Blaise Pascal (1623-1662 CE), a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, thought that we cannot know for sure whether God exists, but we should choose to believe because that is the most prudent thing to do.
Pascal says:
. . . ‘God is, or He is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason . . . you can defend neither of the propositions. . . but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see what interests you the least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? 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. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
[Quoting the skeptic or nonbeliever:] ‘That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.’ Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But 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. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all . . .[1]
There is a lot to unpack here. First, Pascal claims that the odds that there is a God are 50-50. (He compared it to a coin toss, he said there was an equal risk of gain and of loss, and he said: ‘Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other . . .’)
If the odds of winning and losing are equal (50-50, or ½) then Pascal thinks it would be a good bet to ‘chance’ your life to gain two lifetimes, and an even better bet if you could gain three lifetimes if you were right. He is correct that this would be a profitable betting strategy over the long term if it were as he describes it. Suppose you were considering whether you should play a game in which some unbiased person tosses a fair coin and if the coin comes up heads you will win 2 dollars and if it comes up tails you will lose 1 dollar. One would expect this game to be profitable for you in the long run if indeed the odds of the coin coming up heads are really 50-50. It would be even more profitable if you got 3 dollars and lost only 1 dollar if it came up tails.[2]
Pascal thinks that if you are forced to bet it would be ‘imprudent’ to not take the side of the bet that would enable you to gain 3 lives if you are correct and only lose 1 life (your current one) if you are wrong. If this reasoning holds when there is a potential gain of 3 lifetimes then certainly it would if the potential gain is eternal life. In fact, you would ‘act stupidly’ if you did not take the side of the bet that would enable you to win an eternal life of happiness. Pascal describes it as ‘an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain’. What does that mean? It would be an infinitely happy life, meaning there is no limit to your happiness, and it would also have endless duration, meaning that it would persist forever. Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want that? The best part is that to obtain this infinite reward we only have to risk what is finite, our current life. Our potential loss is capped while our potential gain is unlimited in two ways. Nearly everyone would be willing to risk losing $20,000 for the chance to gain $2,000,000 if the odds of winning were 50-50, so obviously you should do it if the potential gain is infinite.
Here is what is known as a decision table showing our options, according to Pascal:
You are Correct You are Incorrect
Believe in God Eternal Happiness Lose Essentially Nothing
Atheism Gain Essentially Nothing Eternal Suffering
The betting strategy that Pascal described would be profitable, and in a way it also makes sense when he extends this reasoning to a potential infinite reward because that would increase the favorable skew between the potential profit and the potential loss, but there is a very serious flaw in his reasoning. It is not a good betting strategy to risk everything that you have on a single trade, no matter how certain you feel that it will work out in your favor. We are dealing with only probable outcomes, after all.
To illustrate what I mean, suppose you could make a trade in which you estimate that there is a 90% probability of the trade making a profit of at least 10 fold, and we will assume that this estimate is accurate, but your only two options are to bet everything that you currently have on it or nothing at all.[3] Would you make the trade? Most people (inexperienced traders) would do it because it has a 90% chance of success, and because you would gain 10 times more if you were right than what you would lose if you were wrong. You may enjoy some temporary success, but if you kept trading this way for very long you would lose everything because eventually you will be wrong about the direction of your bet (that outcome does have a 10% probability, after all), and if you risk it all each time that you make a bet then eventually you will lose it all. Then you would have no capital left to trade with, so you would not even be able to make it back in future trades.
You would likely stay solvent longer if you only bet half of your portfolio value on each trade, but it is still possible to have a string of losing trades in a row and you would still lose most of your money, if not all of it. Gamblers at casinos sometimes bet recklessly, and I think that is the main reason why most of them eventually lose it all. A gambler will believe that he is on a hot streak and will keep doubling down and betting all of his stake on each new bet that he takes. Even if the odds were in his favor (often they are not) it is nearly guaranteed that if he plays the game long enough he will lose all of the money that he is gambling with if he risks too much of it on each bet. Most traders in the financial markets who have long-term success typically only risk 1-1.5% of their total account value on a trade. This is to protect them in case they have a string of losing trades, which can and does happen. It may seem like a cautious strategy, risking and potentially gaining so little on each trade, but those who are not cautious do not survive.
What if someone told you that you should bet your entire life savings on a tiny almost unknown penny stock that he claims will one day become the world’s most valuable company by market cap? I hope that you would not actually do that. Why would you believe that this person can see many years into the future, and that if he could that he would tell you about it for free? Most likely it is a pump and dump rug pull; don’t be gullible enough to fall for it. At the very least, you should not risk any more than 1% of your account value on it, but I would probably not risk anything because I would not believe him. If we do not believe that someone can tell us with any real certainty which stocks are going to be the biggest winners over, say, the next 20 years or 50 years (we should not) then why would we believe that anyone really knows what will happen to us after we die? Many people feel extremely certain about what they believe will happen to them after they die, more certain than any other belief that they have, in fact; they think of it as absolute knowledge, not mere opinion or belief, but the truth is that they do not really know. Are you going to bet everything that you have (your whole life) on them being right?
