Blaise Pascal resists definition. During a short life (he died in 1662, aged 39) he invented the calculator, laid the foundations for probability theory and created the first public transport system. He was also an austere Catholic, whose call for a return to strict Augustinian doctrines put him outside the religious mainstream. As a philosopher, he is remembered today for his ‘wager’ argument – a challenge to atheists, framed as a cosmic gamble.
As Graham Tomlin shows in this lively, conversational biography, Pascal worked in threes, often steering a course between extremes. As a Catholic, he refused to commit to the new sect of Jansenism, but also abhorred the Jesuits’ ideological flexibility; politically, he could sound revolutionary one minute, conservative the next; and as a philosopher he was pulled in opposite directions by reason and scepticism. He is most relevant to 21st-century readers, argues Tomlin, as a thinker who combined the piety of the Middle Ages with the scientific zeal of the Enlightenment, thus refuting the modern idea that religion and science are incompatible.
Pascal distinguished between what he called the physical and metaphysical worlds – respectively, the domains of science and faith. The routes to knowledge in each, he argued, were radically different: experiment and reason in the former, love and faith in the latter. Tomlin suggests that, had this distinction been observed by later critics of religion, beginning with the Scottish sceptic David Hume (1711-76), atheism might not be as prevalent as it is today. According to this view, the blistering attacks made on religion by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris rest on a fundamental error – that religious beliefs should be assessed by the same criteria as scientific hypotheses.
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