Where are you, God? I miss you
On Lucien Goldmann, Pascalean wagers, and managing to live
1
If I wanted to convince you to believe in God, I could proceed in one of the following two ways:
Provide a proof of the necessity of God’s existence. If we know that he exists, we by definition believe in him.
Provide an argument for why we should believe in God even in the absence of certainty of his existence.
Anselm, Aquinas or Descartes all fall into the first category – grounding belief in knowledge. Pascal’s wager belongs to the second category. It tries to convince you to believe in God.
How does he do it? I think most of us have heard of Pascal’s wager at some point or another, and it is usually presented as something like this. I will call this the ‘decision matrix interpretation’ because it essentially presents the wager as a decision theoretical problem of ‘maximising expected utility’.
One of the following is true: either God exists, or he does not.
There are two possible actions to take: one can either believe that God exists, or not.
If God exists, he will, after one’s death, reward those that chose to believe in him, and punish those that chose not to.
If God does not exist, whether one believes in him has no bearing on one’s afterlife.
If God exists, then, believing in him is infinitely better than not believing. On the other hand, if he does not exist, it does not matter either way.
Therefore, to ‘maximise one’s expected utility’ in the afterlife, one is ought to believe in God.
There are many obvious problems with this form of the argument. The most popular ones are the following. First, while premise 1 (that God either exists or not) is technically true, it is true with regards to any number of deities or entities. It is true at the same time for an Old Testament God and a New Testament God, for the Allah of Islam, for Ahuramazda and Ahriman of Zoroastrianism. There is no good justification for why I should wager for this or that particular God.
Second, what does it mean to ‘choose to believe’? Can one really just decide, in any meaningful sense, to believe in God? Don’t beliefs just ‘happen’ to us, appearing as a necessary result of logical thought, or of experience, or of some other deep impression? Certainly many saints and God-believers over history, like the aforementioned Anselm, Aquinas etc found that they had to ground belief in knowledge, grounded in logic and intuition, not just in a voluntary gesture. Furthermore, if one can decide to believe and get rewarded with heavenly afterlife, then what does that imply about the nature of this religion, and of this God? A God that requires no more than this inferior form of belief from his adherents certainly does not appear very wise or all-loving—more like narcissistic and egomaniac. Not very inspiring.
The third and fourth counterarguments are more conjectural in nature. Third: such a logic of wagering on infinitesimal possibilities but infinite rewards can be extended to a variety of ridiculous situations, which have come to be known as ‘Pascal mugging’. Consider the following thought experiment. You walk on the street and a stranger approaches you. She says:
„Hi. I am a time traveller. At some point in the future, I have a gigantic torture machine set up; ready to torture billions of billions of humans for a billion years. I am now going to go back and turn on the machine... unless... you give me 1 penny. If you do give me 1 penny, I will make sure that your grandchildren are going to be incredibly rich.”
Do you think giving a pence to the stranger is more or less reasonable than believing in God as per Pascal’s wager? Why? The logic is exactly the same: the rewards are huge, the punishment is huge, the probabilities are infinitesimal... but the costs are tiny. Would you give one pence? Would you perhaps give 10? Would you give a pound? Or £10? Or £20? Or, if you think that this is just ridiculous, then you should think the same of Pascal’s wager.
The fourth objection is ideological, and is kind of tied to the first one. Pascal’s wager is a product of its time, it is a convenient cop-out from facing up to the cold harsh reality of an infinite and uncaring universe. Pascal himself wrote that ‘the silence of infinite spaces scare me.’ Well, he was so scared that he came up with ridiculous arguments to justify the dominant social beliefs of his time. That’s all there is to it.
I think the decision matrix interpretation is wrong, and that we caa offer a reconstruction of the wager that is both more historically faithful and immune to most of these counterarguments. Nevertheless, these objections do all carry value and we shall be coming back to each of them.
2
Why do I say that this interpretation is wrong? In a way, ‘wrong’ is a bit of a loaded word to describe my attitude towards it. My problem is mainly that it ‘short-circuits’ something that could be a fruitful path towards discovering something interesting. It reconstructs a historical argument in an ahistorical, abstract fashion, so that it becomes extremely weak. It then attacks this extremely weak and decontextualised version of the argument, and successfully defeat it. Well – I mean, if that’s your thing, well done. But the question that I am interested in is more the following: why did this argument made sense to Pascal and why does it not make sense to us?
