Transcription
Mormon gamble, AAM's razor versus Pascal's wager, or why would anyone believe in God today?
In recent years, a big change has happened in the United States. A lot of people have left Christian churches. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center last year shows that since 2007, the percentage of American adults who identify as Christian has dropped 16 points, while those unaffiliated with the religion has doubled to 29%. All other religions have stayed about the same, about 7% of the population. And to me, this seems huge.
Growing up, I don't ever remember knowing an atheist. All my friends went to church. All my family went to church. And it felt like just as much of our national culture as football and apple pie. In our little town of 3,000 people, there were somewhere around 30 churches. It wasn't a question of whether or not you were a Christian. It was simply a question of which Christian church you went to.
But now, Americans are increasingly becoming disenchanted and disaffiliated with religion, and I'm one of them. A year and a month ago, I left the LDS church that I'd attended all my life. It was a difficult and a painful decision. It meant breaking with my family, my friends, almost everyone I'd ever been close to. But more importantly to me, it meant breaking with how I understood God, the universe, and the purpose of my life.
While I was in the LDS church, everything was easy. The path to heaven was laid out clearly before me like a runway. All I had to do was pay my tithing, follow the prophet, and stay on the covenant path, and I was guaranteed to go to heaven. I could coast through life knowing that I was one of the lucky ones born into the covenant and worthy of a temple recommend.
But as I started to see behind the curtain of the careful facade of the LDS church and realize how much of it was based on deception and error, my safe little eternal world came crumbling down. And I was left with a whole bunch of broken pieces without knowing if any of them were true anymore. It was really a dark and scary time for me.
Because I'm a person who values authenticity and truth above all else, I began to rebuild what I believed about life and eternity from the very bottom. Starting first with really questioning whether God is real. I'd borne my testimony countless times in church and on my mission that I knew he existed. But did I really know?
A beloved person I'm close to who is agnostic had told me about AAM's razor that the simplest explanation that accounts for the facts is usually the best and that if we applied this razor to the question of the existence of God and the creation of the universe it suggests there is no divine creator. I thought about that for a long time. I had to admit I didn't have any firsthand concrete evidence of the existence of God. But I also didn't have any exist any evidence that he didn't exist and I didn't want to make a mistake. I mean, what if I didn't believe in God because I had no proof? And then it turned out he was real after all.
The stakes according to the scriptures were pretty high. For example, the Book of Mormon says things like, "No man can be saved according to the words of Christ, say they shall have faith in his name, and in me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name, and there shall be no other name given, nor any other way, nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men, only in and through the name of Christ." These scriptures seem pretty clear and pretty serious. The only way to be saved was to believe in Christ.
And so I found myself in a dilemma. Should I walk away from faith like so many others do after they leave the LDS church? Or should I cling to a belief in God even after realizing that everyone who had ever taught me about him was lying? Both ways seemed at once uncertain and hard.
This was a question that so many people throughout time have wrestled with, including the famous French mathematician Blaise Pascal. In 1670, during his struggles between faith and unbelief, he came up with what's known today as Pascal's wager. It says, regarding a belief in God, quote, "If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing." Wager then without hesitation that he is. Or in other words, if you believe in God and he exists, you gain everything. See ether above. If you believe in God and he doesn't exist, you lose little or nothing. You just die. If you don't believe and he does exist, you lose everything. See Moroni above. And if you don't believe and he doesn't exist, again, you gain little or nothing. You just die.
Considering these options that either way I can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, I have decided to choose each day to believe in God. Not that I can say I'm more correct than my agnostic friend or the 20-some percent of Americans who no longer have faith in any kind of spirituality. They might be right after all. And maybe my decision to have faith will be in vain. But what if it isn't? What if the ending of this confusing and sometimes difficult life will actually be well glorious?
In Alma 32, Alma meets with a group of poor outcast Zorites on a hill. They had lost everything too. Their church, their community, and their dignity. They're forced by their circumstances to be humble. And at that pivotal moment, Alma gives them basically the same words as Blaise Pascal. What do you have to lose by testing out a faith in Christ? Why not just plant a seed and see if it grows? If it withers and dies, well, then you'll know it wasn't true, and you'll be no worse off for the attempt. But if it grows, then it can grow into hope.
I noticed something as I looked again at Alma's famous words in this chapter. "If you have faith, ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true." He doesn't say faith means to hope for things which are not seen but are true, as had always been taught. No, he says if you have faith, you will hope for those things. Choosing faith, even without proof, will bring the gift of hope. And to be honest, that's probably the greatest thing I found in this uncertain post-LDS wandering.
I don't pretend to know anything for certain, but every day I choose Pascal's wager and I believe in God despite it all, despite all the reasons not to. And that choice gives me hope.
[Music]