Pascal’s Wager

2 Peter 1:16-21 (NIV) . . . For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw his majestic splendor with our own eyes when he received honor and glory from God the Father. The voice from the majestic glory of God said to him, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” We ourselves heard that voice from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain. Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts. Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

Introduction from Christianity Today

"Who needs God? Man can make it on his own." So claimed Reason, the philosophy that captured the imagination of seventeenth-century France. Its champions, Voltaire and Descartes, among others, tried to fashion a worldview ruled completely by reason.

French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), though raised in the heyday of Enlightenment thought, found reason inadequate: "Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." He concluded, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know at all"—a statement that soon became the chief critique of rationalism and the starting point for a defense of the Christian faith that still influences people today.

Belief comes through the "heart," which for Pascal was not merely feelings and sentiment but the intuition that understands without having to use reason. And God's grace makes it happen: "Do not be surprised at the sight of simple people who believe without argument. He inclines their hearts to believe. We shall never believe with a vigorous and unquestioning faith unless God touches our hearts; and we shall believe as soon as he does so."

Wrestling with Pascal’s Wager

By John Piper

My argument is that the glory of God in and through the Scriptures is a real, objective, self-authenticating reality. Christian faith is not a leap in the dark. It is not a guess or a wager. God is not honored if he is chosen by the flip of a coin. A leap into the unknown is no honor to one who has made himself known.

Pascal’s most famous work is Pensées (which means Thoughts). In thought 233, he proposed his wager, which has to do with how you decide whether to believe in God or not. In its popular form, it is, I think, quite misleading. That is why I deal with it here. In showing how it is misleading, we shed light on the process of coming to well-grounded belief in God and his Word, not belief based on a venture.

The gist of the wager is that venturing to believe in God involves little risk and great possible gain. Or to put it another way: betting that God does not exist and finding yourself wrong results in eternal loss. But betting that God does exist and finding yourself wrong results in little loss. So venture on God. In Pascal’s own words, the wager goes like this:

God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. 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. . . You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. . . If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, against a finite number of chances of loss.

Here is where the popular (and misleading) understanding of Pascal’s Wager ends. It is misleading because it gives the impression that saving faith in God is a choice we make without seeing God as true and compellingly beautiful. Nevertheless, the wager says, “You must choose.” And it says, “Choose him. But when you do, the choice you make is not owing to a sight of glory that convinces and enthralls.”

But according to the Scriptures, such a choice is of no eternal value. It is not saving faith. It is a purely natural thing, not a supernatural thing. We are drawn to something that we do not know. We are hoping for an eternal extension and improvement of the happiness we have here in the things of this world (since we do not know God). But saving faith isn’t like that. It is rooted in the sight and foretaste of happiness in supernatural reality—God himself. According to the Scriptures, living faith is created in the dead soul by the miracle of new birth. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God” (1 John 5:1).

Without this new birth, we are merely flesh—merely human, merely natural. Jesus said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). And the mind of the flesh cannot submit to God (Rom. 8:7); it cannot please God (Rom. 8:8); and it cannot see the things of God as anything but folly (1 Cor. 2:14). In order, therefore, for saving faith to come into being, God must grant repentance. “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:25). That is, he must make the spiritually dead come to life. “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

This supernaturally given, spiritual sight of the glory of God in Christ is the ground of saving faith. God is seen with the eyes of the heart as truly as the eyes of our head see the sun in the sky. And this sight of the glory of God in Christ compels us. It is no more resistible than the enjoyment of your favorite food is resistible when it is in your mouth. And so it is when God becomes your favorite, by the opening of your eyes to see his convincing and enthralling beauty. To see him as supreme in beauty is to desire him above all.

Therefore, the popular and simple view of Pascal’s Wager is misleading. It gives the impression that you might actually have an eternal happiness in God by simply choosing to believe he exists, when you have neither tasted nor seen his convincing and enthralling glory. But according to the Scriptures, that is not saving faith. The only faith of eternal value is well-grounded faith. But Pascal’s Wager, in its popular form, gives the impression that one can have eternal life on a venture.

But, in fact, Pascal was aware of this problem with his wager, though most popular uses of the wager do not take note of this. To be fair to him, we need to make this clear. He pictures his listener responding to the wager:

“I confess it, I admit it. But, still, is there no means of seeing the faces of the cards?”— Yes, Scripture, creation, and the rest, etc. “Yes, but I have my hands tied and my mouth closed; I am forced to wager, and am not free. I am not released, and am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?”

It is not easy to know from the brevity of Pensées precisely how Pascal conceives of this “cure” for unbelief. His basic answer is to set out on the road of faith as if you believed, and you will soon have eyes to see the certainty of it all.

