The Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (Jesus, Science, Islam, and more)

Blaise Pascal was a genius who made lasting contributions in science, math, philosophy, and beyond. But unbeknownst to many people, he was writing an extensive apologetic for the Christian faith before his untimely death at merely 39 years old. What is Pascal's wager? Is it a good argument? What was Pascal's critique of Islam? What positive case did he offer for Jesus? Our guest today, philosopher Doug Groteis, is back for the third time, I believe, on the channel to discuss his recent book, Beyond the Wager, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Doug was talking with my wife last night about Many of the Findings. She teaches math, and I was like, hey, did you know this about Pascal? So it's a super interesting book, and I'm looking forward to diving in. So thanks for coming back. Oh, you're welcome. Happy to be back again. Well, I understand this is actually an update of an earlier book that you'd written, but just kind of tell us why a book on Pascal, of all the topics and people you could write on. Right. Well, I put out a book in, I guess it was 2003, with Wadsworth, called On Pascal, the short book, and it was part of the Wadsworth Philosopher Series. I also wrote one on Jesus in that series. But Pascal has been a very significant thinker to me in my journey through Christian philosophy, apologetics, and really with my spiritual life, I found him to be brilliant in many areas and in some areas where he goes way over my head, like mathematics and experimental science. But in my wheelhouse, in terms of philosophy of religion and epistemology and apologetics, I found him to be brilliant and also very applicable to the kind of apologetic issues that we face today. So I started reading him way back, probably about 1977. My mom had a great book series, I don't know if your parents bought that, Josh, but a lot of people did back in the 50s and 60s, and one of the volumes was Blaise Pascal, and I took it down that summer and started reading and have never looked back. I've studied and written about and taught Pascal ever since. So tell us a little bit about Pascal, I was aware of the wager we're going to get into, was aware of some of his unique arguments for Christianity from both the greatness and misery of human nature, which we'll get into that, but I had no idea about some of his sicknesses and some of his unique practices as within a unique sect of Catholicism completely took me by surprise. So we'll get to his conversion, but tell us about his life, his unique beliefs, and even maybe his family growing up. Right, he was born into a Roman Catholic family in France, and in the early 17th century. And there's every indication his family was a believing Roman Catholic family, pretty run-of-the-mill, I think, at that time in France, if you were not a Protestant or skeptic. And something happened where his father broke a leg, and the Bonesetters who came in to help him were part of this community of the Jansenists, and they witnessed their faith to the family and really won them over. Jansenism was a reform movement within Roman Catholicism that emphasized the sovereignty of God, the sinfulness of humanity, the need for legitimate saving faith, and also the rigors of being a Christian, that this was a serious endeavor to follow Christ. So this happened when Pascal was, oh, I guess early teens, basically. And he went on to be a very well-known mathematician and philosopher of science and experimental scientist at a young age, he was really a child prodigy, he was educated at home by his father, who was a state official. And there was another turning point that we only find out about after his death, when he had a profound experience of the living God, it's called the Night of Fire. And this was written out on a piece of paper that he put on the inside of his jacket, and nobody knew it existed until after his death, and they found it, and it recounted an amazing experience of God, which I cite in the book. And it speaks of a night of fire, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not God of philosophers and scholars, the God of Jesus Christ, I have rejected him, may I never be separated from him. It's really quite remarkable, because Pascal was such a masterful prose stylist and so eloquent. And this is like a receipt of an experience that was so profound, it was difficult for him to put into words. But he never revealed that to anyone. But we know by looking at history and the scholarship that after that is when he decided to write his comprehensive apology for the Christian religion, which he never finished. He died at age 39. He was in quite bad health for most of his life, really. But after his death, his family found all these pieces of paper that had arguments for Christianity. There were hundreds of them. Some of them were longer than others. Some had fairly complete arguments. Others were very short. And you wonder what he's talking about. One of the fragments, one of my favorite odd fragments is, the parrot wipes its beak even though the beak is not dirty. Well, Christianity must be true if we know that, right? I'm not going to give away what I think he was doing there, but it actually does relate to his overall philosophy and his understanding of human nature as kind of a mechanical part, the body, the mind, in terms of being able to calculate. And there's also the heart, which is the organ of rational intuition. So actually, I gave it away here. I think what he's saying is that a parrot has certain automatic behaviors, and we too have certain automatic bodily behaviors. But we're not only that. We also have the season and we have the heart. So he's certainly transcending any kind of materialistic understanding of the human condition. So he was just quite brilliant. He