Dissident Veteran For Peace: Some Thoughts from Blaise Pascal

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Sunday, September 05, 2021

Some Thoughts from Blaise Pascal

What follows are a few thoughts on God, faith, and Christianity from mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). The text is taken from A. J. Krailsheimer's translation of Pascal's Pensées (Penguin, 1995). Specifically, they are derived from sections 418 - 424, according to Louis Lafuma's numbering scheme.

The first two excerpts are from a larger text commonly known as "Pascal's wager". I am not so interested here in Pascal's actual argument, almost all of which I have omitted, as I am in what Pascal concedes and what he believes about faith, unbelief, and Christianity.

If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is ...
Who then will blame Christians for being unable to give rational grounds for their belief, professing as they do a religion for which they cannot give rational grounds? They declare that it is a folly, stultitiam, in expounding it to the world, and then you complain that they do not prove it! ... Let us then examine this point, and say, "God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. [418]

Pascal's position is that reason cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. However, Pascal argues, reason can and does prove that one should choose to believe and/or act as if God does exist.

The idea is that the cost of the erroneous belief in a non-existent deity is low compared to the high cost of erroneous disbelief in a God who does exist. Conversely, as Pascal would have it, becoming a Christian is a win whether God exists or not.

Having assumed that his imagined interlocutor accepts his reasoning, Pascal concedes that faith in God cannot necessarily be turned on or off like a switch.

... at least get it into your head that, if you are unable to believe [in God], it is because of your passions since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you ... They behaved just as if they did believe, taking the holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally ... — 'But this is what I am afraid of.' — 'But why? What have you to lose? But to show you that this is the way, the fact is that this diminishes the passions which are your great obstacles ...' [418]

Pascal's point, then, is that disbelief in God is not grounded in reason but in an emotionally or psychologically-based resistance he calls "passions". Here are few more excerpts that are not generally considered part of Pascal's wager.

No sect and no religion has always existed on earth except Christianity. [421]

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The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.
I say that it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against either as it chooses. You have rejected one and kept the other. Is it reason that makes you love yourself? [423]

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