What if you had absolute knowledge God existed?
What if you had absolute knowledge God did not exist?
These unanswerable questions make me think of Pascal’s Wager, a famous philosophical argument for living as if God existed. Pascal reasoned that it is clearly better to bet on God and live accordingly: if you’re right, you gain eternal Heaven and avoid eternal Hell, whereas if you’re wrong and there is no God, then all you’ve lost are some earthly pleasures and treasures. The risk greatly, one could say infinitely, exceeds the reward of betting on God.
Some say Pascal’s Wager isn’t the best foundation on which to build one’s faith, but it’s still an interesting proposition, especially and oddly enough for two opposites types, philosophizers and pragmatists.
Let’s explore the Wager by looking at it from a different angle.
Suppose after you died you learned that God did not exist, and now armed with that knowledge would be allowed to relive your life. (Use your imagination.) What would you change? Even as a believer proven wrong, I don’t think I would radically change anything. I would still want to try as hard as I could to sow love rather than hate, to strive to know the good, true, and beautiful to the best of my ability. I would try harder to do more things I considered good, and fewer things I considered bad. Now, to that you might say, “Yeah, right, who are you kidding?” O.K. Even if I were tempted to give myself over to unbridled greed, lust, gluttony, or whatever, knowing there were no eternal consequences — I would still be under no compulsion to actually do so. I would still be free to choose.
Now consider the ramifications of everyone having this opportunity. What if everyone had absolute knowledge of God’s nonexistence and all or a great majority relived their lives by giving themselves over to ungodly impulses? What would things be like if everyone was secure in the path of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die?” In that case, anyone familiar with human nature would realize that with no eternal consequences and when anything goes, the world would be on fire, figuratively and probably literally. The world would be Twitter Incarnate. No thank you.
Now let’s consider the opposite situation. Suppose that after you died you learned that God did in fact exist, and with that knowledge you would be allowed to relive your life. In this case, a person who had lived an ungodly life would be virtually compelled to live differently — radically differently. There would be shock, shame, fear, regret, begging for forgiveness, and finally, repentance. There would be no question about it, no grey area at all.
And expanding the idea to imagine all people having this opportunity to live again with absolute knowledge of God’s existence, we can envision nothing other than a world in which love and harmony and achievement flower to an extent far surpassing anything in recorded history.
Now, these thoughts give rise to a further consideration. Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible things about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Indeed, the universe is governed by laws we can observe, measure, and predict the physical effects of. All the billions of pieces, from subatomic particles to distant galaxies, fit precisely together in a harmony and balance and beauty of perhaps infinite magnitude. Assuming the world was such that man absolutely knew that God did not exist and all people gave themselves over to ungodly living, we get Twitter Incarnate — which is total disharmony, imbalance, and ugliness, a state of affairs fully opposed to the laws of the universe.
Reflection
As things stand in the real world, we have some who bet on God on and others who bet on themselves. Which bet aligns with the natural order of things?
As things stand in the real world, we see humankind producing great good and great evil. Which side of the bet is more likely to produce good?
