Skip to content

Blaise Pascal

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

A HEAP page for Blaise Pascal

Two Views
Two eras for the Gambler

Stephensonia

Christianity, now in its fundamentalist guise, is still trying its best to halt the progress of science. The modern irrationalist "scientific creationism" is a testament to that. Not much different from what was done to Galileo by the Inquisition. As Avi Halaby is concerned with the evil men do. We have to ask: 1. What does Enoch Root get from being a lay brother? 2. Why do the Societas Eruditorum seem to have the only good Christian souls in Cryptonomicon?

Authored entries

Wikipedia: Blaise Pascal enhanced

Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 - August 19, 1662) was a child prodigy. He was mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher. His contributions to the natural sciences include the design and construction of mechanical calculators, co-invention of probability theory (with Pierre Fermat), studies of fluids, several theorems in geometry, and clarification of such concepts such as pressure and vacuum. Following a profound religious experience in 1654, he converted to 'Jansenism' and essentially abandoned mathematics and physics for philosophy and theology.

Born in Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme, France, Blaise Pascal lost his mother at the age of three. His father, Étienne Pascal (1588 - 1651), brought him up. Blaise Pascal was the brother of Jacqueline Pascal (1625 - 1661).

Computer historians recognize his contribution to their field as his construction at the age of 18 of a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction (the Zwinger museum, in Dresden, Germany exhibits one of his original mechanical calculators). He also produced a treatise on conic sections as a young man. In 1654, prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems, he corresponded with Fermat and laid out a simple account of probabilities. The Pascaline
Pascal's Calculator
Two Views

He later formulated Pascal's wager, an argument for the belief in God based on probabilities. Pascal's triangle, a way to present binomial coefficients, also bears his name, though binomial coefficients were known long before his time, and the Chinese knew of the triangle arrangement.

His notable contributions to the fields of the study of fluids (hydrodynamics and hydrostatics) centered around the principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press (using hydraulic pressure to multiply force) and the syringe. He clarified concepts such as pressure (the unit of which bears his name) and vacuum.

In 1650, suffering from frail health, Pascal retired from mathematics. However, in 1653, his health recovered and he wrote Traité du triangle arithmétique in which he described the "arithmetical triangle" that bears his name.

Following an accident at the Neuilly bridge in 1654 in which the horses plunged over the parapet but the carriage miraculously survived, Pascal abandoned mathematics and physics for philosophy and theology. In 1660, King Louis XIV of France ordered the shredding and burning of Pascal's book The Provincial Letters, a defense of the Jansenist leader Antoine Arnauld.

Pascal died in Paris on August 19, 1662 and is buried in the St. Étienne-du-Mont cemetery there.

Pensées

Pascal never completed his most influential work, the Pensées, but a version of his notes for that book appeared in print in 1670, eight years after his death, and it soon became a classic of devotional literature and French prose style.

Pascal also attained fame for his attack on casuistry, a popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period (especially the Jesuits). Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity. His writings on this subject appeared as the Lettres provinciales, or "Provincial Letters." He was also famous for 'Pascal's Wager' which made a 'mathematical' arguement for belief, a form of prototypical Simulation Argument; unfortunately, it does not explain which belief, an alleged defect which is not widely noticed by those for whom it is impressive. “…If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having, neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is ... you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.”

Rejecting the wager

Many can argue that Christianity, in all its forms - Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Protestantism and the Fringe Churches - has inflicted tremendous harm on civilization. When one makes a wager to believe, those who believe in collective guilt believe that one then becomes morally responsible for the propagation of suffering that Christianity had and will continue to bring upon the world. This moral responsibility also applies to so-called liberal Christians. While this group of Christians may do little harm directly, they provide the raw material (in "lukewarm" believers who are already positively disposed towards Christianity) from which fundamentalism builds itself.

The media seems to prefer to portray The Catholic Church as finding it more important to set rigid rules against abortion than to humanely allow for abortion in cases where the mother's life seems to be in danger and in cases of rape. This portrayed attitude of enforcing forced pregnancies on women who could ill afford it is a direct descendent of the misogynist outlook present in the bible and further elaborated by the teachings of the fathers of the church, however the utter/udder lack of any Inquisition related auto da fes or even excommunications against modern day abortionists or women who have had abortions belies this public perception. Womens groups claim women have been consistently one of the main victims of this religion of hate clothed underneath empty words of love. Related to this hatred of women is the Church's perverse view of sex. The celibate culture in the priesthood is portrayed by the mainstream media and anti-catholic hate groups as the primary causes of the current scandal of clergy sexual abuse of children.

It is debatable whether Christianity actually makes a person moral, however an immoral person is going to be immoral no matter whether they are a Christian or a communist. With Christians, at least, you can hold them to their own standard of morality, while radical leftists see nothing as moral or immoral save hypocrisy itself. The inquisition related crimes of some Catholics helped to trigger a critical examination of the idea that men could be forced to be good. The key idea of free will created by the Church implies that an individual must be free of coercive regulations upon one's behavior such that the individual is free to choose to be virtuous or evil based on their own personal struggle. A person forced to be good is not virtuous, they are merely slaves.

Many of the popes throughout history had been morally deficient human beings; so too were many of the church fathers, Protestant reformers and some modern evangelical preachers. For they preached intolerance and hate and sometimes actively encouraged the torture and murders of innocent people. Here is another issue that was ignored by Pascal, that following him through with the wager can have effects on the lives of many people apart from oneself. Of course, the history books used in public schools and by other religions are written only to portray the worst, just as the nightly news only wants to talk about the shootings and other crimes and scandals in our modern society, and not about those who go quietly through life doing good works.

This tendency to moral corruption by men, however, is said to only expose the fact that human beings are faulty, imperfect beings, as capable of sin no matter what position they find themselves in life. Nor is this unique to Christianity. Both Jews and Muslims have committed great crimes against humanity in their history. It is just as wrong to blame all Jews for the banking related crimes against humanity of the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, and the Schiffs as it is to blame all Catholics for the Inquisition. When we deal with making accusations of collective guilt, we deal in unsupported group hate that results in genocide and racial bigotry.