Pascal thought that both sides of the argument were equally reasonable, but most people do not; whichever side of the issue we are on, most of us feel like there is much more evidence for our side than for the other one. We would at least like to think that our opinion is based upon the evidence, whether that is actually true or not. I have gone back and forth on the issue myself, but I now believe that there is much more evidence and stronger arguments for the atheist side. So, what if I think that there is only a 1/1,000,000,000 chance, or even less, that Christianity is actually true? Should I still live a Christian lifestyle and choose to be a believer if I think that the odds are that low? One could make the argument that Pascal’s reasoning suggests that I should. Because the potential gain is infinite, Pascal argues that even if the odds of winning were only one out of infinity it would still be worth it to make the bet. However, on that I do not agree with him. Suppose that I promised you that you will be given eternal life and everything that you have ever wanted after you die if you will just give me $50 right now. Would you do it? Even if you think that I am probably lying, or just wrong, the reasoning used in Pascal’s wager suggests that you should still give me the money, even if it is very unlikely to work, because even a tiny chance at an infinite reward would be worth making the relatively small sacrifice of losing $50. An infinite reward would always outweigh any finite sacrifice that one might make. But one could easily go bankrupt in this life by falling for such schemes. You would be the perfect mark for a con artist. Why would you believe that I, or any other human could really guarantee that you will be given eternal life in paradise, or that I would essentially sell it to you for $50 if I could? Usually the con is more subtle in real life, but that is essentially what many religious leaders promise, implicitly if not explicitly, and sometimes it is explicit. Of course, they claim it is God who guarantees it, not them, but you just have to take their word for it.
If these religious claims of an infinite and eternal reward are in fact false then it has a striking resemblance to the infamous Nigerian prince con, in which the con men claim to be a Nigerian prince who for varying reasons given (such as being unjustly put into prison, or he has a child that has been kidnapped, etc.) really needs you to send him money, and they promise to give you millions of dollars later as a reward if you will just send him $5,000 right now. Even though those being scammed have never met the prince, and do not really know whether he even exists (he does not), incredibly, a lot of people still fall for it. Sound familiar?
Everybody from charities to political causes and political campaigns to churches try to get you to donate money and free labor to them. Some causes are worthy, others are not. Some do not try to lie to you about what you will get in return, others do. Religious leaders claim that you will be rewarded later for all the work that you put in and the sacrifices that you make now, but if what they are telling you is false then you will never receive that promised reward and they will never have to compensate you. They are essentially writing you a check that will never be cashed. They claim that the work is for God, but if there is no God then you are really working for them for free.
Pascal said that if you gain, you gain ‘all’ and if you lose, you lose ‘nothing’, but believing can in fact cost you a great deal, depending upon the religion and how devoted to it you are. Think of all the wasted time, effort, and money that you put in, all for nothing. I know that our lives are finite, but that is all that we have. In some ways, the fact that it is limited makes it even more precious.
Your whole life would be centered upon a lie, a fiction that you think is absolute truth, the most true thing that there is, which you would believe over anything and everything else. Because of this, many of your core values and most cherished beliefs would also be wrong.
It could be even worse for you if the personal character of your religious leader is bad. I grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (a.k.a. the ‘Mormon church’) and one Sunday back when I was in high school a well-known speaker and author within the church named Truman Madsen came to give a devotional, or speech. One of the things that he talked about was a story from church history about a man named Heber C. Kimball, who later became one of the highest-ranking leaders in the church. According to the version of the story that we were all told that day, the church’s founder and ‘prophet’ Joseph Smith informed Mr. Kimball that God had revealed to him that it was God’s will that Mr. Kimball’s wife be taken from him and given to Joseph as his wife. Mr. Kimball and his wife Vilate struggled to accept this at first, as one might imagine, but ultimately, after much thought and prayer, they decided that they must accept God’s will. They went to Joseph Smith and Mr. Kimball took his wife’s hand and placed it in Joseph’s hand, telling him to take her if that was God’s will. Joseph Smith was visibly moved by their faith and obedience. He informed them that he would not be taking Mrs. Kimball as his wife after all, that they had been tested, as was Abraham when he had been commanded to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, and that they had passed the test; he instead sealed them together as a couple for time and all eternity, through the authority that only he had at that time, as the current living prophet of God. What a relief; Joseph, no doubt with God’s approval, was just testing their faith, as Abraham’s faith was tested, and look at the great blessing that they were given because they had trusted the prophet and God.
This story really stuck with me, and it bolstered my faith for a long time. But then many years later I found out the rest of the story. Joseph Smith did marry Heber C. Kimball’s daughter, Helen Mar Kimball, as a polygamous wife when she was only 14 years old. (I am guessing that the reason he married her when she was still so young is because he was probably worried about her becoming engaged or promised to someone else if he waited until she was even 16 or 17.) When I learned of this I put 2 and 2 together, and I now believe that Joseph Smith was manipulating them the entire time. I think he wanted Kimball’s daughter all along, but he knew that asking for that, as a polygamous marriage, could be risky. He could not be sure how they would react. One can imagine how awkward and strange that conversation would be. So, he decided to give them a trial run and see just how far they were willing to go. They were indeed being ‘tested’, but not by God. He probably figured that if they reacted badly to it and tried to out him, as some other members of the church in Nauvoo had done,[4] then he could always tell everyone that it was just a test of their faith, and Heber and his wife had failed. But if they were willing to go along with it then he knew that they would be so relieved to find out that they could stay married, and so grateful to be ‘sealed’ together forever as a couple that they would then certainly agree to give him their daughter in marriage if that was what he (ahem, sorry, I mean ‘God’) asked for, and that was indeed what happened. Smith even got Heber Kimball to teach his daughter about ‘celestial marriage’ (polygamy) and ask her to marry Joseph rather than asking her himself. Remember, this girl is only 14 years old. Is she really going to say no when her parents and ‘the prophet’ ask her to do it? Like any good salesman, he gave her a time limit too: she only had 24 hours to decide. To sweeten the deal, Smith promised as God’s representative on earth that marrying him would ensure her eternal salvation, as well as the salvation of her whole family. I cannot think of a much stronger way to put pressure on a devoutly religious 14-year-old girl (or more manipulative) than to say that the eternal salvation of her entire family depends upon her doing what you want her to do.[5] She probably would have been willing to kill herself, or be sacrificed at the altar, or do just about anything to ensure the eternal salvation of her entire family. How horrible for her and for her family if it was all a lie.
