Why we rarely go to church: Pascal's Wager for the modern world

A quote passed through my Facebook feed earlier today that read like this, "I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't // Than to live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is."

This is not exactly a new idea. In the 17th century, the mathematician, philosopher and physicist, Blaise Pascal, basically made the same claim, albeit far more philosophically and far less poetically. He argued for God's existence based on the logic of gain and loss in an argument famously known as Pascal's Wager. Here is his logic, quoted from his work, Pensées, first published in 1669.

1. "God is, or He is not"
2. A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
4. You must wager. (It's not optional.)
5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

My philosophy professor in undergrad explained the wager in a chart that looked something like this:

It isn't complicated--Bombs, Boston, bullying, baptism and the Bible

Text: Acts 8:26-39

We make this way too complicated.

OK, I get it. We live in a world where you have to fill out a novel’s worth of paperwork to buy a cell phone or play a sport; where our youth going on a summer mission trip have to fill out ten pages of release forms for our liability; and for the rest of us there are taxes and wills and all manner of legal things, and that’s before we come to church and learn about the 613 commandments in the Old Testament that apparently we’re supposed to follow. Clearly, if all that stuff is super complicated then things that really matter—like things about salvation and baptism; things near the center of the faith—must be even thornier still. The idea that there is nothing stopping this eunuch from being baptized is just an absolute affront to this complicated world.

            It’s hard for us to reach back through the annals of history to a time when things were less complex, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try—try to be that Ethiopian eunuch reading from the scriptures for the first time. Imagine being in a world where there’s no Google to tell you how to be a Christian; in fact there are no Christian denominations at all. There is only you in a chariot, some words from long ago and a man named Philip willing to interpret them for you.

            It was such a much simpler time.

Shocking and Humble

I'm not preaching on John 10:22-30 as many preachers will be this coming Sunday--I'll be in Acts with Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch thanks to the Narrative Lectionary--but as we were talking about John's Gospel at our local text study one subject that came up was the radical nature of what Jesus was saying: "The Father and I are one." That is a stunningly bold statement. Honestly, I'm not surprised that the immediate response of the Jews was to pick up rocks to stone him. Jesus was without a doubt violating the first commandment--openly and blatantly. Any observing Jew would have felt the same way those early ones did--in fact, in their shoes I would have been the first one picking up stones.

Time and again in the gospel witness, Jesus does and says a thing that is utterly shocking, which is an important thing to remember for we Scandinavian pastors who are so utterly not. It's astounding how we make a message that is so radical and earth-shattering so completely normal. Each of us are called to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, as Paul says, "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23). Well, how have we made that message so utterly lame? Why are our words not equally shocking? I don't doubt that our people are sometimes complacent, but we're fooling ourselves if we don't believe that there are things we believe that will shock them. The Gospel I want to proclaim is utterly absurd; it absolutely flies in the face of the way that pretty much everything in our world works. It should be absolutely jarring to hear. So, why won't I preach it?

Martyrs, Harry Potter, and the happily ever after

Text: Acts 7:1-2a, 44-60

    There’s a classic arc that almost every fairy tale follows, and a similar path can be traced in stories of all sorts. Whether you go to a movie or open a book, this natural progression in the plot means that you have certain expectations for how the story is going to go. There’s going to be a hero—and a villain—and the hero is going to face some tremendous obstacles, so many and so great in fact that you are going to doubt if it’s all going to turn out well in the end. Then, when things seem their worst the hero will triumph over evil and live happily ever after. Modern stories have tried to mess with that formula, sometimes leaving endings ambiguous or even letting the bad guys to win—there are countless examples of this but the ones that come to mind for me are No Country for Old Men and The Usual Suspects. But even in those modern-day twists on the proven method it isn’t so much that the definition of happily ever after changes as it is that the authors decided to give the happily ever after to the person who was less deserving, and in doing this they made a point about the way the world works.

    Regardless of the moral, we are taught from an early age that the winner is the one left standing at the end of the story. Sacrifice is fine but not for our main characters. Instead, sacrifice is something somebody else does to lift the hero up; we are taught, in short, that sacrifice is something that somebody else does for me. The quicker we get past the characters who die for the sake of the hero the quicker we can all get to the happily ever after; the happily ever after is what gives purpose to the sacrifice. Without it, killing off a good character does not tell a good story.

Harry Potter and depths of understanding

It happened again. Another confirmation student, chilling in my office before class, pointed out Harry Potter on my shelf and said, "You're not supposed to have that in church." Barraged as I was by a dozen early teens taking up every corner of my office as they do on Wednesday afternoons before choir, I ignored the comment until later. That's when I wanted to start throwing chairs, because... well... who still thinks that?

Plenty of people, I guess. Plenty of people think Harry Potter is a manifesto on witchcraft and plenty of people think Christianity is about rules that keep us from having fun, and plenty of people think that our political leaders are good if they wear a certain party badge or bad if they don't. Plenty of people think like this. We like to talk about black-and-white thinking--and that is part of it--but it's more than that. This isn't just understanding that there is grey area; it is realizing there is depth--legitimate, awesome depth--behind so many things that we talk about in the church and in the world. We do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we only scratch the surface of a subject before making up our opinions.

The breaking of bread and the road of life

Text: Luke 24:13-35

             This week a professor mine from Augustana shared an opinion piece on Facebook, which had been printed in the New York Times and was about the Catholic Church and modern apologetics. My professor pointed out a line where the author said, “Traditional apologetics has started with metaphysical arguments for God’s existence.” Now, that was a lot of big words—and I hated when my seminary professors would say things like that and not explain them—so I’m not going to do that to you. In layman’s terms the author was claiming that defenses of the faith (what we call “apologetics”) have traditionally started by first arguing for the existence of God. At first blush that makes a lot of sense; it’s very scientific; it doesn’t assume anything, least of all that there is a God of the universe. But what if I told you that the idea of starting by proving God is a completely modern notion that would have seemed absolutely strange to almost anybody not born in the last four hundred years?

Remembering our past: Easter-life

Text: Luke 24:1-16

The History Channel’s six-week mini series on the Bible is wrapping up tonight and, in spite of the fact that it’s gotten good reviews, I won’t be watching in large part because when Jesus rises from the dead there is no way the producers of that series are going to capture the look that I imagine on the disciples’ faces. Somebody in charge of production is going to be way too pious about this and direct the actors who play the disciples to look completely dopey in an attempt to convey awe. But I know how they really looked; it’s the way somebody looks when you tell them something and they think they know where you’re going with it. “Yes, yes, tomb, Jesus, gardener, yeah, yeah… resurrection… Wait, what?” That’s what the History channel isn’t going to get—that “wait, what?” moment. How could they? The actors know the script and, let’s face it, the History channel isn’t budgeting for A-list actors to play Jesus’ disciples. Anyway, none of us can put ourselves in the place of those disciples that first Easter morning.