also ended up defending the Jansenists in a series of letters, which came out as the Provincial Letters. I have a chapter on that called Theological Controversy. And at the end of his life, he defended the Jansenists but lost, and the church really crushed the whole movement, sadly. I think it was a very winsome and a very persuasive reform movement within Catholicism. Not quite Protestantism, but kind of mixed up to the margins of it. So he lost that battle, and he gave away most of his possessions. He kept the Bible, Augustine's Confessions, a few other books, and lived really in poverty and gave away most of his possessions and his money to the poor, and lived a very ascetic kind of life. And at his funeral, there were a number of the poor people of his community who came because he was so concerned about them. In fact, one of the amazing things that Pascal did, among many, besides inventing the first working calculator, was he came up with the idea of the Omnibus, a busing system. Public transportation invented that idea, right? So it's just remarkable when you trace back so many things that we take for granted that actually go back to Pascal, like the calculator, a busing system, a syringe, because he did work on hydraulics. And at the time, there were two different philosophies that said that nature abhorred a vacuum. And he said, I'm not convinced by either one of these philosophies, that is, Aristotelian accounts of nature or Cartesian accounts of nature. I think we need to do a test to see whether or not nature abhors a vacuum. And he developed a test that was done previously by another scientist and disproved the idea that nature abhorred or could not stand a vacuum, and out of that came our knowledge of hydrostatics and the idea of a syringe and so on. So he had this relentlessly restless mind to discover what was going on in nature. In some ways, if he has not been sainted yet, he should be sainted the patron saint for homeschooling, since he was homeschooled and was such a success in so many fields. He was the ultimate success in homeschooling, yeah. Well, let's shift to some of his ideas, I think are really, really interesting. And some of them are really timely and have some lessons we can learn to today, like four centuries after he wrote some of these things, roughly. He had a unique view of the intersection of science and philosophy. Now we're going to get to his approach of natural theology, so hold that at bay for a minute. But how did he see the intersection of science and philosophy, and what might we learn from his approach today? Right. Well, as I mentioned, he thought we needed to study nature to see how nature worked, that we couldn't just assume certain things about nature. We needed to get our hands dirty and do some experiments and base our findings on experimental results and realize that if your theory is based on experimental results, it could be falsified by one counterexample. So he helped develop the idea of the scientific theory as falsifiable through empirical evidence, and the philosopher Karl Popper did a lot of work on that. And you can see some connections there between Pascal and Popper, although I don't go into that in detail in the book. So Pascal believed in biblical revelation, and he didn't deny that the Bible tells us the things we could not know through science or through autonomous reason. But he said that there is a domain that biblical revelation speaks to, and there's a domain of natural science that requires that we investigate for ourselves, because nature is orderly, and it's put in place by God, but we have to see how the contingencies work out. In fact, this was one of the leading issues, the leading considerations in the development of modern science in the scientific revolution in Europe. And Pascal was really right at the center of that. Although my friend, have you ever interviewed Steve Meyer on your show? A few times, yeah. He's a favorite. He is an utterly brilliant guy, and he's really taking the intelligent design movement out into the world, and he is just such a fantastic writer. But I wrote him, I said, Steve, you left out Pascal when you talked about the development of modern science. I sent him a message from Pascal, I said, if you do a next edition, you've got to include Pascal, because Steve says one of the ideas that jumpstarted the scientific revolution from the medieval period, speaking kind of roughly, was this idea that nature is made up of a collection of contingencies. And it could have been different. So we can't just sit in our armchair and say nature doesn't have a vacuum, or heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. We have to go out and see what's going on to develop these natural laws, and then to use those discoveries for technological purposes. So he had that in his philosophy of science, that the experimental method was necessary, but he didn't hold, of course, to scientism, as some people do today, like Richard Dawkins or Peter Atkins, that science is the only way to come to knowledge. It's one of several ways to come to knowledge. And we need to have a good sense, and this is a word to us as well, what does scripture speak to in ways that science and experience and reason cannot, just unaided human reason? And where do we have to go to scientific discoveries to know the way the world is? Now he thought they all fit together. He didn't see any conflict between what could be discovered in experimental science and what biblical revelation did. He's an amazing example of somebody who believed in the scriptures, believed in Jesus, believed in miracles, and did first-rate scientific work because of his Christian worldview. So I think you're right. He's got to be considered as one of the key figures that brings in the scientific revolution. He also had a good sense of confidence in