It is not really a very faith-promoting story after all, is it? In fact, when you hear the whole story, rather than just a cherry-picked part of it, it is really quite awful. It has the opposite effect of building up one’s faith in the ‘prophet’ and his church. Yet most church members are unmoved by examples like this. There are many of them. But most members continue to believe in Joseph Smith and the church no matter what evidence is put before them. It is similar to Donald Trump’s supporters. We have never had a President of the United States who is so openly corrupt. He is far worse than Richard Nixon ever was. Do they care? No. It does not matter what Donald Trump says or does, they will support him no matter what. If anybody outside of the MAGA cult tries to tell them about all of the bad things that he has done, they either refuse to believe it, or they just don’t think that it is bad if he does it. There is literally nothing that he could do that would cause him to lose their support. To them, by definition, whatever he does is right and anyone who opposes or criticizes him, or anyone that he criticizes, is by definition wrong. For members of the LDS church it is like that with Joseph Smith. If a Bishop, a Stake President, or any other local church leader did the same actions he would be excommunicated and denounced by the church,[6] but members realize that Joseph Smith could not have been committing really egregious sins and moral wrongs on numerous occasions and still be a prophet of God, so they feel compelled to defend his actions no matter what, and they claim (as he did) that it was not immoral because God commanded it. Their entire life and many of their core beliefs (including their belief in God and the afterlife) are based upon their belief that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, and they will not give up those beliefs no matter how much evidence there is against it.
The pattern is to deny, deny, deny, swear that he never did any such thing, and call anybody who claims otherwise a liar; then, after it becomes impossible to deny, they change tactics and say that it is not really immoral after all, and never was. Anybody who says it is immoral is a bad person themselves. Just attack the accuser, that is what Trump does, and that is what Joseph Smith and his followers did as well, and what the church continues to do even now.[7]
Joseph Smith is certainly not the only religious leader to have done things like this; it is actually fairly common for religious leaders to use their position to obtain sexual favors from their followers. Malcolm X became disillusioned when he found out that his spiritual guru Elijah Muhammad was doing that, and the Nation of Islam came to see him as an enemy as well. Malcolm X claimed that Elijah Muhammad had 8 children with 6 different teenage girls, and he went public with his criticism when he felt threatened by the Nation of Islam. Martin Luther King had a lot of good qualities, but he also had a lot of affairs. To some extent, it probably comes with the territory of being a very high-profile man, who many women would find attractive because of his status, but in the case of religion the leader has even more influence over his followers than political or social leaders, and there is just so much hypocrisy. They do not practice what they preach. I watched a documentary about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and I felt really bad for a couple that followed him. Koresh was a cult leader in the 1980s and 1990s who claimed to be the second coming of Christ, and he was having sex with nearly all of the women in the group. This particular couple was unable to have children, but she was impregnated by Koresh, and they were told to be grateful for that, and they were. What a distorted world those people lived in. It is like they voluntarily turned themselves into the worst kind of slave, where even their thoughts were controlled.
Another example from the early days of Christianity is the so-called ‘pillar saints’ or stylites. These guys would stand on top of pillars to preach to people and they would never come down. Others would supply them with food and water when they were not fasting and they would not come down even to use the bathroom or to take a bath. Simeon Stylites the Elder, one of the first to do it, stayed up there for 36 years of his life. According to legend, another named Alypius, after doing it for 53 years, found that he could no longer stand; instead of coming down he laid down on his side and spent the remaining 14 years of his life in that position atop the pillar.[8] Is that a good life? Were these guys as happy as they could have been? If they had not believed in God, would they still have chosen to live that way? If there is a God, would God really even want someone to live that life? Why think so?
Eastern religions have had extremists too. Many Hindu believers and Buddhist monks have given up essentially everything to follow their religious path; in fact, that is an essential part of following it for some faiths. Even the Buddha himself, according to the story, left his wife and young son behind, and all of his material possessions to try to attain enlightenment. As part of the learning process, he also attempted several forms of ascetism (along with the Hindu ascetics he was studying with) such as fasting to the point of near starvation and even going without breathing for as long as he could. Eventually he decided that was not the way to achieve enlightenment, and taught the Middle Way, which I think was a positive development in religious thought, but I still wonder whether abandoning his wife and child was really a good thing. I suppose he felt like they were holding him back, and that he could never attain enlightenment if he had not left, but if the whole thing is made up then he abandoned them for no good reason. Theravada Buddhism in particular teaches that one must follow one’s own path to enlightenment, and that sometimes requires giving up everything that you want and care about in this world, including friends and family, as Siddhartha Gautama did. Is this good? It seems like because we want to show respect for different religions and the beliefs of others that few people ever raise questions like this, but seriously, if it is all made-up bullshit then aren’t they wasting their lives and negatively affecting the lives of the people around them? There may be something to the Buddhist idea that the way to be happy is to control your desires and to stop wanting certain things, or at least not being obsessed with them, but I am skeptical that abandoning friends and family and giving up all of your possessions to voluntarily live like a beggar and a hermit is really the best life that one can live.
With any form of ascetism you give something up because you think that the sacrifice will be worth it. Sometimes it is. Diets can be. You give up a few donuts, pieces of cake, etc., for what you consider to be the greater good of looking better and being healthier. If you want to be really great at something, such as playing a musical instrument, art, or a sport, you must sacrifice quite a bit of your time and make a considerable effort to do it. Sometimes the sacrifice is worth it, but I do not think that it is for religious ascetics. Child sacrifice is part of a surprising number of religions; it was practiced widely in many parts of the world historically. I have often wondered why; it seems like such a strange thing to do. I think that at least part of the reason is that giving up one’s child was thought to be the greatest sacrifice that one can make. Sacrifices to the gods were made frequently; animal sacrifices were quite common all over the world, and sometimes warring groups would sacrifice enemy captives that they had taken, but to really show your devotion to the deity, you had to sacrifice something that you really loved to show that you loved that god the most. Is killing your child for an imaginary deity because you believed the falsehoods of a priest or a prophet who told you that this fake deity required it a good thing?
