Pascal’s Pensées

Just finished listening to Pascal’s Pensées. What a painful experience. I knew little about Jansenism, the group Pascal adhered to after his conversion, but if Pascal’s writings are any indication, it was as fundamentalist as any Baptist church in the Bible Belt. In much of Pensées, Pascal works diligently to prove that Christianity is the one true religion. He demonstrates the one flaw in reasoning that anyone who seeks to prove Christianity, or any other religion, that proof is the antithesis of faith. Neither needs, nor wants, the other. 

I admit I was suckered in as I read the first three books which are intriguing. In those books Pascal makes a fascinating argument, that human beings are inherently gamblers. They have no real interest in the game they are playing, simply in the risk, whether as in games of chance, they risk a little to gain much, or in religion, they risk everything to gain nothing if they gamble wrong. Pascal’s argument that humans are inherently gamblers does much to make sense of Pascal’s Wager. What Pascal leaves out is why we are gamblers. Is this our nature, in which case we were created this way by God, or is this a result of sin. An interesting oversight.