Pascal's wager
You should bet your life that God exists, argued the great French thinker. But wasn't a punt on the almighty a denial of faith?
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: The Hammer of Witches; Socrates and the first ‘self’; Digiselves versus Bioselves
DISTURBED BY the intrusion of science on religion, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) corralled all his literary and intellectual powers in defence of Christianity against those who dared question the existence of God in the post-Copernican world.
This astonishingly gifted mathematician, physicist, philosopher and theologian, the inventor of the mechanical calculator and author of the Pensées, craved the Almighty with an unearthly passion.
Pascal was a Jansenist, a member of the Christian sect that followed the ideas of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who taught a peculiar reading of Saint Augustine…