I realize that these are extreme examples; thankfully most believers will not be caught up in a cult, and religious belief may not entirely ruin their lives, as it has for some people. (Or caused them to harm those around them, such as killing their child to please a fake deity.) But even in more mainstream religions and with more casual observance, one may still give up a lot over the course of a lifetime.
If you spend 20,000 hours volunteering at your church over the course of your lifetime, and it turns out that the claims that it makes are not true, what could you have done with those 20,000 hours that would have been a better use of them? If you are only thinking about yourself, and your own enjoyment, that could be almost anything. But you could also, if you wanted, donate your time and money to a reputable charity and probably do a lot more actual good in this world, if that is what you really want to do.
Even small decisions add up and can affect our overall happiness. I know of an LDS family who would not watch PG-13 movies, and for a while they would not even watch PG rated movies. That might seem like a little thing, but they missed out on a lot of good entertainment that would not really have hurt them. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate birthdays. (Not your own or anyone else’s; not even Jesus’s birthday because they do not celebrate Christmas either.) Would being able to have birthday parties and attend other birthday parties increase one’s happiness? I think it could, especially if there is really no good reason not to celebrate them. It may seem like a minor thing, but I do believe that it would improve a person’s life to do it, and many such decisions add up over the course of one’s life so that it is not as rich and full as it could have been. That is unfortunate if the beliefs that the decisions are based upon are false.
Sometimes it can be more than just a minor inconvenience, as with the Jehovah’s Witness teaching that one should not take blood transfusions, which is based upon what I believe is an obvious misinterpretation of the Biblical text; that could be life-threatening. Other religions that are very focused on faith-healing teach that you should refuse to accept medical care at all, believing that it shows a lack of faith if they have already prayed for the person to be healed.
It is not just time and money, although you could lose substantial amounts of both when you are involved in a religion (how many people have been manipulated and conned by the so-called ‘church’ of Scientology?) you also lose a lot of your autonomy. You allow religious leaders to control you as if they were your God because they claim to speak on behalf of God and to be chosen by God to lead you and others. They have power and influence over you because of a hoax.
I am not saying that all religious leaders are con artists. I know that some of them really do believe what they are telling other people, but even if that is the case they have very little evidence or justification for that belief. They teach what is essentially a fairy tale.
Remember, you are not really giving up an infinite reward or going to hell forever unless what they are telling you is true. I am sure you have heard the saying: ‘If it sounds too good to be true it probably is’; yeah, it probably is.
Many religions and religious leaders do teach some good principles, but those teachings have an air of authority, of infallibleness, that they should not have. We are not able to pick and choose the good things and reject the bad ones because supposedly it all comes from an infallible God rather than a flawed human. The reality is that it comes from an ordinary person, just like you, who probably has some good advice and some good ideas, and some that is not very good. The Bible is not really any different than any other ancient text but think about how differently it is treated from other ancient texts.
Belief in the infallibility of currently living religious leaders is even more dangerous. The infallibility of leaders is a widely discussed topic in many religions. Few claim that their leader is infallible in his personal life and that all of his actions are right because that is too obviously false for it to even be credible, but they often do claim that God would not allow his anointed to lead his church astray, so that effectively means that followers treat their religious leader as being infallible on any issue of real significance. For Roman Catholicism it is not claimed that the Pope has never sinned or made a mistake in his personal life, but when he issues a papal bull or on matters of governance for the church, it is believed that he is led by God and thus cannot make a mistake in such matters.[9]
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are taught that God communicates directly with the ‘prophet’, who is also the President of the Church, and that God will not allow him to lead the church astray. We were told that if the prophet attempted to lead the church in the wrong direction that God would immediately remove him from his position. The obvious implication is that if God has not done so then you are expected to be obedient and accept the President of the Church as a spokesman for God. There is even a primary song called ‘Follow the Prophet’; when you watch and listen to the little kids singing it, it is like you can see them being conditioned to be obedient not just to the prophet but to the church itself in real time.
Being a bit of a troublemaker, I have discussed this doctrine of infallibility with some church members and challenged them on how far they would really go to ‘follow the prophet’. For instance, Mitt Romney is an active member of the church in good standing, and he was close to being elected President of the United States in 2012. Suppose that he had won and was the President, and one day the President of the LDS Church called him up and told him that God had revealed to him that it was God’s will for Mr. Romney to launch all of the United States’ nuclear missiles at China and Russia in a preemptive strike because God had revealed to the prophet that they were preparing to attack the United States, and this attack was imminent. But suppose that Mr. Romney had no other evidence suggesting that this was true. What should he do? Members of the LDS church are 100% committed to saying that he should trust the prophet, because the prophet will never lead you astray, and would not even be allowed to do so by God. So, Mr. Romney should launch the missiles, at least according to church doctrine, and have faith that it was a revelation from God. If the President of the Church told him to declare martial law and have all non-believers executed, he would have to do it, or anything and everything else that he was instructed to do by the prophet, as though it was a directive that came from God directly, as no doubt it would be claimed that it did in fact come from God directly. If that scenario sounds far-fetched to you, reread the Old Testament; that is exactly what King Saul was instructed to do by the prophet Samuel, and supposedly Saul got into trouble with God and was eventually replaced as king because he did not execute those orders well enough. It is not just Mormons who believe that story is absolute truth, billions of people around the world from many different faiths believe it.
