Is Atheism a Safe Bet?

Amy Sayers

Introduction

I have no loyalty to the truth-dependent, pragmatic argument for Christianity known as Pascal’s Wager.  If it can be successfully rebutted, so be it.  Its premises and conclusion have no relevance to whether Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead nor what significance we should find in this resurrection. 

But Pascal’s Wager is the kind of argument that might make a nontheist nervous.  With all the talk of “infinite loss,” the Wager puts to the skeptic the very real question, “Just how certain are you of your atheism?”  So, while the Christian faith doesn’t rest on a policy of “better safe than sorry,” and while the Christian God is not interested in being named “Humankind’s Best Bet,” I am compelled to keep the skeptic on the hook of this question if he has not successfully argued himself off of it.

Richard Carrier claims to have answered the Wager once and for all in his essay, The End of Pascal's Wager: Only Non-Theists Go to Heaven. He writes that his argument “presents a successful rebuttal to any form of Pascal's Wager, by demonstrating that unbelief might still be the safest bet after all.”

I have re-stated the bones of Richard Carrier’s argument here:

God desires to populate Heaven with only morally good people.  To do this, “God will probably select (for Heaven) from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. . . . And the only two kinds of people who do this are those theists and nontheists who devote their lives to examining the facts and determining whether they are right.”  Carrier next argues that a responsible examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that God is either evil or that God does not exist.  If one concludes He is evil, one should not worship Him. If one concludes that He does not exist, one is a nontheist.  Either way, there are only nontheists at the end of this trail.  And so, God, having designed this world as a test to measure the moral character of people, will find that the only morally good, responsible people to pass the test are nontheists.  If “passing the test” means going to Heaven, voila!, only nontheists go to Heaven.

There are several problems with Carrier’s argument but I will mount just two objections here:  First, Richard Carrier has not ended the Wager in all forms, as he claims, because he assumes that the nature of Heaven is completely different from what biblical Christianity teaches.[1]  So, even if Carrier’s argument works if all his assumptions are true, it does not work if the biblical Christian’s assumptions are true.  A believer who holds the biblical view of Heaven can still pose the skeptic with Pascal’s Wager and, where Carrier’s writing is concerned, still go unanswered.

My second objection is that Carrier—and other skeptics—should not use the term “morally good person” in relation to the standards of Heaven without defining what “morally good” means.  But Carrier cannot both define the term and maintain the divine hiddeness that is key to his argument.

A Commonly-Conceived Heaven

Carrier’s first premise is this: “It is a common belief that only the morally good should populate Heaven, and this is a reasonable belief, widely defended by theists of many varieties.”

The key phrase here is “theists of many varieties.”  I agree, among many varieties of those who believe in a supernatural god of some sort, Carrier could find a wide swath of folks who believe that “only the morally good should populate Heaven.” 

But this is not the belief of biblical Christianity.  Instead, a core tenant of the faith is that one’s moral goodness or badness is not what qualifies or disqualifies one for Heaven. While Christians can acknowledge that some people are more virtuous than others, the Bible teaches that no person is virtuous enough—“good” enough—to earn salvation.[2] The only goodness that can qualify a person for Heaven is that which God confers on her through her faith in Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice.  That is, God makes her good through grace.  She cannot make herself good through works. Not good enough, anyway, for Heaven.

Too often the difference between this doctrine and the version of Heaven conceived in Carrier’s “common belief” is minimized when the span between the two is actually enormous.  Biblical Christians do not worship a God who pulls out a scale come one’s death and piles upon the two trays all of one’s deed, thoughts and dispositions, weighing the vicious against the virtuous.  We worship a God Whose standard is perfection.  Only perfectly moral persons can dwell with God in heaven.  Just one thought or deed on the immoral tray of the scale is enough to disqualify one from heaven. 

We also worship a God who looked upon a thief being executed, a man whose actions were bad enough, he confessed, that he himself thought he deserved crucifixion, and promised him salvation.  This thief didn’t have the opportunity to come down from his cross and wrack up a host of good deeds to outweigh his bad ones.  He did have the opportunity to profess belief that Jesus is God, and to ask Him for salvation.  The God of the Bible didn’t pull out a naughty and nice list and demonstrate just how morally bad this guy’s life had been.  He promised the thief presence in Heaven that very day.[3] 

That Richard Carrier conceives of this “common” Heaven gives him the opportunity to make a few clever turns in his argument.  Whether the rest of this argument works even if Heaven is as he suggests doesn’t matter.  What is clear is that if Heaven is not as he conceives of it, the remaining argument does not follow.  Suppose it is not God’s goal or intention to choose “morally good” people to populate Heaven. If, after all, belief in Jesus Christ is the only way to Heaven, then all the nontheists, despite whatever sort of “significant and responsible effort” they have made to “discover the truth” will not go there. 

The question then, remains:  In the event Heaven is as the Bible describes, is the nontheist wise to risk infinite loss for whatever gain he derives from the non-belief with which he lives his finite life?

