How Will You Wager?

In our lives, we have to make decisions constantly. These range from small, relatively unimportant decisions like choosing between Coke and Pepsi, to critical life decisions like the choice between going to college or heading straight into the workforce, marrying or remaining single, and one side of a moral debate and the other. One decision that is more important than any other by its very nature is the decision of whether or not to believe in God. I say "by its very nature" because the decision has eternal repercussions.

From France with wisdom

One of my favorite books is Christianity for Modern Pagans by Peter Kreeft, which deals with this most important decision by outlining and explaining the Pensées (Thoughts), by Blaise Pascal. Pascal was a French-Catholic philosopher, scientist, and apologist who lived during the 17th century. He was a contemporary of Descartes, and until the 19th century was the only philosopher who didn't jump on the ideological bandwagon misnamed the "Enlightenment." Contrary to common misconception, he was not a Jansenist (the heretical group condemned by the Church during his time), at least in terms of his own theology, although he was associated with Jansenists. He was, however, a great physicist, mathematician, and inventor; he invented the first working computer (the Pascaline, a mechanical calculator), vacuum cleaner, and public transportation system. In the area of philosophy, Pascal is best known for his "Wager," which is an argument for the reasonableness of believing in God. The argument is not in any way a proof for God's existence; it is more of a thought experiment that approaches belief in God by a cost-to-reward analysis. Many philosophers and theologians throughout history have believed that the existence of God can be proven with varying degrees of certainty. For the sake of the Wager, Pascal assumes that you cannot prove the existence of God by reason alone, using philosophical arguments. Pascal instead wants you to consider what you can gain or lose by choosing to believe in God or not.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.  Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Not wagering is not an option

Many people are turned off by the idea of "betting" about God's existence.  Isn't is selfish and low to believe in God "just in case" He exists so that you can go to heaven (or not go to hell)? Of course it is! Okay, then wouldn't it be better to just remain an honest agnostic? No. Why not? Why not just choose to not wager at all? "...you must wager," says Pascal, "There is no choice, you are already committed." All of us are like ships embarked on a journey. We see a port through the fog, and we have the choice of putting in to that port or not. Eventually though, the ship will run out of fuel, and the opportunity to put in to the port will be lost. Intellectually, it is possible to be agnostic, to say, "I don't know whether or not God exists." However, it is impossible to actually live as an agnostic (I know from experience)––you're either going to live as if God exists or as if He doesn't exist.

Love stoops to conquer

The Wager does presuppose some things. For example, it assumes that belief in God is necessary for salvation. However, this assumption is a basic tenet in most major religions, and there are very good theological reasons for believing it. Any religious ideology that includes both salvation and free will must also include the possibility of damnation (For more on this topic, see my post, "A Door Locked from the Inside"). Furthermore, Pascal never claims that the belief resulting from a selfishly made "bet" on God's existence is in any way sufficient for salvation. However, God is not a cosmic dictator; He is more like a lover, and love stoops to conquer. God will accept the less than ideal motivations a person has for believing in Him at the start of their journey, but that doesn't mean that He will be satisfied with them. In the book Christianity for Modern Pagans, Peter Kreeft offers a beautiful analogy for this. He says that God is like a parent watching their child learn to walk––pleased and filled with joy at the toddler's first clumsy steps, but not totally satisfied until the child is running around the yard with other children. God loves us the way we are, but he loves us too much to leave us that way.

Motivation — not proof

The Wager cannot convince a person that God exists (it isn't intended to), but it can convince them that indifference and agnosticism are not reasonable options. There is an epidemic of apathy in our world today, especially in our country.  Apathy is like an infection that is resistant to all antibiotics, the antibiotics being rational argument, and the person's appetite for the truth is like their own immune system––both together work to kill the infection. Upon hearing about Pascal's Wager, many skeptics object: "I won't believe in something just because I can gain something if it turns out to be true. If God exists, knows everything, and wants me to believe in Him, then He knows exactly what it would take for me to believe. Since I don't believe, God must either not exist or not care enough to reveal Himself to me. In either case, why believe in Him?"