I will tell you that at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

The wager, in its true complexity, is a wise and sobering challenge. The challenge is to realize that infinite things are at stake. Saving faith is essential, and it is not a wager. Rather, it is an entering through the door of Christ, irresistibly drawn by the convincing and compelling foretaste of the enthralling beauty of God in the gospel.

Pascal’s Wager applies not only to faith in God but also to faith in the word of God. Venturing on the Bible, with no good ground for doing so, is no honor to the Scriptures. God’s word is not esteemed if one believes it by the toss of a coin. Indeed, such “belief,” as we have seen, would not be a belief of any value. It would be like a man’s choosing which of two women to marry by tossing a coin. The chosen one would know she was not chosen because of any good reasons.

The faith in God’s word that honors God has foundations. We have seen its divine glory. We have seen “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” And we cannot turn away to another. In this way, Christ and his word are honored.

However, this does not mean that there are no doubts along the way. Nor does it mean that the conscious experiences of all who embrace the Bible as God’s word are the same. One may come to a well-grounded confidence in God’s word and never have even heard the term “glory of God.” One may never have heard of terms such as “self-authenticating” or “internal testimony” or “compelling and irresistible evidence” or the like. The experience of seeing God’s self-attesting reality in Scripture is vastly different from being able to explain that experience.

Millions of people have come to a well-grounded confidence in the Bible and have not been able to find sufficient words to describe that experience. I do not even claim that the words I am using here are sufficient to do it justice. So let it be clear: the miracle of seeing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” through the Scriptures can happen to a person who never will be able to explain sufficiently why he trusts the Bible. His trust may be well-grounded without his knowing how it is.

For example, take the story of the conversion and execution of Tokichi Ishii—a man who was hanged for murder in Tokyo in 1918. He had been sent to prison more than twenty times and was known for being as cruel as a tiger. Just before being sentenced to death, Tokichi was sent a New Testament by two Christian missionaries, Miss West and Miss McDonald. After a visit from Miss West, he began to read the story of Jesus’s trial and execution. His attention was riveted by the sentence, “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’” (Luke 23:34). This sentence transformed his life.

I stopped: I was stabbed to the heart, as if by a five-inch nail. What did the verse reveal to me? Shall I call it the love of the heart of Christ? Shall I call it His compassion? I do not know what to call it. I only know that with an unspeakably grateful heart I believed.

That is what I mean by the power of God’s word to awaken well-grounded faith, even if the believer does not know how to describe what has happened. In the context of Jesus’s life, this one sentence was a true and compelling lightning bolt of divine beauty. It was enough. Faith was born. And the foundation was solid.

Tokichi was sentenced to death and accepted it as “the fair, impartial judgment of God.” Now the word that brought him to faith also sustained his faith in an amazing way. Near the end, Miss West directed him to the words of 2 Corinthians 6:8–10 concerning the suffering of the righteous. The words moved him very deeply, and he wrote:

“As sorrowing, yet always rejoicing.” People will say that I must have a very sorrowful heart because I am daily awaiting the execution of the death sentence. This is not the case. I feel neither sorrow nor distress nor any pain. Locked up in a prison cell six feet by nine in size I am infinitely happier than I was in the days of my sinning when I did not know God. Day and night . . . I am talking with Jesus Christ.

Here is the key: Through the word of God, Tokichi Ishii had truly met the living God. He had seen the glory of God in the face of Christ. He now knows God. “I am infinitely happier than I was . . . when I did not know God.” This was real knowledge with a real basis in the divine beauty of Christ as he prayed for his enemies when they were killing him, and as he died for them. The authenticity of Tokichi’s experience did not depend on his ability to put it into words, though he did this with remarkable effectiveness.

Not only may one’s authentic experience of God’s glory in Scripture be clouded with the inadequacy of human language, but it may also be clouded by doubts and still be real. The resolution of these doubts may at times look like the resolution of Pascal’s Wager—just ventured on the Bible. I say it may look like this. But in genuine faith—well-grounded faith— there is always more going on.

Billy Graham’s crisis of confidence in the Bible that came to a head in 1949 is a good example. In 1948, Graham’s friend Charles Templeton was having doubts about the integrity of the Scriptures. He left his pastorate in Toronto and entered Princeton Seminary. Billy commended Templeton and said that if he had chosen Oxford, he would have gone with him. Billy “hankered for post graduate study.” And doubts were brewing in his own mind, though he felt he and Templeton were moving in different directions—Templeton toward bolstering his doubts, Graham toward resolving them.

