Blaise Pascal, The Pensées: Probability, Negative Theology, Fideism

Hello and welcome. My name is Jonathan Vita, and in this module we'll be discussing The Wager, an excerpt from Blaise Pascal's posthumous work, Pensee. An overview of what we're going to be covering today, first we're going to look a little bit at Pascal himself, and then we'll talk about his work The Pensee. Then we'll try to talk about this distinction between faith and reason and how it plays out in his works, namely in talking about negative theology and fideism. In order to kind of like get a good grasp of his argument, it'd be really good to kind of work through some stuff in what is known as decision theory, which is an intersection between like statistics, economics, and psychology, and as well philosophy. And then after we do that, then we'll look at Blaise Pascal's Wager, where he tries to say the best decision you can make in life is to believe God exists. Then we'll consider some objections to this work. So for Blaise Pascal, he is originally known for being a mathematician. He was writing in what is known as the early modern period in 1600s, and he has developed probability theory. We often talk about probability in terms of like cards and dice and things like that. That's largely because of him and his colleagues, as they were trying to figure out what is a good way of mathematically representing what are you doing when you're gambling, what are you doing when you're playing cards, and so on. And so it's really intimately tied to him playing games with his friends, including dice and cards and so on. So he's one of the famous developers of probability theory, and that matters for what we're going to be talking later about what is a good rational decision when you don't know what the outcome of the decision is. So if you can kind of think about expected utility, like how much am I going to get out of this? What are the risks? What are the probabilities of those risks? What are the benefits? What are the probabilities of those benefits? So that's going to be directly tied to this. Now for Blaise Pascal, as a mathematician who's trying to be extremely rational in his choices, extremely rational about what he ought to believe, he had what is a very interesting experience. He converted to Christianity after he had a very intense kind of awakening one night. It's actually kind of strange. So he was raised in a religious family, and basically it was because his dad was kind of like pressuring him that he was very religious. But then when his dad died, that dropped off. That dropped off significantly. But later in his life, near not that far from his death, he actually had this weird religious experience where he talks about experiencing fire. And that now he knows the true God, not the God of the philosophers. He knows the God of Israel and the God of Christianity. And he knows this God perfectly, or personally, and in a loving way. It's very, very interesting. If you look it up, it's the the night of fire, the night of fire. But after that experience, he was just like, gosh, so I know God exists, and let me try to work that out given my other things that I believe in life. So he did, he tried to write a defense of his faith, a defense of his faith. But he did, he died before completing it. The pensées are a collection of his notes that he was writing, and he was eventually going to draft into a book. But this was published after he died, so it's not completely edited. And so what we'll look at is just an excerpt. Now, pensées in French just is like thoughts or reflections, things like that. It's like the English word pensive. It's also the same root as our word pansy, like the flower, the pansy. It's a reflective flower, it's a pensive flower, it's thoughtful. So the pensées, these are thoughts that he's working out so that you could come to a conclusion about how you ought to live, including, for example, what you ought to believe about God. Now, for Blaise Pascal, he is falling within this larger tradition of negative theology. So if natural theology is saying, what can you know about God by looking at the world around you, looking at the natural world, so looking just at general revelation, what can you know about this God? Negative theology tries to emphasize a few things that you certainly know God is not. So you know God is not like me, it's not like rocks, and so on. But then you can start framing things like, God is not rock-like, or God is not limited like me, and so on. So you can start saying positive things about God, largely by contrast with things that you know, and saying, God's not like that thing that I do know. So if we know God largely by what God isn't, then we're doing negative theology. If we're describing God in negative terms, in order to kind of like, carve out the way that God is, that would be considered negative theology. So if you think about this, like, I'm limited in time. I will live only for a short period of time in the history of the universe. I take up physical space, and I am alive, but at some point, I will die. Now, if somebody is doing negative theology, they'll say something like, well, if there is a God, God is not going to be like Jonathan here, in that God is not going to be temporary. God is not going to have a body. God is not going to be limited. God is not going to have all these other different things. And so, if you say God's not limited, that is, God is not finite, then that's why we would say God's infinite. If you say God's not temporary, so God, you know, doesn't just exist for a short period of time, then you would say God's eternal. So you're saying God's eternal because you're saying God isn't limited in time. You wouldn't say maybe that God's bodiless, but you would say God is without a body, or parts, or passions, or something like that. So negative theology emphasizes what we know about God in terms of what we know God isn't, what we know God isn't. So arguments about God, then, are going to show a much greater contrast between us and God, between the things that we see and the way that God is. So arguments about God really show that God's radically different, radically different than the way that we are. And Blaise Pascal kind of like captures this when his short