is coming, caused by the betrayal by his disciple Judas and the people he sought to save, and persecuted people who knew he was innocent yet chose to save an actual criminal rather than Jesus. Christianity isn’t the promise of wellbeing and happiness, but gives the strength to act how one knows they should act when suffering and threats arise, and the affirmation that good can then come from these tortures. Christ’s suffering is what transformed the symbol of the cross from execution to salvation, to the point we don’t even realise the morbidity of people wearing a torture device around their necks. Christianity is a promise for strength during trials to maintain one's righteousness. In this life with the certainty of facing troubles, strength is the best thing we can ask for. Epictetus Discourses 1.1: "O Epictetus, if it had been possible, I had made this little body and property of thine free, and not liable to hindrance. But now do not mistake; it is not thy own, but only a finer mixture of clay. Since, then, I could not give thee this, I have given thee a certain portion of myself; this faculty of exerting the powers of pursuit and avoidance, of desire and aversion, and, in a word, the use of the appearances of things. Taking care of this point, and making what is thy own to consist in this, thou wilt never be restrained, never be hindered; thou wilt not groan, wilt not complain, wilt not flatter any one. How, then? Do all these advantages seem small to thee? Heaven forbid! Let them suffice thee, then, and thank the gods."

But religious and secular knowledge are not separable, they are not oil and water. There is only one truth. What I find more interesting is not to try and rationalise Christianity out of religion, but to rationalise the secular world out of Christianity. A major part of my increasing Christian reverence was seeing how functionally impressive these concepts were when considered from a practical standpoint, the key one to me was the aforementioned idea of forgiveness. The typical conundrum secularists face with ‘forgiving yourself’ is how to counter such with ‘accountability’. People tend to conflict these since if you forgive yourself you’re deciding to let yourself off the hook, yet if you beat yourself up over it then you’ll merely be agonising yourself - with emotional distress itself being a common reason to sin. The genius solution of Christianity is that you must confess your sins, and then you can receive forgiveness, although under the new obligation to sin no more. First you must acknowledge that you have sinned if you want forgiveness; ‘forgiving ourselves’ often encompasses further sin, because we downplay and delude ourselves of our actions so we feel less guilty. Or we suppress the acknowledgement of what we’ve done, our conscience gnawing at us subconsciously as we know we’re hiding something important in the shadows. But to confess you must be able to state precisely what your sin is, the specificness actually helps prevent catastrophizing, since when guilt is left generalised and unspoken it often inflates itself to seem more severe than it is. Then you are forgiven, and you can be released from your shame and guilt. But importantly this release is dependent on your genuine devotion and love of God, it is dependent on affirming the rules of Jesus. This helps steer one from sin in two ways: explicitly you have to renew and be reminded of a genuine commitment to avoid sin, but it also removes the justification for new sin.“I’ve already sinned once, so why not sin more?” such thinking cannot be removed in terms of punishment, but only a genuine opposition to sin. My Christian faith is what gives me access to such, and I would trade that for my atheism in a heartbeat, regardless of the afterlife.