Pascal, Blaise

Pascal, Blaise (1623–62). French mathematician and philosopher. From 1646 he was closely involved with the Jansenists and the convent of Port-Royal. On 23 Nov. 1654 he experienced a conversion, recorded in his Mémorial (but found stitched into his coat, known as Pascal's amulet), in which he discovered ‘the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the men of science’. When the Jansenist, Arnauld, was condemned in 1655, he wrote his Lettres provinciales in which he satirized the laxity implicit in Jesuit theories of grace and moral theology. In his Pensées, published posthumously from his notes, Pascal saw Christianity as lying beyond exact reason and apprehended by the heart which dares to risk. He is associated also with his ‘wager’: if we believe God exists and he does, the reward is eternal happiness; if he does not exist, we lose nothing; and the same is true if we disbelieve and he does not exist; whereas if we disbelieve and he does exist, we have lost eternal life. On the mathematics of probability (see further, G. Schlesinger, Religion and Scientific Method, 1977), the wager should be taken up unless the existence of God can be conclusively disproved—which it cannot.