The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

But the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a passionately religious man, returned to the older idea that God was hidden in nature and that it was no use trying to find him there.29 In fact, the mechanical universe was godless, frightening, and devoid of meaning: When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.30 Certainty did not come from the rational contemplation of “clear” and “distinct” ideas but from the “heart,” the inner core of the human person.