If we are to go down on this path, we cannot just stay in the world in premises and conclusions, we have to get our hands dirty, so to say. I want to see how this argument came out of the world that produced it. What were others arguing about? What was society like? Who were the people doing the talking? I guess the hermeneutic principle here is the following: people were not stupider than you and I, back then. And yet it appears that they believed in things that to us seem stupid. Isn’t that insane? Why?
Answering this question with this attitude actually takes an entire book, it turns out. This book, lucky to us, has been written by Romanian-French philosopher Lucien Goldmann. It is called The Hidden God (THG, 1955) and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. The expansiveness of the subject does mean, however, that this talk is going to provide a basic exposition only. Goldmann’s method is basically in alignment with the problem I laid out above: finding the elements of an era, both ideological and material, that contributed to the meaning and creation of a given piece of literature. In THG, Goldmann analyses the Pensées of Pascal (the fragmentary work that contains the passages on the wager) and the dramas of Racine (a French playwright and contemporary of Pascal). He calls this method ’dialectical’ as opposed to a ’positivist’ alternative which he eschews. Keep note of this parallel because it will return later on.
Besides his wager, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is best known as a scientist and mathematician. In mathematics he contributed the Pascal triangle (an arrangement of rows of numbers such that each number is the sum of the two above it) and did work on probability. In physics, he worked on understanding pressure, inventing the hydraulic press and the syringe in the process. He also designed an early mechanical calculator and a roulette machine. Later in life, he founded a horse-drawn tramcar business to serve the poor of Paris with cheap transportation.
A pioneering STEM-lord, tech bro and start-up founder of his time, Pascal also took a keen interest in God. He was educated at Port-Royal, a Cistercian abbey in Paris, and stronghold of the Catholic theological movement known as Jansenism. To immediately offer a rebuttal of Objection 4 above: being a Jansenist was not exactly ‘going with the flow’ of the beliefs of the time. Jansenists were persecuted as heretics and Port-Royal eventually demolished by Louis XIV. The dominant doctrine of Catholic theology at the time was dictated by the Jesuits, who saw themselves as intellectual successors of Aquinas. They believed in the capacity of rational argument to reach God, and on the power of man to choose moral actions and stay on the path to salvation on the basis of his free will.
This latter point had important political implications in an age which saw the Catholic Church struggling to reform itself in the face of a more populist Protestantism. And specifically a Calvinism that taught the doctrine of predestination—roughly, that the omnipotence and omniscience of God must mean that it is actually decided from the moment of birth whether a given soul will go to hell or to heaven.
The Jansenists opposed the Jesuits on exactly this point. Grounding themselves in Augustine (of Confessions and City of God fame), they also endorsed a theology of quasi-predestination, which they called the principle of sufficient grace. The logic was roughly as follows. Getting the grace of God is clearly (by definition) necessary for salvation. The Jesuits thought that on top of this grace, one also needs to be a good human, according to some moral code. But the Jansenists (with Augustine) scoffed at the idea. Let’s be real: if an all-powerful, all-knowing being decides to give you his grace, for whatever reason, it does not matter whether you were a good boy or not.
This doctrine was quite logical – but also somewhat depressing. If grace alone is sufficient for salvation, and grace is given freely (but from our perspective, arbitrarily) by God to whomever he pleases, then what’s the point of striving to be good at all? Are there any human, worldly values left at that point? The answer was unclear, but question was good, and various Jansenists came up with a great number of replies, ranging from complete isolation from the world and a monastic lifestyle, to an eventual reconciliation of Earthly existence as in the case of Pascal and Racine (the playwright). Goldmann also makes a case about how this system of beliefs found its main patrons in the declining court nobility of the time, but we will omit this line of thought here.
The feeling that God’s will is unknowable and withdrawn were complemented by contemporary discoveries of natural science and mathematics—which of course Pascal knew and practiced himself. Pascal’s forays into geometry and the study of infinite spaces in the one hand, and into physics and the apparently clockwork nature of observable reality on the other only dealt further blows to the idea of the Jesuit God. God was not to be found in the infinities of numbers, neither in the structure of nature. If he was there, he must have been there behind the walls of perceptible reality, somewhere perpetually hidden.
Pascal openly came out against another notable contemporary philosopher, scientist and mathematician, René Descartes himself. Their disagreement paralleled the positive-dialectical distinction I mentioned earlier. Descartes thought he had reached certainty in the existence of God through a clear line of argumentation. Descartes thought, therefore he was. In his mind he found some clear and distinct concepts. Such a clear and distinct concept was perfection. There is no perfection in observable reality, neither in the human mind; the source of this concept could only be something perfect. Hence, God exists.
