Within Reason - #149 Blaise Pascal: Philosopher, Mathematician, Genius - Graham Tomlin

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack.Graham Tomlin is a British theologian, author and former Church of England bishop.LINKS:Get Graham's book, Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern WorldGraham's organisation, Seen and Unseen TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - Can Blaise Pascal Be Categorised?03:05 - Who Was Blaise Pascal?11:12 - Pascal’s First Conversion17:19 - Pascal’s “Night of Fire”21:59 - Did Pascal Reject Reason?31:45 - Pascal’s War With Descartes42:31 - Did Pascal Invent the Bus?45:42 - The Heart Has Its Reasons, Of Which Reason Knows Nothing50:03 - How Pascal Invented Probability Theory52:29 - Pascal’s Wager1:15:35 - The Pensées1:18:30 - Pascal’s “Two Minds”1:22:39 - The Importance of Boredom1:26:58 - Why Should Atheists Read Pascal?1:31:34 - What Would Graham Ask Pascal?

Graham Tomlin, welcome to the show. Alex, nice to be here. You know, yesterday I decided I wanted to have a physical copy of this book, your biography, your book on Blaze Pascal. And so I went to a bookshop to find this. And I walked into a Waterstones, which for Americans is like a Barnes & Noble. And I looked in the biography section, and I couldn't find it. So I asked them about it, and they said, oh, maybe you should go and check philosophy.

I said, okay, so I went and had a look. and the guy up there couldn't find it either. So we thought, well, I thought, I'll check theology. Maybe it's, maybe it's in there. And I had a look, and I couldn't find it. I knew it was in stock. They sent me up the road to a different store. And I went in there, and I had a look again.

And they looked on their computer and said, you know, the last we saw of this book, it was in the astronomy section. Astronomy. I said, what's it doing? Okay, I was fine. So I went and had a look, and I couldn't find it. And then the helpful woman behind the desk ran around the shop and finally found it in the science section of the bookshop. And as all of this was happening, I began to realize.

that this is something of a testament to the inability of people to categorize and define a man like Blaise Pascal. So if that bookshop were to phone you up and say being something of an expert on the guy, how would you categorize a man like Blaise Pascal? What would you say to them? Yeah, fascinating. I'm sorry the book was so elusive, Alex. We got it.

We got it in the end. Well done, exactly. Yeah, it's exactly right. He's a very difficult person to pin down in all kinds of different ways. And in some ways, he is a polymath. And you could put him in theology, you could put him in philosophy, you could put him in physics, you could put him in science, you could put him in all kinds of different thing. But he's one of these people who, I mean, partly because of the age he lived in, because in those days, the boundaries between physics and mathematics and philosophy were probably not as rigid as they are today. You could be all of those things at the same sort of time.

but he's someone who in a very short life he only lived 39 years he managed to touch so many different parts of what we take for granted in our world today and one of the reasons why the subtitle of the book is the man who made the modern world is because his fingerprints are all over so many of the things that we just assume today

and so he is a very difficult person to categorize I think at the end of the day I'd probably put him more in the sort of philosophy section than anywhere else Well, somewhere where people would find him anyway. Yeah, I think that's where people expect. Yeah. But, of course, I think also very suitably in theology, known as one of the most important Christian thinkers in history.

Yeah. Well, of course, during his lifetime, he wasn't really known for that at all. Yeah. The theology was something that only kind of came up, he became known as later on for works that he wrote during his lifetime that no one knew he wrote. Yeah, and some of the most important aspects,

I think the most possible, the most famous aspect of Pascal's life outside of his wager, which we'll talk about, was only discovered sewn into the jacket that he died. And we'll get into that. I think when you write a biography of a man like Blaise Pascal and you sit down for an interview, people always want to begin by sort of sketching the man's life. I think we can do that. I think most people are interested in his thought. So maybe you can give us a picture of the man insofar as these facts are relevant to the ideas that he held. Yeah.

Well, Pascal was born in 1623 in a town called Clermont, which is in the Overn, in the sort of middle of the south of France. And his mother died when he was just about three years old, so he doesn't really remember his mother at all, but his father was quite a significant figure for him. His father was a kind of tax official, a bit of a civil servant, I guess. But was also a bit of interested in the intellectual life and in what was going on, intellectual currents and philosophy and mathematics and so on in France. And so when Pascal was nine, eight or nine, I think it was, he moved the family to Paris.

So Pascal had two sisters. They were quite important to him. He had a younger sister, Jacqueline, who was a very sensitive, quite a significant figure herself in her own lifetime. Pascal had a very close relationship with her. And an older sister, Gillesburt, who was a sort of bossy, older sister who organized the family and told him what to do. Anyway, the family moved to Paris

and the idea was Pascal's father wanted the family to be involved in the salons and the intellectual discussions that were going on there. During his teenage years, Pascal, Blaise Pascal, was recognised as being a bit of a child

genius. He said to have discovered Euclidean geometry at the age of 12. When he was 19 he invented this calculating machine which is an extraordinary thing which did calculate up to sort of tens and hundreds of millions, subtraction edition and so on. And it's often told when the story of the computer is told that often that calculating

machine is often part of that story. He then went on to get very interested in physics and mathematics. He did kind of mathematical calculations. He performed what is sometimes thought of as the first proper modern scientific experiment in 1648, which was all about the existence of the vacuum. Again, we could talk about that. But so he was really known as a sort of physicist. That was really what he was known for as a mathematician.

But he also had a very strong kind of religious current going on during his life. His family was a fairly conventional Catholic family in mid-17th century, France. But then they became very influenced by a movement in 17th century French religion called Jansenism, which again we could talk about later on. And Pascal was sort of drawn to that. but then he kind of struggled all the way through his life a little bit with his calling to, if you like, mathematics and physics and to be this sort of famous intellectual in Parisian life and the call to a kind of religious life and the particular version of religion he was drawn to in Jansenism

was very suspicious of this worldly stuff to do with mathematics and physics and so on. And that was a bit of a tussle for Pascal. Anyway, in 1654 he has this very profound, experience of God, which you referred to. The night of fire. The night of fire. And that didn't totally change his life. He carried on with some of his scientific experimentation and so on in his mathematical work.

But it did shift his priorities a great deal. One of the things it did do is it made him want to write a great kind of argument, apology for the Christian faith, to try and convince his skeptical friends who weren't that interested in God at the time that they really ought to be interested in God. And so he began to write this thing, write notes for it, which he never finished. But after he died, was published as the Ponce of Pascal, because his friends brought the notes together and published them in this unfinished form. So he died in 1662, age just 39. He'd suffered a lot of sickness during his life. He said once he never had a day in his adult life without some form of pain. And so that was a

constant presence for him. He had a great sort of sense of intellectual combat. He was quite a difficult person to argue with. I think he didn't win an argument with Pascal very easily. There's a kind of streak of intellectual pride and arrogance in him, which he battled with throughout his life, I think. But he is just a fascinating person. I was reading a biography of him some time ago, and the author said, everything about Pascal is exciting. And I kind of sense that. you know, there's always something going on in Pascal's life. Yeah. So that's a little bit of a taste of the man.

I think with really interesting people and significant figures, there's sometimes a tendency to, what would be the word, heigographies, to make into a saint, to try to... A geography. Yeah, and I wonder the extent to which that sometimes happens with Pascal. And specifically, rewining a second, when Pascal is very young, his father doesn't want him to study maths. says at least not yet, you know, that's something that comes later.

And Pascal has found sort of drawing on the floor having independently discovered Euclid's geometry. Do you think that happened? Do you think Pascal is the kind of mind that could have really independently done such a thing at such a young age? My guess is, I mean, you don't know, do you? Because that story is told by his sister, who definitely is in the category of his, she idolizes her brother. And so when you read Gilbert, that's his older sister, her account. of Pascal's life, you think, well, hang on a minute, is this just the kind of very proud older sister telling wonderful stories about her younger brother? My guess on that story is that Pascal had

discovered something quite remarkable on his own, whether it was full-on nucleidian geometry, is another whole, whole question. But he clearly was a bit of a prodigy, someone who, even at the early stages of life, was able to perceive things and sense things that other people couldn't. But you're right, I think there is a tendency to just kind of brush over people's weaknesses. And Pascal did have weaknesses. I mean, one of his, one of the writers on him, my God, Romano Giardini an Italian philosopher said Pascal's big thing was his demon of combat. And you can see that at different times during his life. He would often pick a fight with someone and he wanted to win that fight. And that's not a very attractive characteristic. The same time, though, I think he's also very

aware of that. Towards the end of his life, there's a kind of humility that begins to kind of come into his, his spirits and his heart. And so do you sense he's someone who is, you know, he has weaknesses like all of us, but he becomes aware of them and begins to sort of deal with them

as far as he can in the short life that he lives. So, so yeah, there's a bit of hagiography and you have to go filter that out a little bit. Yeah. I mean, the way I look at this is my,

my friend John Nelson, who's been on the show a few times, a biblical scholar. He says this about Jesus. When I'm a bit suspicious that we have the words of Jesus verbatim, you know, as said in Aramaic, and he once said to me, you know, even if the only access you had to a person was a set of apocryphal quotes and things that supposedly did, you'd still get a good idea of the kind of person you're talking about. And I suppose it's more important with Jesus to people, whether he actually said and did the things.

