Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Graham Tomlin: These Two Thinkers Made Your World — Descartes and Pascal || SLP594

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Graham Tomlin: These Two Thinkers Made Your World — Descartes and Pascal || SLP594 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's a polarized view of the world that Descartes bequeaths to us, I think.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: He begins from this thing again, you know, he goes into his room, and I'm gonna doubt everything that comes into my mind.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Doubt is the thing that gets you to the truth, he says.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Pascal in his own room on his own encounters got something other than himself.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, that's the difference between them.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Your world was split by a 17th-century Frenchman, but if you have ears to hear it, there's another 17th-century Frenchman who can unite it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Frenchman who split your world is René Descartes, the philosopher and mathematician who went into a room by himself and doubted everything.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: He has bequeathed to us a split that has absolutely shaped your world.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another 17th-century Frenchman who is also a mathematician and a philosopher.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Blaise Pascal.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to be talking to the author of this book, Blaise Pascal, the man who made the modern world.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Graham Tomlin is a Pascal scholar.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: He's also a churchman, an academic, and an author.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And together we'll see how Descartes has split the world and how, if we listen to Pascal, he can help us to unite it again.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Please do give us a like on this video and subscribe to the channel so you can find out more about how Jesus can reunite this world.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I begin by talking to Graham Tomlett about this split in the world that Descartes has given to us.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just worth noting, you know, when he goes into that room to kind of uh doubt everything that can come to his mind.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually while he's a he's a kind of mercenary soldier in in the religious wars.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's right at the middle of these religious wars that are happening in the 17th century.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: So as you say, he does, he tries this mental experiment uh where he goes into a room which is heated by a stove and he uh he decides to kind of stay there until and to doubt everything that comes into his mind until he finds something that he can't he can't doubt at all.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: The thing he he lands up with is the fact that he is doubting his own thinking self.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so he starts to rebuild the world from that position.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a kind of fundamental shift because it's not as people like you know Thomas Aquinas or some you know Sidanson or even sort of you know Lethar or Calvin would have done, rebuilding a sense of the world from the kind of certainty of the presence of God or the reality of God, but it's instead rebuilding the world on the foundation of the thinking self and the fact that he is thinking.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And um now he then goes on, he doesn't he's not an atheist, he goes on to say that you know the first thing the mind perceives outside itself is the idea of God and therefore God exists.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: But God has shifted from the centre of the picture.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: What's happened is that the self has become central to the whole thing, and uh and I think that's quite significant in that sort of shifting of the self to the centre, which is quite significant in Pascal's writing as well.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: He writes quite a lot about the self, um, and how uh you know placing the self at the centre is the kind of beginning of all disorder in life and politics and economics.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Pascal says that, and that's very much a kind of Cartesian sort of move to place ourselves at the centre of the picture rather rather than God.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one thing I think.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think the other thing that that um uh that that is true for Descartes is is what we sometimes call Cartesian uh dualism.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that it that idea that the body and the soul are uh are sort of or the body and the mind are sort of separate things, um and they don't really have much kind of converse with each other.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean Descartes is one of these figures who he almost doesn't he doesn't really think about his body that much at all.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: He's he is a thinking self.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: What is important about us is our is our is our inner life, our thinking.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a very kind of modern thing as well, that we've kind of had this distinction between our inner lives, which somehow define us, uh and our outer lives, which are somehow separate, and therefore you can separate the body from the soul.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: The body doesn't really seem to matter that much.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's this the inner inner life, the inner mind, the inner desires, that's what defines you.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think in those two senses, Descartes is a bit of a maker of the modern world, both in his placing the human consciousness and the human self at the centre of the world and rebuilding everything from our own sense of self, uh, but also that distinction between the the body and the soul, the mind and the soul.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Which again, you know, Christian faith has always seen us as being one in an embodied soul.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I can be something that's much more unified than that kind of dualism that Descartes has.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So Descartes is putting the self at the centre.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's also the individual self as well.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is not just it's not it's not us in relation, it's actually just uh us us on our own, and then relationships is then something we have as a secondary move, as it were.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, um, which is just very focused on the individual.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just Descartes, you've got people like John Locke as well, who is part of that same story about the kind of focusing upon the self, but he plays a key role in it, I think.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the individual independent self and the privileging of mind over body, and the privileging of doubt over faith.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um we we start from scepticism, and then if we can if we can dare to trust something, we might, if there are sufficient reasons.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh how how has that kind of uh been this foundational belief that we we share today?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think that is you're right, that is a big shift.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he he begins from this thing, again, you know, he goes into his room, I'm gonna doubt everything that comes into my mind.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of initial principle, doubt is the thing that gets you to the truth, he says.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you should not believe anything unless you can find very good reason for believing it.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's quite significantly different from someone like St.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine or St.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Anselm, who have a different understanding of the way we go about things.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um St.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Anselm says, unless you believe, you will not understand.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about you know faith-seeking understanding.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that we kind of have to assume a certain number of things before we can begin to understand anything.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I see Pascal is very much within that tradition.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about you know the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um by the heart he actually means a kind of instinct for basic concepts and axioms, including which it you know, one of which is is is is the existence of God, he says.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: We can talk about that a little bit later on.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um but that's a fundamentally different thing from what Descartes is saying, that you start with doubt.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we've we've we've our world is kind of uh surrounded by that.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: There are many people around us who say, you know, you cannot believe anything unless you've got hard evidence for it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um unless you can give me hard evidence, unless you can give me proof, I'm not going to believe it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's again a very Cartesian thing that begins from doubt rather than realizing, which I think I would want to say that we um there are certain things that you cannot find evidence for but are equally real.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so, um, which I think is what Pascal would want to say as well.