science, but not hubris or overestimating what it could accomplish, and a sense of humility. I recall some of this might have been in Augustine, that we didn't want to tie our beliefs too strictly to a scientific theory of the day, and he just seemed to tow that well. Now bringing in Stephen Meyer, of course, takes us next to the question of natural theology. Now I knew that Pascal made a case for Jesus in the scriptures, but I was not aware until I read this that he did not adopt natural theology. Now before we jump into, you list a few objections that he raises and your responses to him. So we'll get to those kind of one by one, but just remind us of what natural theology is and some of the arguments, for example, that you lay out in Christian apologetics that are a kind of natural theology. Right. Natural theology is the attempt to argue for the existence of God from nature, and that includes human nature. So you're not directly relying on scripture or special revelation. You're looking to the stars, you're looking to organisms, you're considering why there's a world at all. And the idea is that without the Bible, you can conclude there is a creator, a designer, a lawgiver. But this syncs up with scripture because scripture says that the heavens declare the glory of God, Psalm 19, and Romans 1 speaks about God's being being clearly known in the things that are made. So my understanding is that we have this category of general revelation, what we can know about God from nature, and then natural theology takes the data of general revelation and forms it into arguments for the existence of God as creator, as designer, as lawgiver, and so on. And those arguments actually are in harmony with the account of God we have in scripture, and scripture takes us further to the Trinity, to the Incarnation, to justification, to faithfulness. But Pascal was not a fan of natural theology. He thought that natural theology would mislead us in some way. I actually wrote my doctoral dissertation on why Pascal rejected natural theology because, as you know with dissertations, you have to come up with something new, and you hope it's true as well. I found in my research that there were no more than a few paragraphs in the literature that I could find in English, anyway, as to why Pascal rejected natural theology. So I went through his writings and addressed his objections and tried to show why they were inadequate. But even though I think he was wrong about that, the rest of his apologetic is so strong that I continue to be a great aficionado of Pascal over all these years. And also, you know, maybe to jam on something I think Nietzsche said, the errors of great thinkers are better than the trivialities of small minds. Even where Pascal is wrong on something, he gives you such a good workout on it that you come out the better, you just end up disagreeing with him. That's well said. Well, it turns out Pascal helped both of us with our dissertation, because I've got that quote by him, I think, if I remember, you could correct me if I'm wrong, where he says, I prefer those witnesses who get their throats cut about the willingness of the apostles to die. I was like, that is a brilliant way to put it. So it's like on the last page of my dissertation pulled that from Pascal. Well, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but let's just give your responses to some of the three objections that he has to natural theology. And what's interesting is he doesn't object to, for example, you know, the arguments themselves. It's more like theological objections or usefulness objections to him. So he says, for example, there's no natural theology in Scripture, and he's probably right. There's no explicit natural theology in Scripture, so how might you respond to that? Yeah, I think there are the rudiments of some arguments for God in maybe Acts 17, maybe Acts 14, but you certainly don't have a formalized argument for the existence of God, where you have premises leading to a conclusion through an argument form. It's, if anything, more implicit. There's no question that general revelation is taught in Scripture, that God has revealed himself in nature. The way to respond to that is the Bible is addressing people who are usually pantheists or polytheists. So the issue is not usually, is there a God or not, but which God is the true God? So that seems to be the apologetic focus if you're dealing with theism in Scripture, and I don't see any reason to deny good arguments simply because they're not in Scripture. If you found something in Scripture that argued that it's somehow sinful or wrong or shows pride to try to argue from nature to deity, then we would have to curtail that. We would have to say, I guess we're wrong-headed to do that sort of thing. But the absence of an argument form doesn't mean necessarily the prohibition of the argument. So I don't think there's any reason to not engage in natural theology simply because we don't see clear examples of it in Holy Scripture. That's a great example, and I think when you look at the audience, naturalism was not dominating the way it does in many Western circles today, and so this is a way of pushing back on a false ideology or worldview in the same way Scripture does on other false worldviews. So very fair. Now this next one, it's interesting, Pascal makes this argument, because I've heard this from some skeptics at times, and it's true. The question is just what follows from it, that the God of natural theology is too thin. This could be the God of Islam, Judaism, Christianity—doesn't get us to a God who's moral. And so how might you respond to that objection? Right, the idea is that even if we can show there is a first cause, or if there is a designer, we're still very far from the living triune incarnational God of Scripture. And I'd say, well, yes and no, because