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Continuing on Pascal's Pensées.
More on our human desire and how God is supposed to address that, plus Pascal's views on political philosophy, the relation between faith, reason, and custom… and finally, the wager! We get into the obvious objections. Why not just be a skeptic? Is Pascal right that people suck?
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End song: "44 Days" by Dutch Henry, written and sung by Todd Long, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #34.
Pascal picture by Drew Blom.
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The secular, popular equivalent of Fallenness, is like the movie Out of the Silent Planet, “the monsters from the Id”.
I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed this episode and Pascal in general. In particular, his idea of imagination and the role it plays in society, custom, power as well as its relationship to reason. I thought that was incredibly perceptive and insightful. As with most philosophers, I think I’ll take with those insights and things that I like and just leave the bits I don’t (or chalk it up to time period).
Good stuff guys made my commute to work through traffic a bit easier to endure!
While discussing the “wager” Mark notes the impossibility of simply ‘choosing to believe,’ i.e. that it is impossible to will to believe something we are not intellectually convinced of. I agree and I think this is actually the point that Pascal is trying to make in this section.
Pascal has offered what he takes to be a rational, or at least reasonable, argument yet he doesn’t expect his readers to accept it. Why not? Because we’ve made ourselves into people that aren’t governed by reason. We pretend to be all rational and sophisticated, but this is a façade—in reality we are ruled by our passions. And because of this we are incapable of accepting the truth.
We see this in other, more obvious areas of life. A drunkard can drink himself into a state wherein he honestly and sincerely believes that one more drink will do him no harm—he has made himself into a creature that cannot see, receive, or believe the truth. Or consider Shakespeare’s Othello. That work is a great demonstration of how humans corrupt themselves and thereby blind themselves from the truth.
That, according to Pascal, is why we don’t come to faith. We might rationalize our rejection of Christ, but we are really full of crap. Yes, we honestly can’t believe, but that is because we have made ourselves into people incapable of belief. Our greatest lack isn’t intellectual, but rather moral. That is why Pascal says we must first change our habits, behaviors, etc. and only then can there be the possibility of an intellectual acceptance of faith.