Billy’s doubts were not in a vacuum. He had seen God’s mighty hand through Scripture. He knew that “when he took the Bible as God’s Word and used it, his preaching had power. He had witnessed men and women weighted by cares and morally bankrupt made alive and radiant. In subsequent years he would say, “When I preach the Bible straight—no questions, no doubts, no hesitations—God gives me a power that’s beyond me. It’s something I don’t completely understand.” But in 1949, the battle raged in his soul. In the words of his biographer, John Pollock:

He must soon decide once and for all either to spend his life studying whether or not God had spoken, or to spend it as God’s ambassador, bringing a message which he might not fully comprehend in all details until after death. Must an intellectually honest man know everything about the Bible’s origins before he could use it? Were theological professors the only ones qualified to speak of religion, or might a simple American, or an ignorant jungle villager, or even a child, lead another to Christ?

The crisis came to a head in August 1949 at Forest Home retreat center near San Bernardino, California. Pollock continues:

Billy was deeply disturbed. After supper, instead of attending evening service, he retired to his log cabin and read again the Bible passage concerning its authority. He meditated on the attitude of Christ, who fulfilled the law. “He loved the Scriptures, quoted from them constantly, and never once intimated that they might be wrong.” Billy went out in the forest and wandered up the mountain, praying as he walked. He knew he had reached what he believed to be a crisis. He recognized that intellect alone could not resolve the question of authority. He must go beyond intellect. “So I went back and I got my Bible, and I went out in the moonlight. And I got to a stump and put the Bible on the stump. And I knelt down, and I said, ‘Oh, God; I cannot prove certain things. I cannot answer some of the questions Chuck Templeton is raising and some of the other people are raising, but I accept this Book by faith as the Word of God.’”

Was Billy Graham’s conviction from that point on based on a guess? Was he making Pascal’s Wager? Was the statement, “I accept this Book by faith as the Word of God,” well-grounded? Of course, I cannot know Billy Graham’s heart at that moment. My point here is that such a resolution of doubts does not have to be a leap in the dark. The thirty-year-old Graham had seen much of God in the Scriptures. He had tasted the power of God’s word in his own preaching. What his experience, and the experience of thousands, teaches us is that the sight of God’s self-authenticating glory in Scripture is often an embattled sight. What we have seen and tasted and known with justified certainty one day may be clouded the next day.

Jonathan Edwards described such experiences like this:

It is remarkable, that the same persons reading the same portion of Scripture, at one time shall be greatly affected with it, and see what is astonishingly glorious in it, the pertinency and pithiness of the expression, admirable majesty, coherence, and harmony; and at another time to those same persons it shall seem insipid, mean, impertinent, and inconsistent.

There is a kind of “strength” that is not muscular but spiritual. It is strength “to comprehend and to know the love of Christ” revealed in the word of God. The love of Christ has a “breadth and length and height and depth” that makes it an inimitable, self-authenticating reality. And when it is seen for what it is, we know it is real. No mere human can produce it. But this conviction is an embattled conviction.

Suppose someone should ask, “Well, if the sight of God’s divine reality in the Scriptures can be bright one day and clouded the next, how are we to know which day is to be believed?” My answer is this: If you have truly seen the holiness of God through the Scriptures—the pure, transcendent, supreme worth and beauty of God through his word— this sight will hold you during embattled seasons. There is an infinite qualitative difference between the witness of God through his word and the witness of clouded darkness. The battle may be so severe that in your own mind you cannot, at a given time, distinguish between the divine light and human darkness. But God has promised to hold on to those who are born of God, and who possess the Holy Spirit, and have seen his glory (1 Cor. 1:8–9; 1 Thess. 3:13; Jude 24–25). He will assert himself in due time and break through the clouds so that you see clearly again (Ps. 42:5).

Jesus taught us through his prayer in John 17 that while he was on the earth, he had begun a ministry of illumination in the minds of his disciples that he trusted his Father to preserve after His ascension. He had revealed the Father’s glory to his disciples, and now, as he prepares for his absence, he asks the Father to preserve that illumination in the disciples:

“I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one. I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. (John 17 excerpts)

The aim of this prayer is to give us the joyful confidence that the manifestation of the Father’s glory, once it is given, will never be lost. And we may be sure of this: Jesus was not praying for those disciples only, but, for twenty-first-century believers as well, as he says: “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word” (John 17:20).

So, even though the supernatural gift of seeing God’s glory in the word is an embattled experience, it is not an uncertain one. God does not cause people to be born again with new eyes, only to let them die and go blind for eternity. As Paul declares, “And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.” (Phil. 1:6).