Jesus said, you believe in God, also believe in me. Well, there are a lot of people who are agnostics or atheists today, and so for people to believe in Jesus, they have to first believe in the creator, designer, God. And sometimes people will go directly from agnosticism or atheism through reading Scripture, or maybe a really powerful argument for the resurrection. But in my apologetic, I think it's wiser, if you're dealing with unbelievers, to deal with the arguments for God's existence. And if they're successful, that deity is not really very thin metaphysically. You have a creator of the universe, a designer of the universe, and source of the moral law. And if you throw in the ontological argument, you have a lot of other things as well. So I'd say, absolutely, we need special revelation to tell us that God is triune, that he incarnated, what the plan of salvation is, what the afterlife is. Natural theology will not tell you anything about the afterlife, but it will tell us that this life is grounded in the existence of a creator, designer, and lawgiver. And that's significant, especially when there is so much agnosticism and atheism in America and in the West. You probably know the last Gallup poll found that only 81% of Americans believed in God. And that was the lowest amount they had ever registered. So that's a significant problem, the problem of atheism. So let's jump to his apologetic approach. And we're going to get into his specific arguments, which I think will be most interesting. But maybe, since he doesn't use natural theology the way you describe this, which is a methodology I often take—God exists, God is good, revealed himself in Jesus, Scripture, etc.—he has a different kind of apologetic approach. What is it? Well, he has several types of arguments. The one that I've spent the most time on in my writing and teaching about Pascal is one that I call the deposed royalty argument, or it could be called the anthropological argument. And this is a one-step argument for the truth of Christianity. So if it works, it's very cogent and it covers a lot of ground. And the method it uses is called inference to the best explanation. So although he didn't use that term, but that's clearly what he's doing, and I articulate that. So you look at the human condition, human beings across history, and you find that we are great in many ways, our intellect, our development of science and culture, humans are capable of great moral heroism and self-sacrifice. At the same time, we often get things wrong, we're confused, we're petty, we're cruel, people try to exterminate whole groups of people. So we have this odd mixture of what Pascal calls greatness and misery in the human condition. And he wants to spark or foment a kind of, I call it anthropological crisis. He wants people to become very puzzled existentially over who they are, what am I in the world? And he ultimately says, listen to God, mere human philosophy cannot explain the greatness and the misery, whereas biblical theology, the revelation in scripture, can, because it says we are great by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God, and the Bible is the only book of all the religions that teaches that. I'm going to give you a footnote here. When Vivek Ramaswamy was on the campaign trail, he was asked about his religious beliefs, and he says, well, I'm a Hindu, so I believe we're made in the image and likeness of God. I said, oh, God, no, no. I wrote an article about that. Hinduism teaches the caste system, which is the utter antithesis of claiming everyone is made in the image and likeness of God. But he was on the campaign trail, so. Sure, in America. In America, yeah, not in India. Anyway, so we're great by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God, but we're fallen. Genesis 1, 2 and 3, the fall, rebellion against God, eating the voice of the serpent, getting kicked out of the garden. So we now come into the world with original sin. And to kind of summarize quickly, Pascal says that human philosophies or even false religions will either esteem human beings too highly or not highly enough. So, for example, if you take atheism, we're merely evolved animals and a meaningless human. No way to account for our intellectual abilities, our sense of morality. Why do we create culture and other living things? Now, can you have other philosophies? Let's take a pantheistic philosophy. And Pascal was concerned about the Stoics in his day. But we could think of a general New Age kind of view, which I've written. Sure. Because we're actually divine beings. We just forgot how great we are. And if we go within and meditate and go through consciousness raising seminars, we can see that we're one with the universal energy. Well, that denies our cruelty and our pettiness and our limits. We're limited, morally flawed beings, but we're far more than just evolved animals. And Pascal says it's only Christianity that gets it right. We're made in the image and likeness of God. We're fallen. And then he also says this is the Christian view. So there's an answer. And the answer to the post-royalty is royalty become incarnate. Jesus Christ is prophet, priest and king as our mediator. So he gives an account of the human condition, which has a lot of really insightful reflections on who we are as preachers. And then he says that we're not alone in this. Christianity not only explains who we are, but it has a solution to the problems of this enigma we call humanity. So it's not just the way to put the pieces of the puzzle together. It's the way to experience eternal life through Jesus Christ. And of all the philosophers I've studied, apart from, you know, let's say Augustine or Aquinas, Pascal is the most Christocentric. He has so many really majestic, wonderful things to say about Jesus. So I have a chapter in the book is called The