Pascal's Wager (14 page)

“Very funny.”

“He felt that there were gods who were immortal, but that we as humans are not.”

“Hence, no soul that transcends death.”

“Right. Now, the New Age movement—you know what I'm referring to?”

“Uh, yes,” I said dryly. “I know exactly what you're talking about.”

“The New Age belief is that there is a spiritual energy but that it is not necessarily God. Or they're pantheists and think
everything
is God.”

“Yeah, God hangs out in crystals, incense, earrings—”

“Earrings?”

“Never mind. You had to be there. I just know everything is ‘incredible' to them.”

“And everything is ‘wretched' to you.”

“At the moment, yes. That seems a lot more realistic to me.”

“The more common belief is that
either
there's no spiritual principle and everything can be reduced to the material and there is absolutely no God—
or
there is a spiritual principle and because of that, there is a God who infuses us with the immaterial.”

I gave him an incredulous smirk.

“What's that look for?” he said.

“For laying your little trap.”

“If I'm trying to trap you I'm doing it unconsciously—I swear it.” Sam put both hands up in a gesture of innocence.

“I don't believe that,” I said. “You tell me all this stuff in the guise of philosophy, and then you cop out by informing me that philosophy doesn't know any more than you do.”

“It's not a cop-out,” Sam said. “My belief goes beyond philosophy. I don't just believe in
a
god or
an
energy. I believe in a specific God—as incarnate in Jesus Christ—who actually intervenes in the world.”

“Great. Can you get Him to do a little intervening on my mother's behalf?”

He smiled at me slyly. “We're making progress.”

“How do you figure?”

“You just asked me to go to God for you. Hence, there is some degree of belief in you.”

“It was a joke!” My voice had gone from bitter to sour. It was probably time to end this conversation, but I didn't. If I dropped out now, he'd think he'd won, and I suddenly couldn't stand the thought of that.

I stopped in the middle of the path. He stopped, too, still breathing hard. I had to shade my eyes from the sun with my hand to see him silhouetted.

“Let me ask you this,” I said, “and don't get offended. How can a well-educated man possibly buy into a belief system that has no basis except in myth?”

“You're referring to the stories in the Bible.”

“Isn't that where your credo is?”

“It is. But I didn't just read the Bible and decide I believed. I've lived what I believe and so it seems reasonable to me
to
believe it.”

“And I'm living what I believe and that seems reasonable to me. Aren't we at an impasse, then?”

“No, because right now you're struggling with a question your belief system can't answer.”

“And yours can?”

“As far as I'm concerned, it can. My own experience living my beliefs has taught me the answer to your question. Your mother has a soul that is still alive in her. That's my answer, based not on my education in philosophy, but on my education in life.”

I didn't answer. I suddenly felt heavy.

“You okay?” Sam said.

“No,” I said. “I'm not. If I go with what I honestly believe, then I have to think my mother is totally gone. She can't think straight anymore, she can't talk, she can barely feed herself—so she's gone. The essence of her has disappeared.”

He didn't say anything, which was fine. I wasn't really talking to him anyway.

“I thought that would make my decision easy,” I said. “Once I knew whether there was anything really left of her, I would know whether to keep beating my head against a brick wall and keep her at home, or to put her in a nursing home and let people who know what they're doing take care of her until her body dies, too.”

“But it's
not
easy for you, even now,” Sam said.

“No. Imagine that. I do know that there's no point in fooling myself any longer. It's clear-cut. It's simple. But I—”

“It's only clear-cut from the standpoint of your belief system.”

I put a hand up. “That's against the rules.”

“It's not against the rules for me to tell you not to give it up yet. You haven't explored all the angles. Look at it as a mathematical theory. You wouldn't consider it disproven just by looking at it from one point of view, would you?”

“What angles?” I said.

He looked me in the face as if he wasn't going to stop until he saw whatever it was he was looking for. “What?” I said.

“This is huge,” he said. “It affects your whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal. You sure you want to continue this discussion tonight?”

“No, I don't,” I said. “But I really don't have much choice. Last night, my mother tried to climb out the second-story window. Next thing you know she'll be swinging from the chandelier. I either have to put her in an assisted-living facility or put my life on hold until—who knows when.”

