This concept functions to bolster group affiliation, combining threat and reward. It is like a company that offers permanent safety and support if you sign a lifetime membership, agree to promote the brand, and guarantee never to deal with competitors—but that also threatens to ruin you permanently if you break the deal. The contract would contain frightening clauses, so that the mere act of challenging company policy is branded with words like “heresy” or “apostasy,” discouraging anyone from questioning the status quo.
Such a system sits in contradiction to the spirit of fairness, grace, and justice—the striving toward a mature morality—present in religious doctrines at their best. An infinite punishment for a finite set of offences does not make sense. And the idea of punishing someone not for an act but for holding an idea, a belief, or a thought that fails to conform to a prescribed norm runs contrary to most people’s notion of a healthy society, and to the “bill of rights” ideals that many of us, religious or not, value highly.
To be fair, the version I have just described—eternal conscious torment, awarded on the basis of belief rather than conduct—is not the only conception of hell. Many theologians have recoiled from such strict doctrine and softened it. When a tradition’s own most serious thinkers find a teaching too monstrous to defend and quietly build exits from it, that is itself is informative. Yet, a great many religious people continue to understand hell in a literal, strict, belief-based, eternal version.
Pascal’s Wager
A classic argument enlisted to prop up religious belief is Pascal’s Wager. The reasoning runs roughly like this: if you believe and the religion is true, you gain Heaven and avoid Hell; if you do not believe and the religion is true, you face infinite punishment; and if the religion is false, there is little cost either way. Belief, therefore, is said to be the safest bet.
But the reasoning is invalid. First, the same logic applies to any number of mutually incompatible religions, each with its own scheme of reward and punishment—and many of them explicitly require that you renounce the others. Which religion exactly, are you meant to choose? Pascal’s own countryman Denis Diderot made the point with a shrug: an imam, he observed, “could reason just as well this way.” One could as easily invent a magical rabbit orbiting the moon who grants eternal reward, or a literal Santa Claus dispensing salvation at Christmas, or Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot drifting between Earth and Mars. The wager does not tell you which claim to believe; it merely exploits fear.
Second, it is a poor moral foundation. It reduces belief to a calculation of self-interest: believe in order to profit, or believe in order to avoid pain. Yet that motive is precisely at odds with the lofty ethical language religions themselves prefer. If a deity valued sincerity, honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity, then a strategic belief adopted out of self-interest would look shallow and hypocritical—the very opposite of devotion.
Third—and this is the objection Pascal least escapes—one cannot simply decide to believe. Belief is not a lever the will can pull on demand; I cannot make myself believe that the sky is green by being offered a reward for it, and I cannot make myself believe in a god I find unconvincing merely because the stakes are high. Pascal saw the difficulty—his imagined sceptic protests, “I am so made that I cannot believe”—and his answer was to recommend going through the motions: attend Mass, take the holy water, and habit will in time “make you believe and deaden your acuteness.” But this rescue destroys the argument it was meant to save. A belief manufactured by deliberate self-conditioning, adopted for the payoff, is exactly the hollow, strategic faith that the second objection says a sincerity-loving deity would despise. William James put it best: such a God would “take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.” The wager thus impales itself—either belief cannot be willed, and the advice is incoherent, or it can be faked, and the faking is self-defeating.
Finally, the claim that there is “no downside” to belief is plainly false. Much of this book concerns that downside: the psychological distortions, tribal loyalties, guilt, fear, dogmatism, social coercion, and political consequences that can follow from false sacred beliefs. Belief is not cost-free. It can shape an entire life, a family, a culture, a society.
Pascal’s Wager, then, is not a deep argument. It is a fear-based sales pitch dressed up as prudence.
* * *
Consider the arithmetic. On average, roughly two people die every second worldwide—about 7,200 every hour, on the order of five million a month. Only a fraction of them subscribe to any one particular belief system. So if one holds a strict doctrine of Hell tied to a strict criterion of “correct belief,” it follows that thousands of people every hour—many of whom lived gentle, kind, generous lives—are being consigned to eternal punitive suffering for failing to endorse the right doctrine, while many who behaved cruelly throughout their lives receive an infinite reward. Picture an all-powerful creator pushing more than one human being every second—many of them kindly elders who simply did not happen to hold the prescribed beliefs—into a flaming inferno.
If one genuinely believes this to be the fate of countless people, one is forced into a grim choice among three options: cultivate indifference to unimaginable suffering, accept a monstrous picture of how reality is run, or devote one’s life entirely to converting as many people as possible before they die. On this logic it would make little sense to spend a life rescuing people on the merely earthly scale—as a firefighter, a physician, a therapist, a humanitarian—since any such work would be trivial compared to the infinite catastrophe of eternal damnation. Proselytizing would be the only fully rational form of altruism; and if one wished to “save the most people efficiently,” one would target those with the shortest life expectancy, whose eternal suffering is nearest. So it would make sense to devote one’s life to proselytizing in nursing homes. Should one’s own child or friend stray from the correct religious belief, it would be reasonable—within this system—to regard it as the most horrifying contingency imaginable, infinitely worse than losing them to accident, assault, or disease, since the loss would be permanent. The telling fact is that almost no one, including the devout, actually lives this way. The doctrine, held with full conviction, would license a fanaticism that the overwhelming majority of believers visibly do not practice—which suggests that, at some level, very few truly hold it.