Think about how dangerous this belief is! What if there was a really bad person who was President of the LDS church? (Kind of like Joseph Smith for instance.) Or what if he went insane and was delusional? (Kind of like Joseph Smith for instance.) Think about the damage that he could do because he could get church members to do literally anything, no matter how crazy or immoral it seemed, and they would not even question it, let alone refuse. It would be much worse than Charles Manson because it is a far bigger following than Charles Manson had. The prophet could essentially be a mob boss if he was inclined to be, and some religious leaders have been, including former Presidents of the LDS Church such as church founder Joseph Smith, Popes in the Catholic Church who had their own personal army and ruled like kings, and a whole bunch of cult leaders and other religious fanatics. But pretty much all that LDS church members will say in response to these concerns is to dismiss the scenario entirely and insist that the Prophet would never tell you to do anything wrong, God would not allow it. They believe that the President of the LDS church is the most moral person on earth, and they do not believe that it is even possible that he could exploit his position for personal gain or exploit their unquestioning obedience for bad purposes. Church members see it as a matter of faith that you just have to trust that the Prophet is God’s anointed, and trust that he would never try to get you to do anything wrong. But that could potentially be catastrophic for your life and the people around you if you are wrong, and he is a bad person, or even if he is misguided.
All of these examples are meant to show that we may in fact end up giving up a lot to believe in a false religion. (Many more examples could be given.) Even if the amount that you ‘invest’ is small in comparison to the potential payout that you might receive (finite vs infinite), you must remember that what you have is all that you have, and that the potential payout which is promised to you may not even be real. It may not in fact be a ‘potential’ reward, it may just be a fiction, or even a lie. What if the true odds of winning that illusory infinite reward, unbeknownst to you, are actually zero because there is no such thing? There is no way to calculate or to know the actual odds.
At the very least you should not do things that are very costly. You should not be spending 20 hours per week or more giving volunteer service at your church. I know of many people who have done at least that much. I gave up more than two years of my life to be a full-time missionary and paid for it all myself (with help from family members) to have the privilege. There are many within the LDS church who have given that and far more. I knew a guy back in college who inherited a vineyard that must have been worth several million dollars. He donated it all to the church, which is somewhat ironic since the church teaches people not to drink alcoholic beverages. I do not know what they ultimately did with it, but the church is quite wealthy because of members like this, and their tax exempt status.
The casual religious observer, the one who only goes to church on Easter and Christmas and is otherwise entirely inactive is actually doing it the right way for Pascal’s wager. You would not want to commit very much time, effort, or money for an extreme longshot bet that is highly unlikely to work out. Just do the minimum to hedge a little, just in case it does turn out to be true, but you would only want to bet a tiny fraction of your time and resources on that outcome.[10] If all that you have to do is believe in order to be saved and receive your eternal reward then it is not really necessary to spend many hours per week on volunteer work, or give your church really large sums of money, and you definitely do not have to break the law for a religious leader or let him have sex with you, with your wife, or with your daughter because he tells you that God commanded it. Do not commit any murders on behalf of your religious leader, or think that he is infallible. Do not fall for the bullshit lies that are told to you by what could very well be a psychopath[11] who is just trying to manipulate you and control you for his or her own interests. Cults are the most obvious example of this, but it happens to a lesser degree even in more mainstream religions which are not labeled as cults.
You should be a lazy deadbeat when it comes to your church activity, if you even have a church at all, which is not really necessary. If you want to be a casual believer and just read the Bible on occasion, and perhaps pray once in a while when you are facing a big decision, then that probably would not be that harmful for your life. But don’t let anybody con you.
But isn’t this also the reason why Pascal’s wager would not get you very far, in reality, even if God did exist? Do we really think that God would give the same reward to someone like this as to the strong believer who works very hard to ‘build the kingdom’? It seems hard to imagine that a just God would do that; a just person certainly would not. If I had two employees and one of them worked much harder for me than the other, I am not going to reward them equally. That would be unfair. If a religious denomination is correct then the true believer would be best off. Someone doing just a little might be better off than an enemy of the faith, but not by much. To me, it all comes down to whether the religion is true or not; if it is, then you should follow it, if not, then you shouldn’t. It is really that simple.
Another of Pascal’s claims that I would like to discuss is his assertion that a decision about whether to believe in God is forced upon us; he says that there is no alternative but to make a bet one way or the other. I think that in a way that is true, but in another way it is not.
Here is how it is: Suppose that you have been in a romantic relationship with a person for three years and then he or she informs you that unless you are willing to set a date to get married your relationship will end. If the person is willing to follow through on this then a decision is forced upon you; even refusing to make a decision will itself be a decision. Procrastinating will do no good, you must decide whether you want to get married or not or it will be decided for you. In a somewhat similar way, while perhaps I could just throw up my hands, shrug, and say ‘I don’t know’ if someone asked me whether God exists, I must make decisions about how to live that could have a great impact upon my life and potentially even have eternal consequences; I cannot escape making those decisions about what my actions will be even if I do not know whether there is a God. In that way I think that Pascal is correct that we cannot escape deciding whether we will live as a Christian or not.
However, there is also an important difference: While you may use facts to help you decide whether you want to marry someone, ultimately it is a matter of personal preference rather than a factual question. Suppose instead that someone tried to force you to decide whether you believe that there are alien life-forms somewhere in the universe. At the time of writing, we do not know for sure whether there are any alien species or not. If someone tried to force me to decide what I believe about it I could make a guess, but I really do not know. While I suppose the question of how I should live based upon what I believe the answer to that other question is, such as whether I should become a ‘prepper’ and prepare for a potential alien invasion, is somewhat important, the more fundamental question is whether aliens exist or not. I think it would be misguided and rather odd if someone were to claim that the prudent thing for you and me to do, even if we do not know, is to center our entire life upon the belief that aliens do exist because we would be better off if we believe it than if we do not. That is not how I decide whether to believe something; I believe it if I think that it is factually true based upon the evidence; whether believing it would benefit me seems sort of beside the point.