“You want some advice—not philosophical, not religious—just an objective observation?”

“Sure,” I said. “Go for it.”

“You're seeing it in black-and-white, and there's a lot of gray area here.” He grinned. “I've got gray areas I haven't even used yet. Look, there's a whole lot more we can talk through that might get you where you want to be. Meanwhile, don't jump ship
one way or the other. Just stay put while you explore the rest of your options.”

I hated to admit it, but that actually made sense. Why hadn't I thought of it? Probably because I was strung out on coffee and sleep deprivation, I told myself. I was in fact so wearied and muddled that I couldn't even think of a way to make Sam think he hadn't won the entire round.

“I'll think about it,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “And now let's think about something to drink.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I've got water in the car. But we can talk again—once I get my head straight.”

“Sure. You say when. I'll say where.”

“Why do you get to say where?” I said.

“Because I'm one for one,” he said. “We just got through an entire conversation without drawing our weapons. I'm on a roll.”

“I'll call you,” I said.

He didn't push it. In fact, he walked me to the car in soft silence and patted the roof of the Miata as I slipped inside.

“Take care,” he said. “I'm going to go soak in a whirlpool, rub on some Ben-Gay—”

“Wimp,” I said.

He pretended to act wounded and grinned as I drove off. In the rearview mirror I could see his long, olive-skinned legs gleaming in the golden half-light.

I forced myself to stop looking.

I
took Sam's advice—grudgingly—and called McDonald's office and asked for a different social worker who could list my options for me. They referred me to a Paige Hill, but she was on vacation and couldn't see me for two weeks. Maybe that was good, I decided. It would give me time to “explore the angles.”

So I met with Sam several more times—purely for that reason. And he followed the ground rules nicely, both the spoken and the unspoken ones. We carried on our discussions in some fairly bizarre venues—while throwing darts at the Rose and Crown, while eating peanuts and tossing the shells on the floor at Antonio's Nut House, and after running each other into the ground up on the Loop and then dialoguing over Gatorade. In spite of all the distractions, I was determined to keep the conversations academic.

One afternoon at the Rose and Crown—a student hangout in Palo Alto—I pushed it until we established the fact what we were actually doing was searching for truth. He insisted that we first had to define truth. His classes, I thought, must be a real snore.

I played along and defined truth as “life's inward reality.” It was about as philosophical as I could get and still not stray too far from being rational about the whole thing.

Sam defined it as “God.”

I wanted us both to continue to refer to it as truth, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do that, so I had to compromise.
That only gave me the motivation to beat him in darts that afternoon.

At our next off-the-wall meeting, he flew a kite out on the Oval while I watched. I asked pointedly how we were going to
get
to the truth. Maybe he had time to just toss it around between picnics, but I didn't.

“So you're asking what our guide is,” Sam said.

“Yeah,” I said. “In my view, it's science.”

“It's faith,” he said. “Have I ever told you about my friend Pascal?”

“Who?” I said innocently. “Is he on faculty?”

He looked intently at his kite. “I've got to give this some more string. Yes! See that thing bobbing and weaving up there? Check it out!”

Only because I knew he wouldn't let it go until I did, I glanced up at the sky. The red-and-white fish-shaped kite was indeed “bobbing and weaving,” as if it were dodging a barrage of something. I decided I knew how it felt.

“Where was I?” he said.

“Your friend Pasquale,” I said, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Blaise Pascal. Seventeenth-century mathematician.”

“Right. The guy who bases his belief on flipping a coin,” I said. “That's very mathematical. Although what can you expect from someone with a name like Blaze?”

“B-l-a-i-s-e.”

“Blaze,” I said. I sat down on the grass and leaned back on my elbows so I could look up without getting a crick in my neck. Sam looked away from the kite, his face lit up as if he'd just had a scathingly brilliant idea. I groaned inwardly.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Come to my nine o'clock class tomorrow morning. We'll be discussing Pascal.”

“You want
me
to sit in on your class? Will I be able to stay awake?”