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, what kind of doctrine of faith have we been bequeathed in this um you know post-Descartes world?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, what what is faith to the modern Westerner?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, faith is I think for the faith of many modern Westerners is a kind of inferior kind of knowledge.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, kind of like a sort of superstition or something which is you know if which is um not based on on uh facts, is therefore something that's unreliable, it's something that can't be proved, and therefore it's it's a kind of secondary, kind of inferior kind of knowledge of things, rather than the foundation of knowledge, which is what it uh always has been for many philosophical traditions, and particularly for Christian faith as well.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so that again is a fundamentally different understanding of faith.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think you know, faith is this idea of something which um it's for kind of weak people who can't kind of reason their way out of things, um, faith is an inferior kind of knowledge.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's I think the idea of faith that many people have today.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we live with this split between mind and body, between uh science and faith.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a kind of split between um you know, faith and doubt, uh about certainty and uncertainty, divisions between sort of mind and body, divisions between science and faith.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: These things are uh separate to it to one another.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's a kind of view in a almost like kind of polarized view of the world that that Descartes bequeaths to us, I think.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Which is the opposite of how we come into the world.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: We come into the world as very dependent, socially oriented creatures who must trust um from the very first moment of our existence.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: We we have this embodied consciousness, and our minds are not very developed as we come into the world, and we simply must trust authority figures from outside ourselves, those who love us and tell us who we are, and we need to grow up in faith.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like in in in what ways has this view of the world actually dehumanized us?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I was thinking it's I mean the other figure I spent a lot of time thinking about over the years is um Martin Luther, and of course his great insight was that of justification by faith.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think by that he meant that faith is foundational to human life, that trust is foundational to human life.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I think a better way of translating that phrase justification by faith is justification by trust.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um I think for him he understands that uh just as you say, you know, foundational to human life is trust.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot get by any any relationship without trust.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in fact, most relationships, you can't prove that the other person loves you or cares for you, you kind of have to trust it to begin with.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, if you don't trust another person, that relationship begins to fall apart quite quickly.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Luther's great insight was that when when we approach God, we approach him not so much um uh uh wanting him to prove his love for us, but simply trusting.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now we get that in him, in the gift of Christ, we get this pledge of God's uh love for us and God's commitment to us.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the response to that for Luther is not to try and earn it in any kind of way, but it's simply to trust it, to trust God's pledge, his word to us.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a that's a kind of recognition of the fundamental nature of trust for human knowledge, for human relationship.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of foundation of things, rather than doubt.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there's a real difference there between you know what what lies at the foundation of human knowledge, what lies at the foundation of every human relationship.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: If I go into a relationship thinking, I'm not gonna trust you until you prove that you're trustworthy.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's not gonna work terribly well as a relationship.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have to begin with trust.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you then work out whether the person is trustworthy or not, and so on.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but it begins with trust.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so trust is foundational, I think.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we're kind of living in Descartes' world, um, even in the year 2025, but uh Pascal was definitely living in Descartes' world.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Can you give us a little potted history?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um who was Blaise Pascal?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Where was he, when was he, and what was his career like?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was brief, wasn't it?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he was born in 1623 in a little town called Clermont in the south, so middle of south of France, in the Auvergne.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um he actually he he uh grew up in a in a very ordinary sort of Catholic family.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was primarily known in his time as a mathematician and a scientist.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: No one really thought of him as a philosopher or or or a or a Christian theologian, because actually his main work, which we sometimes know of him today, the Ponse, was only really discovered after he after he died.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um so he uh he he actually never went to university, never went to school.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: He was homeschooled by his father, who recognized that he had a bit of a genius on his hands.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um the family were influenced by this pietistic movement within um within Catholicism called Jansenism.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he uh carries on doing philosoph doing scientific work, mathematical work.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and that's really what he was known for at the time.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um he got involved in the debates between the Jansenists and the Jesuits.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote a thing called the Provincial Letters, uh, which showed a genius for comedy.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um this was a kind of debate within 17th century the theology, which in some ways is a rather abstruse debate, quite an obscure one, but it's very funny.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, even today, it still works really well as comedy.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so he died aged uh 39 in 1662, um uh not very well known at his time, known primarily as a scientist, and so in some ways, uh all the other dimensions of his life as a philosopher, as a theologian, really came out afterwards when people discovered what he'd been writing and what he'd been thinking about during all those times.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And um the heart uh seems to be foundational as well.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I remember Ashley Null um is this biographer of Thomas Cranmer, and he says that you know, Cranmer's anthropology, which is a very paorline biblical anthropology, um, it's what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in that order, um, that we are these heart-directed creatures that our mind catches up with.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think what we're noticing in the social sciences in the last few decades is that all of our cognitive biases um are basically naming that reality that um that our mind justifies and is very good at justifying what we already happen to love.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if you can bring that into conversation with that famous saying that Pascal uh made.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I want to bring up five famous sayings from from Pascal and get your reflections on them.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he is famous for saying the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: What did he mean by that?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a f it's a phrase that's often misunderstood because um so for example, back in back in the day when uh Wallace Simpson, who uh famously married Edward VIII and um uh and he abdicated the throne of England and they moved off to America, she wrote a book about their love affair and their um this whole kind of story of the abdication, which was hugely controversial here in in the UK, and she called it called this book The Heart Has Its Reasons.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: And her meaning was that, you know, well, you know, when romance comes, it's got its reasons, which reason because the full phrase is the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And she was kind of interpreting that as being kind of romance, um, in a feeling uh that trumps everything else, which is kind of very a long way from what Pascal meant by it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he wasn't talking about romance, in fact, he's not that interested in romance, really, to be honest with Pascal.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he wasn't talking about emotion, he wasn't talking about feeling, he was talking about a kind of deepest instinct we have for certain ideas.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So he talks about, you know, there are certain ideas like infinity.