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The Man Who Calculated Everything, Then Bet on God · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to The Theology Made Podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr. Jordan Vale.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at the man who invented probability,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: then stake everything on faith.
• 0:20
  In the autumn of 1662,
• 0:22
  a servant in Paris was going through the clothes of a man who
• 0:25
  just died.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: The man had been sick for years.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: He had stomach pains that came and went.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He had headaches that never really lifted.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he was 39 when his body finally quit.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: By the end, he could barely keep down a meal.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: The servant reached a heavy coat and ran a hand along the lining.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then the fingers stopped on something.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: There was a small lump stitched into the fabric near the chest.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Someone fetched a knife and they cut the threads.
• 0:50
  Inside was a folded piece of parchment with a paper copy
• 0:54
  wrapped around it in the
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: same handwriting.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: The parchment held no will, no final instructions for the family.
• 1:01
  It described a single knight written down eight years before
• 1:05
  and he had carried it
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: against his chest every day since.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every time he bought a new coat,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: he cut the packet out of the old one and stitched it into the new.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: He told no one.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: For eight years,
• 1:16
  the most important thing he owned wrote an inch from his heart
• 1:19
  and not a single
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: person in his life knew it was there.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: To understand why a dying genius would do that,
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: you have to go back to a boy who,
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: by the standards we usually use to measure people,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: should not have been possible.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was born in 1623, in the middle of France.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: His mother died when he was three,
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: and his father raised him at home and made one bizarre decision early on.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: He kept mathematics away from the boy completely.
• 1:42
  No books on geometry No lessons The father worried the subject
• 1:46
  would swallow
• 1:47
  everything else So he essentially locked it out of the house It
• 1:51
  didn't work
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  The story his older sister told years later was that the boy
• 1:55
  started doing geometry
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  SPEAKER_00: anyway,
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: alone on the floor of a playroom with a piece of charcoal on the tiles.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: He had no words for any of it, so he invented his own.
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  SPEAKER_00: A circle he called a round,
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  SPEAKER_00: a line he called a bar,
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  SPEAKER_00: and working with nothing but charcoal and his own attention,
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  he reportedly proved on his own that the angles inside a
• 2:12
  triangle add up to the
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: same as two right angles.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was 12.
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  SPEAKER_00: By 16,
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  he had written a paper on geometry good enough that grown
• 2:20
  mathematicians in Paris
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  SPEAKER_00: refused to believe a teenager wrote it.
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  One of the most respected among them assumed that had to be the
• 2:27
  work of the boy's father.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then he built a machine.
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  SPEAKER_00: His father had taken a government post collecting taxes,
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  SPEAKER_00: which meant endless nights adding long columns of figures by hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the son,
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  SPEAKER_00: around the age of 19,
• 2:38
  designed a box of interlocking gears that could carry the one
• 2:42
  automatically every
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: time a column passed nine.
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  SPEAKER_00: He turned a dial, and the machine did arithmetic.
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  He built close to 50 versions of it,
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  eventually landed on a design that actually held real use.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was one of the first calculating machines in human history.
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  SPEAKER_00: Three centuries later,
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  SPEAKER_00: when engineers needed a name for a unit of pressure,
• 3:02
  and again when computer scientists needed a name for an early
• 3:05
  programming language,
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  SPEAKER_00: they grabbed his.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because this was the thing about him.
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  SPEAKER_00: He believed the world could be counted.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you can see it everywhere in his early life.
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  SPEAKER_00: He climbed into the question of the vacuum,
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  SPEAKER_00: whether empty space could even exist,
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  SPEAKER_00: a question that had stumped people since the ancient Greeks.
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  He arranged for tubes of mercury to be carried up a mountain to
• 3:24
  show that the
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  SPEAKER_00: weight of the air drops as you climb higher.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was right.
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  SPEAKER_00: He could weigh the atmosphere itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: He could measure the invisible and hand you a number for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then in the summer of 1654,
• 3:35
  a gambler brought him a question that would extend its reach
• 3:38
  for the next 400
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  SPEAKER_00: years.
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  The gambler wanted to know how to fairly split the pot in the
• 3:43
  game of chance that
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: gets interrupted before it ends.
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  SPEAKER_00: Two players are partway through.
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  SPEAKER_00: The game stops.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now who deserves what?
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  SPEAKER_00: It kind of sounds like a small thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's actually not small at all.
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  Because buried inside was the problem of predicting the future
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  when you can't see it.
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  And so he started writing letters about it to another brilliant
• 4:03
  mathematician,
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  SPEAKER_00: a man named Pierre de Format.
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  SPEAKER_00: The letters went back and forth through that summer,
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  SPEAKER_00: and between the two of them,
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  SPEAKER_00: working on a problem from a card table,
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  SPEAKER_00: they laid the foundations of probability theory.
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  SPEAKER_00: The mathematics of risk The mathematics that every insurance company,
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  SPEAKER_00: every casino,
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  SPEAKER_00: every stock model,
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  SPEAKER_00: every weather forecast on earth still runs on today.
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  They took the future,
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  the thing no one can see,
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  and at some level they made it calculable.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the autumn of 1654, he was 31 years old.
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  He had taught the human race how to put a number on what had
• 4:33
  not happened yet.
