Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 47
wager. Pascal’s Wager will be discussed in the next section. The argument
of the wager purports to prove that one should by a sort of brain washing,
going to masses, using holy water, and so on, induce belief in the Catholic
religion. Pascal, as already a believer, would probably disapprove of the
term ‘brainwashing’. It is not clear whether he would regard the acquisition
of belief after immersing oneself in Catholic practices as explicable
naturalistically. He might have held that these practices somehow attract
the grace of God. To the sceptic of course the whole thing must initially
appear as a sort of brainwashing. Such psychological mechanisms are indeed
possible. One might cultivate the company of conservatively religious persons,
avoid reading books such as Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian,
83 and confine one’s philosophical reading to St Thomas Aquinas, or
better still avoid philosophical reading altogether and stick to electronics
or pure mathematics, or other theologically neutral subject matter, and to
practical activities. Whether it would be rational to submit to such nonrational
processes is another matter. To decide this we must wait on our
discussion of the wager.
10 Pascal’s Wager
Pascal, the important seventeenth-century mathematician and physicist,
became an adherent of the austere Jansenist group of Catholics who were
rivals of the more worldly Jesuits. Pascal held that the existence of God could
not be proved by reason. (Later, the First Vatican Council was to condemn
this opinion as a heresy.) He implicitly conflated belief in God with belief in
the Catholic religion, including its doctrine about bliss in heaven and infinite
torment in hell. So for him the only two ‘living options’, as William James
called them, 84 were Catholicism on the one hand and atheism on the other
hand. For example, he would not think of Islam and a Muslim would not
think of Catholicism. Moreover, there are other options, though not ones that
Pascal would have considered. Nevertheless in evaluating Pascal’s argument
we must consider other options.
Still, let us for the moment pretend that Pascal’s two options are the
only ones and follow his argument which can be put simply as follows.
Pascal argued that Catholicism has a non-zero probability. He concedes that
it is possible that one might have many pleasures in our earthly life which
would be lost to us if we embraced a strict religious life. However, Pascal
points out that such happiness could only be finite. Even the smallest finite
probability of infinite torment in hell would outweigh it, since it would give
an infinitely negative ‘expected utility’ (to use a present day terminology).
The product of an infinite unhappiness with even the smallest non-zero