Against Obliteration

Building against annihilation

If consciousness ends, meaning ends with it.
The end of the world would not just destroy life—it would erase the fact that anything ever mattered.

Pascal’s Wager: if Christianity is true and you reject faith, you face damnation; therefore it is rational to believe.

Atheist reply: if you believe and Christianity is false, you risk delusion on top of annihilation; better honest oblivion than comfortable delusion.

Pascal’s counter: if oblivion awaits either way, why not prefer the “delusion” that yields a meaningful life now--and, if you bet right, salvation.

Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? ... I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life. — Pascal

My move: invert the wager and follow the logic the other way--toward the world.

I’m not a Christian, though Christianity seems to be all I can think about these days. And I’m speaking plainly about what I’ve been thinking. I want one thing: for my life to mean something. And if Christianity is not true, then all the faith in the world can’t help.

Let’s assume, without intervention, 100% certain individual, collective, and universal obliteration: individual obliteration with each death, collective obliteration with the death of the species, and universal obliteration with the death of the universe. Call this Obliteration.

Standard cosmology points that way (heat death), even if details are disputed.

Obliteration hollows talk of values, morality, ethics. If nothing endures--no persons, no peoples, no memory--then words like truth, justice, integrity are just neurochemistry. Molecules. Meat. Virtue may feel better (or it may not), but without witness or continuation it has no standing beyond the moment. Obliteration is emptiness, not just in the future, but today. If no one remains to answer for truth, justice, or responsibility, these virtues flatten. They become mere moods.

Classical Christianity fully answers Obliteration by promising new creation; it did not need to answer the immanent, physical obliteration now visible to us. The modern world has opened that horizon--civilizational death, species death, solar death, and cosmic heat death--in a way the Fathers could have never comprehended.

Enter Christianity’s answer--and the modern wrinkle.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26)

“Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5)

For more than a thousand years, classical Christian theology from Augustine through Luther has said that God’s providence works through His instruments: us. Per Aquinas: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. In plain terms: grace reject nature or civic life, as some seem to imply today; it elevates it. Human work is the vessel of providence.

Let’s ask why Obliteration matters to us. We fear death, yes, but we can tolerate the idea of dying. What we truly fear is that our lives might not matter--that everything was in vain. Our hopes, our dreams, our loves and our suffering: we do not want these to have been for nothing. The threat of Obliteration makes them less than nothing: an illusion.

Christianity answers that fear by grounding meaning in a transcendent, eternal reality--each person bears cosmic significance in relation to God--and by commanding forms of life that, when practiced, increase human flourishing.

Back to Obliteration. Hell is terrible; Obliteration is universal. If we are headed for it, everyone goes. Pascal feared an eternal loss; Obliteration is that, and more.

Under Obliteration, the old quarrel--”honest oblivion” vs. “comforting delusion”--is nonsensical. If the end is absolute erasure, the question is not whether we flatter ourselves, but whether anything we care about--including honesty or avoiding delusions--matters.

What feels true now doesn’t matter if those feelings will be obliterated, all trace wiped away, without consequence.

What remains from Pascal’s Wager: if Christianity is true, you should believe, because only then can you avoid both Hell and annihilation.

The Second Wager says: act as if Obliteration can be conquered--by building a world that outlast us.

Now, Christianity asks a lot: creation, revelation, miracle, resurrection, judgment, a love that outlives death. I don’t hold those beliefs; I do understand why, if they’re true, meaning is permanently secured. If they are true, that settles the question.

Obliteration poses two basic problems: can humanity be saved, and can the universe be saved?

We are not bargaining for personal immortality; we are asking whether our shared life can bear significance beyond our lifespans--and, if possible, across epochs.

We are asking a similar question as Christians do: can some future life help safeguard the meaning of our own?

So, can we save humanity? Yes: make humans interplanetary--then interstellar.