But I think, you know, whether or not he specifically did this particular thing, he clearly has this reputation of the kind of guy that that is a believable story to apply to. So he's genius. The fact that he was able to create this remarkable calculating machine, which was one of the first actual machines that worked to calculate sums at the age of 19. That's quite remarkable. Yeah. So you sort of sense, that's fact. You know, you can actually see that there are a number of them still are. still to be seen in museums around France and elsewhere in the world.

And so if you think if he was able to do that, then probably he was able to do some kind of other remarkable things too. I can believe it. And sometimes Pascal's life is split into what you, I forget the phrase they use, but his sort of worldly life that comes first. Well, there's the worldly period they talk about. The worldly period.

That's what I'm reaching for. And so this is where I suppose we land with the grown-up Pascal, who's obviously a bit of a genius. us and is doing various things in his life before this other period, which maybe the distinction isn't as sharp as people make it out to be, what's Pascal getting up to? Like, how's he, how's he spending his life? Well, it is early days. The thing about Pascal, again, is very different from our world. He never married, never had any children. Never, as far as we know, did a day's paid work in his life, never had a job. And that was because his father was, I mean, not very, very wealthy, but his father

sold his, you could do it in those days, he sold his position in sort of French society and gained government bonds and invested them. And so he had a kind of income that enabled Pascal to live a relatively, you know, carefree life financially. So he didn't have to work. And so, you know, he never, never went to university, never did a degree, never did all the things that we would expect someone of that kind of life to do. So he would spend his time doing experiments on physics, particularly the one he was very interested in, was this experiment about the weight of air and the vacuums, which involved tubes of mercury and carrying them up mountains and measuring them all and so on. He would spend a lot of time working on mathematical problems, like conic sections,

which are all about ellipses and cones and that kind of thing. He would quite extensively correspondence. There's a lot of letters we have from Pascal. And I suppose as he's growing up, he's doing these experiments and exploring his very fertile intellect that he has. He then, when he becomes famous in sort of 1648 after that, after this experiment, that's when he goes into this worldly period where he's the kind of talk of the town in Paris. He's going to the salons. People are eager to kind of hear what he has to say. He gets all these very sophisticated frames. He's the kind of talk. He's friends and his sister, who was quite religious at the time, he's a bit worried about him because he's getting it drawn into this sort of world. And so that's really the kind of life he lives.

He always has a kind of relationship with faith at the side of things. I talked about this group called the Jansenists that he was quite attached to. And people talk about his first conversion in his second conversion. Sure. And the first conversion is when his father, when Pascal was in his early 20s, his father had an accident and broke his hip. And what you did in those days, you didn't go to A&E, you went to get bone setters brought in. So they brought these two bone setters, these two characters who were kind of former ne'er-do-wells, who were into sort of boxing and women and everything else, who'd pound this profound Christian conversion through Jansenism. And they proceeded to try and convert the family to Jansenism. And they were very successful with Jacqueline, his younger sister,

he was very devoted to this former Christianity and partially successful with Blaise Pascal. So he was kind of attracted to it, but it was a kind of half conversion, if you like. He was attracted to it and part of the movement, but not fully sold out on it. What's distinctive about Jansenism in terms of their actual Christian beliefs? Yeah. Well, they were very strongly associated. Well, where it comes from is a man called Cornelius Jansinius, who was a Belgian theologian of the early Texas.

17th century, he wrote a very long and very boring book about St. Augustine that very few people actually read because it was so long. But it was very influential because it had a particular interpretation of Augustine, which said that basically salvation is entirely of grace. There's almost nothing you can do to respond to God. It's all of grace. It has quite a strong sense of human sinfulness, that we are kind of radically fallen and broken and sinful as human beings, and that the path in response to grace is of a kind of extreme asceticism, like a denial of worldly things, of sensual pleasure, a very intense form of spirituality.

And so those are the kind of marks of Jansenism. And Pascal always had a very kind of intricate relationship with Jansenism, even in the later period. And scholars debate, was he really a paid-up Jansenist or was he not? But that was the kind of Christianity that the family was into, at least partially at that stage. So first conversion, typically referring to specifically this like Jansenite. Yeah. Well, these Jansenist bone setters come in, they try and persuade the family. And Pascal thinks, yeah, okay, I can buy this. And so he's attracted to the Jansenist movement,

but he wants to try to use his rational capacity, his intellect, to try to prove Jansenism is true. Yeah. And that doesn't really go down too well with the Jansenism. because they're not that into reason. Sure. They're into grace and faith, not into reason. And so it's always a bit of a tricky relationship between Pascal and the Janseness at that point. So yeah, that's kind of his first conversion, which is a sort of half conversion to the cause of

Jansenism, but it doesn't go very deep into his own heart and mind. It's not a personal encounter, if you like, anything like what happens later on. Yeah, I think we often meet people like this, right, who have become intellectually convinced of a position. Exactly. they're often pretty like fired up and ready to argue and they're like oh i've i've got all of the objections and i'm ready to go and do like street evangelism or something exactly yeah yeah but there's maybe something missing behind the eyes exactly yeah that tells you that it it's it doesn't

have the sort of the sort of heart yeah that comes along with the kind of experience that Pascal famously had in yeah 1654 that's right yeah and i'm presuming that this is what people refer to as the second conversion yeah is this moment of yeah yeah extreme religious experience for about two hours from 10 till midnight in 1654. So first question is, we don't know about this until the end of Pascal's life, right? How do we discover that this was the thing he even went through? Yeah. Well, we discover it quite by chance in a way, because what happened when he died in August 1662,

to his family and friends were kind of preparing the body for burial. And there's a servant who is taking off his clothes and so on. And he cuts open his jacket and he feels there's something there. And he opens the jacket in the lining. And he pulls out two bits of paper, one bit of paper and one of parchment. And on these two bits of paper are written what looks like a kind of poem. And it's the same, basically the same thing on both bits of paper. One looks like it's been scribbled at the time.

one was just written up more formally afterwards. And it's an account of an experience. He's dated at the top. It says, you know, November the 23rd, 1654, that he gives the kind of the Saints day that's there. And he says from half-past ten at night until half-past midnight. And then there's the word for fire. That's why it's called the night of fire.

And then it goes through and it talks about this. It's this very profound, visceral experience of God, I guess, where he talks about not the God of the philosophers, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a kind of personal God, not this abstract, distant God. And you kind of feel he's got Descartes in mind here, the idea of a God who is just dreamed up as the end result of a logical argument. And he said, I'm not really, and this is an encounter, not with that God,

not a kind of intellectual being convinced of it, which is probably what happened in the first conversion. This is a profound personal encounter that he has. And it comes as a result. So that's really how we know about it. And you never told anybody at the time. Looking back, his friends could see, well, something changed about that at that time. And he's kind of made sense of a bit of a change of priorities for him.

It came, I think, as about a number, a couple of years before that, his sister had entered into a convent, a kind of Jansenist convent, which caused a bit of a rift between them because it meant she had to take a lot of her the family's money to give us a dowry to the convent. Pascal thought, if he does that, I'm going to be poor

and it's a bit of a tricky issue for the family. So his relationship with his sister, which was always very intense and close one, goes through a bit of a strange period. So you can see him wrestling between his life as a physicist, as a scientist, as an intellectual and this call to this radical, spiritual life that the Jansenists are calling to. And in some way, it's kind of resolved by this profound experience that he has.

We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, on days like today, when I'm working and recording multiple episodes, I sometimes just like forget to eat, which would be bad enough if I wasn't already really bad at keeping on top of my nutrition. But also, I kind of don't want to spend any time trying to make some food. And luckily, in situations like this, This, Huell, today's sponsor, Come to the Rescue. That's H-U-E-L. This is the Black Edition, and this bottle contains a complete meal. 400 calories, 35 grams of vegan protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, and coming in at under $5.

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It's high protein, low sugar, low cost. And if you go to hul.com forward slash Alex O'Connor and use the code Alex O'Connor at checkout, then as a new customer, you'll also get 15% off. Complete nutrition while saving your time and your money. And with that said, back to the show. Yeah, and as you said, this is kind of written almost like it's poetry. It reads, it's like quite staccato would be the word, you know, fire, fire. the god of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ, not the God

of the philosophers and the intellectuals. As you've already just alluded to, Pascal had a bit of a run-in with Descartes, but there is this concept of the God of the philosophers that jumps out of this text. And I think that anybody who hears that instantly recognizes what Pascal's talking about, that the kind of experience he has just had is not of the same kind or quality as the God that is studied in the textbooks. And yet, you know, a lot of Christians and non-Christians alike look at something like this. Look at the moment where Pascal really, like, became faithful. Faith became real, as people like to say.

And just instantly was like not the philosophy stuff, not the rationalist stuff, none of that. And people want to look at that and say, is this Pascal kind of telling us that philosophy and reason? and that kind of argumentation is an inappropriate way to God, or maybe gives us a picture of God that's incorrect. And if that's the case, does this conversion turn Pascal into someone who's quite anti-reason? No, I don't think it does. I mean, I wouldn't say Pascal is someone who is anti-reason. In fact, he talks about reason in quite nuanced terms.

