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

25:41We 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. So you work out the data and you work out the best explanation for that.

26:22He 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.

26:34Alex O'Connor: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 area. era, in that Anselm's ontological argument in the proslogion, and people are like, that's a terrible argument. Maybe, but it's not really an argument though. It's a prayer, that's what it is. It's a reflection on the nature of God. And even modern versions of the ontological argument, like Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument, he says quite explicitly, 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.

27:16Alex O'Connor: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 justified. But as long as somebody isn't making the claim that they're doing more than that, And I think that's perfectly legitimate. And it seems like Pascal is engaged in a similar kind of series of reflections. Yeah. No, I think that is right. And I think Pascal's, he's not a great believer in proofs for God.

27:56Right. 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.

28:09Alex O'Connor: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. Our desires are very strong. And 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 um number infinity and so on by this just this deep instinct not a not a rational process and um and and and that's that's partly the way we're made but it's also exacerbated by what pascal thinks of as the fallenness of human beings yes 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.

29:11And therefore that twists the way we see things. Therefore our desires overwhelm our logic all the time. And therefore, 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.

29:27Alex O'Connor: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 said 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.

30:12Alex O'Connor: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. And I think it's really important to recognize that Pascal is not saying you can't establish this stuff through reason, 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. Rely on intuition. He's saying that you just already do.

30:48Alex O'Connor:In fact, the quote 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. Yeah. Like, yeah, you can, I've always found that fascinating that if you, if, I mean, we're on a, we're on a carpet right now, which is, I don't know, a few meters across. And if, if we were suddenly on top of a massive drop, you know, there's a cliff edge either side.

31:31Alex O'Connor:I am perfectly confident that I'm not going to fall off this carpet, but suddenly it's my intuition and my, 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 operate, that we grasp certain things by the heart, not by reason. Doesn't mean that 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.

32:07So I kind of love that. There is a place for 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, Pascal 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 the kind of 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 sit on it and i can explain where it came into being who made it all that kind of thing it's a it's an object within the world like that um or historical event you can say you know what came before it and what led up to it and so on.

33:02But God is not in that kind of category. He's an object outside the world and therefore isn't subject to the historical or 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.

33:20Alex O'Connor: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 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 philosophers 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 behavior 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 um the ponce like you said, are Pascal's notes.

34:20Alex O'Connor:He's planning on making a larger volume. And so these are quite aphoristic. If you read the Pensee, 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 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.

34:57Alex O'Connor: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 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?

35:32Alex O'Connor: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. And Pascal seems to be seething at the thought of treating God in this epistemological way. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, I mean, Pascal has sometimes been called 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.

36:10Because if you roll the kind of history onwards i think what happens with that is you have decarfe like says okay we can 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 um and that you know was maybe made sense in a world where all these fights were between protestants and catholics and other people were saying well play 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 then get you know um 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 arguments that have been used for this.

36:49And 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, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. I think the other thing about Descartes is Descartes hardly ever mentions Jesus. And the same with Pascal's other great Bette Noire, because he has these two figures that he's always playing off against each other.

37:25Descartes on the one hand, which is the great rationalist tradition of modern thought. And on the other hand, you've got Michel de Montaigne, who is this great example of the skeptical 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 as if God is, as you were saying, just something which you kind of tick off and say, yeah, we believe in God. But 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, the place of Jesus Christ for him.

38:05Alex O'Connor:Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I'd never really 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 ponce there, but you're definitely not going to find the meditations there. And maybe this is on purpose, but I love what you alluded to there in that you're placing a pretty important stake here. 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.

38:41Alex O'Connor:Because you're essentially saying that, should this evidence ever be undermined, you now need to give up your belief in God. Exactly, yeah. And I think Pascal wants to protect 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. 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 yeah, I can understand 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.

39:24Alex O'Connor:I'm thinking Descartes writing his meditations back in bloody 5000 BC for all I care and then Pascal comes along and comments on it but they actually met each other yeah right like these guys were contemporaries and there was one infamous night where they they came into contact yeah they did Pascal was one of his bouts of illness he was in his he was in his bed in Paris and Descartes in town and he'd heard about this sort of young upstart Pascal because Pascal was kind of about 10-15 years younger than Descartes and um 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 these great experiments that he's done and all that kind of thing and um anyway he he goes and visits pascal and it doesn't go well as to be said um so pascal's lying there on his bed feeling pretty pretty rubbish um 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 not really a doctor at all and um they have a bit of a sort of polite but slightly frosty conversation.

