Poetry, Pascal's Wager and Why I Am a Christian

There comes a time in the life of many a man when he will attempt to write poetry. For some, this is the result of an at-worst harmless infatuation (for instance, for a girl), and while the poetry may, perhaps, be rather bad, no one is likely to care overly much. It may chance, however, that the man writes from a movement of the soul that inclines him to take himself seriously as a poet. If the poet is good, we get our Edgar Allen Poes and our James Joyces. If the poet is bad, however, it is up to the rest of humanity to pray that he either realize this to be the case, or else not unleash himself on the public. No matter how much I may enjoy an entertaining evening of reading the poetry of William McGonagall, that sort of thing becomes tiresome rather quickly.

Happily, I realized that I am a dismal poet. (I offer my gratitude to the one or two of you who may have read one of the one or two poems I penned, and read it for the thought behind it rather than my execution.) It occurred to me, however, that I am both more skilled and more trained as an essayist, and that there might chance to be a few who would be interested in reading what I have to say. (And when I say "essayist"...yes, this post is very long. You've been forewarned.) That brings us to this blog, and this inaugural post. My thought is to occasionally (once a month-ish?) take time to share my thoughts on some topic of more or less general interest. I do not intend to put any great amount of research into these posts, but I do hope that by sharing my thoughts and feelings openly, I might at best benefit or interest some number of people, and at worst make my mother proud.

To give only the briefest necessary background on me, I am currently a graduate student in Chemistry at U. Wisconsin -- Madison. I received bachelor's degrees in Chemistry and Philosophy (two areas of study so well-connected that I had to invent the framework for the interdisciplinary double major myeslf) from Wheaton College in 2009. I am also a Christian (currently attending an Anglican church), and a number of my thoughts are likely to draw heavily from this aspect of my life. This first post (as the astute among you will have already observed from the title, and probably by now begun to sigh at my long-windedness in addressing) is no exception.

So, without further ado, Pascal's Wager. I start with this topic because it is actually one of deep personal concern to me. For those not familiar, Pascal's Wager (in my paraphrased form) runs thus: Let's imagine that I am inclined to believe that Christianity is not true, and that instead some form of materialism is true in which I die, and that's the end of me. (The same, naturally, holds for everyone else.) If, however, I afford Christianity any chance of being true, then by believing in Christianity, I give myself a chance (however small) at eternal life in heaven and in perpetual fellowship with God and with other believers. That degree of good trumps to an essentially infinite degree any joy that I may derive in my life from work, friends, or my Magic: the Gathering hobby. Thus, if I afford Christianity even the slightest chance of being true, I ought to take Pascal's Wager and become a Christian. It's worth the risk.

On a personal level, I raise this topic because for the last 4-5 years, I have, to a large extent, been living Pascal's Wager. For various reasons--which I won't be going into in detail in order that I may at least appear to be attempting to keep this post to a reasonable length--I have come to believe that Christianity, taken as a body of statements concerning actual historical facts and truths about the nature of reality, is probably false. Before going on, I would like to nuance this last statement a bit.
In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins (who, for my part, is not much of a philosopher but is certainly a fine rhetoretician and raises points well worth considering) describes the so-called "cargo cults." In short, these cults arose in the islands of the South Pacific in response to the coming of European explorers and soldiers in ships bearing significant wealth. After the Europeans left, religions developed on the islands in which the islanders awaited the return of the Europeans with great weath (sometimes centering on their leader as a Messianic figure), along with an ensuing apocalypse. The comparison to the second coming of Christ is too tempting to resist.

There are, of course, key differences between Christianity and the cargo cults. We know about as well as we know anything that the European explorers were not godlike figures; history is much less clear on the question of whether Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead, at least if one will even admit the possibility. The survival of Christianity after the death of Christ and the persecution of his followers makes the story fairly compelling, in fact. Moreover, Christianity possesses a much more well-developed body of claims concerning the nature of reality and the best way of living than do the cargo cults. Nonetheless, the truth remains that people have a tendency over-interpret patterns and to invent religions of their own accord (after all, not all of them can be true), and for this and other reasons I personally remain somewhat suspicious. I feel ill-at-ease because even though Jesus said to be "as shrewd as serpants (and as innocent as doves)," the attitude that would make me most easily accepting of my faith (which, I freely confessed, I was raised in) would also make me most easily duped by a dishonest used car salesman. If Christianity is indeed true, I can't believe that the attitude God wants is one of blind naïveté. For this reason, on purely intellectual grounds, I maintain skepticism concerning the historical and metaphysical claims of Christianity. I cannot bring myself to believe that the non-Christians are just natively worse at separating truth from falsehood than the Christians.