Pascal wasn’t convinced—but not for the same reasons we might find Descartes’s argument unconvincing. For Pascal, knowing, abstractly, the existence of God would not suffice; what concerned him was the question of practice in a world with such a god. He wanted certainty not about God, but about what to do in this deeply limited and imprefect human life, surrounded on each side by incomprehensible infinities. For Pascal, the problem was precisely this transience of the world, this dual nature of humanity.
Humans are not animals – they are capable of thinking, as Descartes noticed. This thinking quality, our conceptual and linguistic faculty separates us radically from animal life. At the same time, humans can never rid themselves of their animality – they are always infinitely distant from God, and from angelic purity. The only thing that can save them is God’s grace, and, if we take the notion of an all-powerful God to its rational conclusion, as the Jansenists did, we are left with the conclusion that there is no reliable course of action to guarantee that we will receive this grace.
How to live as such a creature in such a world? It is here that the wager comes into play. As Goldmann says, Pascal’s solution was to reject saying either Yes or No to the world. Instead, he found a way to say Yes and No. We should say No, because we should never seek to justify this world as perfect (as the Leibnizian „best of all possible worlds”)—the recognition of its ultimate inadequacy is exactly what puts in touch with our ‘angelic’ side. But we should also say Yes! As Pascal writes, the world is always insufficient for the full flourishing of our powers; but it is sufficient for trying them out. It’s a playground, a torturous and contradictory journey where we constantly have to fight out the dialectics of our animality and divinity.
Jesuits and Descartes said ‘Yes only’, by denying this fundamental and irresolvable conflict, and manufacturing certainty through theological dishonesty. Mystics of the Jansenist movement said ‘No only’, such as the Arnaulds and in certain periods of her life Pascal’s own sister, Jacqueline. They thought that since the world was inadequate to host the angelic side of human nature, the only logical behaviour is to turn to God, wait out the end of our time here, and hope for salvation. Pascal rejects both. There is a way to say Yes and No, to be perpetually dissatisfied with the world and yet continue to live in it.
The secret ingredient is, of course, gambling. What are we gambling on? The wager is really about the existence of the angelic side of human nature; a side that can never be fully realised in this world, but for which we must hope in order to have grounding in this world. We must wager that God will give us his grace, and our angelic nature will come to full realisation in the afterlife. However, in the meantime, we can savour and try out the imperfect manifestations of the powers we have, on this deeply inadequate world, the nature of which we needn’t deny.
After all this, hopefully, we can see that Objection 1 starts to lose its traction. Of course, it is not the exact deity that matters; it is the duality of man and the possibility of championing an aspect of ourselves that we know can never be realised in this world. What about Objection 2, the one about ’willing ourselves into belief?’ This argument also becomes a bit weaker, and by the way, Pascal addresses it clearly in the Pensées. On the one hand, Jansenist theology implies that God doesn’t care whether you believe in him. This is not about God – it is about you, whether you can find a way to act and be in the world. ‘Choosing to believe’ means deciding to act in the world as if you had the certainty that your angelic side will eventually win out, and you will receive God’s grace.
I already mentioned that Objection 4 loses its force when we recognise that Pascal was not trying to justify a dominant ideology, but rather trying to reconcile intellectual honesty with the despairing implications of this honesty for his own life. And as we have seen, the Jansenists for a while were persecuted and punished for their beliefs – not exactly the servants of the ruling system. But what about Objection 3 and Pascal mugging? Is there an analogy in this new reading of the wager, which we might call, the ‘contextualist interpretation’?
3
For this purpose, let us look at parallels between Pascal’s worldview and later philosophies. The guiding motif here should be the denial of false certainties and false reconciliations. The Jesuits denied the inherent contradiction of the human condition by the doctrine of insufficient grace. Radical Jansenists shied away from the contradiction as well, by finding the other ‘stable-state solution’: intellectual honesty at the price of turning away from the world.
This philosophical motif: the conflict between claims to ultimate, static explanations and ones that embrace the fundamentally contradictory nature of things recurs later on in the development of German Idealism. Goldmann spends lengthy chapters on discussing Pascal’s anticipation of Kant, but I’d like to mention the parallel to another German philosopher: Hegel. Hegel also rejected the notion of static, complete systems of thought; rather, he saw the process of philosophy as a dynamic process (depending on your interpretation, this might refer to a literal God-like spiritual entity coming to self-consciousness, or the process of the working-out of human conceptual thought in interaction with the world and with itself).