40:25They 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?

40:46Alex O'Connor: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, Descartes spent loads of time arguing about objections to his arguments. You know, are they circular? Is there a deduction or is it 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.

41:32Alex O'Connor:That's amazing. Yeah, you'd love to have had a bit of fly on the wall if they were in 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 because I don't speak French. Exactly, precisely. Yeah, yeah. 70th century French would be the easiest thing to do. 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 and so like you are your witness to this wonderful thing and you're just like it was uh yeah sounded like a zhe sound and then uh yep you'd I'd be I'd be lost what a waste yeah but it's I think it's um it's actually that you know the reasons why Pascal is so focused upon the God of Jesus Christ as opposed to the God of the philosophers us.

42:15And 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 we have that puts us in competition with each other and that destroys communal life and friendship and everything else.

43:05And because he has this profound sense of human sinfulness, I suppose you'd call it, he sees the absolute need for what he calls a mediator. 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 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 he 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.

43:46And 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 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.

44:14Alex O'Connor: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 that's got a lot to do with him despite his arrogance and whatnot. Strikes me as someone who's probably quite empathetic in a way that maybe Descartes wasn't. I mean, if we think about their little side projects, what were they up to when they weren't discovering foundational ideas and philosophy?

44:55Alex O'Connor: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 uh meanwhile pascal is so concerned with poor people being able to get around paris that he essentially invents the bus yeah so i you know i think there's some evidence to suggest that they had slightly different priorities you know yeah yeah no then 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 pensée, or who knows what it would have been if he'd finished it.

45:36But the other was this passionate concern for the poor.

45:40Alex O'Connor:Yeah. and um one of one of the outcomes of which is as you mentioned this um this um invention of the bus which is basically when he sort of sees how paris has doubled in size during his 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 he thinks okay if we if we raise some money we could buy a number of carriages and we could get them to go from point a to point be and they can stop at various places along the way and somebody can get on and pay a very small amount, sank, soo, five pence or five cents or whatever it might be and they can get off when they want to.

46:20First 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 um bare apartment he 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 um and he says you know i i i love the poor because christ loved the poor and he finds this great attraction or he's been 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 and is one of the outcomes of this profound experience that he has.

47:10And again, you don't really see much of that in Descartes.

47:12Alex O'Connor:Yeah, take that Descartes. You can't prove that you should care enough about the poor to invent the bust 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' way of seeing the world is the way of seeing the world, but it's not.

48:00Alex O'Connor: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, how should they interpret it? Yeah, it's really, along with the God of the Philosophers or um places like that probably that's the most famous one that he he you know and it's sometimes been used as a kind of the heart has its reasons its romance its feeling its emotion its you know disney films and all that kind of thing um but that's really not what pascal means by it the the heart liqueur in french uh has this very distinct meaning for pascal which is this this kind of deep underlying um affective instinct that we have yeah um which is kind of not irrational but it's kind of over and above rationality um 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.

49:16And 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 barmy to believe this but it's not going to get you there in the first place it's a kind of in deep instinctive thing and again comes from his 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 um but that's i think what he what he means by the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing reason can't know about these fundamental reasons that the heart grasps.

50:04Yes.

50:06Alex O'Connor: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. Le cœur assez raison dont la raison connaît point. Yeah. That's what it is in French. It sounds pretty good. I mean, I wouldn't know. But I'm sure it's great. There's a great thing about Pascal. He's a scientist, but he knows how to write. Yeah, man. He writes brilliantly. 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 very interested in sport.

50:35Alex O'Connor: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 this period of human thought where I guess if you're smart enough, there are just problems that need solving.