Seek and you shall find

I am completely sympathetic with the skeptic's objection. The only reason that anyone should ever believe anything at all is because it is true. However, I disagree with the skeptic is in his assumption that God has not already done what is necessary to convince him to believe. Jesus says, "Seek, and you shall find" and through the prophet Jeremiah, God said, "You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart" (Jer. 29:13). When you seek me with all your heart. The question is, are you really seeking God with all your heart? Are you really laying down your weapons––surrendering your passions and opening your heart and mind to the possibility that God is real and He loves you, or are you arbitrarily setting your criteria for belief at a level which you know that God probably will never accommodate, so that you can fool yourself into thinking your unbelief is justified? "Unless x, y, or z happened, then I will not believe in God." When a person sets an ultimatum in this way, they are demanding that God overwhelm their decision to live apart from Him. God cannot do this without undermining the person's free will.  

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't (Pensées).

Pascal divides people into three groups: Those who have sought God and have found Him, those who are seeking God and have not yet found Him, and those who neither seek God nor find Him. Those in the first group are reasonable because they have sought, and happy because they have found; those in the second group are reasonable because they are seeking, but unhappy because they have not yet found; those in the third group are neither reasonable nor happy, because they are not seeking and so they have not (and cannot) find. Notice that there is no fourth group consisting of people who find without seeking.  If you decide that you don't want to know or love God, He will not override your decision – God is a lover, not a rapist. He invites, He doesn't coerce. When two of John the Baptist's disciples asked Jesus where He was staying, He replied, "Come and see" (Jn 1:39). If you've already made up your mind that the Christian God is unreasonable, oppressive, childish, or even just too good to be true, and that nothing will convince you otherwise, then you can rest assured that God will leave you alone.

Momento mori (a reminder of death)

We all have a terminal illness called mortality. Every second that passes brings us closer to that moment when we will face our death. To live in a way that ignores this fact is seriously delusional, which is why atheists who seem happy and content with facing their death are in such a dangerous position. God "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2:4), but if your heart is set against God and the truth, then there is no way for Divine Mercy to reach you. That is why it is so important that we pray for all those who do not believe in God, and especially those who do not even seek Him. I hope you will join me in this prayer, and thank you for reading! God Bless!

† Under the Mercy,

Chris Trummer

Sources:

Catholic Biblical Association (Great Britain). The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. New York: National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, 1994. Print.

The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw "the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply "space." – Peter Kreeft

Frequently, when I'm having a conversation with someone who is either a non-believer or just having doubts, they will make an objection to religious belief that goes something like this:  "Once you understand how unimaginably large the universe is, it makes you realize how insignificant we are. We humans think we're so important, but really, we're nothing in the big picture. If there was a god who cared about human beings, then he wouldn't make them such an incomprehensibly small speck in a universe that is almost completely cold, dark, and lifeless." The size of the universe use to intimidate me as well, so I can sympathize with this mentality. However, further reflection and study on this idea has settled my mind, and so I'd like to share my thoughts here.

"The universe is really big" — compared to what?

This may sound silly, but the universe (or if there is a multiverse, then the multiverse) includes everything in physical reality, so there's literally nothing else to compare it with! Size is a relational property; nothing can be described as being large or small without using something else as a reference. Have you seen other, smaller universes to know that ours is particularly large? Often the response to this objection is, "Well, it's really big compared to us." Oh, so we're the standard of size and mass that everything else should be compared with! In this case, the objector is guilty of the same human-centrism that he accuses religious people of. Also, the argument has the weakness of being based on a matter of degree. How small would the universe have to be for human beings to be significant? One-half of the size it is now? One-thousandth? One trillionth? Human beings have known for literally thousands of years that they are very small compared to the great expanse of nature around them, and this was hardly an obstacle to their believing in gods. What difference does it make to know that there are billions of galaxies out there if you already knew that you were a measly 160 pounds of flesh within an entire solar system, or even just planet Earth? The size of the Pacific Ocean alone is enough to make me feel like a grain of sand in comparison.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established; what is man that you should be mindful of him, and the son of man that you should care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4).

