Pascal's Wager and My Take on Religion and Morality

The existence of a philosophical argument known as Pascal's wager came to my attention about 20 odd years ago when a Christian colleague was addressing a group of Ukrainian young people in an English Club. These are semi-formal groups who gather to practice their English.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and physicist. Pascal's wager posits that human beings wager with their lives that God either exists or does not. You can read all to gory details here in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager  

My colleague explained it this way. As we cannot prove that God exists or does not exist (though there are still some idiots arguing about it) then we should live as though he exists. If we are right, we go to Heaven, and if we are wrong, we lose nothing. If we live as though God does not exist, and we are right we lose nothing, and if we are wrong, we go to Hell. 

I tucked that away in the back of my mind and mulled it over for a lot of years. It felt to simplistic and too much like threatening people into believing in something they may not necessarily embrace.

It finally dawned on me that whether God exists or not, has no bearing on how I live my life. Religion draws its morality from people, not the other way around. Atheists and agnostics are no less moral than religious and in too many cases much more so. We do not have far to look today to find a myriad of examples of believers of all stripes acting in ways highly inconsistent with the teachings of their professed religion. 

 Plato took a run at it 2000 years ago, arguing that if the gods approve of some actions it must be because those actions are good, in which case it cannot be the gods' approval that makes them good. More recently, Albert Einstein wrote in 1930 that "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death."

This article puts it rather nicely. Religion does not determine your morality.

Many Christians don’t believe in magic, but even the ones who do, don’t think they should kill those who use it, even though one could interpret passages in the Bible to be suggesting exactly that. . .

There is a moral behaviour advocated by the Bible that gets rejected by most people. Why? Because they think it’s morally wrong.

They ignore that part of the moral teachings of the Bible. Instead, they tend to accept those moral teachings of the Bible that feel right to them. This happens all the time, and a good thing too. . .

We see that people can choose religious beliefs, churches and even whole religions based on the morality that they already have. And this is the morality that atheists have too. . .

Experimental evidence suggests that people’s opinion of what God thinks is right and wrong tracks what they believe is right and wrong, not the other way around.