Going Home 5: Pascal

Number 205 of Pascal’s scraps contains this famous cry: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here?”
It is the unanswered question of every soul in the night surrounding it. We can never know who is the master of this house, or whether it has a master at all. Or who has put us here; or where we are going
Pascal was one of the greatest scientific minds that ever lived. Yet, he looked into the eye of the universe and could not find an answer. Without a Creator to make sense of it, Pascal wrote, a human life is “intolerable.”

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So what are we to do? Although Pascal was able to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe better than almost any man who ever lived, and although he solved mathematical puzzles for all time, it is his attempt to answer this question that we most remember him by.
As a mathematician, Pascal invented the world’s first calculator and was a pioneer of probability theory. Using this theory, he devised formulas for winning games of chance that are still employed today. It was only natural that he should attempt to analyze the spiritual uncertainties that surround us in the same clinical way he went about his scientific studies
“229. This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing, which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there that revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; ... ”
The sadness of our condition runs like an Aeolian theme through Pascal’s final papers and makes us recognize in him one of the great poets of the human soul. But the scientist in him could not rest until he had also calculated through intellect a way to rescue us from our desperate state
“If there is a God,” Pascal reasoned, “He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no relation to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is, or if He is.” In short, if God exists, He is a “Hidden God” and unknowable to us
It is nature’s silence about the existence of God that creates the uncertainty that makes us human. We desire a home in this world and the next. This is what we know about ourselves. But we do not know – and can never know -- whether we have one in either
Confronting this mystery, Pascal thought that life could be analyzed like a game in which players roll the dice in ignorance of the outcome. Pascal had already made a name for himself throughout Europe by devising mathematical formulas to calculate the odds that governed such entertainments. Now he proposed a mathematical solution to the game of life
The players in this gamble must calculate the risks of believing that there is a God and that He will provide us with what we so pitifully desire. They must weigh these risks against the chance that there is no God and that we are alone. Weighing both, they must make their choice
Pascal summed up his solution to this dilemma in the famous fragment 233: “A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. God is, or He is not…. What will you wager? Weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is…. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”
This solution to life’s riddle is known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Its bottom line is this: Since you cannot know, it is better for you to believe than not
This advice obviously makes sense, but can it make an unbeliever believe? Can a mathematical argument inspire a religious faith? Pascal knew it could not. In an even more famous fragment (277), he wrote, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” His scientific head may have been skeptical, but Pascal was not. “Faith,” he said, “is God felt by the heart.”