Excellence of Christ because he reflected on that and articulated that in a very moving and biblically eschewed way. That's helpful to illustrate the way he thinks and what his methodology is, because interestingly enough, as you know, intelligent design takes an inference to the best explanation. Now, of course, Pascal is not using the argument from DNA or from fine-tuning for a lot of different reasons. But it looks at a feature of human nature and says what explanation accounts for the greatness of humanity? Also, it's misery, our proclivity to good and our proclivity to evil. And it's being made in God's image and a corrupted human nature that best, most smoothly, naturally explains that, hence is most likely true. That's his reason that I think is brilliant. Right. And when I was working on this many years ago, I realized that that was the argument form he was using, although he did not explicitly state it. But that argument form is very useful for a lot of different types of arguments. And also, Pascal didn't develop it too much, but he really appealed to the argument from fulfilled prophecy for the uniqueness and supremacy of Jesus. Of course, you and your dad have done a lot of work on that in your books over many years. And Pascal cites a lot of fulfilled prophecies and he talks a little bit about it. But what I do in the book is I give some examples from Pascal and I use a design inference there, too. So you have clear predictions that are really predictive. They're not just thematic resonance, which some of the scripture is, but there's real predictions like a virgin shall conceive. He will bear the sins of the world. So Isaiah 7, Isaiah 53, and there are many, many others. And then you find reliable documents that report this has happened. So there's a clear statement, it's antecedentally improbable that any person would fulfill even a few of these things. And they're not vague. So you infer a design. It's not happenstance. It didn't happen according to some impersonal, natural necessity, like something that happens according to the law of gravity. So what I do there is I give the examples that Pascal gives and what he thought the significance of this was, and I put it into a design inference format. And I think it ends up being very token. And by the way, I didn't come up with the inference to the best explanation. Of course. I don't want to claim that, but I'm applying it to Pascal in some ways that I think are proven. That's that's totally helpful. Even Darwin arguably used a kind of abduction inference to the best explanation. You see it in a court of law and other disciplines as well. Now, in my experience, I think the biggest objection people have to God is the problem of evil. And this is an objection or question Christians and non-Christians have. A part of that is the hiddenness of God. Why does God not make himself more evident? Now, Pascal addressed this. Tell us how he makes sense of the hiddenness of God. Right. It has to do really with his anthropology. So he believes that, as I said, remaining God's image. So we have great intellectual powers, but we're also adversely affected by the fall and sin. And so our reasoning is clouded essentially by selfishness. So he says that God has revealed himself adequately to be known, but not so overwhelmingly that everyone simply opens their eyes and realizes there is a God. So it's the idea of conditioned cognitive access. You have to follow up the clues that God has left in order to come to know that God is there and furthermore, that God has revealed himself in Jesus. So what he does is he says the problem is really not in the source. The problem is in those that receive the message. And I think he got it right on that. And I appeal to some work that C. Stephen Evans has done this on on this related to God leaving signs that we need to follow up. So it's these these signs of God, like the order of the universe, the existence of the universe, moral knowledge in the heart are easily accessible. But they're also deniable. You can turn away. And in fact, scripture gives us the psychology and the history of this in Romans chapter one verses 18 to 32, there's a recognition of God, then the turning away because people don't give thanks and then the creation of false gods to put in the place of the true God. So I think Pascal was quite brilliant on that issue. And the last 30 years has been a lot of discussion of this. It is sometimes called the epistemic problem of evil. And I think the kind of moves that Pascal makes and then followed up with Stephen Evans and others are really the right way to address. I love the way Pascal does is the way I've generally approached it, and I wasn't aware that he approached it this way, that God has given sufficient knowledge and insight and evidence, but doesn't overwhelm us. Now, of course, I'm reading Pascal going, well, if he just added natural theology, he could make his case for God that much stronger. But the mere fact that he thinks you can have this without natural theology, I think is really interesting, interesting within itself. We can only make the argument arguably stronger. Now, he offers a critique of both Mohammed personally and of kind of the Koran and Islam. Walk through a little bit of his critique. Now, he's right in the 17th century. So Islam had been around for about a decade and it was in France at this time. People would have been aware of it and there was not as much information as today. But for lack of a better term, it was a threat, so to speak, to Christian belief and even to, you know, really civilization at that time, because some of the Crusades had taken place back and forth. So what's his critique of Islam? What's interesting, very few books on Pascal or articles on Pascal address this. And I think the reason is that he did not say a lot about Mohammed. But