He grinned. “Count on it.”

I slipped into the back of the room in building 100 the next morning, cardboard coffee cup in hand and a thousand questions in my head, not the least of which was,
What in the world am I doing here?

Sam barely nodded to me when he strode in, his eyes already on fire. The students settled down around the big conference table, most of them looking at him expectantly. One guy still had his head in a book and was gnawing on a fingernail, but when he found Sam cocking an eyebrow at him, he slammed it shut and gave Sam a sheepish grin.

“I trust you're just reviewing, Mr. Evans,” Sam said.

“Of course,” the kid said.

I was sure, though, that he turned a shade or two paler.
Huh
, I thought,
so Blaze is as much of a taskmaster as I am
.

“All right,” Sam said, when he'd checked the roll. He actually checked the roll? Maybe he was
more
of a taskmaster. “Let's pick up where we left off yesterday. Pascal said faith is the one sure guide to reality. Any rebuttals?”

A boy's hand shot up. “Doesn't sound like much of a mathematician to me,” he said.
“Science
is the one sure guide to reality.”

You go, kid
, I thought.

“But Pascal said science is man's quest for power, not truth. Any response?”

A girl's hand went up this time. I was getting the impression that they knew better than
not
to have a response.

“What about Descartes, though?” she said. “I think, therefore I am.'”

“Excellent!” Sam said. He leaned across the table. “But Pascal said, ‘I look for God, therefore I have found him.' So did Pascal prove that there is a God?”

Yeah, that was what I wanted to know. I leaned forward a little myself.

“Yes?” one girl said.

“Is that an answer or a question, Miss Robbins?”

The girl grinned. “It's an ‘I don't know.'”

“Good. An I-don't-know is always preferable to a guess. No, Pascal did
not
prove that there is a God—not proof the way you see it. What did he say?”

No hands went up. Sam leaned toward “Mr. Evans” like a large praying mantis. I cringed for the kid. “Mr. Evans?”

“Uh—” Evans grinned. “I don't know?”

“Ah, but you should know, Mr. Evans.” He made a buzzing sound. “Thanks for playing. What did Pascal say?”

Miss Robbins raised a timid finger. “He said it's the heart that's aware of God.”

“Yes! Correct! That's what faith is: God perceived intuitively by the heart, not by reason. Hence, if a person can no longer reason—or at least express reasoning—that doesn't mean he or she is not still perceiving.”

He didn't look at me, but I could see the glow in his eyes. He was talking to me. I talked back, under my breath. I
can tell you this much—my mother isn't looking for God
.

“Let me quote some Pascal for you,” Sam said to the class. “‘There is nothing which is so much in conformity with reason as the rejection of reason. The very reason on which man prides himself leads him to conclude that there are an infinite number of things beyond it.'”

Still another hand went up.

“Mr. Davis.”

“Can you give us an example?”

“Death.” He watched Mr. Davis' expression. “You don't buy that?”

“Well, what could be more measurable than death? You stop breathing. Your heartbeat flatlines. Your brain waves stop—”

“But why do we die?”

“Because the parts wear out. Because if no one died, it would get a little crowded.”

Sam leaned back, hands behind his head. “If you had a terminal disease, Mr. Davis, would you be doing everything you could to recover—go into remission?”

“Of course.”

“Good answer!” Sam narrowed his eyes at Davis. “But why?”

“Because no one wants to die.”

“Why?”

“Because death is the unknown. We don't like the unknown.”

“You mean, reason hasn't figured it out yet?”

“No.”

“Then death is beyond reason.”

Miss Robbins gave a groan. “Could you go over that again?” she said.

Sam grinned at her. “Are we moving a little too fast for you, Miss Robbins? Let me just say this: Pascal said reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things that are beyond it. And if natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things?”

“Supernatural—as in the spirit world?” Davis said.

“The spirit world, the afterlife, the soul,” Sam said. And this time he did sneak a glance at me.

“So, Dr. Bakalis,” said a young man who up until that point had been quiet.

“Mr. Francis. I wondered when we'd hear from you.”

There was a bit of eye-rolling and exchanged glances among the students.

