Letting your girlfriend go about her normal life routine—her own free will as you put it—and not interfering is as good as any approach you could adopt at this time. Perhaps when you are more comfortable with your position and as comfortable as discussing let's say initially just bits of it with her, like some light feeler to see how she would put herself in the situation, you will have a general idea how to open up more, if it even needs that. In my case I just went along with my wife through all the religious routines, but dropped little hints here and there until she has a moment of eureka and wraps her head around the whole idea of her husband being the atheist that he is. For example, I would voice out my distaste with some specific church or dogma issues and why they are helplessly irrational and wrong, until she gets the whole picture. Heck, I don't even pursue if she gets it at first: ideas are strange creatures—they linger in the mind until their meaning manages to unravel themselves.
On Pascal's Wager
Very briefly Pascal's Wager states:
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having, neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is ... you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.
For this post, I would briefly dissect Pascal's Wager on a Few Fronts.
Pascal's wager sounds deceptively simple. Many a religious person finds such a call attractive: one only needs to believe without considering the evidence and one would immediately be in a better position than that of the non-believer. After all, they say, if I believe and then it turns out to be true I get to enjoy heavenly bliss; but if my belief turns out to be false, and there is no God, then when I die, I lose nothing. An atheist, the religious person may continue, if he turns out to be wrong will suffer an eternity of torment. If the atheist turns out to be right then it is only equal to the believer's "worst case." Obviously then, the believer will say, you must wager on the side of belief.
But Pascal's argument is seriously flawed. The religious environment that Pascal lived in was simple. Belief and disbelief only boiled down to two choices: Roman Catholicism and atheism. With a finite choice, his argument would be sound. But on Pascal's own premise that God is infinitely incomprehensible, then in theory, there would be an infinite number of possible theologies about God, all of which are equally probable.
First, let us look at the more obvious possibilities we know of today—possibilities that were either unknown to, or ignored by, Pascal. In the Calvinistic theological doctrine of predestination, it makes no difference what one chooses to believe since, in the final analysis, who actually gets rewarded is an arbitrary choice of God.
Furthermore we know of many more gods of many different religions, all of which have different schemes of rewards and punishments. Given that there are more than 2,500 gods known to man, and given Pascal's own assumptions that one cannot comprehend God (or gods), then it follows that, even the best-case scenario (i.e. that God exists and that one of the known Gods and theologies happen to be the correct one), the chances of making a successful choice is less than one in 2,500.
Second, Pascal's negative theology does not exclude the possibility that the true God and true theology is not one that is currently known to the world. For instance, it is possible to think of a God who rewards, say, only those who purposely step on sidewalk cracks. This sounds absurd, but given the premise that we cannot understand God, this possible theology cannot be dismissed. In such a case, the choice of what God to believe would be irrelevant as one would be rewarded on a premise
totally distinct from what one actually believes. Furthermore as many atheist philosophers have pointed out,
it is also possible to conceive of a deity who rewards intellectual honesty, a God who rewards atheists with eternal bliss simply because they dared to follow where the evidence leads—that given the available evidence, no God exists! Finally we should also note that given Pascal's premise, it is possible to conceive of a God who is evil and who punishes the good and rewards the evil.
Thus Pascal's call for us not to consider the evidence but to simply believe on prudential grounds fails. As the atheist philosopher, J.L. Mackie wrote:
Once the full range of such possibilities is taken into account, Pascal's argument from comparative expectations falls to the ground. The cultivation of non-rational belief is not even practically reasonable.
In the intellectual side of things: on the basis of what we now know about the origins of many religions, especially Christianity in our immediate case, far from being inconclusive, shows that the major teachings and claims of Christianity are false. These parts show that one of the main assumptions of Pascal's wager, that we cannot know the truth of falsity or religious claims and are thus forced to make a wager, is false.
On the moral side of things: some believers have tried to argue that Christians lead healthier lives than non-Christians, but the studies cited have been shown to be seriously flawed. Furthermore it is debatable whether Christianity actually makes a person moral. History seems to tell us otherwise. Many of the popes throughout history had been morally deficient human beings; so too were many of the church fathers, Protestant reformers and some modern evangelical preachers. For they preached intolerance and hate and sometimes actively encouraged the torture and murders of innocent people. Indeed recent sociological studies have shown that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and morality.
The world today, perhaps more than ever, is in need of our undivided, moral and rational, attention. The problems of the world, both natural and man-made are many: famine, floods, the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole and the irreversible extinction of countless species of plants and animals. The only chance the world has is for humankind to understand that this world is all we have, there is no other, no afterlife. Only we can solve the world's problems. The solutions for the problems of the world and for life in general are not to be found in Christianity. Christianity, in fact, is part of the problem.
On both intellectual and moral grounds the only course for a person to take is the rejection of Pascal's wager.
For another approach, we could invert the Pascal argument, as some had done, in order to expose its inadequacy better:
You have only one life to live.
Do you want to get to the end, having wasted it in the vain worship of nothingness? Better to live free and to love the life you have, rather than prostrating yourself in hopes for a better one later.
Pascal makes his assumptions based on possible rewards, those of eternal salvation and evading the depths of hell. But that’s betting with credit. Instead of risking the afterlife, we are actually risking our life, which we already know we possess, by using it in capitulation to false and harmful creeds, myths, and moralities. He seems to think that all that matters in his Wager is the stakes of your winning, and writes off what you’ve lost as ineffectual.
I do not consider the waste of my life, the devotion of it to a lie, as nothing.
The stakes in question Pascal would cite as finite and therefore unworthy to be bet against the potential infinite rewards of the afterlife. But since what we know is that we have life, and afterlife is merely a minuscule potential, you’re betting dollars to Monopoly money. Besides which, if one life is truly and ultimately all we have, then it is literally all we have to bet with, making it materially, measurably, finite, but worth everything imaginable–worth infinite amounts.
I’d rather spend my last ten dollars on dinner than a lottery ticket. Especially in a universe where there is no convincing evidence to say anyone wins the lottery.
Lastly, science has made so much strides now that Pascal would have been surprised to know what modern humans have already achieved in understanding major facets of reality. In fact I feel that I have already digressed by the using the above arguments: as, essentially, the death-knell of religions comes from three fronts:
- The most recent findings confirming that quantum fluctuations are the foundation of Inflation and Big Bang Theory: that all the matter and energy in the universe from the smallest to the largest structures (planetary systems, galaxies, supergalaxies, the cosmic filaments all evidenced in the cosmic microwave radiation background) are generated by spacetime itself, essentially eliminating the need for a supernatural agent in the existence of the universe.
- The advances in evolution theory and biological sciences: the fossil evidence discounting any creation myth (billions of years of life origin versus 6,000 years or so in the Christian version, for example), the observed emergence of life from primordial soups and now hydrothermal "chemical gardens," the gained capability of humans to produce new life forms itself through CRISP-R (that gene editing tool), the real-time observation of evolution in action, among many others.
- The insight that many religions share the same astronomy-born mythologies and that there is hardly any religion in the world that is not based on some allegorical codification of easily understood natural phenomena.
These three last arguments alone seal the deal for me to consider any further validity for Pascal's Wager.
