Pascal's Wager: A Cruel Finitude
Blase Pascal (1623-1662), was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor who, after his conversion to Catholicism, paradoxically professed rational agnosticism and (to him at least) reasonable faith. In his Pensees , he demonstrates with math-like arguments the futility of trying to understand the cosmos: “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199). We hang short-sighted between two abysses, the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small. What can we do then, he asks, “but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end?” (199) It's impossible, Pascal says, to know “a hidden God” (427) immune to philosophical proofs such as argument from natural order. If God exists, He is infinite. Just as the last number of an infinite series cannot be known to be odd or even, so God cannot be known by finite beings. He “is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limi...