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Either God exists or not, those are 2 possible states of the world — you need to make a decision. Will you live your life as if God exists? Or not?

So Let’s look at the comparison

States: Christianity is true or naturalism is true (God exists/God doesn’t exist).

Strategies: commit to God or don’t commit to God. This isn’t saying force yourself to believe in God, but you can choose to seek and pursue a relationship with God. This is available to the believer and the inquiring agnostic. 

Both will engage in prayer, the intention to live morally in accord with what God wants, attend religious services, form friendships with religious believers, read and study sacred writings and discuss religious questions. No hypocrisy or dishonesty should be involved for the agnostic, their prayers can be conditional “if you’re there God, help me with X and thankyou for Y”. This individual must have a sincere openness to the possibility of God and a desire to search for him and a willingness to accept belief in God should it come. 

This type of commitment is not necessarily equivalent to faith because it does not necessarily include belief but it may very well be an important stepping stone towards faith. Not committing to God could take many forms, so here we’ll define it as the absence of commitment. 

So you’re either seeking God or not. Here’s our decision matrix

Strategy

Wager and Christianity is true

Goods:

1. Maximised your chance at eternal life
2. Bring joy to god and all others who are with him in heaven (God presents himself as a father who seeks his children)
3. Exhibited virtue of expressing gratitude to God
4. More likely to benefit from divine aid for moral; and spiritual growth
5. More likely to be aware of God’s love
6. More likely to help others in their journey to God

These are all points that could be expanded.

Wager and naturalism is true

If this view is true, yet you committed to God, have you wasted your life? According to psychological and sociological data no.

There are 3 goods you would benefit from if naturalism is true but you made a commitment to Christianity

Goods

1. Increased chance of greater life and satisfaction and happiness
2. Increased chance of longer life
3. Increased chance of exercising certain civic virtues

What evidence do we have for these three?

Increased chance of greater life and satisfaction and happiness

The Handbook of Religion and Health, 2nd edition report shows:

1. Religious participation can indirectly affect wellbeing through directly affecting other areas of life
2. Religious people are less likely to divorce and more likely to have stable families. They systematically went through 79 studies and these studies cover people with marriages as much as 28 years (so not 1 year marriages)
3. Religious people have more social contacts and greater satisfaction with their social support. 82% of 74 quantitative peer reviewed studies showed an positive relationship between religiousness and social support
4. Religious people have a higher self-esteem. 61% of 69 peer reviewed studies. Only 3% of studies showed they had lower self-esteem
5. Religious people have more optimism. 81% reported significantly positive relationships between religiousness and optimism
6. Religious people are more hopeful. 73% of the studies showed a positive relationship between religiousness and hopefulness while the rest showed no correlation
7. Religious people have a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life. 93% (42/45 studies) showed a positive relationship

Chaeryoon Lim and Robert D Putnam in a study (Religion, Social Networks and Life Satisfaction) tell us “when compared with other correlates of well-being, religion is just as or more potent than education, marital status, social activity, age, gender, and race. Other studies find that religious involvement has an effect comparable to or stronger than income.”

There’s a lot more that can be said… buy Michael Rota’s Taking Pascal’s Wager. But the jist is even if naturalism is true but you hold to God, it benefits you even if Christianity wasn’t true in the end.

Increased chance of longer life

Michael E Mcullough and others in a study Religious Involvement and Mortality: A Meta-analytic Review analysed 42 studies on the connection between religious involvement and mortality, after controlling for other variables, individuals involved in religion had a substantially higher chance of still being alive at the end of the studies. 

Increased chance of exercising certain civic virtues.

In a work by Robert D. Putnam (Harvard) and David E. Campbell (Norte Dame) called American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the data shows religious Americans tend to volunteer more, give more to charitable causes (both religious and secular), greater degrees of civic involvement.

They go on to say specifically “the statistic suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of a congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belonging that matters for the neighbourless, not religious believing”. 

Costs of this wager:

1. Lost time spent in prayer, church etc.
2. Loss of sense of control over your life
3. Disruption in your relationships
4. Give up certain pleasures outside certain contexts

So in a nutshell if you believed in God but naturalism was true

Don’t Wager and Christianity is true

Costs

1. Minimised chance at eternal life
2. Bring sadness to God and all others with him in heaven
3. Failure to express gratitude to God
4. Lower receptivity to God’s help in this life
5. Lower awareness of God’s live in this life
6. Lower chance of helping others in their journey to god
7. Regret of a misspent life
8. Increased chance of making a god substitute (as you’ll be looking for ultimate satisfaction in something/one else increasing pressure on them

Don’t Wager and Naturalism is true

Goods

1. Extra time for other activities
2. Greater sense of being in control of your life
3. Reduced disruption in your relationships
4. Retain certain pleasures

Costs

1. Increased chance of lower life satisfaction
2. Increased chance of shorter life
3. Decreased chance of exercising certain civic values

Results

Assessing the outcomes

Christianity + Wager clearly beats No wager + Christianity 

What about the other two? Wager and naturalism being true has goods and costs, as does no wager and naturalism being true. 

Wager & Christianity has the best outcomes but even if it were close, you should still choose Christianity because of the benefits. So the small gains and costs of the other views aren’t worth it.

Symbolically, it could be represented like this:

1. Christianity + Wager = £1,000,000
2. No Wager + Christianity = £0
3. Wager + Naturalism = £25
4. No Wager + Naturalism = £0

These values arn't exact, all it's trying to say is the differences when you weight them appear vast for God over no God

Would you want to risk losing £1,000,000 if these were your choices?  This is all before we evaluate the evidence for God which helps with your decision making. So starting with the wager, we can determine that Christianity is worth the risk and is the best option on the table. And you should explore it. Or at a minimum, God is worth exploring.

So this scenario God weakly dominates in this table. I would argue with the arguments and evidences for God and evidence for Christianity’s truth it becomes a strongly dominant theory.

If Christianity is true, much is to be gained, if naturalism is true, not much is gained.

Buy this book: Taking Pascal’s Wager