Thinker · TH-0084
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist and religious thinker. He built an early calculating machine, worked on vacuum and pressure, and with Fermat…
On the Coordinates: 1.2.2 Fine-Tuning and Necessity
1623 – 1662 · Clermont (Auvergne), Paris, Rouen, Port-Royal
Traditions: Modern European
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist and religious thinker. He built an early calculating machine, worked on vacuum and pressure, and with Fermat helped found the mathematics of probability. Associated with the Jansenists of Port-Royal, he left notes for a defence of Christianity, published after his death as the Pensées. Its wager treats belief in God as a decision under uncertainty, weighing infinite possible gain against finite cost, rather than as an argument from evidence.
Key ideas
- When reason cannot settle whether God exists, one must still choose, and the expected gains favour wagering on God.
- The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.
- Human beings are a mixture of greatness and wretchedness, a 'thinking reed'.
- Diversion keeps people from confronting their condition.
Major works
- Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters, 1656–1657)
- Traité du triangle arithmétique (Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle)
- Pensées (1670, posthumous)
In the conversation
- Discussion Pascal said we cannot sit quietly in a room. Did phones prove him right, or change the problem?
- Debate The argument from divine hiddenness is stronger than the argument from evil
- Reading group Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
- Question At three in the morning, does a first cause comfort anyone?
- Reading group Reading group: Pascal’s wager fragment and the pages around it, in French and English
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Blaise Pascal takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 1.2.2 Fine-Tuning and Necessity Could the universe have had different laws?