This Friday’s ‘Guest writer’ is David Jackson:
Betting for Christians and Atheists
Do you ever think that in fact you are gambling with your life? If you are a Christian, then you are staking your whole existence on the truth of the Good News of Jesus. You are depending on the hope that when you die, death is not the end. Your trust is placed in the promise of Jesus that he has gone to prepare a place for you in heaven and that, after he has judged the life that you have lived in this world, he will receive you into the next world to enjoy the presence of God for ever. You may not consciously think about it all the time (or even very much at all), but in effect you are betting your entire life on the goodness of God.
Atheists, of course, are gambling with their lives too. They are staking everything on the belief that there is no God and that, when they die, there is nothing to follow… just nothingness, non-existence: no judgment, no heaven, no hell. The aim of this life should therefore be to achieve as much fulfilment and satisfaction as possible, in whatever ways are open to each individual, because that is all that there will ever be… and if some aspects of their behaviour sometimes cause them qualms of conscience, those feelings can be suppressed, because death is the absolute end.
Let’s think a little more about these two betting options. Let’s imagine that one of them is wrong. What happens if the Christian is wrong? Well, nothing happens. Death is the end. The Christian does not exist any more. He or she does not know that they have been wrong all the time. They do not know anything after death. Nobody knows anything. There are no consequences. Now what happens if the atheist is wrong? The most horrendous consequences happen. The atheist discovers, to his or her absolute horror, that they have been wrong right through life, and that it’s too late to do anything about it. God cannot be escaped. There is a judgment and there is a heaven and a hell.
Now, purely from a practical human point of view, if you’re going to gamble with your life, is it not common sense to choose the option that has no horrendous results? Why not ask your atheist friends?
Something like this argument has been used by various people in the past, but in particular it was developed by a man called Blaise Pascal, almost four hundred years ago. He was a gifted mathematician, scientist and inventor (in fact he invented the very first calculating machine), and this argument about gambling with your life is known as Pascal’s Wager. From the Christian viewpoint it has one failing: it is not exclusively Christian. The same argument can be used by any religion that believes in an afterlife. But Pascal was convinced that if people were serious enough to be moved by his argument, then they would also be serious enough to think deeply about Christianity in comparison with other religions and would come to see that the Good News of Jesus was far superior to any other message.
In conclusion, I’d like to mention a present-day pastor, John Burke, who presents us with evidence for conscious life after death. He’s written a book, Imagine Heaven, in which he reports many out-of-the-body experiences of people who have been declared clinically dead (no heart or brain activity discernible) and who have been resuscitated by medical teams. He also has six videos available on Youtube in which he interviews some of these people (Imagine Heaven: Heaven Encounters: John Burke). You may wish to retain some scepticism and not just accept everything that another Christian affirms to be true, but the testimonies on Youtube are interesting and intriguing as evidence for the existence of mind/soul independent of the physical body.