“3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
[Wikipedia] “Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God. The reasoning for this stance involves the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.”
Presented thus, the question is one of benefits and losses
to the individual, a profit-and-loss account, if you will, seen through the
lens of what might today be called ‘game theory’.
The calculation, however, assumes that the individual is
essential a computer programme, whose purpose is to maximum gain (the
experience of pleasure; the avoidance of pain). This is remote from reality. At
the bestial level, this might be valid, but human beings are more than beasts.
What people appear more fervently to seek is value and meaning.
Step Three essentially offers a stick-and-twist deal: stick
with what you’ve got, or twist (i.e. exchange your existing hand for a new
one).
What’s the existing hand?
The existing hand is the hand of materialism. Under
materialism, there is no metaphysical realm, except in the illusory imaginings
of beings that have developed self-awareness; there is nothing beyond the
physical; there is no absolute morality beyond the morality of what is
effective, expeditious, or ‘fair’ in the marketplace of human transactions, in
other words morality is a conventional system; there is no underlying,
originating imperative; there is no ultimate accountability; there is no real
good or bad; if one believes in such things, under the materialist viewpoint,
one is actually quite wrong, because the only reality is the atoms, and the
atoms are blind to morality; any
rightness, wrongness, goodness, love is merely a socially convenient construct.
Materialist philosophers tell us that there is no such thing as human will;
we’re subject only to physical processes; materialist doctors tell us that if
we’re depressed or anxious it’s because something has gone spontaneously wrong
with our bodies (specifically the brain bit), and we must alter the body to
treat the mind and alter our experience. Life is simply about avoiding pain and
maximising pleasure, because that’s all we’re programmed to do, and none of it
has any meaning. After all, time’s arrow points in one direction; the universe
is burning out, and the planet will burn out long before that, if we don’t
destroy it or life on it, which we might well be capable of doing and apt to
do.
If we twist, what do we get? A relationship with the
Creator; access to the metaphysical realm; and a mode of living in this world
that has real, ultimate value; we have a morality that derives from a
transcendent and all-encompassing metaphysical realm of which this material
world is simply a fleeting artefact; we have a purpose given to us by God; we
have a mission; there is the possibility of meaning, value, right and wrong,
love, achievement in some real sense.
Is there is a risk if we twist? Well, we might not optimally
maximise pleasure and avoid pain; we might not ‘make it’ in the conventional
sense of the society we happen to have been born into and programmed by; we
might not have the adulation of others or—more importantly—ourselves, because
we do not pass the tests of the material world. All of that would be fine as
sacrifice for an infinitely higher and actually eternal purpose. But worse than
that we might be wrong; there might be no metaphysical realm at all. We might
be sold a bill of goods and compromise our material experience to that end.
But here’s the precise point: to ‘fail’ in the material
realm is not failure, because the material realm is just atoms. The concept of
success or failure is a metaphysical concept, because it requires measurement
of performance against values, and there are no values in the material realm.
Material ‘success’ borrows a concept from a metaphysical world whose existence
it denies then bends it to material parameters. In other words, if we twist and
back the God horse but are quite wrong, and all there is is the material, we
are no further back than the people who have ‘made a go it’ materially, because
one arrangements of atoms is not inherently more valuable than another. We have
not failed, and they have not succeeded, because neither success or failure can
exist in the material realm. Even if we experience more pain or less pleasure,
that experience is precisely as meaningless as the more pleasurable and less
painful experience of another; after all, in the materialist viewpoint, pain
and pleasure are simply a function of the operations of atoms and are just as
meaningless. In other words, we really lose nothing through twisting in the
place of sticking.
However, if we back the material horse and are quite wrong,
we have utterly failed. It is not that we have failed the examination: that can
be honourable if we have sincerely tried; but we have denied the existence of
the examination hall, the Examiner, and the examination. We have not even been
in the running, and the whole shooting match really has been for nought. This
is before one even examines the question of eternity: one’s life has been quite
without value, and, in beings built for value (which we must surely be under
the metaphysical viewpoint), we have actually failed in our own terms even if
we have ‘succeeded’ materially. And we will learn of this in due course after
death.
We are therefore left with the same result as Pascal’s
wager: even if one didn’t have to take Step Three for the purpose of mere
material survival, one ought to take it. It’s the only hope for valuable life.