On the one hand, he's very convinced that reason doesn't get you to God. He says, God is... We know go through the heart, not the reason. Yes. And by the heart, he doesn't mean just experience. He doesn't mean just the kind of experience he had on that night. What he means is a kind of deep, but an affective instinct that we have. That's the heart.

It's not an intellectual thing. It's not. And he puts it in a category of things like, you know, space or time or number. They're basically things you have to assume. You can't argue them. You can't produce some syllogism that gives you. this thing as a sort of proved thing. You just kind of assume these are true. In the wager, he talks about the concept of infinity. We have an idea of what infinity is. We kind of know there's

a number that's bigger than every other number. We don't even know what it is. We don't know whether it's an odd number or an even number, but we kind of know there's this thing called infinity. So he says, we can assume the existence of things that we don't know much about. And so that's how he sees God. God is known by the heart. and not the reason. But that doesn't mean that reason has no place for Pascal. He actually thinks that reason has a great deal to offer in certain fields like geometry and mathematics. He thinks the scientific method. He's a great believer in the experimental method. You do experiments. You work out the data and you work out the best explanation for that. He just doesn't think that reason

gets you to God. He does think there are good reasons for believing in God. But he thinks they're more persuasive for people who already believe than for people who don't believe. Yeah, I think that's something that's often missed in reflections on God's existence, especially older texts before the development of natural theology and debates about God's existence really sort of take off in the way that they have in the modern era, in that like, you know, Anselm's ontological argument in the proslogian, and people are like, that's a terrible argument. Yeah. Maybe, but it's not really an argument, though.

It's a prayer, is what it is. It's a reflection on the nature of God. And even modern versions of the ontological argument, like Alvin Planting as modal ontological argument, he says quite explicitly, like, this isn't really going to help you if you're an atheist, because there's a reverse version of the same argument for atheism. But if you already believe in God, this is just a way of sort of internally justifying it. And it's this sort of faith-seeking understanding. It's filling in the intellectual gaps in what is fundamentally a faithful enterprise.

And I think a lot of atheists would look at that and go, well, that's just silly. That just proves that it can't be, you know, justified. But as long as somebody isn't making the claim that they're doing more than that, I think that's, that's perfectly legitimate. And it seems like Pascal is engaged in a similar kind of series of reflections. Yeah. No, I think that that is right. And I think Pascal's, he's not a great believer in proofs for God. Right.

either the argument from design or metaphysical proofs. It's not that he doesn't think that they hold water, but he just doesn't think they are sort of psychologically convincing. Yeah. And that's largely because of his anthropology, his understanding of the way human beings work, which is deeply influenced by St. Augustine, which actually says that our longings are much more powerful than our logic.

Yes. our desires are very strong. And now, again, there's a very nuanced and technical way of understanding that in Pascal. But I think he basically feels that, again, back to this thing about the heart, we grasp basic concepts like God, time, number, infinity, and so on. By this just this deep instinct, not a rational process. And that's partly the way we're. made, but it's also exacerbated by what Pascal thinks of as the fallenness of human beings.

That our fallenness means that we are consumed not so much. We are, you know, that the natural instinct built into us, which is a love for God, has been twisted into a love for ourselves. And therefore that twists the way we see things. Therefore, our desires overwhelm our logic all the time. And therefore, you know, you can believe, you can be convinced one day by the ontological argument for the existence of God the next day you think, do I really think that? Yeah. And the other problem with that is that an argument is convincing insofar as you are

considering the argument. Yeah. Right. I can remember, you know, once upon a time being convinced of a particular line of reasoning. But unless I'm actually attending to that right now, you know, what if I've changed my mind? There are two wonderful quotes from Pascal which you pull out in your chapter called Make It Attractive, which is another reference to something he wrote. And talking about arguments and proof, you say that he wasn't a big fan of proofs. He writes, at least in this translation, the metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact. And even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they'd be afraid that they'd made a mistake. Exactly. And I think it's really important to recognize that Pascal is not saying you can't establish this stuff through reason. There's reason has nothing to say, but rather it's got a very limited scope. And that the way that humans actually behave is different. And again, it's not like you ought to rely on your faith and your emotivism. I know that you think you want to rely on reason, but don't do that. Relay on intuition. He's saying that you just already do. In fact, the quote on the, that you've pulled out on.

the other side of the page is, again, Pascal says, I love this, put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than it need be. If there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail. Many could not even stand the thought of it without going pale and breaking into a sweat. Like, yeah, you can, I've always found that fascinating that if you, if, I mean, we're on a, we're on a, we're on on a carpet right now, which is, I don't know, a few meters across. And if we were suddenly on top of a massive drop, you know, there's a cliff edge either side, I am perfectly confident that I'm not going to fall off this carpet. But suddenly, it's my intuition and my

imagination that would take over. And as far as I read him, I don't know if you agree here, this isn't Pascal saying, this is how you should behave. This is just how you do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is. Yeah. He's saying this is the way we are as human beings, that we, we operate, that we grasp certain things by the heart, not by reason. Doesn't mean the reason doesn't have any role to play, but it has a very limited role. So there's another thing that he says, you know, reason's last move is to realize that there are an infinite number of things that are beyond it. So I kind of love that.

It says, you know, there is a place for a reason, but reason gets to a point where it realizes there are certain things it cannot manage. And it's fine when it comes to physics and geometry and mathematics and all of that. And Pascal is a great believer in that. In some ways, he's even more of a believer in reason there than even Descartes is. Because Descartes is a great devotee of the experimental method in science in a way that Descartes isn't. But he does think when it comes to things like God, partly because he thinks that God is not another object in the world that can be analyzed through reason or through cause and effect. You know, you can say this chair, I can sort of prove this chair exists by the fact that I can say.

sit on it and I can explain where it came into being, who made it, and all that kind of thing. It's an object within the world like that. Or historical event. You can say, you know, what came before it and what led up to it and so on. But God is not in that kind of category. He's an object outside the world and therefore isn't subject to the historical or, you know, sort of scientific method in that way. And therefore, God is in a different category.

And that's why the God of the philosophers doesn't really work and he's not really interested in that kind of God. Yeah, it's like Hamlet trying to discover Shakespeare, as C.S. Lewis sometimes wrote about an analogy, I think, is extremely instructive here. And there's a line where he said about Descartes. It's a very simple little line. He says one time, he says, Descartes uncertain and useless. Yes. Which I kind of love. And it kind of captures Pascal's thinking about Descartes, because he's uncertain. In other words, he thinks that the kind of certainty that Descartes thinks you can have about God is just not possible. we can't have that kind of certainty or not certainly not through reason

and then useless because he thinks actually even if you did have that kind of God that understanding of the God of the philosopher is it wouldn't really make much difference yeah it's not going to change your heart it's not going to change your life it's not going to change your behaviour and therefore he's interested in a very different kind of vision of God which is the God that he begins to discover

on that night of fire in 1654 yeah the Ponce like you said are Pascal's notes. He's planning on making a larger volume. And so these are quite aphoristic. Like if you read the poncée, firstly, they're going to be in a different order

depending on which publisher and how they've decided to categorize them because that's a little bit unclear. And also, you can kind of open a copy anywhere and you'll just find these individual little thoughts. It's literally like diary entries. And so when you say that there's this moment, it's like one of the entries,

like the entirety of the entry. It's just Descartes, you know, uncertain and useless. And I find that really funny. He also elsewhere writes, I can never forgive Descartes. And he says something like, you know, because Descartes like uses God to be the sort of the flick of the switch

that gets everything going and then sees no more need for him in the rest of his philosophy. And I can kind of understand this. This jumped out at me too, which is that like, Descartes, I've done an episode on Descartes with John Cottingham. People can find it in the description if I remember to put it down there. And Descartes's got his famous meditations and he proves his own existence and then he proves the existence of God.

Why is he doing this? Well, it's because he suddenly realizes, well, what can I know for certain? You know, I want to justify that the external world exists, that this chair is real. So let's go back to the basics. Well, I know that I exist. And then I've got an ontological argument which shows me God exists. And God wouldn't deceive me. Therefore, my eyes must be accurate.

Great. Okay. Job done. And then he just goes about on his business, right? And Pascal seems to be like seething at the thought of treating God in this epistemological. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think Pascal's sometimes been called, you know, one of the very first modern men in the sense that I think he kind of saw the trajectory of that way of understanding God. Because if you roll the kind of history onwards, I think what happens with that is you have take off your life says, okay, we can kind of prove that God exists through this ontological.

argument, we've got that sorted. And we can use our reason to establish God. And that, you know, was maybe made sense in a world where all these fights between Protestants and Catholics and other people were saying, well, plague on both your houses. Maybe there isn't a God after all. Descartes solves the problem by saying, yes, there is a God, we can prove it. You think it, you know, David Hume coming along did sometime afterwards saying, well, actually reason doesn't actually prove God and begins to pick holes in some of the classic argument. that have been used for this. And so therefore the conclusion is, well, if the criterion is using reason,

and we can't establish God by reason, well, maybe God doesn't exist after all. And I think Pascal kind of saw that trajectory and thought, actually going down that line, the line that Descartes was pointing people, was a bit of a dead end when it comes to the God of the Bible that he's talking about, you know, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. I think the other thing about Descartes is Descartes hardly ever mention Jesus. and the same with Pascal's other great Bet Noir, because he has these two figures that he's always playing off against each other. Descartes on the one hand, which is the great rationalist tradition of modern thought.