“So,” Mr. Francis said, “Pascal didn't try to give reasons to believe there's a God. He was just trying to make it reasonable.”

“And is it?”

“It's reasonable…but I don't believe it.”

Sam leaned so far across the table this time that I thought he was going to jump up onto it. “Yes, but, Mr. Francis, the more reasonable it becomes, the less reasonable it is
not
to believe it.” And then he did practically mount the tabletop. He was like an
excited little kid who's going to tell you the amazing thing that happened on the way to the playground. “If there is a God, He's infinitely beyond our comprehension. So who can condemn any believer for not being able to give rational grounds for His belief?”

He looked around the table. Several hands shot up.

“Mr. Evans.”

“I can,” Evans said, “because I'm a skeptic. A true skeptic.”

“There's no such thing. Tell me, Mr. Evans, do you doubt everything?”

“Not everything—”

“Do you doubt whether you're awake?”

“No.”

He reached over and lightly pinched the young man's arm. “Do you doubt whether you're being pinched?”

“No!”

He wrapped his fingers around Evans' wrist. “Do you doubt that I'm touching you?”

Evans shook his head.

“If you really doubted everything,” Sam said, “you'd go stark raving bonkers. You would doubt whether you were doubting, doubt whether you exist. A perfectly genuine skeptic has never existed.”

Hands went up all over the place. It was all I could do not to raise mine.

“What about Nietzsche and Sartre?” one of the girls said.

Yeah! How about it, Sam?

“Ah, that whole crowd,” Sam said. “I think Nietzsche and Sartre have driven more skeptics screaming into the arms of God than the Billy Graham Crusade. If you're going to call yourself a skeptic, perhaps you should qualify your definition. Is that not what we do in philosophy?”

He let them think about it for a minute.

Mr. Francis raised his hand again. “I consider myself a skeptic
to some degree,” he said. “I don't just accept everything at face value.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, I question whether people who believe in God possess the truth.”

“You're right. That's the whole point. The truth isn't in us believers.”

“It's in God. Is that what you're saying?”

Sam nodded. “As a believer, that's what I'm saying. The question before us is, ‘What did Pascal say?'” He pointed at Evans. “Mr. Evans?”

Come on, Evans, you can do it
.

But Evans had to shake his head.

“We know what Mr. Evans is going to be doing before our next class,” Sam said. He was grinning, but the kid squirmed.

Huh. I'd been wrong about Sam's classes. This one at least was far from tranquilizing.

They went on to discuss the fact that Pascal wanted Enlightenment thinkers to get away from science, calculation, and problem solving at times and get back to wisdom, understanding, and exploring mysteries. Nobody, Sam said, could know God through pure reason.

That pretty much left me out, then.

Sam ended the class with an assignment: “A belief in God has to come from something not simply human. That's where Pascal's famous wager comes in. Study that for tomorrow—eh, Mr. Evans?”

After the class had filed out, some of the students stopping to banter with Sam before they left, Sam came over to me and sat on the edge of the table.

“Did you get that assignment?” he said, eyes twinkling behind his glasses.

“Study the wager,” I said.

“Wrong!
Your
assignment is to
take
the wager.”

I shrugged. “You flip the coin. Heads says there's God. Tails says there's not. I pick tails.”

He cocked his head at me. “Would you, though, if you considered it reasonably?”

“What's to reason? The odds are fifiy-fifiy. Of course, that changes with the number of times you flip—”

“There's only going to be one flip. Suppose you pick heads and you live as if there was a God—if it actually comes up heads, you've won. Suppose you pick heads and you live as if there was a God—if it comes up tails, you haven't lost a thing. But suppose you pick tails, you will either win or lose.”

“Fine. I'll admit it's reasonable, but not reasonable enough for me to believe it. I'm just being rational here.”

“Nah. You're being irrational.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Reason is rational. Fear is a passion.”

I shook my head at him. “How is it that you can infuriate me? One minute I'm thinking you're an amazing teacher and the next I want to wring your neck.”

“Okay, forget the wager for the moment,” Sam said, laughing through his words. “You up for some experiments? Purely scientific, of course.”