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is himself as a mathematician talking.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we can't prove infinity, we don't know much about infinity, we don't even know whether infinity is an odd number or an even number, because you can always, whenever you think of infinity, you can always add one and they get into something else.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but we have kind of have a sense that there is such a thing called infinity.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: We have such we believe there is such a thing called number.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: There's a such such a thing called space, and these basic concepts which you can't prove, you can't kind of you know put them in a test tube and analyze them.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can't come up with a mathematical formula that will prove these things, but we kind of have to assume them to be the case.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he says it's the heart that that has this instinct to to to to to recognise these things.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And by heart, what does he mean?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because he he doesn't mean the a Valentine, he doesn't like he he he doesn't mean that romanticized view.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: What does he mean?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: He means a deep human instinct to recognise things that are true.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um in fact he actually says at one point, you know, God.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's talking about God.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: God is known by the heart, not by the reason.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And by that he doesn't mean, you know, we know God by emotion and by experience.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: He means that God is the kind of being that you you in a sense you you cannot prove God because he is beyond proof.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's essentially he's not an object within the world, uh, whereby you can, you know, you can argue that by cause and effect and by a mathematical process you can come to some proof of proof that God exists, as you could with objects within the world.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: God is not an object in the world like that, he is beyond the world, and therefore um he's not subject to proof in quite that way.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in fact, he says more or already some other interesting things about God, which we can come on to in a moment.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: But um so he says, you know, how how how do you how do you grasp God?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you grasp God through the in through this deep instinct we have of things that are true in the same way that you grasp infinity, in the same way that you grasp number, that the same way that you grasp space.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a sense, you have to kind of assume that this thing's true.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you you assume infinity, and then you can go start doing mathematics from that point onwards, you assume space or number.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that is the basis from which you begin to progress from there.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he kind of says the same thing about God, you have to kind of assume God and then work out the rest of the world from that point onwards.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: That I think is part of his argument about the wager, which we can come on to a little bit later on as well.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: But God for him is not the end of a process of argumentation.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's one point he talks about the God of the philosophers, by which he kind of means Descartes' God, um, where God is the end of a pro of a process of reasoning.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's kind of where Descartes gets gets to God.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but for for Pascal, God can never be the end of a process of reasoning.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: God is this being who approaches us that we can only encounter, whom we can only kind of have to assume.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we can actually encounter him personally, which is of course what Pascal himself did himself famously in his Night of Fire.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that I think is what Pascal means by that the heart, this deep instinct for things that are true, which cannot be proved, but yet are true nonetheless.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and and and perhaps more true because it is it is received by faith at the at that convictional core kind of level, and and as a foundation by which I'm I'm reminded of C.S.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's, you know, I I believe in Christ as I believe in the Son, not simply because I say the Sun, but because by the Sun I see everything else.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of the by God we do our reasoning rather than we reason towards God, um, so to speak.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: You've just mentioned the night of fire.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh tell us what is the night of fire and what happened.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Pascal was born into a fairly conventional Catholic family uh in the place called Clermont down in the south in the Auvergne in the middle of um sort of the middle south of France.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he he then his family was quite influenced by a movement within a kind of pietistic, very kind of austere movement within Catholic Catholicism in the 17th century called Jansenism.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he was kind of half he was drawn to this for many of you know from his teenage years onwards.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um but he always struggled a little bit with it for various reasons.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but then he goes through a period in the early 1650s, um, when he's in his early 30s, really, where he's kind of really struggling with both his his identity and calling as a mathematician, as a scientist, that's kind of what he's largely known as.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but also uh his his Christian faith, particularly his sister, Jacqueline, has this very profound encounter with Jansenism, and she enters a monastery, enter into a convent, and she takes her Christian faith really seriously.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: And Pascal is kind of struggling between these two things.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, he um he goes through a period of um where he's really sort of wondering about his own state of mind and his own heart and his relationship with God.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and then on the 23rd of November um 1654, he describes this experience, which um well he he never told anyone about it at the time.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he he actually had it he he dates this experience very very uh um very closely on this particular time.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh anyway, he for about two hours one evening he seems to have had this very personal, very sort of visceral encounter with God.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh shall I read out what he said?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because he he he wrote this down on a piece of paper, sewed it into his jacket, and it was found on him when when he when he died.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um but this is this is what he wrote, and then you then you can um tell us what he meant by it.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um it just begins fire.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the learned.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ, my God and your God, your God will be my God.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: He is only found by the ways taught in the gospel.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Grandeur of the human soul.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Righteous Father the world has not known you, but I have known you.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I have separated myself from him.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: They have forsaken me the fountain of living water.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: My God, will you leave me?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let me not be separated from him forever.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent Jesus Christ.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, I left him, I fled him, renounced him, crucified him.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let me never be separated from him.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the gospel.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Renunciation, total and sweet.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director, eternally in joy for a day's exercise on the earth.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: May I not forget your words.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is passionate stuff.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is, and I think what you notice about that is number one, the the emotion in it, the sense of joy of certainty that, you know, this is not a this is very different from Descartes.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I often they both they both go into a room on their own, looking to find a foundation from which they can see the world.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they actually come up with something very, very different indeed.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: So Descartes, of course, comes up with this um, you know, thing where he he kind of starts with his own his own thinking self.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Pascal in his own room on his own encounters God, something other than himself.