Pascal or Babinski?

Ed Babinski has posted a critique of Pascal’s Wager over at the Debunkers. He doesn’t cite any objections that haven’t been raised before, or better expressed.

As long as we’re quoting folks, here’s quote from William James:

“Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said: belief will come and stupefy your scruples. Why should you not? At bottom, what have you to lose?

You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps. Surely Pascal’s own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others, a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the unbelieving heart. WE fee that a faith in masses and holy water adopted willfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faith’s reality; and it we were ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this patter from their infinite reward. It is evident that unless there is some preexisting tendency to believe in masses and holy water, the opinion offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option,” Essays on Faith & Morals (Meridian 1962), 37.

I cite this, in part, because it summarizes, in more compact and colorful form, some of the central objections raised by Babinski.

I also cite it to take issue with it. It represents a popular misinterpretation of what I think Pascal is getting at.

i) To begin with, fear of a perfectly rational motive, and the fear of hell is a biblical motive. There are many things we have good reason to fear, and ought, on that account, to avoid them. This is simple prudence. There is nothing inherently impious in having spiritual incentives and disincentives for what we do or refrain from doing.

ii) Remember that Pascal, as a Roman Catholic, believed in sacramental grace. So this is not, for him, a case of initially believing in the sacraments, but in the power of the sacraments to engender faith. James has the causal order exactly backwards.

For Pascal you needn’t come to the sacraments with a prior faith in their efficacy; rather, their efficacy is able to create faith in the sacraments themselves. That’s what makes them a means of grace. So James completely misses the point.

iii) Pascal is not presenting the Wager as a reason to believe in God. Rather, his aim is twofold:

a) He is presenting the Wager as a way to make the religiously indifferent take the issues seriously.

b) He is also presenting the Wager as an inducement for the unbeliever to gain a genuine religious experience by participating in the sacramental life of the church.

This is not an unbeliever playing the role of a believer, but an unbeliever placing himself within a spiritual environment conducive to the cultivation of faith.

iv) This also affords an implicit answer to another stock objection. For one criticism of the Wager is that Pascal fallaciously reduces the options to either unbelief or Christian belief.

But this objection also misses the force of the Wager. For the Wager is, among other things, a short-cut. If attendance at church does, indeed, foster faith, then the hypothetical alternatives are moot.

If the sacraments claim to be a means of grace, and if, as a result of sharing in the sacramental life of the church, and unbeliever becomes a believer, then the claim is self-validating.

So it seems to me that Pascal’s Wager has an inner logical which the conventional criticisms pass by within even nicking the surface.

Beyond that I’d make a few more points:

To say that Pascal’s Wager fails because it doesn’t address competing religious claims, but only the choice between belief and unbelief, is off the mark.

i) To begin with, the Wager is not the sum of Pascal’s apologetic. He does have other arguments for the faith, as well as counterarguments regarding rival religions like Islam.

ii) Secular critics of the Wager act as if they agree with him, even when they say they disagree with him.

They may pay lip-service to the hypothetical alternatives, but if you see where they spend their time, they concentrate their fire on Christianity, not Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or Swedenborg.

They themselves treat Christianity as the only live option, the creed to beat.

iii) Very few religions even pretend to offer personal immortality. This really comes down to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The only reason that “other” religions like Islam and Mormonism have a doctrine of personal survival is because these are Christian heresies.

iv) I, as a Protestant in the sacramental tradition of Zwingli and Bullinger, do not share Pascal’s sacramental theology.

But while I reject the specific underpinnings of his argument, I think the core argument can be salvaged.

For according to Calvinism, God ordinarily coordinates saving grace with the means of grace—especially the word of God as the object of saving faith.

God doesn’t regenerate for the sake of regeneration, but in order to ingenerate faith, a faith which reaches out for a suitable object supplied by the word of God.

Going to church doesn’t save you. It isn’t a sufficient condition to save you. But it is a necessary condition to the extent that God dispenses the grace of faith to make you a Christian believer and disciple, and you can find the gospel in the church.

This is not limited to the visible, institutional church. That’s the core. But there are other sources for the knowledge of the gospel. Books. The media. The Internet. Parachurch ministry.

So Pascal’s Wager remains essentially sound. Avoiding the company of Christians is a poor way to become one.

If you’re religiously indifferent, or even a hard-boiled atheist, stop to count the cost.

And a natural way of coming to faith is by coming to the faithful, by immersing yourself in a gracious bath of prayer and preaching, confession and song.