Size ≠ value

The argument makes the assumption that value or significance is somehow determined by size or mass. This I find particularly strange, because in everyday life this standard is almost never used. Is 16 million pounds of scrap metal in a junk yard somehow better than a 16 million dollar fighter jet? Is a sequoia tree (the largest species of tree on the planet) more important than a cow? Is a golden retriever worth more than a seven-year-old girl? Is a mountain range more valuable than the native villagers who live at its base? Is a 40 ton boulder more significant than a human embryo? Clearly, the difference between all of these examples is one of kind and not simply degree. In other words, the difference between them is qualitative, not quantitative. When you try to compare things that are qualitatively different, there is no use in trying to multiply one to make it comparable to the other – it doesn't work. This is especially clear in the examples comparing inanimate (nonliving) matter to animate (living) matter, and those comparing unconscious living things (trees) to conscious living things (human beings). Here, the dedicated materialist will object that there really isn't any qualitative difference between, say, the boulder and the human embryo – both are only the products of the laws of nature working on matter, even if one happens to result in an evolutionary process that produces beings who are capable of a "phenomenon" where they "seem" to be conscious. I say seem because it is very common (and actually, consistent) for materialist philosophers today to deny human consciousness and thought, since they are ordinarily defined as immaterial realities, and therefore, impossible within the materialist worldview. Rather than questioning his or her own consciousness or ability to think, the person hearing claims like this should question the sanity of the person making them! However, philosophy of mind is admittedly a deep and highly complex area of study that I plan on spending more time studying and hope to write about in the future. Suffice it to say for now that, even among prominent unbelieving philosophers, the understanding of the human mind is a highly debated and controversial subject. Take this statement from the well-established agnostic philosopher Thomas Nagel for example:

My guess is that [the] cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind (Nagel 130-131).

Big God, big universe — what's the big deal?

How does the creation of a (relatively) large universe count as evidence against the God of classical theism, who is understood to be infinitely powerful? The Psalmist joyfully wrote that "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament (sky, expanse) proclaims his handiwork" (Ps19:1). I wonder, if the entire universe somehow consisted of only our planet and sun, would the same person not object that "an all-powerful God wouldn't create a universe so small?" It seems as though God has already been ruled guilty from the outset of the trial in the objector's mind, and so now everything must count as evidence against him. The fact that the same feature of reality counts for God to the believer and against Him to the unbeliever may simply be evidence that the objections come from the disposition or desires of the objector, rather than from any actual contradiction within either the concept of God or Creation. The creation of a single atom from literally nothing is as demanding of infinite power as the creation of an entire universe, since in both cases there is, metaphysically speaking, an infinite chasm to cross – the chasm between being and non-being. The idea that the universe's largeness, emptiness, and lifelessness is evidence that humans have no value also presupposes that God is limited in His resources, an idea that no believer would agree with. In addition, the theory of evolution requires millions and millions of years in order for the planet to give rise to life and for that life to evolve. Therefore, given the laws of nature that exist, the size of universe can really be considered a necessity if lifeforms were intended by the Creator, since the size of the universe is a result of the amount of time it has been expanding since the Big Bang.

Mind over matter

Of all the trillions upon trillions of stars, planets, and other cosmic bodies in the universe, none of them is looking back at us, wondering what we are. Why does it matter if a planet is millions of times more massive than me if it is not aware of the fact? Also, if humans have immortal souls, as proposed by most major religions, than we will continue to exist after the entire universe reaches "heat death," the complete reduction of all ordered systems to a state of disordered equilibrium, as dictated by the law of entropy. True meaning or significance can only exist in something eternal. Why? If something existed for a time, and then ceased to exist, and eventually all of its effects ceased to exist, then we would say that thing has literally no meaning. Actually, we wouldn't say anything about it, because we would have no way of even knowing that it had no meaning. The same could be said about the universe its self:  

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. -C.S. Lewis

Say there was a book written by a man who lived in a small village. One day this book was destroyed in a fire, and the man who wrote it later died, and then eventually all of his friends, family, and fellow villagers who knew about him and his book died, and every single piece of evidence that the book ever even existed was destroyed. It would then be impossible to say that what had been contained in that book had "meaning." No quark, atom, molecule, rock, planet, tree, or even animal can ever be the subject in a sentence, can ever say the word, "I." This reality of the self, which has been the most puzzling fact since the dawn of human thought, is what makes us worth more than an entire universe of inanimate matter. I give thanks to God my Creator for giving me my very self, which is not reducible to matter, and therefore worth more than all the matter in the cosmos combined, even if there is more of it than I can wrap my mind around.