I also do not think that you could really make yourself believe a factual claim if you do not, even if you wanted the reward that comes from believing (or so it is claimed). I suppose you could try to talk yourself into it, and say that you believe it if someone asks you, but that is not the same as actually believing it. If my boss had very strong political views and it was extremely important to him that I also thought the same way on those issues, I could tell him that I did if I did not want to get fired, and/or I wanted a promotion, but even if I thought that it would benefit me by believing as he did, my actual political views would not change. He may be able to force me to change my actions and my outward showing of beliefs, but he cannot change my thoughts, and I do not even think that I could will myself to change what I thought was really true. Even if I acknowledged that it would benefit me if I believed differently than I do, that does not mean that I would really believe it is factually true.
The Bible tells us that the two great commandments are to love God and love your neighbor; Pascal’s wager does not fulfill the first great commandment, it is more love of self than love for God. It is not done out of love, or even duty, it is strictly an appeal to self-interest. I have doubts that God would view that very favorably, even if there is a God. Perhaps it would be better than not being obedient, but if motivation makes a difference in deciding whether an action is ethical or not, and I think that it does, this is not a good motive. Would you really be given that infinite reward that you are expecting even if your bet turned out to be correct?
Furthermore, there is an even more fundamental problem. According to nearly all forms of Christianity, you must believe that Jesus is your Lord and Savior and that he took upon himself your sins in order to be saved. Just saying that you believe it, or even if you are trying to convince yourself of it but cannot do so, would not be enough for salvation according to Christian doctrine. It is your faith in Jesus Christ that saves you, so you must really believe to be saved, since you must believe in order to have faith. You cannot save yourself through good works, or any other way, you must sincerely believe that Jesus is your savior and that you are forgiven of your sins through him, and him only. The problem with Pascal’s wager is that if you do believe that Jesus is your savior then you have no need to make the wager, since you already believe and are set to receive the promised reward, but if you do not believe then making the wager would not help you. That is because you would not be given the eternal reward and saved from damnation unless you really believed. Whether we believe that God is real or not, I think that we could all agree that, unlike my fictional boss, one could not trick God, at least as God has been described to us (as an omniscient being who knows even our thoughts and everything about us); if you did not really believe then God would know it, there is no hope of fooling him; thus you would not receive the reward, only the true believers would. Therefore Pascal’s wager is useless because if you already believe then you have no need of it, and if you are not a believer then making the wager would not help you, as that would not be enough to count as the faith necessary for salvation.
Before we end, I would like to acknowledge that belief in God is not all negative. I have brought up many of the bad things, but there are also some tangible benefits that come from being a believer, even during this life. Having an unshakable belief that there is a perfectly just, kind, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity who knows and loves you more than you can even imagine and believing that everything will work out eventually can give you peace of mind when you are going through some tough times.[12]
I have sometimes wondered why groups like Black American slaves or Jewish people at various points in their difficult tragedy-filled history have been such strong believers in God when it seems as though they could be the most bitter. In some ways their faith does not make sense to me, as it would seem to have been disproved many times that an all-powerful supreme being who cared about them was out there. But I think the reason that they continue to believe is that people need hope. Your faith in a better future can get you through the day and may help you to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep going if things are very hard for you right now.
I wonder if there may even be some evolutionary benefit to religious belief for this reason (and other benefits, such as social cohesion) because even if there is in reality no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the alternative to continuing to look for it for some is just to give up, lay down and die. I am sure that some did that; I probably would have if I had been in that situation, such as being a slave, feeling as though it was hopeless to even keep trying so I might as well just give up; but those who survived (and reproduced) under such difficult circumstances may have been able to do it at least in part because they had something to keep them going. That could make religious belief valuable in some cases, from an evolutionary perspective, even if it is a fiction.
Karl Marx had good reason to call religion ‘the opium of the people’; opiates are often used as painkillers. Life is hard at times for nearly everybody, but it is especially so for some. Having faith and trust that you will see your loved ones again and that all problems will eventually be fixed and everyone will be happy for eternity could help in dealing with the death of someone close to you, or other serious tragedies.
Sometimes it can help, or at least seem to help, even with small day-to-day problems. I think I have some social anxiety, and on more than one occasion while growing up I went off somewhere by myself and prayed for help to relax and feel more comfortable, such as at dances and other social events. Believe it or not, it helped. When I was a freshman in high school I was having a hard time at a dance, finding it very difficult to talk to people and just generally feeling really uncomfortable. I went off by myself and said a little prayer, asking for help to feel more relaxed and comfortable, and because of that I was then able to go back and ask the girl that I had a crush on to dance, and we had a good time. It was a good experience for me.
I do not have faith like that anymore, now that I am no longer a believer, and I admit that sometimes I miss having it. I do not think that you can ever go back though. I have tried to pray a few times after I was no longer a believer because I think that it is almost a form of meditation that can sometimes help you in thinking through your problems and making important decisions, but it does not work for me anymore. I no longer believe that anyone is listening or will be there to help me, so it seems pointless and rather silly to pray. But I do miss feeling like everything will turn out okay. Now I realize that sometimes evil does win, and bad things happen to people who do not deserve them, and bad people frequently get away with what they do without ever having to face consequences for it, and there is nothing that I can really do about that, which is difficult to accept.[13]
I also miss being part of a community of like-minded people. You might have very different backgrounds and interests from others, but if you all have a set of core beliefs and values then you are united on at least some things. It is also nice if you need help with something, such as getting a ride if your car breaks down. Freedom does have a cost. It means that you cannot rely on anybody but yourself. That can be difficult. Sometimes a community is stronger than a lone individual.