what he said is quite telling. So what he says is Mohammed is a very different sort of figure than Jesus. Mohammed was not foretold in any prophecies. Jesus was. Jesus foretold the future and was correct in as much as the things happen fulfilled, like Jesus predicting Peter would deny him three times, things like that. So the way you can sort of summarize this by bringing together various parts of Pascal is Jesus foretold and foretelling Mohammed, neither foretold nor foretelling. Now, Jesus worked miracles. There's no material in the Koran that says that Mohammed worked miracles. And of course, the account of Jesus in the Koran contradicts what we have in the scripture. The Koran denies the deity of Jesus, denies the trinity and so on. So essentially what Pascal does is to look at the evidence from history for the Koran related to the evidence from history for Jesus in the New Testament. And it's it's really no contest. And he also has this interesting hermeneutical principle that I had not seen people write about. He says in both Islam and Christianity, we have clear passages and passages that are a little difficult or a little bit dark. And he says in Christianity, there are a lot of clear passages that make sense and explain the world. So we try to understand the tougher passages in those light. In that light, he says, with Mohammed in the Koran, we have clear passages that teach absurdities, and so we don't give the benefit of the doubt to the rest of the scripture. He's talking about the nature of paradise being very much a male oriented place of pleasure and so on. So he says Islam in the Koran, where it's clear, is often clearly false, where Christianity is clear in scripture, is true and compelling rationally. So we can give the benefit of the doubt of some of the tougher passages. He says we don't even have that kind of epistemic set up in it. So I developed that in the book as well. So it's a kind of hermeneutical argument against Islam. He's got the historical argument against Islam, really based on prophetic fulfillment. So even though there's not much in there about Mohammed, he says one thing that's actually not true, which I point out, probably just he didn't have a lot of sources on Islam. He says that Mohammed forbade his followers to read. There's probably no evidence for that or not sufficient evidence. But you can just bracket that because this whole argument doesn't depend on that at all. And the arguments that he gives, I think, hold up very well in apologetics, interreligious kind of set. Now, of course, you don't go into full depth on that in your book, you give some examples and we're not going into depth here, but some of the things that would be absurd would be, you know, these miracle stories of Jesus from when he was a child, like the infancy gospel of Thomas, I believe it is, that no one takes as historical. Sura 4, that Jesus did not die by crucifixion. There are some clear cut falsehoods that are really difficult to avoid. Those are the kinds of things that he would go into and you would. Now, the moment I started reading this section, I was like, when he says there's no fulfilled prophecy for Mohammed, I thought, well, I wonder if he's going to address Deuteronomy chapter 18. Flip the page over and you cite some Muslims agree that the future prophet spoken of by Moses is Mohammed. Now, let me just read this text and then you list a couple here of reasons why this specifically is not referring to Mohammed. But again, Deuteronomy chapter 18 says, For the Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him, for this is what you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, Let us not hear the voice of the Lord, nor this great fire anymore, or we will die. Now, the prophecy goes on, but why can this not refer to Mohammed? Well, for one thing, Mohammed contradicts both the Old Testament and the New Testament. So on that basis, he's a false prophet. He's not a true prophet. And moreover, the prophet, like unto Moses, has to be Jewish and Mohammed is clearly not of that lineage. He's not Jewish. Now, it's interesting that the Koran says that it fulfills the Bible, but it never gives specific passages. So Islamic philosophers and theologians have been mining the Bible for all these years, trying to find Mohammed somewhere in there. And they can't. And another thing that they do is they say that Mohammed was actually the comforter that Jesus promised. And of course, that's such a weak argument because the comforter will be with you always while Mohammed died. He's not with us always. And the comforter will make known the teachings of Jesus. And Mohammed denies the deity of Jesus and denies his death on the cross. So we don't have any prediction for Mohammed. And Mohammed was not a prophet, either in terms of speaking the truth about God or rightly predicting the future. I mean, it says it right here, it says the prophet like me from among you, from among your fellow Israelites. That's a pretty clear cut that it's not referring to somebody outside. All right, well, let's jump to Pascal's wager, which probably some folks who are still with us are wondering about. Whenever I do this, I've done in the past kind of this atheist encounter where I role play an atheist, do my best to defend it, and then help Christians better respond. One of the things that Christians will always raise up, they'll say, whether they know it comes from Pascal or not, they'll say, what if you're wrong? And smarter people say, you know, try to cite Pascal's wager. So maybe let's just start with what is Pascal's wager and what was he really trying to accomplish by it? Was it an argument or is he just motivating people to understand the seriousness of the question at play related to God? Well, there's a lot to be said about that, but the wager, first of all, is not an argument for