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that's the difference between them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this emotional certainty that comes from this experience, but it's not the result of a process of reasoning.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is the heart.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is Pascal's sense of the heart, engaging with God, encountering God.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think the other thing that you notice about it is the fo focus on Jesus Christ.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um he repeats the word Jesus Christ over and over again.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this is not the God of the philosophers.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I feel like he's sort of shutting the door on on Descartes' idea of God, God as a as a kind of almost like kind of mathematical than that which none greater can be conceived.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or at least just just that at that approach to kind of God.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um but instead this is the God of Jesus Christ.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fundamental thing for for for for Pascal.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the two figures he is most in dialogue with Descartes on the one hand, Montaig on the other, neither of them talk about Jesus very much.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they talk about God, but they don't really talk about Jesus.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is not the God of Jesus Christ.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas for Pascal, this is this passionate God who approaches us and who wants everything of us.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And who um who can only be found by those who are serious about a relationship with him.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: He cannot be found by those who are just playing intellectual games.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think is one of the big differences, again, between Pascal and some of these other writers at the same sort of time.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he kind of thinks he thinks Pascal is and Descartes is playing a kind of intellectual game.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, at one point in the Pensee, he says, you know, well, um Descartes um wrong and useless.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because he thinks Descartes just thinks of God as fingers.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: I know, exactly.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he has strong opinions, Pascal.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um but he has this moment where he thinks about Descartes' God snapping his fingers and bringing the world into being, but then kind of abandoning the world from that point onwards.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh whereas for Pascal, God is this hidden God within the world, and that's a really interesting theme which we could pick up on, the hiddenness of God.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: But one who is always approaching us, and who can only be found by those who are open to the possibility of a transforming encounter with him, rather than those who are just idly curious about the idea of God as a concept.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Pascal that is very interesting.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about the hiddenness, because I I think in kind of apologetic circles, that's perhaps the biggest current objection, I would say, to Christian faith.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I think the problem of evil more generally is always the largest issue to wrestle with when you're talking about faith in the modern world.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I think a subset of that question is what kind of God leaves us in such a state that I, as an agnostic, I'm non-resistant, so you know the as the argument goes, there is such a thing surely as non-resistant non-belief.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: There are those who don't believe who'd quite like to believe, they're not actively resisting this sort of thing, and yet knowledge of God seems to be desired uh denied to such people.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um what would Pascal say to that issue?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think he would talk about the hiddenness of God.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I think he discovers it, or at least he he focuses on this idea largely because soon after his conversion, or his what's sometimes called his second conversion, this night of fire in 1654, um this remarkable event happens to a niece of his.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: His niece's uh is a kind of young girl living in a convent in Paris, and she has this remarkable healing.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: She has this kind of terrible thing on her eye.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's a kind of strange story, but by being touched by a uh a thorn, which is supposedly one of the thorns in the in the cr in the kind of the crown of thorns of Christ, this eye is miraculously healed.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um he has to kind of work out what's gone on in this.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he he realizes that even though you know seven doctors come in and say we can't give any explanation for this, suddenly this this eye has been healed overnight, um however rational it seems to be, however much the evidence there is for this for this miracle, some people just won't believe it.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so he starts realizing that you know that that there's a kind of hiddenness to this stuff.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh that whatever whatever you do, whatever evidence you give people, that some people just absolutely won't believe God is hidden from them.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so he starts thinking quite a lot about this theme of the hiddenness of God.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in fact, he what he what he loves to do, I think, is to is to kind of emphasize the the kind of paradoxes of Christian faith.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, he says about his scientific work, you know, he says actually when you look at science, you look into the world, you won't find evidence of God.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are good reasons for believing in God, but actually they're not conclusive.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: They're not things that will bring you to faith necessarily.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um He talks about how, apart from faith, there's no evidence as to whether we were made by a good God or by an evil demon.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know these things.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um He talks about how, you know, he's very modern in the sense that he looks into, I mean, he he is he's living in a world where the the microscope and the telescope have recently been invented.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So he's very aware of, you know, our our our ability to know the minute details of life through the microscope, but he's also aware of looking into space and talking, he talks about the vastness of space and the sense that we are these small, tiny creatures living on a very obscure planet in the tiny corner of the of the solar system.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: We don't seem terribly significant.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um so he emphasizes the kind of paradoxes of Christian faith, uh the fact that if if there is a God, um he seem to be hidden from us.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so he talks on the one hand about the strong point that the dogmatists, Descartes and others have, that there is an order within the world that you can't, you know, always bumping up against.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the most sceptical philosopher always puts on the well, in our terms, puts on a kettle and expects the water to boil.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is a kind of order, there's a scientific regularity to the world, but on the other hand, there's an awful lot about our world which is pure custom and um is just the way that we've worked things out.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so he always plays with his dilemmas on one side or the other.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so he says, Well, if if there is a God, a god behind this order, he's not a god who shows himself very clearly.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's he seems to be a god who hides himself.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then he says, Well, actually that kind of makes sense of what and at one point he says actually the true religion must be a religion that proclaims a hidden God, because that's the if there is a god, that's the way we that's the way God is.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't show himself, obviously.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: But then he says, Well, actually, Christian faith kind of does that, because when you think of the person of Jesus Christ, well, God is hidden within the person of Jesus.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: You could easily meet Jesus, you could shake the hands of Jesus and entirely miss the fact that you were shaking the hands of God.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, in fact, in the central revelation of God in Christianity, God presents himself as a hidden God.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he then also talks about the other ways in which God is hidden.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, of course, he's a he's a Roman Catholic, he believes very strongly in the Mass as being the bread and wine of Holy Communion, as good as God in some ways hidden within the bread and wine of Holy Communion.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um so he talks about this this ways in which God comes to us as this hidden God.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then he asks, why does God hide himself?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, because he doesn't want to be found by those who are simply idly curious.