BIOGRAPHY

Blaise Pascal was the middle child of an upper-class magistrate in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His mother died when he was three years old, and five years later Pascal's father moved the family to Paris. His father, Etienne, an excellent amateur mathematician, educated young Blaise at home. Etienne first taught young Blaise Latin and Greek, deciding to wait on his own love, mathematics, until his son was older. By the age of 12, however, Blaise had figured out many of the principles of Euclidian geometry on his own. His father finally relented and bought Blaise a copy of Euclid, which he devoured. Over the next several years, father and son attended weekly mathematical lectures and were regular guests at important intellectual salons in Paris. In 1638, the family underwent another trauma when Etienne Pascal was forced by a conflict with Cardinal Richelieu to flee Paris. However, Blaise Pascal's younger sister, Jacqueline, performed so well in a children's play for the Cardinal that their father was pardoned and installed as tax commissioner for Rouen.

At Rouen Blaise Pascal began to concentrate on mathematics. While still a teenager, he wrote his first book (on conic sections in geometry) and developed a plan for a calculating machine to help his father's tax work. In 1644, he built the first of the machine's several working models- no small feat given the state of metalworking at the time. Pascal's contributions to mathematics and computing machines were so important that a major contemporary programming language is named in his honor. Pascal also experimented on the nature of a vacuum showing that, contrary to Aristotle's belief, "Nature has no abhorrence of a vacuum."

In 1647 Pascal became seriously ill and returned to Paris with his younger sister to recover. Following his father's death in 1651, his sister entered a convent, leaving Pascal alone. Over the next several years Pascal seemed to drift: he outwardly enjoyed the social life of Paris as a successful mathematician and eligible bachelor, but he was inwardly dissatisfied. Although he had undergone a conversion in 1646 under the influence of the Jansenists, a group of devout Catholics, Pascal still felt without direction. On the night of November 23, 1654, Pascal had a remarkable second conversion experience, the description of which he sewed inside his coat:

Pascal committed himself to living his faith in good works. He wrote a remarkable series of Provincial Letters defending the Jansenists against the Jesuits. Pascal also worked on one of the first regularly-scheduled public transit services, with profits for the poor; the line became operational shortly before Pascal's death in 1662. But Pascal's most important mature work was his Apology for the Christian Religion, the completed portion of which is now known as the Pensées (Thoughts).

BASIC THOUGHT

Collected and published after Pascal's death at age 39, the Pensées is considered a French classic-despite its fragmentary character. Touching on numerous areas of religious and philosophical thought, the Pensées portray humanity "engulfed in the infinite immensity" of the universe. Unlike Descartes, Pascal claims that reason is insufficient to find certainty. While the cogito ("I think") is indeed God's one of greatest gifts to humanity and "all our dignity consists . . . in thought," there is nevertheless something more important than thought and reason: the heart. As Pascal put it, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."

As for knowledge of God, Pascal knows that reason is utterly insufficient for the enterprise. Against Descartes, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others, proofs for God's existence and the Christian truth "are not of such a nature that they can be said to be absolutely convincing." There is always "both evidence and obscurity [enough] to enlighten some and [to] confuse others." Given that one can never know if there is a God, how can live one's life? According to Pascal, one can never have true knowledge of anything until one has submitted to it-and so there can be no true knowledge of God until one has submitted oneself to God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Is there, then, no rational basis for making the Christian commitment? In the selection given here, Pascal appeals to the bon vivants of Paris by asking them to consider faith as a wager. If you bet your life on God and turn out to be right, you have gained eternity. If you are wrong and there is no God, what have you lost-except the possibility of "those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury"? But if you bet your life against the reality of God, you gain little if correct, and lose eternally if wrong.

Some critics have argued that Pascal's Wager hardly seems like faith at all-that it is a "calculating and self-regarding attitude" and "profoundly irreligious."* Others have claimed that the wager leads not to Christianity, but to any religion with a great reward for belief and a great penalty for disbelief. Still others argue that the most reasonable choice is to avoid wagering at all until the evidence is clear. (See the suggested readings below.) However, to be fair, Pascal never claimed the wager was the way to faith or that it provided the means for proving Christian truth. His two goals were to show that while being suprarational, belief is not irrational, and that one must decide. As Pascal put it,

Do not then reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice . . . The true course is not to wager at all."
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?