This is one reason the Heaven-and-Hell framework is so morally destabilizing. It rewards fear, coercion, and tribal control—it is the same machinery of “turn or burn” I described in an earlier chapter, now generalized to the whole of humanity—while quietly undermining the best of what religion also teaches: compassion, humility, grace, and love.
There is a sentiment I find ethically beautiful, and it belongs not to Mother Teresa, to whom it is sometimes loosely attributed, but in its purest form to a figure far older. In eighth-century Basra, the Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya was said to have walked the streets carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. Asked what she was doing, she replied that she meant to set fire to Paradise and pour water on Hell, so that the two veils would fall away and people would love God for God’s own sake—neither from hope of reward nor from fear of punishment. Her famous prayer makes the same point: “O God, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship You for Your own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.” It is the exact inversion of Pascal’s calculation, and the exact rebuke to the whole economy of threat and reward this chapter has described.
The same impulse surfaces across traditions: in Moses, who begs God to blot him out of the book of life rather than let his people be destroyed; in Paul, who could wish himself “accursed and cut off from Christ” for the sake of his kin; in the Buddhist bodhisattva, who forgoes his own liberation until every last suffering being is freed. To enjoy eternal bliss in full knowledge that others endure eternal torment would require a catastrophic failure of empathy; the impulse to forsake one’s own salvation and sit with the damned is, by contrast, a genuine transcendence of character. And note what kind of empathy it is. It is not the warm, partial sympathy that flows most easily toward those near to us and like us—the biased spotlight I questioned earlier in this book—but its opposite: a deliberate, reasoned compassion extended to the most distant and least deserving beings imaginable, the damned themselves. That is the form worth cultivating. It carries a final irony: the highest conceivable morality—an unconditional, self-sacrificial compassion—turns out to demand the rejection of the traditional boundaries of divine justice altogether.
References
Attar, F. al-D. (2009). Memorial
of God’s friends: Lives and sayings of Sufis (P. Losensky, Trans.). Paulist
Press. (Original work composed c. 1230)
— The
principal early hagiography of the Sufi saints and the fullest source for the
life and sayings of Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra (d. 801), including the image of
the torch and the water and her prayer rejecting worship motivated by reward or
fear. Margaret Smith’s Rabi’a the Mystic (1928) remains the standard scholarly
study.
Hart, D. B. (2019). That
all shall be saved: Heaven, hell, and universal salvation. Yale University
Press.
— A forceful
contemporary case for universal salvation by an Eastern Orthodox theologian,
arguing that eternal damnation is incompatible with the nature of God, of
persons, and of freedom. Representative of the tradition’s own recoil from the
doctrine of eternal conscious torment.
Hájek, A. (2022). Pascal’s
wager. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
(Fall 2022 ed.). Stanford University.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
— The standard
scholarly survey of the wager and its many objections, including the “many
gods” problem and the question of whether belief can be willed at all. A clear
account of why the argument, for all its historical importance to decision
theory, fails as a reason to believe.
Kvanvig, J. L. (1993). The
problem of hell. Oxford University Press.
— The leading
philosophical treatment of the moral difficulties raised by the doctrine of
hell, including the proportionality problem—how a finite life could merit
infinite punishment—and the strategies theologians use to escape it.
Lewis, C. S. (1946). The
great divorce. Geoffrey Bles.
— A
theological fantasy advancing the “free will” view of hell, in which the damned
remain by their own choice—its doors, in the book’s image, locked on the
inside. The best-known statement of the idea that hell is self-chosen rather
than imposed.
Pascal, B. (1966). Pensées
(A. J. Krailsheimer, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1670)
— The
posthumous fragments containing the wager, in a single celebrated section,
together with Pascal’s own reply to the objection that belief cannot be willed:
act as if you believed—take holy water, hear Masses—until habit produces faith.
Russell, B. (1997). Is
there a God? In J. G. Slater & P. Köllner (Eds.), The collected papers
of Bertrand Russell: Vol. 11. Last philosophical testament, 1943–68.
Routledge. (Original work written 1952)
— The essay,
commissioned but never published in its day, in which Russell introduces the
celestial teapot to illustrate that the burden of proof lies with the one
making an unfalsifiable claim, not with the doubter.
James, W. (1956). The will
to believe. In The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy.
Dover. (Original work published 1896)
— James’s
qualified defence of the right to believe, which nonetheless skewers the wager:
a faith adopted by mechanical calculation, he writes, would lack the inner soul
of faith’s reality, and a deity might well take particular pleasure in cutting
off believers of that pattern from their reward.
A note on
scriptural and primary references (handled as sources rather than formal
citations): the impulse to stand with the condemned appears in Exodus 32:32,
where Moses asks to be blotted out of God’s book rather than see his people
destroyed, and in Romans 9:3, where Paul wishes himself “accursed and cut off
from Christ” for the sake of his kindred; the parallel Buddhist ideal is the
bodhisattva vow of Mahāyāna tradition—exemplified by Kṣitigarbha—to forgo final
liberation until the hells themselves are emptied.
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