©2002 Ed Buckner, Council for Secular Humanism, www.secularhumanism.org
The short-hand description for the claim behind this question is “Pascal’s Wager.” Blaise Pascal, French philosopher and mathematician of the 1600s, gets credit for this one, though it probably was asked in various forms long before him. The essential claim is that we should all believe in God, since not believing can cause us to go to Hell if we’re wrong, while believing is harmless if we happen to be wrong in doing so.
There are many problems with this claim so there are many answers to the question:
· It’s not really a fifty/fifty choice at all. There are thousands of religions/gods, and presumably you’d have to pick the right one if there is a right one. So your odds are thousands to one against you, no matter what the truth is.
· Belief is not really something you can simply choose to have or not have. Any omniscient god worth his salt would know if you were just pretending to believe, and surely that would void your contract, as it were. Sincere belief can only be held by someone who has been convinced (by evidence, emotion, or just by not questioning what one was taught as a child).
· There is in fact a great deal to lose by believing in a non-existent god: aside from time and money wasted in religious activities, self-delusion can be quite destructive, potentially leading to many mistakes, lack of self-reliance, and considerable unhappiness in one’s life. If we only have one life, we can make the best of it only by recognizing that.
· And my favorite answer, initially implausible but in fact no more illogical than Pascal’s Wager: What if “God” in her almighty wisdom only wants to have in her heaven (to keep her company and entertain her) curious, skeptical, intelligent beings? People who are wise enough to not accept her existence without good reasons or evidence? Then, of course, all of us secular humanists and freethinkers will be “in” while D. James Kennedy and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson will only make it if they are in fact charlatans who don’t really believe any of the baloney they peddle.
For more on the subject, see Section II, pp. 55-104, in An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism, edited by Gordon Stein and published by Prometheus Books, 1980.
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