And on the other hand, you've got Michel de Montaigne. It was this great example of the sceptical tradition in sort of modern life. And both of them are Christian. They both have a belief in God, but neither have any great place for Jesus Christ. There's no real interest in Jesus. It's almost if God is, as you were saying, just something which you kind of tick off and say, yeah, we believe in God. And that's really not the kind of God that Pascal is interested in. So I think that's one of the key things, the differentiations between Pascal and Descartes' God is the place of Jesus Christ for him.

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I'd never really sort of noticed that before. But then I guess maybe they see themselves as engaged in different projects. I mean, Descartes, you're not going to find the meditations in the theology section. You might find the poncée there, but you're definitely not going to find the meditations there. And, you know, maybe this is on purpose. But I love what you alluded to there and that, like, you're placing a pretty important stake here.

Like, you're kind of gambling if you say the reason why you believe in God, or you should believe in God, is because of this argument or this empirical observation or something like that. Because you're essentially saying that should this ever, evidence ever be undermined. You now need to give up your belief in God. And I think Pascal wants to protect him himself against that. And also, you might think to, for someone like Pascal, it might be like, well, if that is the way you're supposed to come to God, don't get that impression from the Bible. Yes, exactly. Jesus wasn't going around saying, verily I say unto you, premise one. He's healing people and doing things and living a particular kind of life. And I can understand the sort of the sort of reticence there.

But this isn't just, sometimes, like when I first learned about Pascal writing about Descartes, I kind of didn't clock in my head the timelines involved. I'm thinking, Descartes writing his meditations back in, you know, bloody 5,000 BC for all I care. And then Pascal comes along in comments on it, but they actually met each other. Yeah. These guys were contemporaries, and there was one infamous night where they came into contact. Yeah, they did. Pascal was one of his bouts of illness.

He was in his, it was in his bed in Paris and Descartes in town. And he'd heard about this young upstart Pascal, because Pascal was kind of about 10, 15 years younger than Descartes. And he was a bit annoyed about what he's hearing about Pascal, because people were writing him saying, this young guy is amazing. You know, he's got all these great experiments that he's done and all the kind of thing. And anyway, he goes and visits Pascal, and it doesn't go well, as to be said. So Pascal's lying there on his bed. feeling pretty rubbish. Descartes comes in and proceeds to tell him what he ought to do to get better and prescribes all kinds

of medicine, even though Descartes's not really a doctor at all. And they have a bit of a sort of polite but slightly frosty conversation. They meet twice over the weekend. It's the only time they ever actually met, but they kind of left not having made great friends with each other. And I think both of them have a degree of intellectual pride that probably meant that it was always going to be a bit of a tricky relationship. But you're right. You'd love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting, wouldn't you, between Pascal and Descartes? I certainly, I certainly would.

And I would love to know how Descartes, maybe he addresses this in some of his correspondence. I should ask someone like John Cottingham, but like specifically this challenge, I think Descartes spent loads of time arguing about objections to his, to his arguments. You know, are they circular? Is there a deduction or is an intuition? But I wonder if anyone ever really put to him this sort of line of like you're taking the wrong approach. Like, where is Jesus in all of this? And if you can't get to Jesus through the methods you're using, then what are you doing here? And I don't know if there's an extent to which Descartes was ever presented with this sort of forthrightly, but I'd like to see what would

happen if Pascal did that. You know, that's amazing. Yeah, you'd love to have, I've had a bit fly on the wall if there are a longer conversation when Pascal was feeling a bit better. But I do think... Having said that, I wouldn't understand a blind word of it, so I don't speak French. Exactly, yeah, yeah. 70th century French would be, it would be like the, you know, we don't know what Einstein's last words were. Yeah.

Because he spoke them in German to a nurse who only spoke English. Right, yeah. And so, like, you are your witness to this wonderful thing. And you're just like, it was, uh, sounded like a jeer sound and then a, yep, I'd be, I'd be lost. What a waste. Yeah. But I think it's, you know, the reasons why Pascal is so focused upon the God of Jesus Christ as opposed to the God of the philosophers.

And I think it's partly because, and again, one of the differences I think between them is that Pascal, especially later on in life, comes to, and this partly comes from the Jansenism, begins to believe there is a real sickness at the heart of human life. there is a sort of tragedy, there's a sadness at the heart of human experience that you can never quite get rid of in this life. And he thinks that all the philosophies and the political systems that we dream up are all attempts to try to get rid of that fundamental sadness that is there, that sickness that is at the heart of human life and experience, which is this radical self-focus that we have that puts us in competition with each other and that destroys common life and friendship and everything else. And so, and because he has this profound sense of human, well, sinfulness, I suppose you'd call it, he sees the absolute need for what he calls a mediator.

You know, we need, we need saving. We don't just need an intellectual process, which means we can then agree that there is a God. We need something much more profound than that. We need, we need, we need rescuing in a way that it's not that I think Descartes didn't believe that but it's not really the focus of his philosophy and you may be right in saying that they're trying to do something different in their work but there's no sense in Descartes or certainly not in Montaigne of actually we need help yeah and that's why i think Pascal is so focused upon Jesus Christ and when he talks about Jesus Christ he talks about him not so much as the teacher he doesn't really quote a great deal from Jesus. He's not the sort of teaching figure. He's more the Jesus who

dies on the cross for the salvation of the world. Yeah. And of the salvation of humankind. And that's really important for Pascal because of this deep sense of human sort of sickness, sadness, or whatever you call it. Yeah. I get the impression that Pascal might have been a bit of a pessimist. And some people say this of him. I've met a lot of people who essentially say, that were they not Christians, they would be complete nihilists. And Pascal strikes me as someone who might have been similar. He was in pain all of his life. He was sort of acutely aware of the sufferings of others. And I think there's got a lot to do with him, despite his arrogance and whatnot, strikes me someone who's probably quite empathetic in a way that maybe Descartes wasn't. I mean,

if we think about their like little side projects, you know, what were they up to when they weren't discovering foundational ideas and philosophy. Well, Descartes was tearing apart a dog live to try to prove that animals can't feel pain and performing live vivisections to prove it. Meanwhile, Pascal is so concerned with poor people being able to get around Paris that he essentially invents the bus. So, you know, I think there's some evidence to suggest that they had slightly different priorities, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And they did. You know, Pascal had that very practical cast of mind. And it was one of the other impacts of this night of fire. I mean, one, I mean, had a number of impacts on his life. One was this project to try to write this great

apology for the Christian faith, which became the Ponce or who knows what it would have been if he'd finished it. But the other was this passionate concern for the poor. Yeah. And one of, one of the outcomes of which is, as you mentioned, this invention of the bus, which is basically when he sort of sees how Paris has doubled in size during the first half of the 17th century, which is no problem for the rich because they can get around in their carriages, but it is a problem for the poor getting around Paris. And so he thinks, okay, if we raise some money, we could buy a number of carriages and we could get them to go from point A to point B, and they can stop at various places along the way,

and somebody can get on and pay a very small amount, sanksu, five cents or five cents or whatever it might be, and they can get off when they want to. first urban transportation system in Europe. It's remarkable. And it came out of this intense identification with the poor that came on his later in life. In fact, towards the end of his life, he basically gives away pretty well everything he possesses. He lives in a very bare apartment. He actually says when he's dying, he wants to die among the poor. He wants to be taken to the workhouse so he can die amongst poor people. And he says, you know, I love the poor. because Christ loved the poor and he finds this great attraction or he's being drawn towards

poverty. So there's a, there is a kind of deep compassion that begins to come about in Pascal's life, which I think wasn't always there before. Yeah. And is one of the outcomes of this profound experience that he has. And again, you don't really see much of that in Descartes. Yeah, take that Descartes. You can't, you know, prove that you should care enough about the poor to invent the bus from metaphysical first principles sat in your feverish nightgown. This is, yeah, I mean these two

they sort of offer a really helpful personification of these two lines of thought and kind of at this period I mean, Descartes is sometimes called the father of Western philosophy. So it's a very pivotal period in the development of thought and Western thought is quite indebted to

Descartes now. But I think that a lot of people myself included think that That is what often goes wrong when trying to understand how particularly religious belief works, is that we just assume that Descartes's way of seeing the world is the way of seeing the world, but it's not. So Pascal summarizes the kind of stuff that we've been talking about into his maybe most famous phrase of all time, which is the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing, which is beautiful and poetic, sometimes misunderstood.

