The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

Pascal could see that Christianity was about to make a serious mistake. Theologians were eager to embrace the modern ethos and make their teaching conform to the “clear and distinct” ideas currently in vogue, but how far should the new science impinge upon religion? A God who was merely “the author of mathematical truths and of the order of the elements” could bring no light to the darkness and pain of human existence. It would only cause people to fall into atheism.32 Pascal was one of the first people to see that atheism—meaning a radical denial of God’s existence—would soon become a serious option.33 A person who had not engaged himself with the rituals, exercises, and practices of religion would not be convinced by the arguments of the philosophers; for such a person, faith could only be a wager, a leap in the dark. Pascal had developed his rational powers more than most: by the age of eleven, he had worked out for himself the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid; at sixteen he had published a remarkable treatise on geometry; and he went on to invent a calculating machine, a barometer, and a hydraulic press. But he knew that reason could not produce religious conviction; “the heart” had its own reasons for faith.34