51:07Alex O'Connor: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 you know that's that's sort of where we were at that period in my spare time yeah and um yeah pascal invents 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 they like gambling and um playing tennis and going going hunting and witty conversation they go to the salons there's a phrase that's used in french at the time called the honnête honest man or a sort of gentleman or something unless this is a classic people that they are and they're um they're not interested in god they find god rather boring and um they're kind of nominal catholics pretty well everybody was um and uh so but they gamble quite a lot and one of them poses pascal a problem one time and he says well you know 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 uh this is a it's a well-known sort of mathematical problem that had been tried out by various people over the previous hundred years or so and um so pascal thinks this is quite interesting i'll try and work it out some people said when you can't it's just chance pascal thinks oh no maybe it's not just chance if you can work out the probability of this result or that result.

53:11And 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 Fermat's last theorem and probably one of the most famous mathematical problems. And Fermat is one of the most 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.

53:47Probability 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. And that plays quite an important role in the development of some of his theological argumentation as well, particularly the wager. But probability is a key thing for him.

54:12Alex O'Connor: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 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.

54:50If you're wrong, you go to hell. It's all like that. So it feels like for many people -

54:56Alex O'Connor:Well, if you believe in God and you're wrong, if you do believe in God and you're wrong, then it's like who cares yeah but there's so much to gain yeah if you don't believe in god and you're right yeah then who cares but there's so much to lose exactly so you want to go for the option where you've got more exactly yeah yeah yeah so it's you know 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 but if i do win i gained a great deal and um and so the argument is often thought of is pascal saying here is a good reason for believing in God.

55:30And you really ought to believe in God because of this argument. But I actually don't think it works that way, partly because, as we said earlier on, Pascal's not that convinced about foolproof 100 % reasons that force you into believing God. The way I think it works is like this that um so it starts with probability theory um and uh the start of the wager he says um it says we you know we are our soul is cast into the body uh he said what he says is that our 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 um 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.

56:22And 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 do i have to bet um can i just be agnostic and pascal says no no no you have to bet because you're already living your life as if god doesn't exist or if god does exist you've already you've already bet you're already embarked on the journey is 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 um uh pascal says well yep you've already bet you've already you're already really one side or the other.

57:14And 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 exists exists and you're wrong um well you haven't lost a great deal maybe a bit of sacrifice in this life um 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 stand to lose a great deal, the eternal damnation or annihilation or whatever the conclusion is.

58:12So basically what he says then is, look, 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 that's 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 um but the fact that you don't shows that you're the real reasons for unbelief are not rational they're more instinctive back to this idea of the heart um and it's it's to do with your passions not your reasons so he's what he's trying to do is uncover the real foundations of belief and unbelief and it's not primarily about rationality yeah which is what descartes thought it was now then there comes an interesting move because again um the guy says well what what do i do then?

59:24And Pascal says, well, the way to find faith, if you're in this position where you're maybe true, maybe 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 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.

1:00:10Start 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.

1:00:52And 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.

1:01:03Alex O'Connor: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 um 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 i to the extent that if you ever mention pascal's wager i often get yeah i think you'll see a lot of christians being like no you don't know it's it's 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 it 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 it till you make it but only once you've like sort of already agreed that faking it as it were would be the better thing were it possible okay fine um but like there are all kinds of other of other issues with this 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 um 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.

1:02:40Alex O'Connor: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... And it's not like there's only one way to believe in God. 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?

1:03:21Alex O'Connor:because yeah if i believe like i think the only thing worse than atheism in a lot of religious traditions is worshiping the wrong god yeah 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 you would say to that kind of thing yeah well i think it's why i think you know the wager comes within the whole pensée and it would have 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 or some of them are or half of them are the others are all scattered all over the place and so we don't really know where it would have come in the argument but there's a lot more to the pensée than just the wager so there is actually quite a long section where he does well it is 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 um so so you're absolutely right just taking on its own that what's called the many gods objection yeah can be something which you can say well well, that argument on its own could lead you to the God of Jesus, or could it be the God of Mahomet or Moses or whatever.

1:04:49But there's a section, I think, in the Pensee 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 pensée. 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.

1:05:26It is about creating or at least 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 yeah 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.

1:06:09Again, 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 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 tragedy and sadness and everything else. And he thinks, 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 rather than a God of might and law and military conquest.

1:07:06And 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. 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 pensée. 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 in a vast universe.