God's existence. It is meant to motivate the skeptic to pursue the truth of Christianity in light of the possible outcomes. So if the Christian God is real and you don't believe in him, you lose heaven, you lose an infinity of an infinitely happy life, is the way Pascal. If you believe in Christianity and the Christian God is real, then you gain an infinity of an infinitely happy life. Now, if you believe in Christianity and Christianity is false, you lose some earthly pleasures, but there's not, as it were, an infinite loss. If you are an unbeliever and Christianity is true, there's an infinite loss. So it's not an even situation with consequences, prudentially, it's not even. Now, there are a lot of questions of interpretation and reasoning in the wager. And I deal with some of that in the book. But I think the real insight that Pascal has is of apologetic significance to us is that there are several. One is we need to consider factors of prudence or self-interest in beliefs. So some beliefs are not that significant, whether or not they're true or false. Others are very significant. So the example I often use is about our health. So if we have some symptoms, which could be nothing, but could also be a fatal illness, and we don't know, the best thing to do is to go into a physician and get the tests and find out. Because if you have a fatal illness or potentially fatal illness, maybe it's treatable. If you just say, well, I don't know, so I'm not going to do anything. You're not wise in that because the possible outcome is so significant, life or death. So I think really the best way to use this in terms of prudential reasoning is so much is at stake about the truth of Christianity in relation to your belief or unbelief that you should investigate it. You shouldn't be cavalier about it. You shouldn't say, well, I don't know and I don't care. Well, you should say, I don't know and I should try to know whether I think it's true or false. And one of the other real significant aspects of the wager fragment, and it's one of the longer essays of the fragments, is the very end or the second to the end where Pascal says to the person, it's a dialogue with a skeptic, the skeptic says, I'd like to believe, but I just can't. And Pascal says, well, then engage in religious practices and you will find yourself believing the way so many other people have done. Now, Pascal doesn't discount evidence in the wager, but sometimes the evidence will not push people off the dime to go in the right direction. So the very uncharitable understanding of this is, well, Pascal's telling people to stupefy themselves, to sort of engage in self-hypnosis so they end up believing. And just in case God is there, they get heaven and avoid hell. That is not what he's saying. What he's saying is that some beliefs require certain practices to know whether the beliefs are true or not. So Christianity is a set of truth claims and we have arguments for Christianity, and he gave some very powerful ones, even apart from natural theology. But it's also a matter of experience and a matter of exposing yourself to conditions that might help convince you, not brainwash you, but help convince you. So I think that a charitable reading of what he's saying in light of the whole corpus of his thought and what I've found over many years of studying Pascal is that people will take isolated aspects of his thought, unrelated to the rest, and then ridicule this isolated thought that they've given a caricature of. And so I'm trying to rectify that injustice with this book. All right, so give me your quick thoughts on a couple of objections here. Then I want to push back on one area where I disagree, and maybe I'm missing it as well, and you can correct me. But some might say, well, wait a minute, he's just motivating people to believe in God out of fire insurance. The God of the Bible doesn't want somebody to believe just because it's a waiver in their own self-interest. Well, I think it's about that. Jesus said, what is it worth if you gain the whole world and lose your soul? So Jesus himself warned of the eternal implications of rejecting him. So I think Pascal is being like Jesus with that. But Pascal is not only talking about avoiding punishment. He's talking about the enjoyment of the Christian life. And if you go to his other statements in the Pensees, he says no one is more happy than the true Christian. And he means in this life, because we know we have a mediator and we can offer ourselves to God. We can come to God without pride and without utter self-abnegation either. There's a wonderful quote on that that I need to memorize. But we can come to God knowing he loves us and we can have a saving relationship with him. But we can't come to him in pride because we're sinners and need to be saved. So he's like Jesus in warning people of the consequences of unbelief, really. But he's saying there's far more to being a Christian than just avoiding hell. There's this infinity of an instantly happy life that starts in this life and will be consummated in the next life. You know, it's interesting that obviously Pascal wrote before a lot of the recent sociological data that does show the very things that Christians believe about commitment, about a deeper purpose, about love rooted in the Christian faith. This is J. Werner Walsh's recent book actually lead to human flourishing. So he was on to something before the data was there. What about this one that there's, look, the wager just assumes it's like atheism versus Christianity, but there's Islam, there's progressive Christianity, there's New Age, there's all sorts of other beliefs. Doesn't that neutralize the effect of the wager? Well, if the wager is set up such that we really can't know whether God is there or not, so we just have to embark on a quest as if God existed. And that's all there is