Perhaps Carrier’s answer to this is his claim in his introduction, “since we do not know whose assumptions are correct. . .we therefore cannot exclude the assumptions on which this argument is based.”  I agree that the Wager itself cannot “exclude assumptions” that Carrier uses for his argument.  Christians might be wrong about their conception of Heaven and arguments for why we are right lie outside of the Wager’s scope. That is, Heaven might be as Carrier assumes, and it is the Christian’s burden to demonstrate good reason to believe it is something other if we were debating the nature of Heaven.  But this first portion of my essay does not seek to demonstrate which conception of Heaven is accurate, if either is.  Instead, I am arguing that Richard Carrier’s “end” the Pascal’s Wager only has a chance at working if Heaven is as he assumes.

And by the same stroke of his own logic, Carrier must see that he cannot exclude the assumptions of biblical Christianity.  In short, he may have an answer to the Wager if Heaven is as he describes it.  But he has no answer if Heaven is as a Christian sees it. He might argue, “If there’s a deadly crash coming, I’ll be OK because I have this parachute.” It might be a good plan if the crash is to happen as he is in flight.  But if he’s on a ship headed for an iceberg, the parachute will not do him much good. 

The Skeptic’s Wager

There is a second problem with Richard Carrier’s argument. He writes that “God's hiddenness is necessary on this account, since his presence would inspire people to behave as if good out of fear or selfish interests, not out of courage or compassion or a sense of personal integrity.”[4]  But if God is hidden, then He has not revealed a law or standard by which He will determine who is “morally good” enough for Heaven.  How can a just God apply a test to a person’s life that the person was unaware of while living?  Carrier cannot posit both a Judge of moral goodness and a Judge who is hidden. 

Before I make this argument, let me explain why it is worth the effort, given that my first objection already re-opens the question to Richard Carrier.  It will be useful to challenge skeptics to consider what it means to be “morally good” enough for Heaven.  Too easily, this phrase rolls off the skeptic’s fingertips and tongue, as though it were very obvious what “morally good” means.  I hear often the Skeptic’s Wager.  Indeed, I once made it myself before I became a Christian:

When I die, if there is a loving, knowing, and good God, then this God will see that I spent my life making honest inquiry and living by the convictions I came to via my virtuous use of reason.  He will reward this responsible and virtuous search, and forgive me for not reaching the right conclusions.  And this God will examine the rest of my moral life and find that I’ve lived a pretty good one.

Is this a wise bet?

The problem with this Skeptic’s Wager is that it focuses on the virtue of people “who devote their lives to examining the facts and determining whether they are right.”  The Skeptic’s Wager does not address what God says about the rest of the skeptic’s moral constitution.  Carrier’s estimation of what God wants, regarding our morality, is “to see if we have the courage and fortitude to choose morality over faith or loyalty, and be good without fear or hope of divine reward.”

Even if I were to grant Carrier’s readings of certain Old Testament stories that allow him to conclude that God issued immoral tests of loyalty—and I do not grant that these readings are sensible, reasonable or academically responsible—Carrier’s version of God and the “test” for attaining heaven is endlessly troubled by the term “be good.”

“Endlessly,” because the hashing out of what it means to “be good” is a far bigger task than one lifetime of contemplation has the opportunity to calculate.  What does it mean to be good enough for heaven?  Let the skeptic who posits this version of Heaven be the one to answer: How many people, for instance, am I allowed to curse in anger?  How many curses per person?  How many times am I allowed to use language that others find offensive?  How many times am I allowed to disrespect authorities over me, even if I’m only asking about the authorities I agree have a righteous authority over me?  How much physical violence am I allowed to perpetrate?  How many times am I allowed to hurt a person with unkind words?  How many lies am I allowed to tell?  How much am I allowed to steal, or consume without real need?  How many sexual relationships am I allowed to have, and with whom, either in the physical world or in my own private mental world?  How arrogant am I allowed to be and with whom? 

And what about the “examination of facts” to “determine whether they are right”?  How many facts must I examine before I can decide?  Richard Carrier has decided, though he certainly wouldn’t claim to have examined all there is to know about subjects of God and those relating to Him.  For how long and to what degree must I examine these facts before deciding?

Do all these moral rules apply to all people living in all places for all times?  What percentage of wealth am I able to collect above the poverty line (of my society? of the world?) before I am required to give the excess away to charity?

Does God keep a running tab of each category of moral behavior?  That is, if I tell a whopper of a lie one year, how many years of telling only white lies or none at all must I go to make up for it?  How many white lies can I tell in a year before they count against me as much as whopper would?

Or does being very, very good about keeping one standard make up for being rather bad about failing at another?  That is, if I have never been unfaithful to my husband, am I allowed to wrack up a few more misdeeds of conspicuous consumption?

Or does God just keep a simple count of sins—some “worth” more than others, perhaps—and set the cut-off line at a certain number?  What is the number?  One hundred sins per year?  One thousand? 

What is the standard? [5]  We would expect a loving, just, knowing God to reveal to those being tested just what the test will be.  If our destinies did depend on committing no more than a certain number of sins, we would even expect God to inform us of our current totals.  I would likely have a much better year if I were informed on January 1 that my sin-spending was running at a deficit.

Yet we have no such standard to shoot for, other than those presented in the scriptures of various religions which, of course, the skeptic would reject as being God-given.  So where has God made it clear what is expected of us? 

