Taking Pascal’s Wager

We live in a time of atheist triumphalism. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are best-sellers. They are on a roll, witty, ebullient, confident—far more so than those Christians who take them on.

Consider that debate not so long ago in London, in the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster. The subject was: “Are We Better Off Without Religion?” A couple of thousand Londoners turned up on a cold night to listen and vote.

On the anti-religious side was Richard Dawkins. “Christians are idiots!” he proclaimed. Then Professor A.C. Grayling pronounced: “Religion never did anybody any good! Ever!” Finally along came Christopher Hitchens: “I hate Mother Teresa! The old fraud.”

On the pro-religion side there was an art historian, Nigel Spivey. He wanted everybody to know that he was not at all religious himself, but his studies had satisfied him, he said, that in days gone by great art was tied up with religion. Rabbi Julia Neuberger, from the most liberal wing of Judaism, also made it clear that she had just about given up on religion, although she is still a rabbi.

The best of the pro-religion team was the philosopher Roger Scruton, who supported religion without compromise. But he too seemed preoccupied with getting off his chest his idea that Plato had got something or other wrong in one of his dialogues somewhere or other.

When it came to a vote the audience was decisively on the side of the atheists. I doubt whether the debate changed anyone’s mind. Most arguments about atheism and Christianity are dialogues of the deaf and this was no exception.

Yet surely it is possible to make some progress occasionally—and not always by argument. Simple experience and reflection must count for something.

I do not want to bore you with autobiography. To cut the story short, my Mum was a Christian. She believed in the church—for marriage, baptism, confirmation, Sunday school and so on. Dad was an atheist, hedonist and a bit of a bohemian.

In my youth I thought Dad had the better of the argument. But in time I came to believe that my mother was right after all. So what changed my mind? Of the many people you meet in life who have some sort of influence on you, one or two often stand out. Let me mention two who helped shape my view of things. (“Thinking” would scarcely be the right word.)

One was my philosophy teacher at Sydney University, John Anderson. His freethought seemed to me at the time to be a more advanced version of the atheism and hedonism that my father and his bohemian friends espoused. I too espoused it. His influence was in many respects good. He initiated his students into Greek philosophy and classicism. He inoculated us against Stalinism, Soviet fellow-travelling and the New Left.

But—this is the dreadful down-side—he also taught a desolate ethics. Scientific and philosophic enquiry and artistic creativity were the principal goods. But the ethical issues the wide world is interested in—let us say, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount or their “empirical equivalents”—express uncritical conformism and unscientific thought. There is no objectivity in our ideas of “right” and “wrong”, in ought and ought not. They are mere recommendations.

The result of Anderson’s teaching was a moral paralysis that condoned evil. The best study of his influence in this respect is Jim Franklin’s book Corrupting the Youth.

In my disenchantment with this false prophet of my youth, I found myself returning to a poet whose work I had happened on some fifty years back at the time of his conversion to Christianity. I mean James McAuley. (He was an old student of Anderson.) In several long autobiographical poems (“Letter to John Dryden”; “Celebration of Divine Love”; “A Leaf of Sage”) and some shorter lyrics, he sketches his wandering life from a homeless freethinking youth (much as I had experienced it) through a desperate search for a creed to live by, until

      … ill at ease, his steps are led apart

Where the despised and hated remnant clings

To the old way with undivided will:

Out of the bowed darkness a voice sings,

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem …”

He listens; and his heart stands still.

His poetry helped me—not so much by its argument as by the vividness with which he depicted the sterility of his years without God and his recovery of faith. I began to glimpse a way out of the wilderness.

But there are gaps in this little testament. One is that it does not satisfy the mandates of reason. To move from doctrinal atheism to belief in God calls for some argument—the ontological argument, the argument from design … Yet it is difficult to escape from an ingrained materialism. The vomit always returns to the dog, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it. You may argue till the cows come home without resolution or settling doubts.

Another gap in the story is that it is not peculiarly Christian in any doctrinal sense. It is not uniquely Christian to experience the emptiness of materialism and the moral chaos of relativism. Islam, Judaism and other faiths teach as much. But if you are a Christian, there must be acceptance of the creeds—the Apostles’ creed, the Nicene creed, the Athanasian creed.

This is certainly where I have stumbled. I do not comprehend many of the Christian doctrines—the Trinity, for example, the “three-personed God”. I cannot usefully discuss the great issues of transubstantiation or consubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, the Bodily Assumption. I used to hope for a sudden illumination, a bolt of lightning, but it did not happen to me.

At this point Pascal’s Pensees fell into my hands. The great mathematician and scientist knew the lure of scepticism. The very idea of God, he said, of the uncreated Creator, of the immortal soul, is incomprehensible. So is the denial of God, of the Creator, of the soul. But the heart has its reasons, he said, that Reason knows not of.

The breakthrough is Pascal’s Wager, the leap of faith. Bless yourself, Pascal said, with holy water. Have Masses said. Commit yourself. Make the Wager, and by a simple and natural process, this will make you believe and quieten your proud and critical intellect. Cela vous fera croire, et vous abetira. It will make you believe and stupefy you. (Pascal does not make it easy.)

Is there any other way out of the maze of unbelief? I do not think there is. Pascal does not convince everyone. The unbeliever is no weakling. The atheist, the sceptic, the stoic often shows strength of mind—but only to a certain degree.

McAuley put it well:

And when the heart is once disposed to see,

Then reason can unlock faith’s treasury.

To rapt astonishment is then displayed

A cosmic map Mercator never made.

This is the text of an after-dinner speech to students at Campion College, Sydney.