However, I must now make another set of admissions: I am both frightened and thoroughly depressed by the idea that this life is all there is. On the first point, many would probably claim that my fear is in large part a product of my Christian upbringing (with its promise of eternal life), and that there is no need to get bent out of shape by the concept of an absolute end. To this I can only say that it's not only Christians who feel this way, and that I feel that on a purely pragmatic level, Pascal's analysis looks about right--if there's any real chance that death isn't all there is, it's worth going after! On the second point, I can say only that all of human existence seems (to me) like about the most sad and pathetic thing ever if the day will truly come when no one--not us or anyone else--will ever care whether I freed hundreds of innocent people from the slave trade, killed hundreds of innocent people with a bomb, or didn't do any of that and just spend my time playing Tiddlywinks. I see the argument that in that case, we should just live in a way that makes us happy--and for most of us, it seems that all things being equal, we'd like the people around us to be happy, too--but the whole idea makes my life seem purposeless and any real exertion on my part not worth it. That's just my intuition; feel free to disagree.

Anyway, all this leaves me in the following state: I can't honestly claim to believe Christianity is true, but I do find in it a compelling and beautiful description of reality as well as a way of living that gives both my actions and the world and all the people in it value. I love how Christianity balances good sense with apparent contradiction (isn't reality bigger than us, after all?) and how it balances conventional morality with the unconventional demands of genuine love. But on a purely intellectual level, do I honestly believe it? Well...not really. Still, I'm not about to give up on my Christianity, and I'm attempting to live as a Christian, to the best of my ability. But through this effort, I've learned some things about belief, and about Pascal's wager.

I think most everyone will agree that it's roughly impossible to just up and believe something that you don't actually think is true. If I told you that I'd give you a billion dollars to believe that 1+1=3 (and could somehow test to see if you'd succeeded), I doubt you could, unless perhaps you underwent an intensive session of torture and brainwashing. That hardly seems like a good way of going about believing in Christianity, though. So, I thought, I'd do the next best thing--I'd try to perform all the same actions that I would if I really believed in Christianity. What I've learned after a few years of this effort is that it's really, really hard to live consistently with a belief you don't have.

It's hard to sacrifice sleeping in on Sundays when you're not deeply convicted that it's at least somewhat important to be at church. It's hard to resist imbibing an unhealthy degree of pornography when you're not deeply convicted that what you do in this life matters beyond this life (even when you find the majority of pornography at worst disgusting and at best kind of boring). And it's really, really hard to pray to God when you think it's probable that the only one you're actually praying to is the fly buzzing around your ceiling fan. If it came down to it, would I be willing to die for my faith? Probably. But it can be very hard to live for it.

And now for the last part of this essay...why I am still a Christian. Most simply put, my reasons for wanting to remain a Christian are still roughly the same, and although I haven't thoroughly researched the alternatives, none of them has yet convinced me to throw in the towel on Christianity. (The most likely alternative in my mind would be some form of Buddhism or Jainism, but again, my understanding is very limited, and I do tend to find the Christian concept of redemption more full-bodied and compelling than the Eastern concept of liberation.) One might ask, however, in view of what I said previously about the necessity of some kind of real belief--for while I don't think that faith simply is intellectual belief, I do think that faith involves belief in some way--why I don't just give up in the face of my persistent (well, 5-year-old) doubts and spare myself the trouble. Some time ago, I would have told you that I didn't have a good reason aside from the fact that other Christians have gone through long dry periods, and that I was hoping my perspective might change one day. More recently, however, I have begun to have another queer experience: The simple fact that I've carried on struggling and honestly grappling with my faith for this long without giving up on it has helped me to own it, to accept that for better or for worse, this is my faith and I'm sticking with it, at least as far as my day-to-day existence goes. I can never be sure if I've made the right choice, but I've made the choice the best I know how. Through this, I've come to admit that faith (taken as a commitment to and a dependence on my Christian belief, from which corresponding actions flow) is, indeed, not something that I can drum up on my own, so long as I'm being honest with myself. And I've become queerly accepting of the notion that as much as I hate the idea of being duped, belief--that is, genuine conviction--is something that humans really need in order to live most effectively, and that one day, God might just give me that gift. And whether I like the idea or not, that belief probably won't have much to do with how smart I am.