14-1: Coin Flipping

If only God’s existence were as simple as flipping a coin. Pascal’s wager seems to assume that the complexity of belief can be reduced to a simple decision. In binary terms, the gains of believing in God surely outweigh the losses—but in binary terms, so much of humanity is erased.

So not only was Pascal’s wager exclusive of the multitude of religions—and of gods—that are present among different cultures, it also reduced Christianity to simple terms of opposites.

This argument is perhaps more holistic than that of free will, yet we still end up with the same answer: that there are none. Our group, week after week, always comes to the same conclusion: that when faith is questioned, it is inevitably destroyed, perhaps even by the same force that creates it. The point of religion—ideally, at least—is belief. If one has belief at all, it should not be questioned, because faith itself is supposed to eclipse those very questions. The bottom line? Faith and logic just don’t mix.  That doesn’t mean that one should not open their mind to other possibilities, not at all—it just means that you cannot force disbelief in the same way that you cannot force belief. It's not a formula, but a feeling.

Did Pascal even breach the realm of philosophy, or did he remain within Christianity, to which his “philosophy” was really only a personal defense?  There has been a trend among these religious philosophers, and more often than not, their individual theories end up seeming like justifications for what they can’t answer. I suppose most of us fear the unknown, and these philosophers, like so many of us, wanted to make sense of the world and their place in it. But the gaps they bridge seem tenuous, vulnerable to even the slightest of questions.

Pascal’s definition of “faith” was also very narrow—in the end, faith cannot be defined by how many times one goes to church or the number of prayers one says.  

Going through the motions of belief does not equal belief. Perhaps ideally, it would, because we can’t deny the hope and protection that religion offers to its followers. If we could choose what we believed in, the world would be much simpler, and maybe we wouldn’t have so many conflicts. But isn’t that the beauty of our differences—that we can then acknowledge them, question them, accept them, and change? Without anything against which to measure ourselves, we wouldn’t be going anywhere, both relatively and progressively.