Pascal's Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God by James A. Connor

From the Publisher

In a major biography of Blaise Pascal, James Connor explores both the intellectual giant whose theory of probability paved the way for modernity and the devout religious mystic who dared apply probability to faith. A child prodigy, Pascal made essential additions to Descartes's work at age sixteen. By age nineteen, he had invented the world's first mechanical calculator. But despite his immense contributions to modern science and mathematical thinking, it is Pascal's wager with God that set him apart from his peers as a man fully engaged with both religious and scientific pursuits.

One night in 1654, Pascal had a visit from God, a mystical experience that changed his life. Struggling to explain God's existence to others, Pascal dared to apply his mathematical work to religious faith, playing dice with divinity: he argued for the existence of God, basing his position not on rigorous logical principles as did Aquinas or Anselm of Canterbury, but on outcomes - his famous wager. By applying to the existence of God the same rules that governed the existence and position of the universe itself, Pascal sounded the death knell for medieval "certainties" and paved the way for modern thinking.

Publishers Weekly

Is there a God? Are you willing to bet your eternal soul on your answer? This essentially is what has become known as Pascal's Wager, a bare-bones approach to challenging the folly of unbelief. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is widely regarded as a brilliant mathematician, but he is less well-known as a deep student of religion and the Bible. He and his father were devoted Jansenists, schismatic Roman Catholics seeking to revive Augustine's stern views of judgment, predestination and radical orthodoxy. Connor, professor of English at Kean University in New Jersey and author of Kepler's Witch and Silent Fire, believes that this passion, along with Pascal's insatiable curiosity and his father's deep love for learning, produced the prodigy who would change the way we view both God and the sciences.

Driven by the tumultuous events of 17th-century France (vividly recreated by Connor), and meeting resistance not only from fellow mathematicians like Rene Descartes but from such powerhouses as the Jesuits, young Pascal repeatedly proved himself more than just a "spoiled son of a controlling father," rising above the challenges of his youth and diminutive stature. Written for a general audience, this biography is a compelling and readable study of one of the most influential thinkers in religious history. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0060766913
  
• ISBN-13: 9780060766917
• Format: Hardcover, 240pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: October 2006
• Sales Rank: 620,218

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Pascal's Wager

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

[ 1625 ]

The Witch

Historians are the best gossips.
--John Padburg, S.J.

It seemed certain that the boy would die. Mysterious childhood ailments abounded, but this one was mysterious indeed. The boy Blaise was only two years old, the first and only son of Étienne and Antoinette Pascal, when suddenly he began to waste away, becoming emaciated, as one en chartre, or "starving." He seemed dejected. He could not stand the sight of liquids, nor could he take water in any form. In fact, he seemed afraid of water, obsessed by a sudden hydrophobia that set him shrieking with fear. What's more, he couldn't bear to see his parents together. His mother, by herself, was fine, as was his father, but the two of them together sent him into rages. Was he possessed? Was he bewitched? It was the seventeenth century, and most of the Pascals' fellow towns-people would have thought such things possible. Rumors about the boy and his illness fluttered about Clermont like birds.

The boy's father, Étienne, was uncertain. He was too much the scientific intellectual to easily believe in witchcraft and was, by his own account, an honnête homme, a man of good breeding, one of the new bourgeois intellectuals who served his king and his God, and who made a little money on theside doing it. He was a worldly man, though pious; a rational man; a philosophical man who doubted all the superstitious frippery of the simple people. But still, the boy was wasting away, and if the father did not find a cure, and find it soon, his son would die.

The town gossips suspected first this one, then that one, finally culling out an old woman who had once worked for the Pascals, possibly as a sevreuse, one who took in the children of the wealthy during their time of weaning, one who would put up with the children's tantrums and their weeping, one who, because of her age, could no longer be a wet nurse and who was therefore the child's first teacher about the hardness of the world.¹ This particular old woman had once received the Pascals' charity--a fact that, oddly enough, became the source of her grievance against Étienne, the tax judge. Because of her prior relationship, she had expected a favorable judgment by monsieur the judge, but was disappointed and grumbled about his hard-heartedness. And so the people put together the pieces. An old woman, a grievance, a mysterious illness--it had to be witchcraft. Étienne stopped her in the street one day and told her that if she was indeed responsible, he would take her to court and see her punished. He demanded that she cure his son at once and without further witchcraft.

The old woman, cowed, apologized over and over, and said that certainly she would do what she could. Still, life for life, death for death: some other poor soul would have to sacrifice its life for the boy. After all, the spell had been a killing spell, which could be satisfied only by a death. Pascal ridiculed her and asked if she wanted one of his horses to kill, but the old woman pushed on. She said no; a cat would do as well. In time, the bargain was set. Étienne returned to his home, and the witch cast about for a cat to steal. She went out and found herself a cat. But as she was walking up the stairs of Étienne's house, she met someone on the stairs, likely a servant, who opposed her, insulted her, and upbraided her. Startled and upset, she threw the cat out the window. Now, cats are legendary when it comes to surviving falls, and the window was not very high off the ground. But when the old woman found the cat outside the window, it was already dead.

To complete the cure, the witch then gathered common herbs from the garden and, after mixing them with flour, placed them on the boy's navel. Suddenly, little Blaise fell into a coma and looked as if he had fallen dead, just like the cat. Étienne called for the doctor, who arrived and examined the boy, and then told the distraught parents that their son had indeed died, that he was sorry, that there was nothing he could do. Meanwhile, the witch had gone off for a time, but after a while she returned. She knocked on the door, and the servants ushered her into the child's bedroom. Overcome with grief and anger, Étienne the philosopher, the gentleman of good breeding, ran to the woman and knocked her to the ground with his fist. Standing over her, he shouted at her and cursed her. But the witch pleaded, assuring him that his son was not dead, that they should not put him in a shroud, and certainly not bury him--that this lethargy was part of the cure, and that if they only had a bit more patience, they would see that Blaise would awaken soon and begin to heal.

The spell required that they wait until midnight, when suddenly, she said, the boy would awaken and return to himself. That afternoon and into the night, the Pascals--Étienne and Antoinette--with their few servants and possibly even their daughter Gilberte, the woman who would eventually write down the story as part of a biography of her brother, Blaise, stayed by his bedside and prayed, taking cold comfort in what the witch had told them--that the boy was not dead but only asleep. Midnight passed, and nothing happened. One o'clock, and still nothing. Two o'clock. Three, four, five, six. The family despaired, but then around six thirty in the morning the boy stirred, and finally his eyes fluttered awake. The first thing he saw was his father and mother next to the bed, standing together, and he began to cry, as he had done in the past. So they knew that . . .

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