The patron saint of cultural apologetics is Augustine of Hippo, author most famously of City of God and Confessions. Second place is up for debate. But you’ll get a lot of votes for a 17th-century disciple of Augustine, the Frenchman Blaise Pascal.
Graham Tomlin describes Pascal as the “man who made the modern world” in a new biography. Tomlin is the director of the Centre for Cultural Witness in Oxford, England. He writes of Pascal that “it is hard to think of anyone who has impacted so many fields of human endeavour in such a short time.”
Here’s a taste from Tomlin about Pascal’s accomplishments: he basically invented probability theory; proved the existence of the vacuum; laid the foundations of integral calculus; conducted the first modern scientific experiment; developed theory that made possible the hydraulic press; demonstrated that air has weight; designed and built the first mechanical calculating machine, which led to what we know as the computer; set the trend of wearing wrist watches; and built the first public urban transportation system in Europe.
And did I already mention he was one of the most effective and enduring cultural apologists of all time, perhaps second only to Augustine? Tomlin writes, “His was a Christianity founded in a profound experience of God, an intense devotional life and a form of faith that offered a radical alternative to the comfortable assimilation to culture that the Church of his day often seemed to promote.”
Let’s talk to Graham Tomlin about this remarkable man, who lamented man’s inability to sit quietly by himself, who observed, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
In This Episode:
00:00 – Pascal’s wager and living as if Christianity is true
00:49 – Introducing Blaise Pascal, the cultural apologist who helped make the modern world
02:36 – Pascal’s remarkable inventions, including public transportation and the Pascaline
05:42 – Augustine’s influence on Pascal’s theology of desire, fallenness, and grace
08:11 – Why Pascal trusted reason in science but not as the starting point for faith
10:46 – Pascal’s “Night of Fire” and encounter with the living God
16:43 – Why Pascal went to war with the Jesuits
20:20 – Jansenism, Calvinism, and Pascal’s understanding of grace
25:51 – The hiddenness of God as an argument for faith
32:38 – How human misery points toward human greatness
39:46 – What Pascal’s Wager actually means
48:45 – Pascal, Jonathan Haidt, and the psychology of belief
49:05 – “Make it attractive”: Pascal’s enduring strategy for cultural apologetics
51:59 – How Pascal anticipated both the modern and postmodern worlds
59:22 – What Pascal would say about modern science and scientism
1:01:43 – Why Pascal’s faith speaks to people who have looked into the abyss
1:03:21 – Outro
Resources Mentioned:
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