Now that we've sort of covered this base, when people hear that phrase, should they interpret it? Yeah, it's really, along with the god of the philosophers or places like that, probably that's the most famous one that he, you know, and it's sometimes been used as a kind of, the heart has its reasons, its romance, its feeling, its emotion, it's, you know, Disney films and all that kind of thing. But that's really not what Pascal means by it. The heart, Le Courier in French, has this very distinct meaning for Pascal, which is this

this kind of deep underlying affective instinct that we have. Yep. Which is kind of not irrational, but it's kind of over and above rationality. So the heart has its reasons. You know, the heart knows things that reason can't establish

or argue about. Yeah. So back to these basic concepts of number and space and time and God. And so he sort of thinks that at the end of the day, belief in God is a kind of deep instinctive thing for us. It's not something you can argue your way towards. There aren't reasons.

There are good reasons if you already believe. You can think, okay, this makes sense. I can see some reasons that means that I'm not completely bar me to believe this. But it's not going to get you there in the first place. It's a kind of deep, instinctive thing. And that again comes from his Augustinian idea of grace, that God's grace enables faith. It's not our achievement.

It's not something we've done because we've heroically kind of argued our way into belief like Descartes thought it was. But that's, I think, what he means. The heart has its reasons at which reason knows nothing. Reason can't know about these fundamental reasons

that the heart grasps. Yes. And I've always wondered if it's like rendered so beautifully in French or whether that's just a quirk of the English language. The core has a raison, don't know why. He's in French.

It sounds pretty good. I mean, I wouldn't know. It is. Yeah. It's a great thing about Pascal. He's a scientist, but he knows how to write. Yeah, man. Well, he can do everything, can't he?

Is there anything he was bad at? Is there anything he sort of tried that was like, I don't know, do you ever try to, like, take up the violin or something? He was never, he was never very interested in sport. Okay. I can believe that. But then, you know, he was sick, so. He wasn't exactly.

That's right. Yeah. But he never shows much interest in it. He's interested. He's got these friends who go gambling. Right. And they ask him. to kind of work out the odds on their bets and that kind of thing.

But he's interested in it as an intellectual exercise. Yeah, and insofar as, you know, they need to work out disputes regarding gambling. Pascal just sort of casually invents probability theory, right? I mean, it's like, it's this period of human thought where I guess if you're smart enough, there are just problems that need solving. It's like how Newton is basically having a bet about can he explain the orbital motion of the planets and just goes and like invents calculus. Just for the sake of it, you know.

It's that, it's that, I've seen some internet memes about this where, like, these days, if you want to get a PhD in science, it's so hyper-specific. And you're just like, oh, I've, I've done a sort of four-year analysis of, you know, molecular interactions in water, salt compounds. And a few hundred years ago, it's like, oh, here are the foundational laws of magnetism. I thought of them while I was in the bath. Yeah, that's sort of where we were at, that period. In my spare time. Yeah, and, yeah, Pascal and Vince probability, right, essentially. And it's got something to do with gambling.

Yeah, so what happens again? He has these friends during his worldly period, as it's called. He has these friends who are, they're kind of sophisticated kind of men about town. They like gambling and playing tennis and going hunting and witty conversation. They go to the salons. There's a phrase that's used in French at the time called the Onet-om, the... honest man or sort of gentleman or something. This is a classic people that they are.

And they're not interested in God. They find God rather boring. And they're kind of nominal Catholics. Pretty well everybody was. And so they gamble quite a lot. And one of them poses Pascal a problem one time. And he says, well, again, if we're playing a game, and maybe it's a game of coin tossing or cards or something.

And people have bet on one party or the other. and halfway through the game, the game has to stop. How do we allocate the stake? And this is a well-known sort of mathematical problem that have been tried out by various people over the previous hundred years or so. And so Pascal thinks, well, this is quite interesting, I'll try and work it out.

Some people said, when you can't, it's just chance. Pascal thinks, well, no, maybe it's not just chance. If you can work out the probability of this result or that result, and so he goes through this, and he works out a scheme to do this. And so he writes to Michael Pierre de Fermat. People may have heard of Fermar's last theorem. And probably one of the most famous mathematical problems. And Fermat is one of the famous mathematicians there's been.

But he was a contemporary of Pascal as well. And so Pascal writes to Fermat and they have this correspondence. And basically out of this comes the basis of probability theory, which is at the basis of all insurance, whenever you get an insurance bill telling you what your premium is for your life insurance. or your car insurance, that's based on probability. Probability is all about the management of risk, and we do that all the time, in transport, in life in all kinds of different ways. And so it's a fundamental aspect of modern life. And a lot of that comes down to Pascal and

Fermat in their correspondence about probability theory. Yeah. And so, and that plays quite important role in the development of some of his sort of theological argumentation as well, particularly the wager. Yeah, quite. Ability is a key thing for him. Yes, the wager that's been hovering over this conversation since we began, in that most people, at least in the context of God and philosophy and the stuff we talk about on this channel, if you say Pascal, people think of his famous wager. What is Pascal's wager? Give us the sort of popular understanding level and then we'll investigate. Yeah. Well, the popular understanding of Pascal's wager is

basically the argument that you might as well believe in God because the benefits are better. And you make a wager. You've got to bet one way or the other. You might as well bet on God because if you're right, then you get eternal bliss. If you're wrong, you go to hell. It's all like that. It's so it feels like for many people. If you believe in God and you're wrong, then it's like, who cares? Then it's like, who cares? Then there's so much to gain. If you don't believe in God and you're right, then who cares? But there's so much to lose. So you want to go for the option where you've got more to take. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, it's an argument about. It's an argument about. you know, most people who buy the lottery do the same sort of thing. It's a very small stake for a potential big win. If I don't win, I haven't lost very much. If I do win, I gain a great deal. And so the argument is often thought of is Pascal saying, here is a good reason for believing in God. And you really ought to believe in God because of this argument. And I actually don't think it works that way because partly because, as we said earlier on, Pascal's not that convinced about, you know, foolproof 100% reasons that force you in to believe in God.

The way I think it works is like this. So it starts with probability theory. And the start of the wager, he says, you know, our soul is cast into the body. What he says is that our life is kind of like a game that is halfway through. In other words, in the end, we will find out there is a God or there isn't a God. We don't know at the moment. We can't quite know for certain right now. But you've got to wager on one or the other.

And then it goes in the form of a kind of conversation. And I think it's like the person he's talking to is someone who is kind of in the position of thinking, well, there may be good reasons for believing in God, but maybe good reasons for not believing in God, slightly poised between the two, not quite sure which way to go. And so Pascal says, well, you know, life is like this. You've got to bet one way or the other. And so the guy says to Pascal, well, do I have to bet? Can I just be agnostic?

Pascal says, no, no, no, no, you have to bet. Because you are already living your life as if God doesn't exist or if God does exist. You've already, you've already embarked on the journey, as the language he uses. And the question is, are you going to change sides? There isn't a sort of side in the middle. And so Pascal says, well, yep, you've already bet, you've already, you're already one side of the other. And so the guy then says to Pascal, well, is there any evidence to push me one way or the other? And Pascal says, well, there is, but it's not 100% conclusive.

It's not a watertight argument to go one way or the other. And so the guy says, well, what do I do then? And that's when Pascal brings in this quite intricate bit of argument about probability. where he goes into this thing and saying, well, if you believe that God is, God exists and you're wrong, well, you haven't lost a great deal, maybe a bit of sacrifice in this life, but our lives are very short in the concept of eternity and you haven't lost a great deal. If you're right, you stand to gain a great deal, eternal bliss in heaven. If you bet on God not existing and you're right, well, again, you haven't gained a great deal, you know, just a few

years of pleasure on this life, but then into nothingness or whatever. But if you're wrong, you to lose a great deal, eternal damnation or annihilation or whatever the conclusion is. So basically what he says then is, look, if you're, if you were being really irrational about this, if you were really calculating the odds, you'd always bet on belief. But then the guy comes back and says, but I can't make myself believe something I don't believe. I can't feel it. And that's where Pascal says, yeah, I get that. I can see why you can't do that. And this is when the key point comes in the wager. Pascal says, well, at least get it into your head that the reason you don't believe

is not because of your reason, it's because of your passions. In other words, what he says is, if you were really being rational, you'd bet on belief because that's where the odds tell you. That's the good bet. But the fact that you don't shows that the real reasons for unbelief are not rational. They're more instinctive, back to this idea of the heart. and it's to do with your passions, not your reason. So what he's trying to do is uncover the real foundations of belief and unbelief,

and it's not primarily about rationality, which is what Descartes thought it was. Now then there comes an interesting move because, again, the guy says, well, what do I do then? And Pascal says, well, the way to find faith, if you're in this position where you're, it may be true, be not true, you can see there are reasons why, but you can't quite feel it and so on. Pascal says, well, you do what pretty well every Christian has always done, which is to act as if

you did believe. And so he says, in the text, he says, go to Mass, take holy water, the sort of Catholic actions of the time. You know, we might say, well, start reading the Bible as if it is God speaking to you for that day. You start going to church as if it really is. is the place where God's people gather, start praying as if God is listening, even if you're not sure whether he is or not. Start treating each person you meet each day as if they were someone made in God's image and someone incredibly sacred and precious because they are God's gift to you in that moment. In other words, start to live as if it was true, even before you're sure it is. And then he says, that process of habit, because that's the way we're made as human beings,

we learn things by habitual action as much as by reason and everything else, gradually you will gradually begin to realize it does kind of make sense. It suddenly falls into place when you act in that way. Because what you do is you start to learn to look at the world with a whole new set of eyes, and then it begins to fall into place for you. And that's his recommendation as to how you then find faith, given the way in which things work. So sort of the long explanation. Yeah, no, but it deserves it because it's important.

