What Blaise Pascal’s Life Teaches Us about Faith and Reason

On August 19, 1662, French philosopher, mathematician, and apologist Blaise Pascal died at just 39 years old. Despite his shortened life, Pascal is renowned for pioneering work in geometry, physics, and probability theory and even for inventing the first mechanical calculator. His most powerful legacy, however, is his Pensees, or thoughts, about life’s biggest questions, including God and the human condition.   

Pascal’s intellect garnered attention at an early age. At 16, he produced an essay on the geometry of cones so impressive that René Descartes initially refused to believe that a “sixteen-year-old child” could have written it. Later, Pascal advanced the study of vacuums and, essentially, invented probability theory.  

His life radically changed on the evening of November 23, 1654, when Pascal experienced God’s presence in a powerful way. He immediately and radically reoriented his life and thinking toward God. He described the experience on a scrap of parchment that he sewed into his jacket and carried with him the rest of his life:   

FIRE—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certitude, certitude. Heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. My God and thy God. Thy God shall be my God.   

From that moment, Pascal dedicated his life to serving God through his writing. His ideas on apologetics were collected and published after his death in a volume entitled, Pensées, or “Thoughts.”  

Best known of his ideas is “Pascal’s Wager.” Facing uncertainty in a game of life with such high stakes, he argued, it makes far more sense to believe in God’s existence than to not: “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”  

Pascal also offered keen diagnoses of the human condition, such as this:   

The human being is only a reed, the most feeble in nature; but this is a thinking reed. It isn’t necessary for the entire universe to arm itself in order to crush him; a whiff of vapor, a taste of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, the human being becomes still more noble than that which kills him. . .. The universe, it does not have a clue.  

Or even better:   

What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.  

Pascal also accurately described the moral condition of human beings. For example, “[W]e hate truth and those who tell it [to] us, and … we like them to be deceived in our favour.” He also observed that people tend to distract themselves from the reality of death, but when our diversions run their course, we feel “nothingness.”  

A generation later, even the most prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment could not dismiss Pascal’s brilliance. According to philosopher Dr. Patrick Riley,  

Holbach, as late as the 1770s, still found it necessary to quarrel with the author of the Pensées, Condorcet, when editing Pascal’s works, renewed the old debate; Voltaire throughout his life, and even in his last year, launched sally after sally at the writer who frightened him every time he—a hypochondriac—felt ill.   

The fallout of the French Revolution would prove that Pascal’s arguments about God—who, he claimed, was essential in everything—and his observations about the human condition were right. On the contrary, Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, who argued that mankind would be better off if freed from any higher power, were shown to be naive at best. Divorced from God and committed instead to “pure reason,” France devolved into a violent, anarchic wasteland.  

Even today, Pascal’s writing has lost none of its fire, nor has the fruits of his intellect, passion, and eloquence dedicated to God diminished. As he wrote on the parchment sewn into his jacket,  

Jesus Christ.
I have fallen away: I have fled from Him,
denied Him, crucified him.
May I not fall away forever.
We keep hold of him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on earth.
I will not forget Thy word. Amen. 

Dr. Glenn Sunshine co-authored this Breakpoint. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.

Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/GeorgiosArt

Published Date: August 19, 2024

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.