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: He only waits to be found by those who are serious about a real encounter with him.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's what he would say to those who say, Well, why doesn't God show himself?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: You say, Well, number one, um, well, that is the way God is within the world.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's if there is a God, he's hidden.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: But actually that matches, there's a kind of fit of the jigsaw piece the Christian faith says about God and the hiddenness of God, but God deliberately hides himself so that he can only be found by those who really are serious about an encounter with him rather than those who just want to say, Okay, I believe in God, tick that box and get on with their lives.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: That is fascinating.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and it it kind of puts the spotlight back on ourselves as the humans.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, do we really desire to know this God?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and what would he say to such a person who says, Okay, I'm I'm an agnostic at the moment, I am open to meeting God.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: What advice would Pascal give them?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's where his argument of the wager comes in.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um because he has his famous famous uh famous argument of the wager, which has been criticized for being a fairly kind of you know abstract idea uh about belief.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the the the way the wager works is is like this.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that Pascal would do, he had a lot of friends who were into gambling, and um one day one of his gambling friends set him a uh a test, which is a kind of long-standing mathematical test, which was basically if if you're in a game, maybe a game of cards or a game of cossing toy tossing coins or whatever, and people have you know bet on the the outcome of this game, and the game has to finish halfway through, how do you allocate the stake?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, he has a kind of interesting correspondence with Pierre de Fermat, Ferma's last theorem um fame, where they kind of work out probability theory, which is basically you you can kind of work out probabilities uh for you know how how how to predict the end of a game where the game is uncertain, um you know, where the game isn't finished.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like if you're a cricket fan, the Duckworth Lewis method of trying to work out what the result would have been.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um if you're not a cricket fan, don't worry about those things.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's happening in all sports now with the win the win stats.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can go onto Google and whatever game you're playing, you know, the the Chicago Bulls are now 73% more likely to win than the LA Lakers.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it happens all over the place.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's but that's basic Pascal and Fermer doing that sort of work of probability theory and calculation of what could happen.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, he kind of then says, Well, life is a bit like that.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we find ourselves in the middle of life, like the middle of a game, where the outcome is uncertain.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we don't know.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a god?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is there another god?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um after this life is over, do we just go into nothingness or do we go to a eternal bliss or do we go into something worse, which is you know, eternal torment and so on?
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we don't know, he says.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so then he says, sits down and says, Well, okay, well, it's you know, he's he's having a conversation with someone.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think the wager would have been in the form of a conversation.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he poses this question.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: He says, There's a coin being tossed at the far edge of the universe.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to come down head or tails.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Which one are you going to bet?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Either God exists or God doesn't exist.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Heaven or hell.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: What are you going to go for?
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he actually says, 'cause I'm I'm quoting from your your own book here on page 325.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: You say, How will you wager?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next sentence he says, Reason cannot make you choose either.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Reason cannot prove either wrong, which is interesting.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, his conversation partner says to him, says to him, Well, is there, you know, how how do I choose?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is there are there good reasons one way or the other?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Well, reason's pretty limited in how he can help you in this, in this, this, this regard.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the guy says, Well, what do I do?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so Pascal says, Well, let's work out the probability.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes through a bit of mathematical exploration where he kind of says, Well, okay, let's think about it.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you bet, if you if you bet that God doesn't exist, um and you're right, well, you know, you haven't gained much, you haven't lost much.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're wrong, you stand to lose a great deal if you're wrong that God does exist.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um whereas he says, if you bet that God does exist and you're wrong, well, again, you haven't lost a great deal, maybe a little bit of sacrifice in this life, but you know, then you go into nothingness and that's it.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're right, you stand to gain a huge amount, which is you you you stand to basically win the jackpot, eternal bliss.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: So he's saying if you purely go on probability, if you were being entirely irrational about it, you would always bet on belief.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: You'd always bet that God exists because you stand to gain a lot more that way, whereas the other way you stand to lose uh lose a lot more.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's so that's that's the kind of bit of mathematical reasoning.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then his course his kind of conversation partner comes back and says, Well, yeah, but hang on, I can't just believe something, um, you know, I can't make myself believe something that I don't.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: And Pascal says, Well, okay, fair enough, I get that.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: But then he says, this is the killer point, I think.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: He says, at least get it into your head that the reason you don't believe is not because of your reason, it's because of your passions.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, that's what he's driving at.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's trying to get this person to realise why they don't believe.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's not because of their reason, it's not rationality, it's not that they're being properly rational and Christians are being every rational, faith-based people.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's because they don't want to believe.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you were really following reason and probability, you'd always bet on belief.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the kind of way the thing goes.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then the guy says, Well, what do I do then?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where this was a long answer to your your original question.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um he says, Well, act as if it's true.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: He says, even if you can't make yourself believe something, well, try an experiment.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Try living as if this thing really is true.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so in our terms he would say something like, Okay, well, start reading the Bible as if it is God's word to you, even if you don't you're not sure whether it is or not.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Start praying to God as if God really is there.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Start going to church as if this really is God's people meeting on a Sunday to learn his way.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: Try start treating every person you meet as if they are someone made in the image of God, loved by God, for whom Christ died.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And see what happens.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Live as if it's true.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then he says, Well, it 'cause it may well be that if you l if you do that, you will place yourself in a position where you might just be open to receiving the touch of God's grace, and suddenly the things begin to fall into place.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, just on a personal note, I I've often often found, I've often used that bit of advice with people I've known who um who are in that position, you know, not quite sure whether to believe or not to believe, and I've often said, well, go and try it for a few weeks.