If you spend much time on the Internet, you’ll probably sooner or later come across this rather pathetic “Gotcha” attempt:

Atheists, imagine you’re going skydiving with a Christian baby. Suddenly the baby tells you he won’t open his parachute until you renounce atheism and accept Jesus as your lord and savior. What would you do?

Just for fun, let’s actually bite on this and really tear it to shreds. First, let’s pick holes in the central premise:

Imagine you’re going skydiving…

OK, right from the start we have a really serious problem. In the UK, you legally need to be at least 16 to skydive, with explicit permission from a parent or guardian, and I’m sure that similar rules are in place elsewhere in the world.

Who the hell thought it was even remotely appropriate to let a baby go skydiving? Did the supposedly licenced operators of the skydiving business not notice that one of their customers was a baby? Did they not realise what exactly that small person waddling on board the aircraft was? Surely they’d realise at the point they had to attach a small, baby-sized parachute to a customer (requiring an entire industry manufacturing baby skydiving equipment, which they had to have bought, paid for, and have to hand just in case?). Never mind during the training process when they trained people to make a parachute jump!

This is already absurd. But, thought experiments often are, so let’s carry on…

With a Christian baby…

This is a pretty easy one to shoot down. As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, no-one is born a believer of a specific religion, and in general, people, at least in youth, passively inherit the religious beliefs of their parents or guardians, and aren’t actually given any opportunity to choose another one. It’s no less absurd to call a baby a Christian than it is to call them a Tory, a Keynesian, or a Marxist (Dawkins, 2006, pp. 311-315).

As such, there’s no good reason to accept that the baby is, in fact, Christian.

The baby tells you…

You’re minding your business skydiving, when suddenly a baby, who happened to be skydiving from the same aircraft as you were, suddenly glides up to you, and over the noise of you both falling through the air at terminal velocity, makes itself heard, and manages to tell you, coherently and eloquently, that unless you embrace its religion of choice it’s not opening its parachute. Oh dear, me. First the factual problems:

• The noise when making a parachute jump before the parachute opens is very loud - around 100dB. Even a strong adult shout is going to struggle to be heard at a distance of more than a couple of metres. A baby with a fraction of the lung capacity has no chance of making a coherent demand and being heard.
• A baby, who has the ability to describe a coherent demand that you renounce your religious or philosophical beliefs and embrace his, or he will commit suicide and it’ll be your fault? Really? Someone who can do that is not a baby. They’re an adult (or maybe a sulky teenager who thinks they’re being edgy) with some kind of unusual developmental disorder, or some sort of science experiment, or some kind of supernatural being, as a result of which they look like a baby. If they genuinely have that capability, they’re mentally not a baby, and can therefore be treated as being to all intents and purposes as an adult (maybe that’s why they’re allowed to skydive…). And if it’s an adult, it’s sad if it decides it’s willing to end its life over your religious beliefs, but that is not your problem.

In short, the problem is being framed very, very selectively. They’re a baby when it suits the questioner’s purposes, but not when it doesn’t. That’s wildly inconsistent, as well as disingenuous as hell. It’s really, really hard to take the rest of it seriously after this level of utter absurdity. But let’s continue anyway…

He won’t open his parachute until you renounce atheism and accept Jesus as your lord and saviour

Finally, we get to the meat of it. Here’s where someone who looks like a baby in order to try to guilt-trip you, but is clearly not a baby in any meaningful psychological sense, attempts to hold your beliefs hostage.

First off, this is textbook emotional blackmail. The baby is threatening to carry out a stupid and dangerous action in order to control and manipulate you. If you witnessed a friend’s spouse doing something like this, your first instinct would probably be to give that friend the number of a good divorce lawyer.

But, again, let’s treat it with more seriousness than it deserves. There are multiple possible answers that turn the questioner’s argument back on itself:

OK, I accept Jesus. Honest…

How exactly does the baby know you’re actually being sincere? Belief isn’t a switch you can throw. You can say “OK, I believe.”, land safely, and then say to the baby “Oh, little white lie, to save your life.”

