Pascal and Nietzsche: what is at stake in believing in God or not?

What the Bible says

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), a mathematician, died at thirty-nine while preparing a defence of Christianity; his notes became the Pensées. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a Lutheran pastor's son, became the faith's sharpest modern critic. They shared one conviction: everything turns on whether God is, so no one should be indifferent.

Scripture agrees. Moses, like Joshua and Elijah after him (Josh 24:15; 1 Kgs 18:21), sets two roads before Israel.

I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live

Deut 30:19

And if there is no God? The fool who "says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Ps 14:1) is not the honest doubter but one who lives as if no one will call him to account. Ecclesiastes looks at life "under the sun" alone.

Everything is futile! What does a man gain from all his labor, at which he toils under the sun?

Eccl 1:2-3

Nietzsche's madman stands here. One bright morning he carries a lantern into the marketplace, looking for God; the unbelievers laugh. He turns on them: "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?" Then the cry: "God is dead! God stays dead! And we have killed him!" Nietzsche, The Gay Science 125 This is a diagnosis, not an argument: Europe has stopped believing without grasping the cost, a world with no above or below. He throws down his lantern: he has come too early.

Paul draws the same line from the other side (1 Cor 15:19): without the resurrection, the honest motto would be:

If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

1 Cor 15:32

That is not where Paul ends. "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead" (1 Cor 15:20).

God does hide: "Truly You are a God who hides Himself" (Isa 45:15), a verse Pascal cited more than once. Yet "You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart" (Jer 29:13). When many left Jesus, Peter asked, "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life." (John 6:68)

The church's witness

Augustine's Confessions begins: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" Augustine, Confessions 1.1. Pascal sees the same creature from another side: "Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." Pascal, Pensées A vapour can kill him, yet he is nobler than the universe, for he knows that he dies. Only the Christian story of creation and fall, Pascal held, explains such greatness and misery.

Misery and death are hard to face, so we keep busy. "All the unhappiness of men comes from one thing: not knowing how to stay quietly in a room." Pascal, Pensées

The wager is for someone stuck there. Reason, Pascal grants, cannot decide whether God is, yet "you are already embarked." Wager, then, that God is: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing Pascal, Pensées. It was never offered as proof that God exists, only as a reason to start seeking, and its author, Pascal adds, knelt to pray before and after.

His own faith did not begin with a calculation. On the night of 23 November 1654 he met God, and kept the record sewn into his coat until he died: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned." Pascal, The Memorial Pascal was a Catholic with Jansenist sympathies, close to the abbey of Port-Royal; popes condemned Jansenism, an Augustinian movement that put grace first, in 1653 and 1713.

Origen, on Jesus' question about gaining the world (Matt 16:26), writes: "These two things being set before us, we must rather choose to lose the world, and gain our souls." Origen

In the original languages

The "futility" of Ecclesiastes is hebel (הֶבֶל): breath or vapour, gone as soon as it appears, like the vapour Pascal says can kill a man. Life under the sun is not evil, but it cannot be held.

Life in John 10:10 is zōē (ζωή): not bios, the span of a life, but life itself, in John the life God gives. Jesus came "that they may have life, and have it in all its fullness" (John 10:10); behind "fullness" is perissos (περισσός), overflowing. The quarrel with Nietzsche is not whether to say yes to life, but which life is fuller.

Common objections

"The wager is a gamble, not faith." Choosing God for the odds sounds like commerce, not trust. The classic objections are three: Which God? Can belief be chosen? Would God reward a calculation? Taken alone, the wager is open to all three. But Pascal never meant it to stand alone. The rest of the Pensées argues that only Christianity makes sense of human greatness and misery, so this is no bet on just any god. He granted that belief cannot be willed, and advised lessening the passions rather than adding proofs, beginning as believers did, with holy water and the Mass. Nor did he think calculation saves: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." Pascal, Pensées This heart is not mere emotion but the knowing that grasps first principles. Faith is God's gift; the wager brings a person only to the door of the God who "rewards those who earnestly seek Him" (Heb 11:6).

"Nietzsche showed that faith is weakness and resentment." His case: those who could not beat the strong in deed took an imaginary revenge, calling the strong evil and their own powerlessness humility. "The slaves' revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself turns creative and brings forth values." Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality 1.10 Hope in another world, he argued, says no to this one. He asked instead for a demanding yes: to love life as it is, suffering included, enough to will it again forever. That is self-overcoming, not indulgence. Christians should concede that a piety relishing others' downfall as judgement, or despising the body, has been real. Nietzsche loved Pascal, he wrote, as Christianity's most instructive victim; Pascal's severity with his sick body lends that some weight. But resentment waits for payback, while Jesus on the cross prayed, "Father, forgive them" (Luke 23:34). In The Antichrist Nietzsche himself found no resentment in Jesus and blamed Paul; yet Paul, too, blessed when reviled (1 Cor 4:12) and found strength in weakness: "when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor 12:10). And Pascal's Memorial cries, "Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy." Pascal, The Memorial

"We can live good lives without God." True. Many unbelievers put believers to shame, and Paul says Gentiles sometimes "do by nature what the law requires" (Rom 2:14). The question is what makes good good, and Nietzsche pressed it hardest. Of English moralists like George Eliot, who kept Christian ethics without God, he wrote: "Whoever gives up the Christian faith thereby pulls out from under his own feet the right to Christian morality." Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols That morality, he added, is anything but self-evident. Philosophers still seek grounds for morality without God, and the debate is open; see Who decides right and wrong?

Going further

Both men refuse indifference. Nietzsche said: if God is dead, follow that honestly to the end. Pascal said: if you cannot yet decide, seek; seekers who have not yet found, he wrote, are unhappy but reasonable. Jesus offers an invitation before any argument.

Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Matt 11:28

This is the rest Augustine's heart longed for. You may disagree, and that is all right: whoever asks as honestly as Nietzsche and as seriously as Pascal is already on the road.

Ask yourself: am I using diversion to put this off? If God is not, which of my values would still stand? If I refuse Christianity, is it Jesus I refuse, or Christians who lived by resentment and fear?

Read on in Does God exist? and Why can't we see God?