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And time and time again I've had people coming back to me and saying, once I'd actually started to live as if it was true, I suddenly realised it was.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so that I think is the advice Pascal would give.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I l I love that.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not at all what popularly has been understood as Pascal's wager.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you talk about Pascal's wager with the average average person in the street, if they've heard anything about Pascal, they've heard about a triangle.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um if they've heard anything about Pascal in regards to faith, it's usually as regards the wager.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the popular understanding of the wager is um to misunderstand it as Pascal is saying, um, bet on God because if it comes through, you're infinitely wealthy, and if he's not there, then you haven't lost very much, you've just given up a Sunday morning.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you you may as well just go to church like a hypocrite and and sort of use God in that calculating sense.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, because people don't know the other things about Pascal somehow, that survives in the popular imagination, but that sounds like a million miles from the Pascal who has his night of fire.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds a million miles from the Pascal who says, you know, you know, the the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um so clearly that popular understanding of the wager is wrong.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the way I kind of understand it, the way I explain it to people, and you can correct me because you're the expert in this, is I I kind of say, well Pascal is basically saying, look, if you were a reason-driven creature, you would just go to church on a Sunday morning, and you would just go through the motions, because if it pays off, then you're infinitely wealthy, and if it doesn't pay off, you haven't lost that much just a Sunday.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you were this calculating individual who who uses reason chiefly, that is what you would do.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: But you don't do that, do you?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: Which which goes to show that actually you're you're actually a passion-driven creature after all.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is is that kind of what he's saying with the wager?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: I I think the key line is that one at the end.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, at least at least admit this.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Get it into your head.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Get it into your head that if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe, and yet you cannot do so.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So he's not saying that faith at that point is sub rational.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, we are subrational.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that faith is subrational, humans are sub rational, and the proof of it is that if you were rational, you'd just take the wager.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: You don't take the wager, and that just proves that you're a passion-driven creature, not a reason-driven creature.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's not an argument that's trying to argue people into faith, it's actually trying to reveal the real reasons for un for unbelief.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it's about.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's getting someone to the point where they realise that actually, you know, the reason I don't believe is not because it's because of my reason, it's because I don't really want to believe.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And once you get to that point, you begin to think, well, have I got good reasons for not believing?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you begin to open yourself to the possibility that God may be real and it might be possible to have an encounter with him.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the way in which you put yourself in the place where you might have that encounter is by starting to live as if it's true.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's when it begins to fall into place, I think.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Rupert Short, who we've had uh on on the channel recently, he's got a great line that you we we don't we we rarely think ourselves into a new way of living.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Most often we live our ways uh we live our way into a new way of thinking.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um which is and and that you know for Pascal it was a dramatic encounter that changed his way of thinking.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was you know it was the night of fire, it was something in some ways that he prepared for, but not something he was in control of, it was something that came to him.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I think he found that in in the process leading up to that he was beginning to live as if it was true, and then it suddenly dawned on him that it was, in this absolute this very personal encounter with God on that night.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a transformative thing for him, and it was because of that that he starts to write the Ponsee, this um great kind of apology for the Christian faith, which of course he never finished because he was he was he he he died age 39, very young, but he was the kind of one of the most haunting bits of Christian apologetics that's ever been written, uh, in which the wager comes, and so that's part of the reasoning for that.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: So t tell us about some of the um the background behind the ponse, because uh if people have come across Descartes, it's usually because it's it's just a thought here and a thought there, which he sort of numbered and kind of written wrote down.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: But uh originally, what was the intention?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was to become uh a major work of Christian apologetics?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: What was what was the purpose?
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, so he had these friends who were sort of sophisticated, sort of men about town, into gambling and going to the salons and witty conversation and womanizing and playing tennis and doing whatever they wanted to do, easily distracted, as Pascal would put it, by the kind of trivial things of life, but not really thinking about God that much or about eternity, about what happens after this life is over, about the kind of big questions of life.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so he he kind of feels he wants to write something to try to persuade them that actually their true happiness will be found in God.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that actually all these things they fill their lives with are only trivial and tiny compared to the the depth of joy and happiness and certainty that can be found with God there as he had experienced himself on the night of fire.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so he begins to start writing this he has this idea of writing a grand apology for the Christian faith.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um at one point he meets with his friends, his you know, Jansenist friends, and he kind of describes his approach to this and what he's going to do, and he starts writing little notes when things occurs occur to him, he writes them down on bits of paper.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them are just one line long, some of them are a paragraph or two, some of them are kind of like like long essays.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um he writes a lot of these different things, so well over sort of a thousand pieces of paper, and so when he when he died, uh his friends found these piles of paper in his room, some of them organized into chapters, some of them just lying around the place.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they work out, well, what are we going to do with this thing?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because he never got to finish it, he never got to uh to bring all of these thoughts into uh into some coherent argument.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they they they published them.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um about eight years later, after he died, so he died in 1662 and 1670, they published the The Thoughts of Monsieur Pascal, the Pensee of Monsieur Pascal on religion and various other subjects, and it's been through various different editions since then.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can imagine scholars have great fun trying to work out what what it would have been like and in what order to put them all.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but when you pick up a copy of the pensee today, that's what you pick up, this these long list of fragments written by Pascal, some of which are just extraordinary in in their kind of thought-provoking character.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're the kind of thing, there are pages where you just have no idea what's going on.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you have to be a pretty seasoned Pascal scholar to work out what's going on in some of these strange bits.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: But every now and again you get one that makes you have to sort of sit down and put the book down and think about that for a moment, because it is so profound, so powerful.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um so yeah, it was that was the idea.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was a it was a book that was trying.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: One of one of the great things, and and and one of the five things I wanted to raise with you, and now now's probably the best time to raise it, is he he does make these statements that just strike you out of the clear blue as the he really gets human nature, doesn't he?
