The Thinking Reed
This morning, when I usually turn to the Daily Office readings, I set out on another course instead. I worked on a sermon I will be giving on Sunday.
Not to abandon my duties, I now, twelve hours later, take up the task of catching up on what I missed.
To my surprise, today is the day we remember a physicist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, who died on the 19th of August, 1662. Known as the inventor of the calculator, he also dabbled in barometric pressure and the mathematics behind gambling, and for writing a treatise in defense of Christianity that never quite came together as anything more than a collection of thoughts on paper.
The state of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.
Men never do evil so completely or cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
In addition to these thoughtful quips, Pascal gave us a memorable and controversial wager about being a Christian that has raised the cackles of many a theologian for its apparent cynicism.
"If Christianity is true, then you stand to gain infinitely by accepting it. If it is false, then you stand to lose only a finite amount of well-being by accepting it. Therefore the odds make deciding to become a Christian the sensible move." - Blaise Pascal
It almost sounds like he is not a true believer. According to James Kiefer, the noted biographer and religious writer, Pascal experienced a life-changing vision of God, Abraham and Jesus, causing him to totally submit to Jesus in 1654. This was a believer.
So to understand this radical statement, we must consider the mind that created it.
This is the mind that figured out how to make the first mechanical calculator, a mind that had trouble organizing thoughts into words when it came to an Apology of Christianity, and a mind that could fascinate itself with the study of liquid rising in a tube as the weather changed.
That was the kind of mind that would come up with such a logical statement of truth. Christianity is a bargain.
Ok, now he has me doing it!
Think about it. I have met atheists and agnostics who despite their aversion t o God-thinking, they live by and swear to the golden rule as laid down by Jesus and Hillel and others.
There are people who meet many of the life criteria that Christians aspire to. In effect, they are living like Christians but not believing in Christ. Pascal reasons that they have less to lose by converting than by living as they do, since so much more is waiting for them when they do.
And, if in the end, the expectations we all have for whatever we believe comes after this life are not exactly as we had hoped, we have lost nothing by living the life we lived.
Put another way, if we spend the precious hours we have not living the life we could be living, thinking we can always do it tomorrow, we will run out of time before we realize it.
I don't think Blaise needs to apologize for his wager. It is just the thing to set a logical mind thinking, and as he said:
Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.