I’ll Pay You 10K to Believe in God
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Pascal's wager
11 min read
The article directly discusses Pascal's Wager as a pragmatic argument for belief in God, including Pascal's response to critics about voluntary belief. Understanding the full philosophical context and historical debate would enrich the reader's comprehension.
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Blaise Pascal
18 min read
Pascal is quoted directly from The Pensées and his wager is a key example in the article. Understanding Pascal's broader philosophical and mathematical contributions provides context for why his arguments on faith remain influential.
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About the Author
Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.
I won’t really pay you 10K to sincerely believe in God. But the idea does prompt the following thought experiment:
Suppose Beth sincerely believes that there is no God. However, Sam offers Beth ten-thousand dollars to sincerely believe in God. Would God object to this?
Here we are assuming that God wants people to believe in Him. This is because, among other reasons, He wants a relationship with his creations, namely humans. One cannot have a relationship with someone if they believe that they do not exist. Merely believing that someone exists isn’t enough to ensure that one can have a relationship with them; however, it does look like a necessary component—even if it isn’t enough, i.e., one must believe in someone exists who actually does—of having a relationship with someone is that one believes they exist. One couldn’t, by example, have a relationship with someone if they believed that that person was dead and gone forever, or they never existed in the first place (e.g. Santa Claus).
The first problem, though, with our thought experiment is that it doesn’t look like people have direct control over what they believe. We cannot, like the flip of a switch, decide we believe that ‘2+2=5’, no matter how much money someone offers us to sincerely believe it. It doesn’t seem possible: we appear to spontaneously believe, without the operation of the conscious will, as to what or whether we will believe. As the philosopher, William Alston (1988) explains, to think we have direct control over whether we believe something, it would,
...[Have] to be true that I have effective voluntary control over whether I do or do not believe that the tree has leaves on it when I see a tree
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.