Furthermore, this entire argument undermines the whole idea of religious belief. How many people in theocratic societies past and present have lied about their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) to avoid persecution? How many people cynically claim religious belief for personal advancement while actually having none, or ignoring its teachings when it suits them?

Which Jesus?

It has to be said, there’s more than one interpretation of Jesus’s teachings. Most religious beliefs are mutually exclusive, and how granular are the baby’s demands? You might easily respond with:

Which Jesus? Catholic Jesus? Orthodox Jesus? Protestant Jesus? Mormon Jesus?

Based on the response, you can then potentially follow a very extensive tree of responses. What exact denomination does the baby mean? Given the time constraints and the need to pull your own parachute to avoid dying, it really isn’t a convenient time or place for an extensive theological debate over the merits of various religion denominations. And of all unlikely philosophers, Homer Simpson says it most succintly:

What if we picked the wrong religion? Every time we go to church we’re just making God madder and madder!

If you picked the wrong church, the baby presumably still isn’t going to agree to pull its cord, and at some point you’re going to have to say “Alright, I don’t have the time to search for whatever exact denomination you want me to believe in. I’m out of here.” - you’re presumably not trained for a HALO jump!

Fine, I won’t pull my cord unless you renounce Jesus / accept Allah / embrace Satan

This argument turns the baby’s argument back on itself, putting it in the exact same position it tried to put you in. Now, if it sees itself as a moral being, it must go through the exact same quandary it tried to inflict on you.

If the baby is morally OK with the idea of emotionally blackmailing you to renounce your sincerely held religious or philosophical beliefs, it’s not exactly a moral being to start with.

Overall, the baby’s statement is basically a piss-poor version of Pascal’s Wager. Now, Pascal’s Wager is rather more sophisticated than it’s often presented as, and we’ll deal with that separately later.

OK, I’ll pull your cord / grab hold of you and pull my own cord

As mentioned above, the baby is going to have to be very close to articulate its demands, and that puts it well within grabbing range. It’s not going to be physically strong enough to stop you from physically intervening, whether you pull its cord or grab it and pull your own.

If you opt for the latter, the only way the baby’s likely to be able to stop you is by threatening to foul your parachute, and at that point the baby is threatening to actively harm you, an inherently immoral act, whereas the act of trying to save the baby is morally neutral. At that point it’s entirely reasonable to protect yourself.

What irresponsible twat let a baby go skydiving? On its own, with sole responsibility for pulling the cord?

I’ve mentioned already how utterly absurd it is that a literal baby would have been allowed to go skydiving, and a procedural failure on this kind of epic scale is not your problem. Honestly, if this genuinely happened, then I would probably find myself thinking “I am going to be writing a very strongly worded email about this” as I scraped the baby’s innards off the landing pad with a squeegee.

The real Pascal’s Wager

Note that Pascal’s Wager isn’t really anything to do with religion. It’s actually an argument used to explain how epistemic rationality differs from normal rationality (Pritchard, 2014). Epistemology is the branch of philosophy focused on the nature and scope of knowledge, and epistemic rationality relates solely to how a belief was arrived at. Pascal was effectively arguing that the question couldn’t be settled on purely evidential grounds, and so had to be approached as a matter of practical decision-making under uncertainty. It’s just been very selectively weaponised by ignorant Christian fundamentalists (Dawkins, 2006, pp. 103-105). And I suspect people who are genuine about religious beliefs would find it grossly offensive to have their belief reduced to a simple bet for cosmic brownie points.

There’s a well known quote attributed to Marcus Aurelius, which I personally find far more convincing as an argument about whether to believe in any religion or not, and is in no way dependent on a specific deity:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Summary

Obviously that whole skydiving Christian baby argument doesn’t deserve being entertained seriously for a second. Anyone presenting this as a serious argument isn’t engaging in philosophy — they’re relying on a badly constructed rhetorical trap. However, it’s worth pointing out just how bad it is just for fun.