1:07:50and 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 that that speaks to that in a way that other things don't and so that's kind the way he does his arguments, I think. See, for me, these kind of function

1:08:19Alex O'Connor: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 considered. If you're like, I want to figure out which of these religions 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.

1:08:56Alex O'Connor: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.

1:09:30Alex O'Connor: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 right 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 to, if I don't bet on Christianity and I'm right, then nothing really matters. And so I'm kind of comparing not the bliss of God versus, oh, you haven't really lost much, but versus eternal damnation.

1:10:16Alex O'Connor:And in those contexts, I might be just more motivated to avoid eternal damnation at all means possible. I'd rather be an agnostic who can come to God and say, look, punish me for my indiscretion here, but 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'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.

1:10:49Alex O'Connor:But if I'm wrong about that, that's not going to convince God that I should be let 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 you into the Christian God, which I don't think it is. Right. I don't think that's its point. Its 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 its 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.

1:11:25Alex O'Connor: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 theism or Christianity or Islam or whatever. What is 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. Even though you say it is. The decisions are made on other grounds. And therefore, he wants to move them on to other grounds to say, well, okay, there are other reasons why you might want to do this.

1:12:06And so, yeah.

1:12:06Alex O'Connor:And then he wants to say, like, recognize that the reasons are more emotive and 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 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 uh you know 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 it's just you know invest five ten pounds a month in artificial intelligence development right and you might say yeah but i i just yeah a bit unlikely i just don't think it matters that much i'm 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 abusing 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 i think what pascal would say to that two things one is he's somebody but that's his point about you know the possibility or otherwise of agnosticism.

1:14:31And it's the thing earlier on, when his conversation partner says, well, can't I just be agnostic about this? Can't I just sit on the fence? And Pascal says, vous êtes en barque, 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, the God of Jesus exists or the God of Muhammad exists and so on. So we've already made a choice.

1:15:11And so I think he's questioning how, to what extent, and the difference between that and the kind of AI scenarios, 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, 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 pensée where he actually talks about the benefits of faith. And he actually talks about the, certainly, you know, within the night of fire, there's a great note of just sheer joy that comes through it.

1:15:49This sense of, you know, joy, joy, certainty, trust. And he says that Pascal, towards the end of his life on the one hand there's this very ascetic kind of um 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 a kind of profound happiness that that um 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.

1:16:34No 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, in an encounter with the God who made us. And we will, again, the 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 joys 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.

1:17:18Alex O'Connor:I also think it's probably worth reminding people that even if this is a really silly line of thought that crumbles under pressure, if that's the case, then 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 published polished like argument when you're literally reading a man's diary you know so give him give him some grace especially in insofar as he might not have expressed clearly what he meant or not not sort of exhaustively explained where he's coming from yeah 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 have no idea what's happening here.

1:18:18But 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 on religion and various other subjects. It's not all about -

1:18:34Alex O'Connor:No, he writes about the monarchy, He writes about kings and stuff. Yeah, there's a whole field of Pascal's 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 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 it's a key point in it i think it um 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 a an argument of strong-armed people into belief in christianity yeah right i think it works that way um but in so far as what it's trying to do um uncover the the real reasons for why we make these fundamental choices about faith, I think it works.

1:19:59And therefore, it has a place within a much broader set of arguments within the posse, which is why it's really worth reading the posse. Oh, yeah. Not just going straight to the wager, but reading the whole thing.

1:20:08Alex O'Connor: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 yeah and and the left brain as the rational language interpreter and the right brain as the sort of big picture uh 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 for dominance i do sometimes wonder if that's another thing that pascal might have been yeah 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.

1:21:18I think the third element to it, and he often thinks in threes rather than twos, is one is, as you say, he has this sort of sense of the rational Descartes sort of pathway. And he has the intuitive sense, you know, the heart. But then the other is 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.

1:22:02You just turn the handle and it comes out with the number. And there's a sense in which 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, it's just saying that's the way we are. We tend to do things because of the habit that we have. So, I mean, and we acquire certain characteristics by that. So, an example would be that there's a lot of neuroscientists, or at least neuroscience recently, it 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.

1:22:47I sort of knew in my mind how to get there. Now, I don't need that because I've got Google Maps. 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. And now I think Pascal's saying something a little bit like 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 till 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 that's being given to me.