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's it's that and and and in fact he's got many, many of these pones about um diversions, distractions.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh I haven't got the quote in in front of me now, but it's it's something like all the problems of m of man are down to the fact that he cannot sit quietly in his room by himself.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is it something like that, like that?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the sole cause of our unhappiness is that we do not know how to stay quietly in a room.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not social media.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's not purely so social media might be amplifying a problem with the human soul.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what is this problem?
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: What is this problem at its heart?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's right.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I think he he would have been fascinated by our age because we are the most distracted of all ages.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have these these things in our pockets that can distract us at any moment with endless entertainment or information or ideas.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Pascal knew about that very well.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: He was in some ways a predictor of he predicted this onslaught of of distraction.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he kind of thinks of it as a the way in which um human society kind of deadens our souls by providing us with endless trivia to keep us from finding God, putting it bluntly.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And to distract us from our mortality, isn't that isn't that part of it as well?
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: To distract us from our mortality, to distract us from questions of what happens after this life is over, the fact that we're gonna die.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there's one point where he writes, you know, being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, people have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: We deliberately don't think about such things as death, wretchedness, ignorance, and so on.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh going back to the the night of fire when you read it out, I mean, one of the things that struck me about it is is the kind of consciousness of his own inadequacy and frailty.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've abandoned you, I've abandoned God, I've lived my life without God.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: He's conscious of that.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, for him, most of his contemporaries just don't think about that for a moment.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he talks about how uh you know we're very successful at distracting ourselves from the big questions that that that every human being ought to kind of be asking, you know, not all the time, but at least some of the time.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: And how even you know we can distract ourselves, he talks about how, you know, someone who's He's even gone through great tragedy.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe lost a uh a child or a wife can distract himself by having a tennis ball served at them at great speed and having to make a repl make a response.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's the kind of way he he thinks about it.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so you know, again, there's this sense of distraction.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot sit on our own quietly.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're incapable of doing that.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: We have to find something to do.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because actually, this thought of our own isolation.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it talks about you know a king that has no distraction will go mad eventually.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's why they have jesters, yeah.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, yeah, to get of entertainment.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now we've got jesters in our pockets.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're called phones.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Weapons of mass distraction, as we sometimes call them.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, he he is a it's a really strong theme of Pascal.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: The um the the the capacity of humankind and human society to distract us, to deaden our souls, uh, to stop us asking those questions that that are actually the the clue to finding true happiness.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what he thinks of.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: He actually talks about you know, human life, he says everybody wants to be happy, without exception.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he talks about you know the the search for happiness, and he talks about how uh everyone wants to be happy, everyone has an idea of what happiness is, but we never really find it.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: Occasionally we glimpse little bits of happiness, we might experience it for a moment or an afternoon or a day or whatever it might be, but it slips away from us pretty quickly.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: But then he asks, Well, what why should we have an idea of what happiness is if we can't actually find it?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: And surely the only the only reason why we should have an idea of happiness is if we once experienced it, if we once knew it.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so he says, Well, that kind of describes us as human beings, because in our origins we were made to be in the presence of God.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: We experienced that true happiness that was there in the beginning.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now we've lost that happiness since the fall.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so he talks about, you know, our wretchedness is the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: We were once king, but we've lost our our kind of status, as it were.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so he he calls for evidence that sense that you know, that sense of fleeting, sense of longing for happiness, having an idea of what it feels like, but not being able to grasp it.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: That for him is a sign that we once had a happiness that we're desperately searching for, that we will only find in the God from whom we came and to whom one day we will return.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So he he names human nature very well, and he wants to direct us to God.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and here's the the final of the statements by by Pascal that I'd love you to kind of comment on.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's it's much beloved of uh apologists, those who want to um make uh a defense of the faith and and and uh speak of Christ um today to those who might be skeptical.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: And uh here he gives kind of a rationale for for why he's writing what he's writing.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: He says, uh men despise religion, they hate it, and are afraid it may be true.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: To cure this, we have to first show that religion is not at all contrary to reason.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: It is worthy of reverence and respect.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is true.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: Worthy of respect because it really understands human nature, attractive because it promises true good.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds like very good advice, don't you think?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Augustine has this very uh this anthropology, this understanding of humankind, which is very similar to the one you mentioned earlier on that that Cranmer had, which is that we are we are passion-driven creatures, we are creatures driven by our desires, that our hearts are stronger than our heads, you know, our loves are stronger than our logic.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're not brains on sticks like Descartes thought we were, um, but actually our passions are much stronger than our reason.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um So therefore he says, actually, you know, there were apologists at the time in the 17th century who kind of racked up all kinds of arguments from design or arguments, the philosophical arguments that tried to prove God exists.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Pascal didn't think those were much good.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: He thought he thought they were fine as far as they go, but they're not much help with people who are basically passion-driven creatures, because you can prevent all the logic you want, um, but it's not really gonna succeed with people whose passions are stronger than their desires.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, therefore, this is why he he says the order of it, you know, make it attractive, make good men, good people wish it was true, and then show that it is.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: Not the other way around.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: Don't show that it's true, then make people wish it was true, and then you know, then the the the kind of desire comes last.