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Blaise Pascal: God
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It was on this date, June 19, 1623, that French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand. He was always in ill health, so it is tempting to attribute his preoccupation with the afterlife and God to being so close to finding out for himself. He was a contemporary of René Descartes and was ten when Galileo was forced to recant his belief that the earth circled the sun. He and Thomas Hobbes lived in Paris at the same time (1640) including the year Hobbes published his Leviathan (1651). Together with Pierre de Fermat, Pascal created the calculus of probabilities.
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Blaise Pascal was a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and philosopher born in 1623. Although he only lived to be 39, he created mathematical theorems that are still used today. He was known for his mastery of logic, reason, and probability, writing volumes of theory, rhetoric, and prose that remain foundational in contemporary education. Whether it was designing a mechanical calculator, discovering the properties of a vacuum, or debating the existence of God with the finest minds in Europe, Pascal was known as a truly special intellect.
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It was on this date, November 23, 1654, that French mathematician and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal had his famous religious conversion. The story goes that on the proverbial dark and stormy night, while Pascal was riding in a carriage across the Neuilly bridge in the Paris suburb, a sudden fright caused the horses to bolt, sending them over the edge. Somehow, the carriage, bearing Pascal, was miraculously spared. If this was indeed the hand of God in Pascal's life, it must be admitted that it was a little hard on the horses! And it is probably only coincidence that 109 years before Pascal's traumatic event, and again 53 years before it, the painters Michelangelo (1545) and Caravaggio (1600) painted scenes using the medieval convention of representing pride as a falling horseman — in their respective paintings of the conversion of Saul to Saint Paul.
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Pascal's Wager (... known as Pascal's Gambit) is Blaise Pascal's application of decision theory to the belief in God. It is one of three 'wagers' which appear in his Pensées, a collection of notes for an unfinished treatise on Christian apologetics. Pascal argues that it is always a better "bet" to believe in God, because the expected value to be gained from believing in God is always greater than the expected value resulting from non-belief. Note that this is not an argument for the existence of God, but rather one for the belief in God. Pascal specifically aimed the argument at such persons who were not convinced by traditional arguments for the existence of God. With his wager he sought to demonstrate that believing in God is advantageous to not believing, and hoped that this would convert those who rejected previous theological arguments.
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Unfortunately, Pascal could not finish his most influential theological work, referred posthumously as the Pensées ("Thoughts"), before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination of and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). What was found upon sifting through his personal items after his death were numerous scraps of paper with isolated thoughts, grouped in a tentative, but telling, order. The first version of the detached notes appeared in print as a book in 1670 titled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. One of the Apologie's main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of skepticism and stoicism, personnalized by Montaigne on one hand, and Epictetus on the other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God. This strategy was deemed quite hazardous by Pierre Nicole, Antoine Arnauld and other friends and scholars of Port-Royal, who were concerned that these fragmentary "thoughts" might lead to skepticism rather than to piety.
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The final years of Pascal's life were devoted to religious controversy, insofar as his increasingly poor health permitted. During this period, he began to collect and draft ideas for a book in defence of the Catholic faith. While his health and premature death partly explain his failure to complete this work, one might ... suspect that an inherent contradiction in the project would have made the task impossible. Apologetic treatises in support of Christianity traditionally required the author to provide reasons for religious faith; however, according to Pascal's radical theological position, it was impossible in principle to acquire or support genuine religious faith by reason, because genuine religious faith was a pure gift from God. Having collected ideas for some time, Pascal began the task of cutting and pasting his draft notes into a coherent form before he died; however, he left the manuscript in such a condition that subsequent editors failed to agree on any numbering system or on the order, if any, in which they should be read. The most frequently quoted modern editions of the Pensées—those of Lafuma, Sellier, or Le Guern—provide concordances to the numbering systems adopted by alternative editions.
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