The universe is harder: whether heat death is inescapable is unsettled, and whether any finite civilization could alter cosmic boundary conditions is unknown. That uncertainty is a reason to fund the long‑shot physics that could lengthen the window of meaning.

If Christianity is true and we work, we gain salvation and steward creation. If it is true and we refuse to work, souls may be saved but history is wasted. If Christianity is false and we work, we still preserve meaning for as long as the cosmos allows. If it is false and we refuse to work, Obliteration erases everything. In every case, working is the rational bet.

This does not contradict Pascal’s Wager; it completes it. Pascal’s Wager asks for our transcendent salvation. The Second Wager asks for our commitment to history.

A merely therapeutic half‑Christianity misses the point: if everything is erased, “helpful” is just a way to manage our moods.

Pascal’s wager still holds: avoiding Hell is a decisive reason to believe if Christianity is true.

So follow the logic into the world.

In short, the Second Wager: act as if Obliteration can be resisted--not to usurp heaven, but to preserve the field on which souls are born, love, and choose. The first wager refuses Hell by faith; the second refuses Nothing by work. They are not the same, but they are not enemies.

The danger is Babel. Building against death without faith is a revolt. Building with it is stewardship. The Bible asks this of us, too.

“Faith without works is dead” (James 2:17).

If we accept Pascal’s Wager, coherence pushes us to accept its worldly corollary: bet--not on securing salvation, which lies beyond us--but on resisting Obliteration by building.

Objection: you can’t hedge both. Reply: they run on different axes--faith orders ultimate ends; work orders proximate means. They are complementary. In fact, they may be essentially linked.

If Obliteration is true and Christianity false, either we vanish or we prolong meaning by rescuing ourselves; if Christianity is true, the first wager decides eternity and the second governs what we do with history.

So what should a sane civilization do on Monday morning? A practical program toward preserved meaning: build civilizational redundancy (interplanetary habitats and hardened Earth systems); strengthen innovation capacity (real meritocracy; strong scientific institutions); reduce tail risks (biosecurity, nuclear safety, planetary defense); expand energy abundance (fission now; serious fusion research); pursue long‑horizon physics/engineering (reversible computation; extreme‑astrophysics energy capture); and found institutions mandated to think on century‑to‑millennium horizons, with memory and governance designed to outlast leaders.

The Second Wager asks for less metaphysical assent than faith--and far more action.

“Belief in progress” means specific commitments to preserve civilization and consciousness in time.

Does this go beyond what Christianity asks? Christianity asks for faith; the Second Wager asks for work.

We do not know if we can achieve any of this; prudence says try.

Obliteration is, in one crucial respect, worse than Hell: it erases even the memory of the good. If Wagers are rational against a lesser bad (Hell), they are at least as rational against the greater bad (absolute erasure).

So if the First Wager supports faith in Christ, the Second Wager supports civilizational investment in the scientific and institutional capacities that might defy Obliteration.

Christianity promises to ground meaning in a transcendent reality and to save humanity from obliteration by a life that does not perish.

A technological worldview cannot guarantee eternity, but it can extend the time horizon of human meaning--across planets, stars, eons--and deepen understanding of the created order.

This is not transhumanism. Exceeding biological or earthly limits will not cancel sin. Resources will remain scarce; desire always outruns supply; sin can never be engineered away. Stewardship is not utopian.

I believe in technological progress ordered to the worldly preservation of humanity--not a guarantee of eternity, but a disciplined attempt to expand time for the good if Christianity is false.

If the good deserves to endure, then either God secures it by eternity or we must buy time for it in history. I don’t possess the first assurance; I accept the second responsibility.

Classical Christian theology says that even if humans fail to act as instruments of divine providence, God will still find a way to fulfill His promises.

Pray toward eternity; build against Obliteration. If God makes all things new, our labor is gathered up; if not, let the labor itself carry the good--beacon to beacon, age to age. Lights fail; the line endures. We refuse Obliteration.