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  Three weeks later,
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  something happened to him that he could not put a number on at
• 4:38
  all.
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  SPEAKER_00: The date was November 23rd, 1654.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometime around half past ten at night and lasting maybe two hours.
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  SPEAKER_00: He had an experience he never fully described to anyone.
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  SPEAKER_00: We only know what happened because of the paper sewn into his coat.
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  SPEAKER_00: We know roughly when because he wrote the date at the top of the page.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first word he wrote was fire.
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  SPEAKER_00: Capital letters, one word, sitting alone above everything else.
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  SPEAKER_00: And underneath that were broken phrases.
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  And they read like something had a grip on the man who was
• 5:10
  known for always being so certain.
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  SPEAKER_00: He wrote about weeping for joy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote a line that's followed him ever since.
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  SPEAKER_00: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
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  SPEAKER_00: Not the philosophers and scholars Wait, huh?
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  SPEAKER_00: This is the philosopher,
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  he is the scholar The man who weighed the air and tamed the
• 5:30
  future with arithmetic
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  But here he's writing in the dark That the god he had just met
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  Was not the god you
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  arrive at by thinking hard enough He had spent his entire life
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  Reaching truth by
• 5:43
  the force of his own mind And the most important thing he ever
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  encountered He said
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  SPEAKER_00: plainly did not come to him that way
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  SPEAKER_00: He didn't write a treatise about it the next morning.
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  SPEAKER_00: He folded the page, sewed it into his clothing and went on living.
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  The smartest man in France kept the most important night of his
• 5:58
  life as a secret he
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: wore under his shirt.
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  SPEAKER_00: After that night, the mathematics mostly stopped.
• 6:04
  He turned towards faith with the same intensity he had once
• 6:07
  aimed at numbers.
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  He moved into the orbit of a strict religious community outside
• 6:11
  of Paris and he
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: threw his whole mind at theology.
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  He wrote a series of public letters defending faith that are
• 6:17
  still studied today as
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: some of the sharpest prose in the French language.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he began a great book,
• 6:22
  a defense of the Christian faith aimed at people who had
• 6:25
  already given up on it.
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  SPEAKER_00: He never finished that book.
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  SPEAKER_00: He died first.
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  SPEAKER_00: What survived were the fragments,
• 6:30
  scraps and half-thoughts found among his papers gathered up and
• 6:34
  printed after he
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: was gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: We call them pansy, which simply means thoughts.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in those fragments sits the strangest move of his entire life.
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  That the man who invented the mathematics of betting decided to
• 6:48
  bet on God.
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  SPEAKER_00: He laid it out the way he once laid out a card game.
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  SPEAKER_00: You cannot prove God exists by reason alone.
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  SPEAKER_00: He admitted that.
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  SPEAKER_00: The mind cannot carry you all the way there.
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  So you stand in the position of a gambler who has to wager
• 7:00
  before the outcome is known.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then wave, he said.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bet your life on God and turn out wrong and you've lost very little.
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  Bet against God and turn out wrong and you've lost everything
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  you had Under that
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  kind of uncertainty the reasonable wager is faith Think about
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  what he's confessing
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  SPEAKER_00: here The greatest mind of his generation
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  SPEAKER_00: And of many generations around him.
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  SPEAKER_00: The man who could prove the things other people only guessed at.
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  Looked at the question of God and did something no one would
• 7:27
  have expected from him.
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  SPEAKER_00: He reached for a wager.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he of all people knew exactly what that meant.
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  SPEAKER_00: A proof compels you.
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  SPEAKER_00: A wager is the thing you reach for when proof has run out.
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  There's a line in those fragments that has outlived almost
• 7:40
  everything else he wrote.
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  SPEAKER_00: People who have never even heard his name,
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  SPEAKER_00: they've probably said it,
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  SPEAKER_00: or at least heard it secondhand,
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  SPEAKER_00: read it on greeting cards,
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  SPEAKER_00: or...
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  SPEAKER_00: Heard aloud in a wedding toast,
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  SPEAKER_00: the line is this,
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  SPEAKER_00: the heart has its reasons,
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  SPEAKER_00: that reason does not know.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in Mo's mouth,
• 8:15
  that's a soft little sentiment with the clinging of champagne
• 8:17
  glasses in the
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  SPEAKER_00: background.
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  SPEAKER_00: But for him, it was menace surrender.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pascal was as clever as human beings get.
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  And he spent the back half of his life insisting that
• 8:25
  cleverness has a limit.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then he found something waiting on the other side of it.
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  He died at 39,
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  worn down,
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  in pain,
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  surrounded by people who had no idea what he was carrying.
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  And he left the proof of his deepest conviction in the only
• 9:01
  place he trusted.
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  SPEAKER_00: Books can be argued with.
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  SPEAKER_00: His own chest could not.
• 9:06
  So that's where it stayed an inch from his heart through every
• 9:09
  coat he ever owned
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  until the day a servant felt a lump in the lining that should
• 9:13
  not have been there.
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  We tend to assume the smartest people in the room have the
• 9:17
  shortest path to the
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: truth,
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  SPEAKER_00: that if you're only clever enough,
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  SPEAKER_00: you can think your way to anything worth having.
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  But Blaise Pascal was as clever as they come,
• 9:27
  and his life says otherwise.