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, you've got to start by making it attractive.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you make it attractive by showing that it's not contrary to reason.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um he doesn't think you can prove it, but he does think you can show that it um that it's not against reason.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um but he then talks about you know making it attractive, and he goes through all kinds of ways in which he does that.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about how you know Christian faith is something for those people who need, who sense a kind of longing for happiness and a sense that they are inadequate as they are.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: This provides redemption, it provides salvation.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he talks about the alternatives, he's very interested actually in Judaism and Islam.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, unusually for a 17th-century apologist, he talks about these quite a bit and actually talks about how actually Christianity offers something different and better, he thinks, than Judaism and Islam.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: Again, we could go into that in time.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: He then talks about the hidden God, but he also talks about um the sovereign good, this idea, and there's a there's a uh again, one of the famous ideas that he talks about is uh we talk sometimes about the God-shaped gap in human life.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Pascal doesn't use that phrase, but he does talk about um this sense that we have within ourselves a kind of eternal abyss, a sort of longing, a desire for happiness that can never be filled by anything temporal.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: And however much stuff we put into that abyss, how many distractions, how many games, how many gadgets, it can never totally be satisfied, because it's an infinite abyss and it can only be met with an infinite object, which is God Himself.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's one of the ways he talks about the attractiveness of Christian faith, that it offers something that meets that deepest kind of infinite, eternal sense of longing that we have within the human heart, um, that can only be satisfied with with God Himself.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so for him, making Christian faith attractive, desirable is a crucial thing.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he then says, you know, make people wish it was true, because if you can get someone to the point where they they kind of say, Well, you know, I I don't believe it's true, I can't see any evidence for it, but I somehow wish it was true, because there's something so attractive about this.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: You've kind of got half the way there.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, showing that it is true, giving reasons and proofs and everything else, there is a place for that, but it's it there's a place for it is when people have begun to wish this thing was true.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's if you like the way he goes about his bringing people to a kind of understanding of faith.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think we can learn for that as as we as we wrap up together?
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think we can learn from Pascal for today?
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm here at Speak Life.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: We we want to uh make people of goodwill um wish that it were true and show them that it is.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you're at the Center for uh Cultural Witness.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you you want to make people of goodwill uh wish that it were true and and and show that it is.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And how can we do what Pascal is saying in 2025?
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Pascal Pascal Pascal.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh one of the things that Pascal does is he he kind of glories in the paradoxes of Christian faith.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't say it's obvious.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um he kind of back to the hidden God theme, that if God is there, he's a hidden God.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he kind of intrigues people with the paradoxes, he presses the questions.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: He says, you know, how how how do you make sense of the fact that human beings have this extraordinary capacity for understanding, for knowledge, for love, for compassion?
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're able to do amazing things, but at the same time we have this extraordinary compassion capacity for destructiveness and malice and hatred and anger.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he talks about what kind of freak is human humanity?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about us as the glory and refuse of the universe.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great phrase, that's what human beings are, the glory and the refuse of the human universe.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're not one or the other, we're both at the same time.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you explain that?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you explain the fact that science sometimes gives you an order that might suggest there's a sort of God behind it, there's a structure, but at other times seems to not have an order and seems to be ambiguous in many ways?
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: How do you he kind of presses the questions?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I think what he's trying to do in it, in some ways, is like a kind of experimental scientist that he is.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: He brings out the evidence and says, What's the best explanation with this evidence?
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a theory that can somehow explain it?
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um then he offers, well, actually, Christian faith explains these things.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: Christian faith explains the humanity as the refuse and glory of the universe by the very simple idea that we are created and fallen.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um we are both gloriously created with these immense capacities, but we we we are desperately fallen from that place by turning away from the God who made us.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of explains that.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of a hidden God explains the idea that, you know, science in some ways gives you an order, but in some ways that order is hidden from us and so on.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think what he would want us to do is to kind of press into those questions and show how Christian faith makes sense of the whole of life.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of the things we do, you know, what you what you do on Speak Life so well, and what we try to do on our website, seenandunseen.com, is try to sort of show how everything looks different through the lens of Christian faith.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what does everything faith make everything look different and actually richer and bigger and more colourful?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a large part of what Pascal does uh in showing people that that um that that Christian faith offers uh offers a relationship with God that can can own is the only thing that can bring that sort of true happiness that each one is each one of us is desperately seeking to find.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um Graham, time has flown, uh, but uh this book is now out.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Blaise Pascal, The Man Who Made the Modern World.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you can get it where all good books are sold.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh how else can people keep up with you, Graham?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, uh as I was mentioning a moment ago, um one of the things we do in the Center for Cultural Witness is um uh this website called seenandunseen.com, which uh tries to bring out I know I know two or three articles every day, uh podcasts, um, just trying to show a Christian take on the world.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: So whatever's going on in in your newspapers and the websites that are around, whether it's you know what's happening in America under Donald Trump, whether it's Israel-Gaza War, whether it's the latest shows on Netflix, trying to kind of bring a Christian perspective on those, showing how Christian faith makes sense of our world and gives a better and richer picture of the world.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I I write on that quite often.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh you can find me on Twitter, you can find me on Instagram, you can find me in those sort of places.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: But seen and unseen would be the main place to find um the kind of thoughts that I have and things that I write from time to time.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: An absolutely uh excellent resource if you want to do what Pascal has uh called us to do as Christians.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but uh Graham Tellman, thank you so much for joining us.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Glenn.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed our conversation.