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One benefit of teaching introductory philosophy to undergraduates is that it lets you talk about philosophy with eager and intelligent people who do not come with predispositions formed by years of technical study. This semester, preparing for a philosophy seminar with first-year honors students at Notre Dame, I reread with fresh eyes one of philosophy’s best-known arguments for belief in God — Pascal’s wager.

The argument, made by the 17th -century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, holds that believing in God is a good bet at any odds, since the possible payoff — eternal happiness — far outweighs any costs of believing — even of believing in a God who does not exist.

Most discussions of Pascal’s wager take it as a peculiar if not perverse calculation of self-interest. As Pascal puts it: “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing.” Taken this way, the argument seems morally suspect; William James noted that those who engaged in such egotistic reasoning might be among the first that God would exclude from heaven. In considering it again, I found what I think may be a more fruitful way of developing the wager argument.

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The wager requires a choice between believing and not believing. But there are two ways of not believing. I can either deny that God exists or doubt that God exists. Discussions of the wager usually follow Pascal and lump these two together in the single option of not believing in God. They don’t distinguish denying from doubting because both are ways of not believing. The argument then is about whether believing is a better option than not believing. My formulation of the argument will focus instead on the choice between denying and doubting God.

I propose to reformulate Pascal’s wager as urging those who doubt God’s existence to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference.

Denial of God means that I simply close the door on the hope that there is something beyond the natural world; doubt may keep that door open. I say “may” because doubt can express indifference to what is doubted. I don’t know and I don’t care whether there is an even number of stars or whether there are planets made of purple rock. Indifferent doubt is the practical equivalent of denial, since both refuse to take a given belief as a viable possibility — neither sees it as what William James called a “live option.” But doubt may also be open to and even desirous of what it doubts. I may doubt that I will ever understand and appreciate Pierre Boulez’s music, but still hope that I someday will.

I propose to reformulate Pascal’s wager as urging those who doubt God’s existence to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference. This means, first, that they should hope — and therefore desire — that they might find a higher meaning and value to their existence by making contact with a beneficent power beyond the natural world. There’s no need to further specify the nature of this power in terms, say, of the teachings of a particular religion.

The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power. The next question is whether there are paths we can take that have some prospect of achieving this contact. Many people, including some of the most upright, intelligent and informed, have claimed that there are such paths. These include not just rituals and good deeds but also private spiritual exercises of prayer, meditation and even philosophical speculation. A person’s specific choices would depend on individual inclinations and capacities.

So far, then, we have good reason to expect much greater happiness if there is a beneficent power we could contact, and we know of paths that might lead to that contact. The only remaining question is whether there are negative effects of seeking God that would offset the possible (but perhaps very improbable) value of contact with God.

Unlike the traditional versions, this wager does not require believing that there is a God. So the standard drawbacks of self-deception or insincerity don’t arise. The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually. The commitment is, rather, to what I have called religious agnosticism: serious involvement with religious teachings and practices, in hope for a truth that I do not have and may never attain. Further, religious agnosticism does not mean that I renounce all claims to other knowledge. I may well have strong commitments to scientific, philosophical and ethical truths that place significant constraints on the religious approaches I find appropriate. Religious agnosticism demands only that I reject atheism, which excludes the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

Religious agnosticism may accept the ethical value of a religious way of living and even endorse religious ideas as a viable basis for understanding various aspects of human existence. But the ethical value is a matter of my own judgment, independent of religious authority. And the understanding may be only a partial illumination that does not establish the ultimate truth of the ideas that provide it, as, for example, both Dante and Proust help us understand the human condition, despite their conflicting intellectual frameworks. None of this will interfere with a commitment to intellectual honesty.

But perhaps a “serious involvement” with religion will require giving up other humanly fulfilling activities to make room for religious thought and action. Given a low likelihood of attaining a “higher form of happiness, it may make more sense to seek only the “worldly” satisfactions that are more certain, even if less profound. But we can decide for ourselves how much worldly satisfaction is worth giving up for the sake of possible greater spiritual happiness. And, it may well turn out that religious activities such as meditation and charitable works have their own significant measure of worldly satisfaction. Given all this, what basis is there for refusing the wager?

I don’t see this new wager as merely a way of nudging atheists and indifferent agnostics onto a religious path. It’s also important for those who are committed to a religious community to realize that such commitment doesn’t require believing the teachings of that community. It’s enough to see those teachings — and the practices connected with them — as a good starting point for an inquiry into their truth. We should also realize that the real truth of a religion may be quite different from its official “self-understanding” of this truth. A living religion should have room both for believers at rest with its official teachings and for nonbelievers (religious agnostics) who see these teachings as a promising beginning in their search for the truth.

I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument. It does not require belief and isn’t an attempt to trick God into sending us to heaven. It merely calls us to follow a path that has some chance of leading us to an immensely important truth.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. His new book, “What Philosophy Can Do” (W. W. Norton) offers essays, expanded from his Stone columns, on politics, science, religion, education and art.