1:23:38This 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 begin to treat other people as if they're not just an inconvenience who happens to be passing your way, but someone who's 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.

1:24:22Alex O'Connor: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, the heart has its reasons, reasons it knows nothing of, and 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's going on there? Why do you think that Pascal is interested in this concept of boredom and stillness?

1:25:04Alex O'Connor: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, our greatness, our capacity to understand the mysteries of the world through science, and yet at the same time our insignificance in the great scheme of things. But I think another thing of those would have been this strange thing that 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 yeah um that one sense you think maybe that's a good thing that you could need to take your mind off it but isn't it a strange thing that we're able to somehow divert ourselves from the really important things in life um They're really important questions by parent trivia.

1:26:15And 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 hares and chasing women and having witty conversations and trying to present a kind of good image of themselves to other people. But he would 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.

1:26:56He actually thinks, part of this train of thought about diversion, is that 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 um i think what he's trying to get to alert people to is how easily distracted we are from some of those crucial questions.

1:27:39And I always think there's a bit of an irony about this because we have these devices in our pockets that give us distraction at any possible moment. We are the most distracted of 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 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, What happens after?

1:28:28You know, all those sort of questions. So I think that's really what he's trying to do. Trying to make people think, yeah, that is a bit weird, isn't it? Why do I think this? Why do I do that? Yeah. And he's just trying to bring people up. Sure. Sure. Monster Energy. Everybody knows White Monster Zero Ultra. That's the OG. It kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian, Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the monster energy punch. So if you've been living in the white can, branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe.

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1:29:10Alex O'Connor:So good, so good, so good. Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. And they're up to 60 % off. Stock up and save on Rag & Bone, Madewell, Vince, All Saints, and more of your favorites. How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Why do we rock? For the hottest deals. just so many good brands. Join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. So then, two quick questions in closing to round things off here and give people something maybe a bit more actionable or interesting.

1:29:49Alex O'Connor: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 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? Why should an atheist be interested in reading this guy, do you think?

1:30:26Yeah. Well, I think because, particularly in the modern day, a lot of atheism has, in recent times, bought into that rationalist argumentation that basically says, Christianity is not rational. therefore you can't really if you're 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 you know 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 um which i think it's definitely worth considering oh yeah there are other approaches to christianity than just trying to prove it.

1:31:13And, 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 his ontological 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 pensée. 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.

1:31:49And stuff that he's written and other ways, and we haven't talked about the provincial letters, this 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 is still read a great deal today, and it's still very powerful and evocative. just makes you think at the very least, even if it doesn't ultimately make you believe.

1:32:11Alex O'Connor:And it helps you to meet Christians on their own terms, at least this kind of Christian, and realize 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. Because someone like Pascal will go like, yeah, now you're speaking my language. And I think that's well worth engaging. 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. As long as you're smart enough to understand planting as modal ontological argument, you can inherit eternal life.

1:32:49Alex O'Connor:You can understand the discourse method, you're in. Unlucky. 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.

1:33:22Alex O'Connor: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 thread 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. Pascal is trying to kind of 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, which is about your life, your future, God or not, what happens after this life is over, all those kind of questions.

1:34:06He'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. And open yourself to the possibility of the sort of thing that happened to him on that night in 1654.

1:34:17Alex O'Connor: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 get to say, 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 going on?

1:34:59What 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, as you say, it's little lines, it's phrases. it's um i would love to know a bit more about that yeah well anybody who wants to know a bit

1:35:16Alex O'Connor:more about pascal can find it in this book blaze 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 uh 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 um you are the editor-in-chief of seen and unseen can you tell us about what that is. Yeah. So seenandunseen.com is a website that tries to offer a kind of Christian commentary on what's going on in 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.

1:35:58And so we try to put on maybe five, 10 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 um but it might be a really interesting way of yeah accessing you know how christians see the world um we also have a number of podcasts on there as well one of which is um uh called re-enchanting which is hosted by justin bryerly and bel tindall and uh which i'm familiar with it yes yeah that was great fun um and they

1:36:36Alex O'Connor:shoot it at the Lambeth Palace Library, 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 that show. It's all interlinked. It's all a sort of network 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.