He says, maybe in this context, maybe in another, he says something like, you know, first convince men that Christianity is desirable, then convince them that it's true. Yeah, yeah. And, okay, fair enough. And I think, and Pascal's wager has got a lot of attention as of late because it's been quite resoundingly mocked and ridiculed by atheists. And then just recently, I think people, particularly online have been trying to be like, no, no, no, like, it's more. It's more subtle. It's more, and to the extent that if you ever mentioned Pascal's Wager, I often get, I think you'll see a lot of Christians being like, no, you don't know. It's not what you think it is.

But I think even with this clarification, people are still going to look at this and find a little bit strange for a few reasons. Firstly, it does feel decidedly fake it till you make it. And maybe that's fine. I mean, Pascal, the criticism is, I can't choose what I believe. And Pascal says, well, not directly, exactly. but if you start living in a particular way, you are more likely to become convinced of it. So it's sort of a way of choosing your belief.

So, yeah, it's fake until you make it, but only once you've sort of already agreed that faking it, as it were, would be the better thing, were it possible. Okay, fine. But, like, there are all kinds of other issues with this line of thought for people, right? So the first thing people say is, I can't choose what I believe. Then they might say something like,

okay, maybe there is actually quite a lot to lose from betting on God and it being false, because I would have to give up a great deal of the way that I live my life. If I really wanted to live like a Christian, maybe that would involve cutting people out of my life that I love and care about, who are bad influences. I have to give up my Sundays, maybe the time that I spend in prayer and whatnot. I give away my money like Jesus did,

and now I can't do the projects I want to do. It's quite big. But also, it's not like there's only one way to believe in God. You know, you can see a Muslim saying the same thing. You can say a Hindu saying the same thing about belief in Brahman. Do you think, with this slightly more subtle, properly characterized version of Pascal's wager, that it is susceptible to the, okay, but which God? Because, yeah, if I believe, like, I think the only thing worse than atheism in a lot of

religious traditions is worshipping the wrong God. Like, if you're a Muslim, not believing in God is a pretty bad thing, but worshiping something that is not truly God is like the worst sin you can possibly commit. So speaking to Pascal, I might say, well, like, you know, if I worship, if I worship your Christian God and I'm wrong and Islam is true, then I'm on like the lowest level of hell. So what do you think he would say to that kind of thing? Yeah, well, I think it's why I think the wager comes within the whole, panse, and it would I mean, scholars argue, should it come at the beginning?

Would it come in the middle? Would it come in the end? And you can... Because, again, these notes are just sort of... Exactly. They're not sort of edited by... Yeah, they're kind of edited. They're in a sort of...

Some of them are, or what half of them are. The others are all scattered all over the place. So we don't really know where it would have come in the argument. But there's a lot more to the Ponce than just the wager. So there is actually quite a long section where he does... There's quite a number of fragments where he does talk about this business about other religions. And he's quite interested in it. He's quite interested, particularly in Judaism and Islam, which are the two religions he was

particularly aware of at the time. And so you're obviously right, just taking on its own, what's called the many-god's objection can be something which you can say, well, that argument on its own could lead you to the God of Jesus, the God of Mahmed or Moses or whatever. But there's a section, I think, in the Pompense, where he would have looked at what are the alternatives here. And he does this section where he looks at Judaism and he looks at Christianity and he looks at Islam. And he kind of encourages you to kind of look at those quite closely and think, well, which of these actually does speak to the human heart more than the others?

And this is an argument that doesn't come within the wager. It's another part of the Ponce. And his argument is, and again, you may or may not buy it. But he argues that the heart of Christianity is what he called the order of charity. It is about creating or he's enabling people to become people of charity of love. And so he thinks about Islam. And one way you could put it would be to say, if you like, the predominant statement of Islam is God is great. The predominant statement of Christianity is God is love. And he kind of almost asked, well, which of those speaks to the human heart more, which do we need more? Do we need a great God who gives us commands to live, or do we need a God who is love, who approaches us and who draws us into

a relationship with love with him and with others? And he said, well, for him, it's the latter. Again, with Judaism, he talks about how the Old Testament you can interpret it literally, predicting a Messiah who will come and kind of release Israel from its foreign yoke, a bit like a kind of Prime Minister of the modern state of Israel. Or you could read it figuratively pointing towards a Jesus who, a Messiah who will release the human race, not from physical enemies, the Roman Empire or the Greeks or whatever, but from sin and selfishness and in, you know,

tragedy and sadness and everything else. And he thinks that, well, that's kind of what we need. So he appeals to, again, that deep sense of instinct that he thinks people have that longs for a God of love and compassion other than a God of might and law and military conquest. And I think that's where he does his argumentation as to which God you're talking about and why he thinks the God of Jesus Christ is the one that makes sense and meets the human heart if you like. And I think that's a large part of the way in which Pascal does his argumentation. I mean, as a scientist, he was very committed to the experimental method. You do experiment, you get the data, and you work out what's the best explanation for that.

He does the same in a way in the Ponce. He says, well, let's look at the human condition, this strange mixture of greatness. we have this capacity to understand the world, and yet we are tiny and significant bits of scraps of life and in a vast universe. And he's writing in the context of the invention of the telescope where suddenly we're aware of how small we are. And he talks about how, you know, we desire happiness,

but it slips through our fingers. We have this idea of happiness, but where does that idea come from? How do you explain this strange thing that is humanity? And that's where he begins to sort of say, well, actually, it's Christian faith. that speaks to that in a way that other things don't. And so that's kind of the way he does it.

Yeah. You might be tempted to let Taco Bell's new Lux value menu go to your head. Because 10 indulgences for $5 or less makes you feel fancy. Like you might think you need cloth napkins. Well, you don't. Just use the ones that come in the bag. Don't let the Lux go to your head. See, for me, these kind of function independently of each other.

And maybe had he had more time, Pascal might have tied these together more explicitly. But I think, okay, fair enough, all things are considered, if you're like, I want to figure out which of these religions is, speaks to me the most. Yeah, okay, Christianity, cool. But then in the context of an argument which basically says, you're just making a rational analysis of the possible outcomes and then choosing which one gives you the best bet. It's not like, you know, we're going to bet on Christianity because it's got the best evidence or whatever. It's like, bet on religion or theism because it has the best outcome. And I'm like, okay, I understand why you might have some reasons to favor Christianity over Islam or something like in a different context. But in this gambling, if I'm just trying to be probabilistic and I think to myself, okay, let's put it this way, when I've asked people in the past, would you take, say, 10 minutes of the most unbearable suffering imaginable?

If it meant that afterwards, you get to then have 10 minutes of the greatest possible bliss. And a lot of people actually say, I wouldn't. They say it's almost like the suffering is weighted more. Like suffering is more bad than bliss is good. And so my sort of wager of outcomes here is like, say, we're believing in the Christian God, right? If I believe in the Christian God and I'm wrong, you want to say, well, it costs nothing, unless Islam is true. Supposing we're talking about that kind of context, and if I bet on Christianity and I'm right, I get, eternal bliss and if I'm wrong

I get eternal damnation if I don't bet on Christianity and I'm wrong I might get eternal damnation but if I'm right what I'm gonna if I don't bet on Christianity and I'm right then sort of nothing really matters

and so I'm kind of comparing not like the bliss of God versus oh you haven't really lost much but versus like eternal damnation and in those contexts I might be just more motivated to like avoid eternal damnation at all means possible. I'd rather be like an agnostic who can come to God and say, you know, look, punish me for my indiscretion here, but, you know, at least I didn't worship

the wrong thing. And the perfectly rational person might say, to avoid that eternal suffering at all costs, I need to retain that ability to face God and say, I just, I'm just here, I'm just coasting through. I wasn't committing shirk and worshipping the wrong thing, you know what I mean? And it's all very well and good saying, well, you've got good reasons to think Christianity might be true. But if I'm wrong about that, that's not going to convince God that I should be led off for worshipping the wrong thing, you know. Yeah, but I think that depends on if you think the wager is fundamentally an argument to argue, argue you into the Christian God, which I don't think it is. Right. I don't think that's its point. This point is not to say, you know, you had better bet

on the Christian God because if you don't, you're in trouble. Yeah. I think it's, it's purpose is a specific part of the argumentation for Pascal, which is why it may well have come early on in the argument. It's not the clinching argument for him. Yeah, sure. It's more trying to kind of uncover the real things that are going on in our choice of belief, whether for atheism or atheism or Christianity or Islam or whatever. What's fundamentally going on is not a primarily rational thing.

I think it's an argument directed primarily at Descartes and the followers of Descartes. a lot of whom were the people he was writing for. Sure. That is actually saying to them, what's going on here is not fundamentally a rational thing. Yeah. Even though you say it is. Yeah. It's the decisions are made on other grounds.