thing that he says, if there's a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension. So if we think about what we're able to understand, God is completely beyond that, infinitely beyond that. Since, so because, God having neither parts, he's not made up of stuff, nor limits, God doesn't have like little bits of like limitations on himself. He, God, bears no relation to us. God bears no relation to us. It's not just that there's like a big difference, there's an infinite difference in every single way. So what does he conclude? We are thus incapable of knowing either what he is or if he is. So we're incapable of knowing God's essence, what God is, or his existence, that God is. Right? So he's contradicting Aquinas, he's contradicting a lot of other people who are saying that we can know either God's essence or God's existence. He's saying, you can't know either. We're unable, we're incapable of knowing either what God is or whether God exists. This being so, who will dare undertake to resolve this question? Surely not we who bear no relation to him. So if somebody wants to ask, does God exist? He's going to say, well, if God exists, God's going to be so totally different that you're not going to be able to solve this question. You're not going to be able to solve this question. You're not going to be able to say something positive about God. You're only going to say something about what God isn't. God does not have a relation to us. Maybe we have a relation to God, but God doesn't have a relation to us. So God's infinite, God's infinitely good, wise, powerful, eternal, and a bunch of other stuff, but we're finite. We're limited in how good we are. We're limited in our wisdom. We're limited in our power and our weaknesses. We're temporary, things like that. God's just totally different than we are. So if you think about finite and infinite, bring this back to mathematics and how infinity has all these different weird unintuitive things that you would say about it. Like if you were to think about how you take infinity and you add one, it equals infinity. That sounds absurd. If you take infinity plus a thousand, it's infinity. Add anything to infinity, it's still infinity. If you take infinity and you subtract one, it's still infinity. If you take infinity minus a thousand, it's still infinity. Infinity has this weird property of being so radically different from all these finite numbers, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, all the way up to a Googleplex, one followed by a thousand zeros. There's just such a radical difference between the two that anything finite just does not compare to the infinite. All of these finite things just would be absorbed or made insignificant in the light of infinity. The same could be said then about any of your knowledge about God or any likeness that you have to God. It pales in comparison. There is just like such an infinite distance that it's like it doesn't even matter. It doesn't compute. It breaks the way you normally think about stuff, just like it breaks the normal way that you do math if you have infinity plus one. You don't really add this new like infinity higher number. It's just infinity. So if God's infinite, there's nothing we can say about God because he's so radically different from us. So radically different from us. And any knowledge we have is going to fall short because if you have like a thousand things that you could say about God and God's infinite, gosh, you're not saying much at all. It's an infinite distance between that thousand words and how maximally great this God is supposed to be. Now I might have lost you, but the point I'm trying to make here, the point I'm trying to make here is according to Pascal, God is so very different from us. There's just no way that we can have knowledge of God. Knowledge about God is impossible. We're incapable. And that's the point. Now in thinking that you just don't know whether God exists or not, Pascal falls within this other kind of characteristic movement in religious life, which is fideism. Fide is the Latin word for faith, like seprafideis, which is always faithful, right? So that famous military phrase. Now fideism is just the view that you need to have faith. And if you can't have knowledge, that's okay. So pursue faith. And that's the way your religious life should be. Even if you don't have knowledge, even if you don't have proof or evidence. Faith delivers truth, but it can't be judged by reason. Reason is just going to fall short all the time just because what we're having faith in is infinitely good, but what we can reason is only limited. Now this means that he is being anti-rationalistic. So if you're a rationalist, you only believe things that fit in your understanding, that can make sense, that you can compute. But fideism is saying, nope, there are going to be matters of faith that just exceed what we understand, and they just resist being analyzed by human reason. There's stuff that you just don't understand, but you just got to believe anyway. In a sense then, you can think of faith and reason being opposed to one another on this fitteist view. So the existence of God, of the real God, can't be proven by argument. But that's okay, because no way could any argument actually get you there. If you try to look at any of the skeptical arguments against God, they really just try to show that you can't prove God exists. You can't prove God exists. It shows the inability of reason to actually get you to understand a God. You have to have faith, you have to be able to have faith, and not necessarily have to listen to reason as a prerequisite. If you can have reason, that's fine. But notice, it's not going to get you to God. So even if you can't prove God exists, even if you can't prove God exists, does that mean that you shouldn't be religious? If you can't prove God exists, if there's no way that evidence is going to determine you one way or another, if no argument could ever actually prove God exists, can you still be religious? Can you still make a decision on how you ought to live? That's his question. That's his question. Can you still make a rational choice to believe or not to believe? To live as if God exists or to not live as if God exists? Can you make that choice?