Renaissance/Early Modern
Blaise Pascal
1623–1662
“When we act on an uncertainty, we act reasonably; for we ought to work for an uncertainty according to the doctrine of chance.”
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician and physicist who turned, after a religious conversion, to the defense of Christian faith. The Pensees, fragments of an unfinished apology, set the God of Abraham against the abstract God of the philosophers. Reason has its office. It cannot settle what matters most. The heart has its reasons. The wager shows that one cannot avoid living as if God is or is not. Christianity, he holds, alone explains both human greatness and wretchedness. Later apologetics that refuse pure rationalism and pure fideism still work in his register.
In the Conversation
6 of the Great Ideas
Theology & Metaphysics
Religion
The heart has its reasons that reason does not know; Christianity alone explains both human greatness and human wretchedness.
Sin
Original sin is the only doctrine that explains the human condition in full: it accounts for both our greatness, which exceeds the animal, and our wretchedness, which exceeds it further still.