Playing the lottery

This post will be on a similar theme as my dark horse post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/08/betting-on-dark-horse.html

The main difference is that I'm using different examples to illustrate the same basic principle. In Christian apologetics we usually stress how much evidence there is for the Christian faith and how the evidence for Christianity greatly outweighs prima facie evidence to the contrary. That's all well and good. I do a lot of that myself. Many churchgoers as well as unbelievers have no idea how much evidence there is for the Christian faith. 

But while that's a necessary element in Christian apologetics, the emphasis can be misleading if that's all we do. It presents the Christian faith as a seesaw: whether you're a believer or unbeliever depends on which side of the seesaw has the most evidence. However, that can lead to a crisis of faith if some objection, some line of evidence, seems to shift the scales. Overemphasis on that model can produce an unstable, teeter-totter faith when a Christian is exposed to objections he's not heard before, for which he has no good answers. 

That's a practical problem but it's also a conceptual problem, because the seesaw apologetic is simplistic. It reduces to the question to whether Christianity is more probable than not. Just one variable. 

On the seesaw apologetic, it's irrational to believe in Christianity if Christianity is deemed to be improbable. Indeed, that's treated as general principle, not unique to Christianity. If it's a choice between two options, of which one is more probable and the other is less probable, it would be irrational to opt for the less likely choice. Or would it?

In cost/benefit analysis, there are several variables. Take playing the lottery. (For the record, I don't play the lottery.) In my experience, critics of the lottery think it's irrational to play the lottery because the odds of winning are so astronomically poor. However, that in itself doesn't make it irrational to play the lottery because a gambler is juggling three variables rather than one:

i) Improbability of winning

ii) Low investment

iii) Huge payout if you beat the odds

The odds of losing are offset by the minimal investment in relation to the huge payout in case you beat the odds. So it's a question of how the variables balance out. Yes, it's highly unlikely that you will ever win, but if it costs you so little to buy a chance at winning, and if winning is so enormously lucrative, then it can be reasonable to play the lottery. You have very little to lose, and a lot to gain. 

Now, if you blow your paycheck on buying lottery tickets, then that changes the cost/benefit assessment. So it depends on how the three variables are adjusted to each other. 

Another example is young men who want to be professional athletes. It's quite unlikely that they will make the cut. But if they have lots of athletic talent, and that's their dream, then despite the long odds, it's not unreasonable for them to see if they can make the cut. They'd rather take their chances, even if they fail, than look back on their life at 50 years of age, regretting the fact that they never gave it a shot. Of course, they still need to have a fallback option in case they wash out. 

And that's one way, a neglected way, to think about the Christian faith. Even if, for argument's sake, Christianity is probably a losing ticket, that in itself is not a good reason to reject Christianity. That judges Christianity by a single variable. 

Suppose you're bitten by a cobra. As luck would have it, your medicine cabinet has three vials of antivenom for three different kinds of snakebite, only you don't know which one is for cobras, and it would be fatal to take more than one. So you have a one in three chance of injecting yourself with the right life-saving antivenom. Lousy odds, but consider the alternative. 

To take a more mundane example, having kids is a big gamble. Kids can be a source of heartache and heartbreak. You pour the best years of your life into your kids, but some kid are ingrates. You don't know in advance.

So there's a risk. You can be lonely with or without kids, depending on how they turn out. But it's still reasonable to have kids, even though the outcome is unpredictable.

If another religion was more probable than Christianity, that would change the cost/benefit assessment. But Judaism is the only serious contender. And Judaism is like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. 

Suppose for argument's sake that atheism is more likely to be true than Christianity. But that has no payout.  

Of course, there's more to Christian faith than calculating the benefits. It requires commitment and conviction. But to constantly frame the case for Christianity in terms of probabilities is dangerously one-sided. If a Christian is passing through a desert, the cost/benefit approach can tide him over until he gets back onto green pastures.