It requires a similar step going from Kant to Hegel as going from Descartes to Pascal: Kant saw the human mind as isolated from the world, only interacting with it through the senses. Hegel saw the mind as the result of the process of the world, and therefore having an organic connection to it. It is another instance of saying Yes and No – the mind is always out of step with the world, but always made of the world.
Finally, Goldmann also sees deep parallels between Pascal’s wager and the political philosophy of Karl Marx (a follower of Hegel’s). In Pascal, we see a conflict between an animal and angelic side of man, and a wager on the full realisation of this angelic side in the realm of God. In Marx, we see a humanity with immense potential for developing its powers, and yet stuck in a state of constant strife amidst scarce natural resources on the one hand, and social systems that systematically thwart individuals’ capacities to develop their powers on the other hand.
However, there is a crucial difference: Marx is, of course, an atheist. What is the wager being placed on? Accoring to Goldmann, the wager is now on History itself. The parallel holds – the potential is there in humans, except it remains unrealised in this world. The difference is that the realisation is posited not in an afterlife, granted arbitrarily by divine grace, but in the future of this world, which can be brought about by appropriate human action.
In our time, this human future is hidden in a similar way as God was in Pascal’s time. We can see traces of it – we have the technology and the productive power (measured in absolute value) to eliminate economic scarcity. And yet, we are locked in systems where a world fully realising human greatness nevertheless seems unattainable. Perverse incentives, grotesque self-moving machineries of capital and state, and the darker side of human nature all seem to perpetually stand in the way. In a time of climate breakdown, nuclear threat, mass extinction, inequality, surveillance capitalism etc, we basically became Jansenists with regards to this God that is human History.
The possible answer options are also parallel to Jansenists. As far as I see around me, there certainly are the ‘Jesuits’ of this world who suggest that things are basically on the right course, and it is through intellectual discipline and correct human moral practice and volition that the promised world will be realised. There are the ‘mystics’, retreating into theory and cynical resignation, hoping for the best. Adorno famously summed up this position by saying that “there is no right life in the wrong world.” But might there be a third way? A way of the wager? Of living the right life in the wrong world? Saying Yes and No?
Here we arrive at Objection 3, which proves to be the toughest to defeat. It is the case that under the contextualist interpretation of the wager, Pascal mugging is still possible, and it is mugging of catastrophic proportions. You can get all sorts of people to wager on all sorts of human futures, requiring all sorts of catastrophic actions. In a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, might we say that Stalin Pascal-mugged the people of the Soviet Union? Or that post-socialist Eastern Europe was Pascal-mugged into shock therapy? There is indeed no shortage of things to wager on, and also, one of our original problems come back to haunt us – in many of the gambles we might make, the probability of success is very low indeed.
And yet – can we ever not gamble? As I am writing this, I certainly could find a great many things that I am wagering on. I find myself wagering, amongst other things, on the possibility of genuine, lasting love. I find myself wagering on the beauty of art, of the power of some shared humanity. And yes, I also tend to wager on the hope of a better human future. I wager that there will be no nuclear war in the near future. I wager that we will survive climate breakdown. I wager that there is a good and beautiful life that can be lived in the world that was given to me. I kind of have to wager, otherwise… why live? Why act?
Across centuries, the point about the duality of human nature still stands: there is something animal, and there is something divine about us. The world remains broken, in the sense that we certainly cannot live up to our full potential, for reasons that are often arbitrary and irrational. And yet we keep on living, and we keep on living even when we are not driven by immediate hedonistic (that is, animal) principles. And if we are to be intellectually honest, there are some sufficient and necessary assumptions that are far from certain.
We are all gambling – the question is merely what we should gamble on?
As Goldmann writes in another book, Lukács and Heidegger:
„It follows that despite the most penetrating and honest efforts to increase to the maximum the adequation of knowledge to its object and to the efficacy of action, neither could ever give man either absolute certitude or certain efficacity. That is why all positive reflection on the relationship between man and Being, or even more simply, between man and History, necessarily ends up in such ontologically fundamental concepts as: the effort to humanize reality – the necessity of incarnation, the hope of succeeding in this effort, the risk of failure, and – the synthesis of the three – the gambling element which is found at the centre of all thought which is truly and rigorously dialectical.”