to it. That is, if there was no positive evidence for Christianity, then you have what is called the many gods objection. You know, what if Allah is the right God or what if there is some other God, some God who doesn't like people to believe in him and that God sends people to hell who believe in him. So you just come up with all these, believe it or not, that's in the literature. You have all this material and I say, well, wait a minute. The wager fragment is set up to address a person who is a skeptic who can't quite believe in God. And so Pascal says, well, there is evidence of scripture for God, but if you can't believe in God, then engage in this practice and maybe you will come to believe in God. So if you look at the whole, again, the whole corpus of Pascal's work, you see arguments against Islam. You see arguments for the Bible and for Christianity, the fulfillment of prophecy, the uniqueness of Jesus, the reliability of the witnesses who are willing to die for what they believe was true about the resurrection. And you have written so much on that. So, again, it's taking a kind of caricature of the wager and then ridiculing it. And that's really the fallacy of what's called the straw man. And the opposite of the straw man is the steel man. So if you're dealing with an argument, you want to give the best version of that argument and then criticize that. So what I try to do in the book is be fair to Pascal, but to show that he's a he's a lot smarter than you think. If you think you're smarter than Pascal, you're probably wrong. So don't get cocky about it. He's not dumb. He doesn't make stupid, simplistic mistakes. If he makes mistakes, you've got to work hard to show it. It is somewhat humbling to read all he accomplished, and he died a decade younger than I am, just think, wow, this guy was a genius, that's for sure. Now, for fun, but somewhat serious, let me push back an argument you make, tell you where I differ, and you can tell me what you think. This is on page 172. You said that Pascal says that one will lose nothing if one wagers on God and God does not exist. Yet one will lose the knowledge of the truth of the matter by wagering wrongly. You said by being a theist, when atheism is the case, one loses the possibility of possessing the truth. So you said he is wrong in thinking that the theist really risks nothing. All the contestants risk the possibility of losing truth if they wager wrongly. So if the Christian wagers on God and atheism is true, then the Christian loses truth. Here's what I would say. If God doesn't exist, truth doesn't matter. Truth only has instrumental value now, not intrinsic value. And so really, it's no loss. The only loss is from the perspective of assuming that Christianity is true. But if atheism is true, we can't actually assume that. So there really is no loss. Your thoughts? I think that's a really good point. So my comment assumes a universe in which truth is noble and beneficial. And really, only the Christian worldview can support that. So I guess I am granting a little too much to the atheists at that point. But I can do it, I think, sort of theoretically, that we should all pursue the truth. And maybe the truth is there is no God. So let's pursue that. But we could use a kind of transcendental argument and say, we couldn't even have truth at all. We couldn't have knowledge unless the universe is designed for us to know these things. And I have made that argument. So I guess what I'm doing is maybe granting something to the atheists for the sake of getting the argument going that ultimately the atheists cannot justify truth or knowledge on an atheistic worldview. I think that's right. So that's what we're doing. There's a second edition, I'll put a footnote in for you. Well, I owe it to Neil Shenvey. I had him on, we did an entire program on this and talked about how if there is no God, truth only has instrumental value, just like moral principles have instrumental value or beauty has instrumental value. But it doesn't have intrinsic value. So I'm just not going to concede that as a loss in a universe without God. That would make the argument even stronger then. Perfect. So footnote him. Not me, because he's the one who drew it to my attention. But hey, small point, thoroughly enjoyed the book. Like I said, I was sharing with my wife, who's a Christian high school teacher last night, going, hey, did you know Pascal invented the calculator and probability theory and talked about prophecy? I mean, it's just so interesting. So I want to commend it to viewers. It's called Beyond the Wager and it's academic. So it's understandable to non-academics. But you go into some depth in about a 200 page book. So it's not a light read before you go to bed. It's something to invest in. But to make you think it'll challenge you. And you're right. He really elevates Christ powerfully in this book, which is one of things that I will take away. So always appreciate having you on. Before you click away, friends, make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some other shows coming up, including an interview on hellish near death experiences. People have been asking me about details on that in a while. That's coming up. We've got a former Muslim who's in the Iranian National Guard who's become Christian going to speak of his experience, radical conversion, a ton of other stories you will not want to miss. Make sure you hit subscribe. If you thought about Stunt Apologetics, we'd love to have you at Biola, have a fully distance program and even a certificate program. If you want to study further, but not quite ready for a master's, information below. Doug, it's always a treat to have you on. Conversation is always wonderful. Thanks for writing a great book and thanks for joining me. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. You're welcome.