The skeptic might shake her head at me here and answer that God doesn’t necessarily have to hold a code that includes all the “how many’s” or “to what degree’s.”  God might, she could suggest, “Just look at my heart and know that I tried my best.”

But this simply dodges, or at best delays, the question. What does ‘try my best’ mean?  Is “your best” one hundred sins?  One thousand?  Ten thousand?  Is the important word “try”?  What does that mean?  How many times in a week or day or hour must I think, “I wish to behave morally right now” for it to constitute a real “try”?  How many times can I fail to “try” before God will look into my heart and see that I did not “try my best.”   Again, this standard for “trying” is one we would expect God to reveal to us.[6]

Those who make the Skeptic’s Wager, who, to some degree, bank on their own moral goodness to meet the standard for heaven if there is a God, need to answer this question:  Where is the standard God will use to judge you? [7] 

Perhaps the final reply from the Skeptic would be a reference to the Skeptic’s Wager itself:  God will forgive.  Whether He is forgiving the intellectual error of my doubt, or the immoral sum of my sins, or both, a loving God will forgive. 

No, He won’t. 

At least, this is the Christian answer.  And if the skeptic makes a theological supposition about the character of God, he should be prepared to argue for why his claim is superior to those of other theists, by which time, the discussion will have become one of theology and not philosophy.

This is why the idea of a “morally good” person, one whose moral goodness qualifies him for Heaven, is suspect.  It cannot be defined without acknowledging a Law-giver, and such acknowledgement marks the end of a skeptic’s nontheism. 

The use of the phrase “morally good” is troublesome to Richard Carrier in a more specific way.  He includes in his rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager that this test is given by a “hidden” God.  In fact, this is the only way Carrier’s version of “the test” works, for if people could hope for heaven or fear hell, then they would act out of a selfish desire to end up in the former instead of the latter.  So Carrier can’t allow that God has given the standard to people, since doing so would constitute showing Himself instead of remaining hidden.  But neither can Carrier argue that a just God would apply a test of goodness to a person who had no idea how to pass that test. 

In Carrier’s account, “divine hiddeness,” coupled with several other questionable tenants,  makes nontheism a requirement for heaven.  But Carrier admits that something more is required—one must “be good.”  It is unreasonable to suppose that a just God (and Carrier does postulate that the God of the nontheist heaven is just) would remain hidden instead of delivering the message of how to be “good” when it is His intention to choose only the “good” to live in heaven for eternity. 

Conclusion

Heaven is as the Bible describes, and if salvation is determined by faith in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, and not by the moral character of one’s deeds, then Richard Carrier has not ended Pascal’s Wager.  The point of the Wager, aside from its pragmatist conclusion to bet on the possibility of infinite gain, remains powerful: If the skeptic is wrong in his atheism, his loss is. . .everything.

Those skeptics who are banking on their own moral goodness and the forgiving nature of God to see them through eternity (if it turns out there is an eternity) would be wise to examine this idea of a morally good life, a life good enough for God.  And they’d be wise to question where the standard for determining that goodness comes from.

[1] By “biblical Christianity” I mean the theology and doctrines solely derived from the Bible, understood as God’s revelation.

[2] Ephesians 2:4-9; Titus 3:4-5.  Even if one argued that these verses—or the whole Bible—are not describing a Heaven of salvation through faith alone, that argument would merely support another version of Heaven.  That the version I suggest in this essay is the one believed in and preached quite popularly in bible-reading Christian churches is beyond dispute.  Thus, this version of Heaven warrants consideration.

[3] Luke 24:40-3.

[4] This premise itself is flawed as it creates a false dichotomy.  He argues that a person who knows there is a reward to earn is either good out of “fear or selfish interests” or is not good at all.  But it is possible for someone to be good out of “courage” and “compassion” and “a sense of personal integrity” while understanding the reward that happens to come as result happens to be good.  Thus, a person can pursue goodness while being self-interested and without being selfish. 

[5] Moral philosophers, among others, seek to answer questions like these.  Several think they have reasoned out the most probable understanding or set of understandings of the rights and wrongs of morality.  But none claims these understandings are God-given, or that they are the standards used by God to divide the saints from the damned.  If they do make such claims, their work by definition becomes theology.  And it is work the atheist would reject anyway, because of its metaphysical claims.

[6] Virtue ethicists would object to my entire suggestion that God would necessarily have a sin-counting mentality, as though He were a quandry ethicist.  They would suggest that God might look for a virtuous character in the Aristotelian sense, as opposed to keeping track of every deed and mis-deed.  There is a difference, they argue, between a liar and one who tells one lie.  This distinction is very helpful for discussion of moral philosophy.  But on the eternal scale, it still meets the same question:  How many lies can I tell before I am a liar?   What is the standard God uses to determine whether a character is virtuous enough for heaven?

[7] The skeptic might want to make a simple answer:  God gave us reason to figure out His standard.  And I think the work(s) of (insert ethicist(s) name(s) here) describes that standard.  But in holding this position, a skeptic is simply declaring his adopted religion and renunciation of his nontheism.