What Blaise Pascal Has to Say about Apologetics | Testable Faith

Welcome to Testable Faith here at Reasons to Believe. My name is George Horakson. I get to serve as the Scholar Community Program Director and a Staff Scholar here at Reasons. And today with me, I'm very excited, we get to talk to Dr. David Bloch. He's a renowned South African astronomer and has been published in Nature. You can read much of his material. He has a book entitled God in Galileo. And we get to explore with him a little bit more about the thinker, the great Christian thinker and philosopher Blaise Pascal. So Dr. Bloch, you have had an interest in Pascal. Absolutely. Maybe you could just share at first for people who are not as familiar with Pascal, kind of when did he live? Who was he? What makes him stand out and your interest in him? Certainly. Well, first of all, let's take our minds to Paris. And let's take our mind to the Rodin Museum. And let's take our minds to one of Rodin's masterpieces, the thinker. Why? Because Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest apologists who ever lived, a great, one of the greatest mathematicians, really, and physicists and philosophers and much more besides, was Blaise Pascal, who lived more or less the same time as Galileo, Galilei. And my interest, my deep interest in Blaise Pascal is that he put together his thoughts, his title pensée in French, and he put together cogent numbers of arguments for faith in God, and moreover, for faith in Jesus of Nazareth. I think what riveted my attention to Blaise was his night of fire. You know, he experiences that burning fire within him. Oh, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers. And he describes the work of the Holy Spirit coming down upon him, you know, for a period, as I recall, of a few hours in the night of fire. And he knew that he knew that he knew that Jesus is alive and is resurrected and is exactly who he said he was. And so with my Jewish background as an astronomer, I became intensely interested in Blaise Pascal because he tried to address the two tensions, if you like, George. The one is pain. Living in a world of pain and suffering, Pascal suffered from much pain during his life and headaches and so forth. How do we fit in and reconcile a God of love with a world of pain and angst and fear and so on? But also, Pascal loved geometry, of course. He loved geometry, and he speaks in the pensée of the spirit of geometry, l'esprit, you know, the spirit of geometry. And so here is someone I can identify with, George, a mathematician, someone who loves mathematics, someone who adores the geometrical method, someone who is a very, you know, cogent thinker of his day, one of the foremost thinkers, in fact, of all time. And he's trying in his pensée to try and help us traverse the path which he traversed, of understanding that you can be the most creative scientist or mathematician, and yet, on the other hand, continually live with the experience of being born again. I mean, he didn't use those words, but in The Night of Fire, if you read it, as you understand, you are an expert in philosophy yourself. The Night of Fire is the most beautiful description of God coming down to save Blaise Pascal, and it really encapsulates my deepest interest in Blaise. He also talked a lot about the greatness of humanity, but also the wretchedness of humanity. Absolutely, absolutely. Did that capture your imagination as well, and how to engage with that, explain it? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You know, in the pensée, we read, man is a reed, but man is a thinking reed. And yes, the pensée is filled with the wretchedness of man. And I can identify that because I, too, as a Jew who has come to faith in Jesus, has suffered my own universe, if you like, of persecution. And then also, George, I wrote another book on bullying. The tribe is not spoken. And there again, I can speak about the depravity of mankind, the depravity of my bullies, the wretchedness, the hell of that experience. So I can identify with Blaise Pascal on many, many, many, many different levels. But then, in the pensée, he moves on from the wretchedness of man to the greatness of man in God. And I think that it just describes my life, the story of my life, much better than I could, in that he describes my wretchedness, the wretchedness I face around me, and yet the wonder of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. And he minces no words there. You know, in The Night of Fire, he has this most intimate encounter, just like I did in October of 1976, George, he has this most intimate encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. I remember Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher, also a fan of Pascal. He wrote this, he said, Pascal knew the power of science, but also its importance to make us, its impotence, I'm sorry, its impotence to make us wise or happy or good. So you can be an expert scientist, but then fail to be wise, happy, or good. Would you comment on that as a scientist? Absolutely. I'd be so happy, George. Such a good question. You know, growing up as a Jew, I loved going to shul. I loved going to the synagogue. I'd hear about the rabbi speaking about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in other words, the living God. But to me, God was dead. And science had nothing really to say about my inner happiness. As much as I adored astronomy as a youngster, astronomy could not provide an inner contentment. It couldn't. And the more I studied the wonders of the universe, yes, they were awesome. It was awesome to look at objects such as Messier 42 and baby stars being born, much beside. But it wasn't comforting to my soul. I could never say with a psalmist, the Lord is my shepherd. I couldn't, because there was no shepherd and the shepherd was apparently dead. But I like that so much, what Peter Kreeft says, because science is impotent in that sense. It cannot fill the soul with love, with joy, and also with the forgiveness of sin. Science can never describe your night of fire. Mathematics can't describe your night of fire. General relativity can't describe that. For those of you who are interested in the more mathematical things, let me give you one little idea. I've done a lot of research on active and conformally active symmetries in metrically automorphic space-times. That was a really big set of words. That's right. So what I'm saying is, I understand by God's grace the awesomeness of the human mind. But I understand that mankind, men and women, boys and girls, are not only fleshly beings, but we're spiritual beings. And when I was in London, and when I heard Stephen Hawking speak, I was filled with angst. I was lonely. The spiritual candle had not been lit. But the psalmist says, does he not, George, the Lord has lit my candle. And in October of 1976, as I share elsewhere on the RTB pages, I came to a living faith. I met the God of the night of fire of Blaise Pascal. And I would wholeheartedly agree with what Peter Kreeft says. Science is impotent when it comes to this, fulfilling the inner needs of being born again. And knowing that you know that you know that you know that you know that your And that's not to diminish science. You're an expert astronomer, very well accomplished. So both can be the case. I think Pascal would also resonate with this. And who knows what he would think of the new images we're getting from the James Webb Space Telescope and that. But as we look out into the vastness of the cosmos, we can start to feel very, very small. In fact, you shared a letter about this with me. But there's something about God in Jesus that also makes us huge, right? Can you comment on that? Oh, yes. That actually is the result of a letter, of a lecture I gave for Lauren Cunningham, who founded Youth of the Mission, Why When? And he invited us to speak in Hawaii many years ago, probably in the early 1980s. And I gave this presentation and he said, he summed it up as follows. As we look into the immensity and the normative space, we feel like a speck of dust. But, said Lauren, when we look at Jesus, we become mammoth in meaning. Because him who has created this vast cosmos, this glorious cosmos, as our home, can reside in our hearts. I think that the message of Lauren Cunningham is essentially as in 2 Corinthians, for the same God who created the universe has shone his light in our hearts in the face of Jesus of Nazareth. So Lauren's comment really was, look guys, when we look out there, we feel like a speck of dust. But when we look at Jesus, Gloria in profundis Deo, the God who comes down, we become mammoth in meaning, for he died so that I spiritually need never die. Well, I love the vibrance of your interest in science, but also your vibrance in your interest in Jesus. If you want to hear more from Dr. David Block, of course you have his book, God in Galileo. He also has a great passion for Blaise Pascal. But to hear more from him, please go to reasons.org and search David Block to hear more and get more resources on this subject.