But I have decided to pay the price because now that I know what I know, I could not stand to stay silent and still be part of that community when I know it is all based upon a lie. I know what would happen if I tried to say something; the church members would all turn on me, even my own family; they will always choose ‘God’ or really the church over me or over any person, even a spouse or children/parents. That seems crazy to me now, but at a different point in my life, I probably would have done the same, so to some extent, I understand.[14] I know that no one could ever convince them, and if I tried they would just turn on me, so in many ways that sense of belonging and fellowship is already lost. Thus, I have decided to just leave, to go my own way, blaze my own trail. It is difficult, but hopefully it will be worth it.
I cannot say what would be right for others; they may be in different circumstances. But for me, the path lies elsewhere. I will take my chances.
David Johnson
2026
[1] This comes from section 233 of the Pensées (which is an unfinished collection of Pascal’s thoughts on matters related to religion) in part III, called ‘Of the Necessity of the Wager’. The version of the text that I read was this: URL: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees.html Trotter, W.F. (Translator)
Publisher: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Grand Rapids, MI. The quote comes from page 39.
In addition to this, other sources used for this essay are: Porter, Theodore M.. “probability and statistics”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Dec. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/science/probability. Accessed 14 January 2025. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. ‘Pascal’s wager’. Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Dec. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pascals-wager. Accessed 14 January 2025. Hájek, Alan, “Pascal’s Wager”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/pascal-wager/>.
[2] This ratio of 3 to 1 profit to loss is considered by many professional traders (stocks, forex, or commodities) to be a healthy ratio that will likely keep you in business. Inexperienced traders often think that the way to be successful is to have a very high ratio of winners to losers, but unless you are trading on insider information it is quite difficult to have a really high winning percentage. A more likely path to success is to make sure that you make much more on the winning trades than what you lose on the bad ones. This is known as ‘cutting your losses short’ and ‘letting your winners run’. Some successful traders have an even higher profitability ratio than 3 to 1, and because of that, they can still be profitable even if they have a winning percentage of 35% or even less. What Pascal describes here is a good betting strategy, which he probably learned from gambling.
[3] I have modified it some, but this is based upon an example from Ed Seykota, a well-known futures trader.
[4] Joseph Smith was being held in prison when he was killed by an angry mob. The reason that he was in prison was because he had ordered a printing press to be destroyed that was run by former members of his church. These former members were trying to tell the other members of the church that Smith had been marrying other men’s wives while they were still married. Most church members in Nauvoo did not know that Joseph Smith was doing this at the time. There were rumors, but he always lied about it and denied on several occasions that he had ever done any such thing, so most members would not have believed it. However, it all came out after Smith’s death, in part because Brigham Young and other church leaders used the fact that Joseph Smith had done it as a justification for their own polygamy. (Heber C. Kimball was one of them.) Church members finally believed it because Brigham Young said it. It is not even disputed that Smith did all of this anymore. Sometimes the woman’s other husband would know about it and sometimes he would not. I think that Joseph Smith may have sent some of these men out on missions to faraway places just so that he could secretly marry that man’s wife. (He sent Sarah Ann Whitney’s brother Horace out on a mission around the time of his plural marriage to her because he was afraid that Horace would not accept it. By the way, Sarah Whitney was 17 when Joseph married her, and her father, Newel K. Whitney, received a revelation directly from the Lord himself that God approved of it, a revelation that was given through none other than, you guessed it, Joseph Smith. Imagine that.) These so-called ‘marriages’, some of them to single women, some to women who were already married to somebody else, were all in secret, so is it really a marriage or is it a secret affair? He was definitely not just testing the faith of these members, he went through with it and was having sex with a lot of these women, and he did everything that he could to keep it all hidden, even from most people in the church. Does that seem like the actions of an ethical person to you? Would ‘God’s anointed’, an especially good person, really be commanded by God to do these things? Joseph, and those defending polygamy, including Helen Mar Kimball, later in her life, claimed that he would have been doomed to suffer eternal punishment if he did not teach and obey these commandments regarding plural marriage which came directly from God. Poor guy. He must have suffered so much. What a burden. But I guess if your first wife is now in her late thirties and borne several children, and you have been married to her for almost 20 years, and then God commands you to have sex with dozens of attractive young women half your age, well I guess you just have to do it whether you want to or not. It must have been one of the most difficult things that God ever required him to do. God demands so much from his faithful servants at times.
[5] Also, does that even make sense doctrinally? In other contexts, Smith and the church claim that each one of us is judged for our own actions, not the actions of another. The Articles of Faith, which Smith wrote right around this same time period, states in the second Article: ‘We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.’ So, even if she did commit some horrible sin by rejecting him, why would the rest of her family be condemned for that if they were obedient themselves? Similarly, what if one of them committed all sorts of terrible sins? He or she would still be given eternal salvation anyway just because Helen chose to marry Joseph Smith? It makes no sense to claim that their salvation would be determined by her actions. Rather than seeing this as a deep doctrinal mystery that one will only be able to find out the answer to after death, which is usually what they tell you in Sunday school when you ask tough questions that they cannot give you a good answer for, we should just realize that liars sometimes have a hard time keeping their story straight and end up contradicting themselves.
[6] Similarly, can you imagine people voting for a convicted felon as their local mayor? It seems unlikely that any politician could survive something like that, but for whatever reason Trump seems to be able to withstand anything. Scandals simply do not affect him. It does not matter what he does, his political support is unshakable. I don’t really understand it. He should not even be eligible to vote, let alone serve as President of the United States.