And therefore he wants to move them on to other grounds to say, well, okay, let's, there are some, there are other reasons why you might want to do this. And so, yeah. Yeah. And then he wants to say, like, recognize that the reasons are more emotive, they're more feelings based. And then try to bring about those emotions in yourself by living in a particular way. And so, like, I'm kind of imagining another objection here in that, I guess we're sort of running the gauntlet of Pascal wager objections. But another one that's a little bit more, maybe a little bit more sophisticated is one that's based on the abuse of infinity. The fact that so long as you say, well, like, you've got infinite bliss on offer.

and not that much to lose. And in the face of infinity, this small sacrifice is definitely worth it rationally. I feel like you could construct loads of situations like that. Like I could say there is a small possibility that one day artificial intelligence will grow clever enough to essentially wipe out all physical matter, take human beings consciousness and upload it into the cloud. And suppose that, you know, AI wants to thank people who've been. instrumental in its creation. And so everyone who's like somehow invested in artificial intelligence technologies, this future AI is more likely to take them,

upload them to the cloud and give them a sort of infinite bliss in the sort of non-physical digital future, right? So all you've got to do to just hedge your bets and make sure that you protect yourself in that scenario is just, you know, invest five, ten pounds a month in artificial intelligence development, right? And you might say, yeah, but I just, yeah, a bit unlikely. I just don't think it matters that much.

And like, okay, but it's possible. And the possibility that we're considering here is like infinite bliss, right? And all you've got to do is it's nothing. You basically lose nothing. Whereas if you're wrong about this, look at what you've missed out on for what? For five, ten pounds a month, a year, whatever. And yet most people would look at that and go, that's just a beautiful. using the concept of infinity with an unlikely scenario to make me do something that I don't want

to do. And for many people, Pascal's wager feels a bit like that. It feels like a con. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what Pascal would say to that two things. One is, I mean, but back to his point about, you know, the possibility or otherwise of agnosticism and his, it's the thing earlier on, you know, when his conversation partner says, well, you know, can't I just be agnostic about this? Can I just sit on the fence? And Pascal says, you've already embarked on the journey. You're on the journey. You're living your life in a particular way.

And it's not a matter of intellectual belief, I believe in God or I don't believe in God. It's about how you live your life. And you are living your life in one way or the other on the basis that God exists or that God doesn't. Or as you say, or the God of Jesus exists, or the God of Muhammad exists and so on. So we've already made a choice.

And so I think he's quite, questioning how to what extent, and the difference between that and the kind of AI scenario, you could make that better, you could not do, you could just sit on the fence on it. And I think Pascal is saying, well, it's not quite straightforward like that in the question about belief. And I think the second thing he would say is that, that yes, and he does say that on the one hand, yeah, there are some sacrifices involved in Christian life, but there's a bit towards the end of the Ponce where he actually talks about the benefits of faith.

and he actually talks about the certainly within the night of fire there's a great note of just sheer joy that comes through it this sense of you know joy joy certainty trust and he says that Pascal

has towards the end of his life on the one hand there's this very ascetic kind of identification with the poor which in one sense you think is just stripping away all the things that we kind of enjoy luxury and food and sensation and so on

But somehow in that, he finds a kind of profound happiness that he's never sort of found before. And he actually does think that in this experiment of Christian life, there is a real joy to be found in it. And it's one of the big themes of Pascal. He says, you know, everybody seeks happiness. No exceptions. We're all wanting to be happy. And yet happiness slips through our fingers whenever we grasp it. And that's because he thinks that ultimately we were made as human beings to find our happiness in relationship with an encounter with the God who made us.

And we will, again, a classic Augustine thing, you know, our hearts are restless till we find our rest in you. And so he does think, yes, there are some sacrifices. And that can be the most apparent when you're considering the bet of belief. What you don't realize is that when you do make that step, there are all kinds of joy. and pleasures to be found, not necessarily the ones you think are pleasures right now, but they're there waiting for you before you even know them. I also think it's probably worth reminding people that even if this, like, is a really silly line of thought that crumbles under pressure, if that's the case, and it's quite possible

Pascal would have just realized that and not included it in the final manuscript. You've got to remember you're reading a guy's notes here. It's often treated as though it was this very considered public. like argument when you're literally reading a man's diary, you know, so given, give him some grace, especially in so far as he might not have expressed clearly what he meant or not, not sort of exhaustively explained where he's coming from. There are some pieces that are much more polished than others. Yeah.

There are some pieces where you think he really has worked at this, and they're almost like short essays. Yeah. Other bits are literally scraps of paper. Yeah. Which are just a jotting that you put down on your phone when you're just a thought comes to your mind, and it may not have found its way into the final thing, which is why it's such an intriguing thing to read because some lines you think, I've no idea what's happening here, but other things, you just have to put down the book and think, I've got to think

about that. That is extraordinary. It's loads of... It's such an intriguing set of thoughts arguments, which is why the title is exactly right. It's just the thoughts of Pascal. Yeah. On religion and various other subjects. It's not all about... No, he writes about the monarchy, he writes about kings and stuff. It's... Yeah, there's a whole field of Pascal. political philosophy, which is really interesting in its own right as well. Yeah, he's got a lot going on. And I like to remind people always, if you're ever reading, I mean, Pascal was not an idiot, right? And if you're ever reading somebody and you go like, well, that's just obviously stupid,

two options present themselves to you either this otherwise undisputed genius has said something just completely unthinkingly stupid. or there's more going on than meets the immediate eye, right? And I think that with, like, most of the time when you think something is really obviously stupid, that's because it is. And that's not what the person actually said. That's just sort of what you read. And I think that's worth remembering.

Exactly. And I think the wager, I don't think that Pascal's argument stands or falls on the wager. I think it's a key point in it. I think it makes sense. as an argument in the way I think I've tried to explain it. I think it makes less sense when it's sort of thought of as an argument, a strong arm people into belief in Christensen. I think it works that way.

But in so far as what it's trying to do, uncover the real reasons for why we make these fundamental choices about faith. I think it works. And therefore it has a place within a much broader set of arguments within the poncée, which is why it's really worth reading the poncee. Oh, yeah. Not just going straight to the wager, but reading the whole thing. Yeah, it's an extraordinary text.

And I think it will jump out at you that you're dealing with. I think that the key theme in this conversation that we've been having and that jumps out of Pascal is this distinction in sort of two ways of thinking. There's the rational, mathematical, argumentative, and then there's the intuitive, emotional. And what's fascinating to me is that Pascal literally has sometimes writes about like the sort of two minds. It's like two minds of people. One is the intuitive mind and one is the sort of hyper-rational specific mind. And I must say that as of late, having become interested in the hemispheric divide of the brain and the left brain as the rational language interpreter and the right brain as the sort of big picture, essentially intuitive brain and the way that they sort of seem to work together and sometimes kind of battle it out with each other for dominance, I do sometimes wonder if that's another thing that Pascal might have been preempting. Yeah, I mean, he was not a neuroscientist or a brain surgeon or anything like that,

but I think he does anticipate a lot of that kind of understanding of the different ways of thinking. I think the third element to it, and he often thinks in threes rather than twos, is one is, as you say, he has the, exactly, that's right, yeah, he has this sort of sense of, you know, the rational Descartes sort of pathway, and he has the intuitive sense, you know, the heart. But then the other is this, this sense of habit, what he calls the machine, the impact of habit upon our lives.

We are creatures of habit. And our mental processes, our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing the world, are created as much by habit as they are by reason. I often think he thinks about his calculating machine. It was made to do these calculations without really thinking. You just turn the handle and it comes out with the number. And there's a sense.

in which we we kind of learn our ways of acting and thinking by habit, by doing things over and over again. And that's kind of, again, it's not saying we should do this. He's just saying that's the way we, that's the way we are. Yeah. We tend to do things because of the habit that we have. So, I mean, we acquire certain characteristics by that. So if I'm an example would be that there's a lot of neuroscientists, or at least neuroscience recently,

seems to suggest that since, and it used to be the case, we all had very good spatial awareness. You know, when I was growing up, I could find my way around Bristol, the city where I grew up because I kind of knew to get from one place to another. I sort of knew in my mind how to get there. Now, I don't need that because I've got Google Maps. Yeah. And so actually we've lost a lot of our ability to have that spatial awareness as a capacity we've lost because of. We just don't use it anymore. Yeah.

And now I think Pascal's saying something a little bit like that. that with faith. Faith is kind of like a habit that you learn to look at the world in a particular way. So when he says this thing of, you know, act as if you believe, yeah, it could be fake it until you make it, but maybe that's just the way we tend to work as human beings. That actually if you start going to church and receiving the bread and wine of Holy Communion and you start to think, see, maybe this is something beyond. just bread and wine, it's being given to me. This is somehow Christ's presence given to me as a gift. You begin to think that way. It begins to transform your whole way of receiving and your sense of

gratitude towards God for bringing these things to you. You know, you begin to treat other people as if they're not just an inconvenience who happens to be passing your way, but someone is sent to you in that moment by God as someone who is intentionally precious and sacred and so on. It changes the way you look at the world. until you acquire a new capacity to see the world differently by acting in this way. So I think alongside the rational and the intuitive, there's also the habitual, which is an important part of his anthropology, his understanding of the way we work as human beings. Yeah.

