Blaise Pascal

French Prodigy Blaise Pascal once stated, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal essentially suggests that psychological suffering will always be humanity's greatest weakness. Mental anguish can exist as a repercussion or as a cause of a circumstance. This pain derives fundamentally from the vulnerability of the human mind. Humans are susceptible internally, a fact that will eventually lead to their demise as it serves to restrain them from…

The Ontological Argument and Pascal’s Wager The “Ontological Argument” was created by Saint Anselm; this argument is in support of God’s existence. His argument is one based on observation and reason not on empirical evidence and is spit in to three parts. The parts include why god exists, why god cannot be thought to not exist, and lastly why atheists are able to think that God does not exist. In the first section he begins with a definition of God that he believes everyone would be accepting…

astronomer genius who developed laws of motion based on empirical experiment. The book also mentioned the one of the great philosopher René Descartes who helped in promoting the mechanistic world view. Blaise Pascal who was a mathematician, an experimenter, and a philosopher in the 17th century. According to Pascal, God occasionally intervenes miraculously, but never interfere with the mechanical laws of nature . Through Kearney’s words, for the society as a whole, the mechanistic philosophy…

like music, some of it they touch, like stones, but others they are only told about. Like the sky. They cannot see it, or hear it, or feel it, or even touch it but they have the choice to believe whether or not it is there. This type of faith is what Pascal and James were addressing when they confronted Clifford’s argument. Belief does not go hand in hand with hard facts because something’s cannot be explained. For example the beginning of the universe. Scientist could go as far back as the big…

“It is in your interest to believe that God exists.” Do you agree? Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher of the 17 century proposed a wager, that indeed, it is in your interest to believe in God. Pascal’s wager is as follows: If God exists and you believe in Him, you will go to heaven upon death and have infinite happiness, while if He does exists but you do not believe in Him, you will go to hell upon dying and experience infinite suffering. If God does not exist but…

In Pascal’s Rapist which uses Pascal’s Wager and applies it to rape. Pascal’s Wager written by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), states that the existence of god cannot be known so it is better to believe in a god so I do not suffer infinite loss (hell) and gain the possibility of an infinite gain (heaven). Essential Pascal’s Wager adds gain, ‘neutrality’ and…

“People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found out by others.” This quote by French philosopher Blaise Pascal explains the success of any good speaker. They have the ability to make the audience adopt the ideas as their own. In the play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, this remains true. Julius Caesar is murdered by conspirators who claim to be his friend. The idea, spawned by Cassius, has been taken over by Brutus and together they have…

is something simple and that everyone should believe in something whether that belief is in a religious or a nonreligious sense. This is why I enjoyed reading and discussing the argument of Blaise Pascal, and how he approaches believing or rather having faith. I thought the reading was so good because Pascal takes such a simple approach to having faith; however, I would take a slightly different approach to his argument. I would say that having faith or believing doesn’t need to be in a…

The Immortal Jew In his essay titled Concerning the Jews, Mark Twain wrote: "If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one-quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.”1 The Jewish…

Religion is a matter of personal belief, faith, or dogma. The majority of religions are centered on the existence of one or more gods. The existence of God, or multiple gods, is a priori truth- no observation can show that God does not exist. However, there is also no observation that prove that God does exist. This dilemma has driven many philosophers to propose numerous arguments against and for the existence of God. Of these, The Design Argument presented by William Paley. The Design Argument…