† Under the Mercy,

Chris Trummer

Sources:

Catholic Biblical Association (Great Britain). The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. New York: National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, 1994. Print.

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. Harper: San Francisco, 2009. Print.

Nagel, Thomas. The Last Word. Oxford University Press, 1997. pp. 130-131. 

From Party Animal to Rational Animal

From the time I was a junior in high school until I was a freshman in college, I had many long and deep conversations with a close friend from Brazil, Felipe. Felipe asked me questions that caused me to have a lot of doubts about my Catholic faith. I never got to a point where I actually would have claimed "God does not exist," but looking back I would say that I was basically agnostic. I didn't know what I really believed or what I could really know for sure, and I was heavily influenced by Felipe's relativistic attitude towards truth and knowledge. A few years ago, I had become depressed and dissatisfied with the lack of meaning in my life, because I was working a job that I thought was pointless, going to school to get a job that I couldn't see myself actually doing everyday, spending most of my nights drinking and partying, and many of my mornings with a regretful conscience and a throbbing brain.  

Facing the facts

Finally, I started to ask myself the tough questions like, "Is this all there is in life? Hating Mondays and loving Fridays? Mechanically going through the motions of life, punching your time card, checking the boxes, motivated only by the next opportunity to get a 12-pack and play video games?" Somehow I had the honesty to admit that, if God does not exist, then the answer to these questions is, ultimately, "Yes, this is it." This was a frightening realization to me, like the harsh reality we face at a funeral. We know in the back of our minds that we will all die someday, but that fact is brought into the light when we get that diagnosis, that phone call, or we have to carry that casket. The Catholic apologist Matt Fradd said in his story of conversion from agnosticism,"When you die, people will talk about you the same way you talk about people who are dead now." Like the motivation that comes from the realization of one's own mortality, the thought that my life might be meaningless motivated me. It motivated me to search for the truth about God, reality, and the purpose of my life.

Enter philosophy

On my search for meaning and purpose I quickly came across the work of Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is a Christian (evangelical protestant) philosopher of religion and time.  He has written many books, and has also participated in many debates with some of the most prominent atheists of today, including the late Christopher Hitchens (who died in 2011), theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and neuroscientist Sam Harris. The argument that Dr. Craig is probably most famous for defending is the Kalāam Cosmological Argument (hereafter KCA). The KCA is a deductive argument for the existence of God.  The argument was originally formulated and defended by Muslims during the Middle Ages, and the word "kalaam" means "speech" in Arabic. The argument is simple, having just three steps:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.

Until modern times, the truth of the first or major (first) premise was more or less taken for granted. The idea that "nothing comes from nothing" seems so self-evident that most people find it almost redundant to even mention. This is, however, the goal of the first premise in an argument, to begin with something that your opponent will almost certainly agree with. The second premise was the one that received most of the criticism. Realize that, until the Big Bang Theory was proposed by Belgian priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, and observational evidence found to support it in the late 1920s, virtually all scientists believed that the universe was eternal, that is to say, that the universe had existed for an infinite amount of time into the past. Dr. Craig points out that the idea of an actually infinite past is very strange and has many paradoxical implications. For example, imagine you are waiting for a particular domino (which represents today) to fall in a row of dominoes. But, imagine that there are literally an infinite amount of dominoes that must fall before that domino can fall. How would that domino ever fall if you had to wait for an infinite amount of dominoes to fall before it? In other words, if the past is infinite, how did we manage to get through an infinite number of days in order to get to the present day? The impossibility of such a scenario, known as an "infinite regress," provides good reason to think that the universe must have had a beginning, without even getting into the empirical evidence that has been discovered in more recent times.

