If you are a secularist with a sense of humor, and you read the Pensees, I suppose you might judge that Pascal was right. For all of the fact that he was a seventeenth century French rationalist, his musing on chance resonates with us today.
Are we humans able to prove God? No, said Pascal, and he was correct; we can’t. Even the Christians can’t, if the validity of the test is to prove God's existence to someone who will not be persuaded by the evidence…since the evidence, this doubter will say, is just such evidence as proves God's existence to those who already believe in His existence.
God’s existence is just a tautology, this doubter will say, in the same way that love or art or anything else which claims to be ultimate truth is a tautology. There isn’t any such thing as ultimate truth…and, even if there were, it wouldn’t be your ultimate truth.
This doubter will say that what we are able to prove is only those things we can record with our senses. Yet—this makes their so-called logical construct even funnier—every one of us has evidence from our own experience that we cannot always trust our own senses!
“I saw my keys on the hall table, just yesterday. So how can they possibly be in the refrigerator right now?”
***
Some of us believe in the religion of God, and some others believe in the religion of No-God. Still others keep their feet in each camp, and they resist taking a chance. That was Pascal, before he logic-ed himself into taking a chance.
His chance was a wager. Here’s how his wager stacks up.
n It is impossible to prove that God exists, that heaven exists, that Jesus is Christ. Nevertheless, Pascal felt he must make a choice in order, purposefully, to live.
n One choice is to act as though nothing is ultimately true and to live accordingly, basing decisions only on personal desire and anticipating after death no mighty thing.
n The other choice is to act as though the Christian assertion is true and to live according to its injunctions, anticipating after death a very mighty thing.
n If you choose the first choice, and you’re right…no harm done (except probably to others around you), since, really, nothing was at stake after all. But if you are wrong…well, then, you’ve lost your soul.
n If you choose the second choice, and you’re wrong…again, no harm done. And on the positive side, you may have been of some help to people around you while you played out your role as a helpful person in a world in which neither help nor harm is of any great matter. But if you are right…ah! Heaven!
Pascal concluded that the only rational choice was to proceed through life as though God does exist, as though morality has a basis in something larger than our own desires for sensation, and that Jesus is Christ. This, he said, is the rationalist’s proper gamble.
On the one hand, might this woman be she? On the other hand, I had been badly wounded by the demise of an earlier marriage; renewed marital pain I did not want.
I found myself at the gambler’s table, with Pascal, daring whether to hold ‘em or fold ‘em.
There is no way to prove that today’s love will have the character to be sustained through life. So the gamble is this.
n Live life as an unbeliever and refrain from chance. If you are correct, and there is no future in love, after all, you will have lost nothing and will come to the end of your existence, burdened perhaps with an occasional sadness, but buoyed by the knowledge that your sternness of reason has kept you safe.
n But what if you are wrong? What if original love may be strengthened through time, by persistent and concerted effort, so that its original allure endures and grows ever more compelling and rises to a triumph at the end?
I gambled, proposed, married, survived 37 and 11/12th years in martial happiness, and I have won.
***
Doubters who struggle against Christianity usually do so because they feel most comfortable when distance is maintained between themselves and a powerful choice, that is, any choice which resounds with absoluteness. They comfort themselves by taking the stance neatly articulated by Lawrence Durrell in Justine, Book One of his tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet (1957):
“For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care,
really care, about one; then one day…one realizes it is God who does
not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one
way or the other.” (emphasis in the original).
How world-weary and sophisticated a stance this is! If even God doesn’t care, we are free men indeed.
Durrell has said of his four interconnected novels about Egyptian life from the late 1920s through to the mid-1940s that, principally, they are about religion and sex. Indeed, there is much on both subjects in them, particularly on the first. What is revelatory, though, for my purpose here, is that despite the existence in the novel of a myriad of religions, all of them well articulated and forming the bases for the actions of a score of major characters, there is scarcely ever a reaction to any of the novel’s lurid events on the basis of the moral code of any of the religions. The novel throbs with marital infidelity, drunkenness, chicanery, false prophesy, child prostitution, incest, financial skullduggery, political corruption, even outright murder. The city of Alexandria, and its environs, as seen through the eyes of a supreme prose stylist—Durrell—and a world-weary British mid-century ex-pat—his protagonist, Darley—is an agnostic carnival.
But my stance is different. Here’s what I say: do your due-diligence, yes. But then dare. Make a moral—an absolutist—choice. Leap.
***
From about 1850 to 1950, it’s been one hell of a hundred years. For the church—though the church is an organization that’s been under the same management for 2,000 years—it’s been a tough slog.
Human events in the West: the Franco-Prussian War irritated the perpetual antagonism between its two peoples and left them both, and their neighbors, bristling. Then the Great War slew ten million over possession of a few hundred yards of bombarded mud on either side of the line. Though it stopped, no one truly won. The Great War dribbled out into the Spanish Influenza, which slaughtered many more who had survived the guns. Germany
Intellectual events in the West: there are the God-debunking theories of Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and of Marx’s dialectical materialism. There is the challenge of Freud, of his assertion that God Himself—the very belief in God—is just the Id against which the Ego mightily struggles: that Christianity is all about sex and about the Ur family, that Oedipal one. There are the aesthetic challenges against artistic standards, modernism in verse, cubism and Dadaism in painting, mere cacophony in music. There is Fraser also, who, in The Golden Bough, showed us that all peoples of whatsoever culture have the same structure of myths, indeed the same myths of dying and then rising gods, the same propitiations of the divine to secure a favorable harvest, next time. Jung is there too, explaining the ubiquity of dying gods as archetypes of the collective unconscious, further humanizing what before had been numinous. Spengler in in the mix, who taught that history isn’t going anywhere, just around in circles. Too, there is Einstein, who showed us that even the security of a Newtonian universe is not to be counted upon, and that time itself is curved, light is susceptible to gravity, and nothing you thought you could point to is really quite there.
By 1950, how was Christianity to survive? It did, and more to the point, not only did it survive, its fundamental division throve.
***
The doubters have every secularist reason not to believe. It would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, if their unbelief were right?
But, with G.K. Chesterton, when confronted by a friend amazed at the idea of griffons and gorgons, we respond: “I am even more amazed at the existence of a giraffe.”
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