[7] While Joseph Smith’s ethical behavior was horrible, that was not what convinced me that the church could not possibly be true. I was teaching a class in World Religions and although I tried to present them in a mostly positive way in class, I found myself being skeptical of all of them. One of the things that I noticed from teaching the class is that many students thought that the religion that they grew up in was perfectly reasonable but other religious beliefs seemed crazy to them. We were only able to talk about each religion for a few weeks at most, so there was nowhere near total immersion in it like there is when you grow up in a religion. This caused me to question my own religious beliefs. I started to wonder if one could actually prove it one way or the other. I assumed not, since we usually feel that religious beliefs cannot be definitively proven or falsified. However, LDS church leaders have actually made a number of claims that have been proven to be false. I thought about some of the issues that one sometimes hears about and decided to investigate them more. I was surprised, once I really started to research it, that it seemed to me so one-sided, that almost all of the evidence clearly showed that the church was not true.
It was the issue of no DNA evidence supporting the claim that the American Indian tribes had ancestry from the Middle East (supposedly Lehi and his family were Jews from Jerusalem) and the strange business concerning the Book of Abraham that really convinced me. Joseph Smith tried to translate some ancient Egyptian papyrus, claiming that it was written by Abraham himself, but it was actually a funeral text for an unknown person who lived much later than Abraham. Museums have several copies of similar texts. His attempted direct translations of the Egyptian characters given in the ‘Pearl of Great Price’ (the ‘explanations’ given for facsimile 1, 2, and 3) are completely inaccurate, it is obvious; so how could he really be a seer who could translate ancient documents by the power of God? It seemed to me that God would not have allowed him to make such a mistake if it were all really true, because that discredits him as a prophet and seer. After I became convinced that Joseph Smith could not really be a prophet and seer, it caused me to wonder about the personal character of someone who would tell such lies, and I finally started to see and understand Joseph Smith’s character with more clarity. I felt that reading the 7 volumes called The History of the Church, with much of the early volumes actually written by Smith himself, gave me a much different view of him. These were his own words, not enemies of the church, and to me he seemed petty, narcissistic, and controlling. He seemed much different in his own writing than how he is portrayed in film, artwork, and the stories produced by the church, I can tell you that. I now had a much different view of him than I had when I was only exposed to the church’s carefully edited sanitized version of what supposedly happened in church history.
[8] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylite Accessed July 12, 2025.
[9] Another example that might come to mind is that in some (but not all) sects of Islam, Muhammad is considered to have been infallible along with other Imams and spiritual leaders, such as Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah. However, because all of them lived a very long time ago, I think of this as being similar to thinking of the Bible or the Qur’an as being infallible. To me that is a little bit different than the Catholic view, or the LDS view, where current leaders are considered to have equal standing in terms of authority with Biblical figures.
[10] Personally, I would not bet even one dollar on winning the lottery because it seems like a losing strategy to me. But I suppose one could argue that spending only a dollar to potentially win a billion dollars would be worth it, particularly if you get some entertainment value out of it as well. I suppose just about anyone could afford to lose a dollar without it seriously affecting their life. If it is 1/10000th or 1/100000th, or 1/1000000th of your net worth, then maybe it would not be a terrible bet. At least it would not seriously harm you if you were wrong. If we apply this thinking to Pascal’s wager, it indicates that the potential sacrifice for the bet must be small if the odds of success are small.
[11] We often think of a ‘psychopath’ as a murderer, but it is actually far more common than one might think. Scientists estimate that about one out of a hundred people is a psychopath. The difference is that they do not feel empathy, or as much empathy as others, so they have no problem manipulating and using other people for their own purposes. They feel no guilt or remorse in doing so, even if it very seriously harms those people. Psychopaths are drawn to positions of power, and unfortunately they often get them. They love politics and religion because that gives them great power over other people, and they have no problem lying. Most cult leaders are psychopaths or sociopaths. Traveling salesmen (such as the proverbial conman Bible salesman) often are as well, because many salespeople are good at manipulating people and have no problem lying.
[12] It may give you some benefits that are similar to Stoicism. Perhaps there is a certain amount of peace that comes with simply accepting things as they are, even if they are not as we want them to be. Those who see everything that happens as being part of God’s plan for them may be able to accept things better when life is hard. After all, the belief is that eventually you will have everything that you want, and your current sufferings are only temporary. No wonder it is a popular belief. However, it is not consistent for believers to give God credit and the ‘glory’ when things go right, such as after they win a football game, but they never blame God when things are bad. I know that they feel grateful and happy in that moment of victory, but if God really helped them to win the game it means that he must have also prevented the other team from winning and caused them to lose other games where they came up short. If you feel grateful that God kept you from dying in a horrible traffic accident then wouldn’t you also have to blame God for allowing that traffic accident to happen in the first place, and also acknowledge that God apparently chose not to help other people who have suffered and died in traffic accidents?
[13] However, it does not do any good to lie to ourselves or to other people, and it especially does not help to be manipulated by con men who want to take advantage of you. The truth can be difficult to accept, but deception and false hope are usually worse in the long run.
[14] The biggest problem with religion, in my opinion, is that it is often made the highest priority in the believer’s life, and many religions teach their followers that it should be. You are expected to sacrifice everything for ‘God’, even your family and closest friends, if necessary. In the LDS church you promise to sacrifice everything that you have and are to the church, if asked. That was surprising to me when I first heard it, but they specifically say that you must sacrifice everything to the church. Religious teachers claim that this is putting God first in our lives, but if there is no God and we are putting a church that is not really true above all other priorities in life and deprive ourselves needlessly of good things then we will not be as happy as we could have been if we had lived unfettered by false beliefs.