The worst birthday present ever

In 2007, at the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday party, prominent cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin presented a theorem titled the "Borde, Vilenkin, and Guthe (BVG) Theorem." The BVG theorem, developed by Vilenkin and his colleagues, proved with a very high level of scientific certainty that any universe that was expanding would have to have a beginning in time. Vilenkin pulled no punches when he put forth the proof, saying this after he had presented it:

"It is said that an argument will convince a reasonable man, and that a proof will convince even an unreasonable man. Now that the proof is in place (referring to the BVG theorem), physicists and cosmologists can no longer hide behind even the possibility that the universe is past infinite. There is no escape. They must face the reality of a beginning," and later,"To view an inflationary universe without a beginning is impossible."

Once he had heard the proof explained, the birthday boy Stephen Hawking exclaimed, "My goodness! It has very transcendent implications!" No kidding! One journalist writing about the event in New Scientist magazine titled her article "Why Physicists Can't Avoid a Creation Event: The Worst Birthday Present Ever." With more and more evidence mounting to support the idea that the universe did in fact begin to exist, some physicists and cosmologists, worried about these implications, have resorted to attacking the first premise, that "Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence." The fact that they would go so far as to reject one of the most basic principals in philosophy, the "principal of sufficient reason," which maintains that every effect must have a cause that explains it, reveals how strong their prior commitment is to an uncreated universe.  

Let nothing be nothing

If the universe really did begin to exist, then that would mean that prior to its absolute beginning, the universe was literally nothing. While it may sound simple enough, it is important to understand what is meant by the word "nothing." Nothing is the complete absence of being, and it has no properties or potentialities, that is, it does not have in itself the potential to become something. It is not the low-energy state of a quantum field or a vacuum, both of which have properties, namely, that they are conditioned by time. It is also not a void, because you can have more or less of a void, and a void is dimensional and orientable. One scientist once joked, "nothing is the stuff rocks dream about." So, if the universe was really nothing before it began to exist, then it could not have moved itself from nothing to something – that would imply that it could do something. There would have to be a transcendent cause, a cause outside of the universe, that brought the universe into existence out of nothing. Also, since there is literally an infinite gap between nothing and something, we can infer that the transcendent cause would have to be all-powerful or omnipotent (sound familiar?). Suppose someone is still willing to deny the first premise and say that something can come from nothing. This raises the question, "What is it about nothing that makes it only able to produce universes?" In other words, if something can come from nothing, then why have we never observed it? Why don't random planets, objects, molecules, or even BMW's and Border Collies pop into being out of nothing? This might sound silly, but that is only because it is perfectly consistent with a silly notion, the notion that something could come from nothing.

In conclusion, I believe the KCA is sound and that it has strong theistic (or at least deistic) implications for anyone who is willing to study it honestly (key word: honestly). It is important to realize that the KCA, along with other arguments for the existence of God, does not in any way prove the existence of the Judeo-Christian God, or any particular god, but it does prove the existence of an all-powerful and transcendent cause of the universe, which is enough to refute the atheist or to reassure the person doubting God's existence. In dialogue with atheists or agnostics, it is important to remember that, once you sort through all of the rhetorical and often times emotionally charged arguments, every argument against the existence of God will be claiming one of two things:  1) that the past can be infinite, or 2) that something can come from nothing – both of which are problematic propositions and extremely difficult to support by reasoned argumentation. Thanks be to God, for all of Creation, and for giving us the ability to reason our way to knowing that He exists, as the Church maintains in her Catechism: "The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason" (CCC 286). Saint Paul wrote the following about unbelievers in his letter to the Romans:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Rm 1:19-20).

† Under the Mercy,

Chris Trummer

Sources:

Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd Ed. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000. Print.

Grossman, Lisa."Why physicists can't avoid a creation event." New Scientist. Retrieved on 11-11-2014. URL:  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328474.400-why-physicists-cant-avoid-a-creation-event.html. Web.