One more thing that I think, it's the only thing I can think of that we sort of haven't covered in this conversation that's crucial to Pascal. We were talking about his most famous quotes. Our heart has its reasons, reasons, knows nothing of. stuff like that. And perhaps another one is when he says that all of man's problems stem from his inability to sit in silence in a room. And Pascal often writes about the concept of boredom and how it sort of plays an important role in philosophy. I've spoken about it before myself as well. I just wondered, what do you think is going on there? Why do you think that Pascal is interested in this

concept of boredom and stillness? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's part of his analysis of how strange we are as human beings. And I think there would have been a whole section at the beginning of the eventual apology where he would just draw on some of the strange paradoxes of human life, you know, what he calls our greatness and our misery, and greatness, our capacity to understand the mysteries of the world through science. And yet, at the same time our insignificance in the kind of great scheme of things. But I think another other thing of those would have been this strange thing that we have, of how easily distracted we are from things that really matter. So he talks about how, you know, a man might have, you know, lost his wife and his children in an accident, but is somehow able to take his mind off it through playing tennis. At one sense, you think maybe that's a good thing that you could need to take your mind off it.

Isn't it a strange thing that we're able to somehow divert ourselves from the really important things in life? They're really important questions by apparent trivia. And I think what he's got in mind there is he's talking about these friends of his who are the kind of smooth, sophisticated, gambling types who spend their time playing tennis and going hunting and chasing hairs and chasing women and having witty conversations and trying to present a kind of good image of them. themselves to other people. But you never think about the question of, is there a God? What is the purpose of my life? What happens after I die? Those sort of questions which he thinks are pretty important questions for every human being to ask. And I think it's also to do with his understanding of how we understand ourselves. He actually thinks part of this train of thought about diversion is that we we often like to portray an image of ourselves to other people,

which is often quite different from what we are really like underneath. And yet we sort of believe that impression we give to others and we present it and we hope they're going to believe it. We sort of half believe it ourselves. And we're able to distract ourselves from what we really are by this kind of false image of ourselves which we give to the world outside. And I think what he's trying to get to alert people to is how easily distracted we are from some of those crucial questions. And I always think there's a bit of an irony about this because, you know, because we have these devices in our pockets that give us distraction at any possible moment.

We are the most distracted at all generations as there's ever been. Pascal and somebody's played a hand in that because the calculating machine was part of the story towards the modern computer. But I think he's just trying to make us aware of, well, why is it that we spend our time on apparent trivial things, giving ourselves time to scroll through endless videos on with TikTok or worrying massively about, you know, this football result or that football result, which in the grand scheme of things don't really matter that much and don't really think a great deal about those bigger questions about who I am, why am I here in this world, where did I come from, where am I going, where am I going? what happens after, you know, all those sort of questions. So I think that's really what he's trying to do, try to make people think, yeah, that is a bit weird, isn't it? Yeah. Why do I think this?

Why do I do that? Yeah. And he's just trying to bring people up short with those things. So then two quick questions in closing. To round things off here and give people something maybe a bit more actionable or interesting. We've got a lot of atheist listeners. And we've spoken about how Pascal isn't, you know, maybe isn't going to convince someone of God's existence, but that's kind of not what he's trying to do.

He's saying, like, oh, if you're already a believer, this is how you justify it, or if you're sort of on the fence or whatever, this is the route you should take. And there's quite a reticence to say, Pascal isn't going to, like, convince the atheist. He's not going to try and grab you by the shirt and drag you to church. If that's the case, what does Pascal have for an atheist reader? Like, why should an atheist be interested in reading this guy, do you think? Well, I think because particularly in the kind of modern day, a lot of atheism has, in recent times, brought into that kind of rationalist argumentation that basically says, Christianity is not rational. Therefore, you can't really, if you're probably being rational, you wouldn't be a believer in God and you wouldn't. There is no evidence for it and so on.

And I've heard that argument so many times. I can't be a Christian because there's no evidence for it. where's the evidence, you know, and so on. And I think Pascal is interesting because he doesn't argue about Christianity on those lines. Yeah. He takes a kind of bit of a backdoor approach, which I think it's definitely worth considering. Oh, yeah. There are other approaches to Christianity than just trying to prove it.

And, you know, yes, Christian apologists have sometimes said, well, I can give you all kinds of reasons as to why God exists and his historical reasons and his metaphysical reasons and so on. but they may or may not be that convincing. But I think Pascal is worth looking at because he takes a different route to it. And I think that it's just worth considering and therefore worth reading the Ponce. Because many people have read it and haven't become believers. Yeah. But I do very often come across people whose journey to faith was in some way influenced by Pascal somewhere on the line, even today. Yeah.

And stuff that he's written on other ways. we haven't talked about the provincial letters. Yeah. This is great work of satire that he did against the Jesuits of his time, which again is very funny, but not read much today. But the post has still read a great deal today, and it's still very powerful and evocative. It just makes you think, at the very least,

even if it doesn't ultimately make you believe. And it helps you to meet Christians on their own terms, at least this kind of Christian, and realized that saying that Christianity isn't rational or that there are no arguments to, establish the existence of God or something, needn't necessarily function as a criticism of Christianity. Someone like Pascal will go like, yeah, now you're speaking my language, you know.

And I think that's well worth engaging. I've also, I've spoken about this before where I think if Christianity is true, it's unlikely that there would be an intellectual barrier for entry. You know, as long as you're smart enough to understand planting as modal ontological argument, you can inherit eternal life. You can understand the discourse of method. Yeah. Yeah, unlucky if you got, it just doesn't seem like the way that God would behave.

And I think Pascal embodies someone who is avoiding that line, but obviously not because he couldn't. Because there are some people who are sort of like, oh, well, gosh, I can't really prove God's existence. So I'll just say it's faith. Pascal was a genius. And he did the science. And he, you know, had the first experiment and invented the bus and proved the existence of the vacuum. And then, I think, therefore, had the authority to say, look, I've been on both sides of this. And I think this is worth more.

And as so often happens, sometimes compared to Thomas Aquinas, who also does not finish the Summa Theologica, having a religious experience near the end of his life and realizing that it's all straw, as he puts it in comparison. You know, I think the threat is common here, that there's something about those intense religious experiences that escape rationality. And even if you're not going to be convinced by that, it's worth familiarizing yourself with that landscape in a world that's so dominated by the left-brain atheism. to get yourself, he's trying to get people to the position where they will make a good choice about the most important thing there is. Yeah. It's about your life, your future, God or not, what happens after this life is over, all those kind of questions. Yeah. He's trying to help you get to the right place where you'll make a right decision, a good decision on that as opposed to a bad one. Yeah. And open yourself to the possibility of the sort of thing that happened

to him on that night in 1654. What would you ask Pascal if you were here? You get one question. Yeah. Good question. I probably would ask him about the wager and where it would have fitted into his argument. And I'd wanted to know, if I had an hour with him, I'd want to go, just talk me through how this thing would have worked, the apology. Because they say we have this fragmentary text and it's fascinating in its own right. But you can wonder how it would have sort of played its way through. And I think the other thing I'd want to ask him about that night November the 23rd, 1654, what happened?

What was that going on? What were you doing? What was the content of it? Because you get this evocative sense of what it was from this extraordinary text that he wrote. But it's, to say, it's little lines, it's phrases. I would have loved to know a bit more about that. Yeah. Well, anybody who wants to know a bit more about Pascal,

You can find it in this book. Blaise Pascal, the man who made the modern world. Big claim that hopefully we've given some indication as to why he might justify the title. Graham Tomlin, thanks for coming on the show. It's been great fun. I love talking about Pascal. It's one of my favorite things to do.

You are the editor-in-chief of Seen and Unseen. Can you tell us about what that is? Yeah. So Seen and Unseen.com is a website that tries to offer a kind of Christian commentary on what's going on culture and news. And it may be that listeners, watchers are interested to know how would the world look if you looked at it through Christian eyes. And so we try to put on maybe five, ten articles every week.

Looking at issues that are in the news or kind of cultural questions and showing how Christian faith might make a difference to the way you look at the world. And it's written for people who don't have faith as well as those who do have faith. So it doesn't make assumptions that people believe or don't believe. but it might be a really interesting way of accessing, you know, how Christians see the world. We also have a number of podcasts on there as well, one of which is called Reenchanting, which is hosted by Justin Briley and Bell Tyndall. And which you came on.

I'm familiar with it, yes. Yeah, that was great fun. And they shoot it at the Lambeth Palace live with beautiful views of Westminster in the background. And yeah, some people who've been watching me on this show might have seen some clips from from that show. It's all interlink. It's all the sort of network of of Christian and atheist discussion. But seen and unseen is your

organization and we'll link that down in the description for people who are interested. Thank you so much for your time. I don't know if you ever get bored of talking about Blaise Pascal, talking about boredom, but I don't think it's possible. So thanks for coming on. Thanks Alex. I really enjoyed the conversation so thanks very much.