Bell was an adjunct teacher at Azuza Pacific University and Fuller Seminary. His contract was not renewed this semester after the project started, and along with the suspension of a project he had undertaken with another church, this caused him to conclude on his blog that “Those who “come out” as atheist face serious consequences in our society.” Of course, most of those people aren’t working for institutions that use Christian faith as an explicit, contractual condition of employment.

Christian pastor Ryan Bell was all over the media this week for a project he has just undertaken: spending a year without God. Without having lost his belief in God, Bell wants to explore atheism as an alternative faith system in order to see what conclusions he comes to at the end. Will he return to faith? Will he become an atheist? Or will he remain what he clearly now is: an agnostic (although he doesn’t use that language).

Bell’s project reveals a fascinating set of assumptions about faith, religion, and doubt. It is reminiscent of one of the most famous experiments in living with God: the 17^th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal’s wager.

Pascal, whose mathematical work was in probability theory, considered the pros and cons of faith in God whose existence by its very nature cannot be proven. So there are no final rational reasons for believing or not believing in God. Instead, I have to bet—with my life—on whether God exists or not. If God exists, and I fail to believe in God, I will experience eternal damnation—about the most significant downside imaginable. If I believe in God, and turn out to be right, salvation and eternal bliss are mine. But if my belief turns out to be wrong – God doesn’t exist—what will I have lost? Not much, in comparison to the risks of not believing in a God who is real.

Therefore, Pascal concluded, one should live “as if”—as if God is real, which does not mean intellectual assent to the proposition “God exists” but rather participation in all the practices of Christianity:

Read More [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]