Explainer

Creed

Distraction

19 June 2023

8 min read

How to escape 'the sole cause of unhappiness'

Our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions is nothing new. Born 400 years ago this month, Pascal noted something similar and that got him thinking. Graham Tomlin tells his story.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An engraving of Pascal's showing him raising an eye brow.

Blaise Pascal almost raises an eyebrow at today's distractions.

Clermont Auvergne Métropole, Bibliothèque du patrimoine, GRA 6025, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent survey of belief in Britain yielded a confused result. Belief in God has declined, yet belief in the afterlife has risen. People are less likely to see themselves as religious, and don’t pray much, yet continue to trust religious organisations. We are caught between belief and unbelief.

A guide to our times might just be found in one of the greatest geniuses of the modern world, born 400 years ago this year – on 19th June. Blaise Pascal died before he reached the age of 40, and lived much of his life in chronic sickness, but in less than four decades he became one of the most famous and celebrated minds in France, conducting ground-breaking scientific experiments in a range of fields of physics, laying the foundations of probability theory, building one of the very first functioning calculating machines - a precursor to the computer, playing a key role in a start-up company which provided one of the first urban public transportation systems in Europe, and writing one of the great classics of satirical French literature – the Lettres Provinciales.

Yet he is best known today for a book that he never finished.

The thoughts

Pascal was born into a well-to-do middle class French family, the son of a tax official in the civil service. Although his mother died while he was still a toddler, his father recognised the extraordinary talent of his young son and decided to home-school him along with his two sisters. Theirs was a fairly conventional Catholic family and yet in time they came under the influence of an intensely devout movement in 17th century French religion, the Jansenists. Taking their name from a Belgian Bishop, Cornelius Jansen, their world-denying piety and ongoing feud with the powerful Jesuits made them a controversial group in the landscape of French religion at the time.

Blaise himself had a somewhat distant relation to the Jansenists, being much more interested in his investigations into physics, geometry and mathematics that began to raise eyebrows all over Europe. That was until a dramatic event on the 23rd November 1654. Not much is known about this life-transforming experience, but for two dramatic hours late that evening, Pascal experienced a profound encounter with the God who had always been vaguely in the background of his life but not a compelling presence.

The change was radical if not total. He didn't give up on the life of the mind, but instead started to think deeply about how to change the minds of the many cultured despisers of religion he had come to know through his scientific researches and through his exposure to the fashionable salons of Parisian life.

As various thoughts on this project occurred to him, he began to write them down on scraps of paper. Some were brief enigmatic sentences that clearly made sense to him but to no one else; others were a paragraph outlining a radical thought; some were longer, more reasoned pieces, carefully developing an argument. He died before he was able to finish this great Apology for Christianity and left behind a haunting, tantalising collection of fragments, which were collected together by a group of friends after his death and published as the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et sur Quelques Autres Sujets – or Pascal’s Pensées, for short.

Pascal had a problem in trying to do this. He knew from his own experience that piling up arguments as to why God might exist, or that you should think about God once in a while, don’t get you very far. They tend to produce at best a lukewarm, distant kind of religion that is more of a burden on the soul than a liberating presence, the kind of passive, slightly reluctant faith that he had held until that dramatic November night. They also point you towards the wrong God, the ‘God of the philosophers’ as he described it in his famous phrase, a God who is the logical conclusion of an argument rather than a living, breathing, haunting presence, both majestically distant and yet hauntingly present at every moment. He also knew that you can't manufacture profound experiences of the presence of God such as had happened to him. It was at the heart of St Augustine’s teaching, as conveyed through Jansenism, that only God's grace can shift the stubborn human heart, kindling in it a love for God that until that point was impossible to imagine, let alone experience.

Pascal was fascinated by our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions of life and death. Is there a God? Who am I? Which religion is true, if any of them? What happens after our brief lives are over? If we are a tiny speck of life on a tiny insignificant planet within the vast expanses of space that were beginning to be discovered at the time, what possible significance can we have? How do you explain the monstrous contradiction of human beings who have the capacity for compassion, understanding and greatness and yet also for cruelty, bestiality and shame?

In the room

These are all big questions on which our eternal destiny depends, and so should occupy our minds day and night, and yet we have a remarkable capacity to distract ourselves from thinking about them. Silence and inactivity are unbearable to us and so we fill our time with (in his day) hunting, cards, conversation, tennis. As he put it, “the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” He would have marvelled at our age with Twitter, TikTok, 24-hour TV and the myriad ways we find to divert ourselves during the most fantastically distracted age there has ever been.

And so Pascal tries to unsettle his reader, trying to stir up the instinct to consider deeper questions. Yet he still knows that even when we do start thinking about these things, we get muddled. Is there a God? Religious people say Yes; Atheists say No. Pascal knows enough of science to know that it is not capable of adjudicating on such questions, that evidence of miracles or biblical prophecies are ambiguous, and certainty is impossible to find. So what do you do when you're intrigued by religion but there isn't enough evidence to push you across the line to be a Christian? When one moment you're convinced God is real, but the next you doubt the whole thing?

Maybe you give up on it - get back to scrolling through TikTok videos, watching the football on TV, musing over Harry and Meghan? Yet Pascal says you can't just do that. You have to live your life as if there is a God and you need saving, or as if there isn't, and you don’t. And you and I will face the consequences of that choice after our lives are over, one way or the other.

This is where one of Pascal's most distinctive moves comes in. Among his sophisticated friends, were many who spent hours betting. Pascal had already done a playful bit of work working out the odds on certain bets, and what the likelihood was all victory and defeat in an uncompleted game – for cricket fans, a kind of early Duckworth-Lewis method for gambling with dice.

The wager

Pascal’s argument runs like this: If you were strictly speaking betting rationally on the odds, then you’d always bet on God. If you bet on God not existing, and there is no life after this one, and you’re right, you don’t gain a great deal – just a few brief years’ pleasure while you’re young and fit enough to enjoy it. But if you bet on God existing, and there is a life beyond the here and now, and you end up being right, you stand to gain a huge dividend – eternal happiness in the presence of God – all this for the sake of a tiny stake – a life of discipline and self-denial for a few years here on earth. So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But Pascal knows that we don’t think that way. Why? It’s not because we are being rational; it’s because belief is inconvenient, we would rather there was no God, it costs too much, and we just don’t want to believe.

So if the evidence is inconclusive, and you're aware that your own motives are mixed, then what do you do? Pascal thinks we are creatures formed by habit. So his advice is to start living as if it's all true even if you're not sure whether it is. Wise people in the past “behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said and so on….” Start practising the habit of daily prayer to God even if you're not sure whether he's listening or not. Start treating each person you meet each day as if they're not just another inconvenience in your path but someone precious, loved by God and created in his image. Start going to a church regularly meeting with other Christians for that kind of mutual strengthening of faith that only being with others can bring. Take the bread and wine of Holy Communion as if they really are the gift of Christ’s presence to you. And see what happens.

Start living

Pascal reckons, sooner or later, as had happened to him and countless others, belief will surely follow behaviour. Start living as if it is true and slowly (or perhaps dramatically) you will realise not only that it is true, but that it brings far more joy and delight than you ever thought possible.

T.S. Eliot once wrote:

“I can think of no Christian writer… more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt, but have the mind to conceive, and the sensibility to feel, the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being.”

If we live in a culture that profoundly doubts God, yet which at the same time longs to find happiness, then perhaps Pascal is just the kind of guide we need.

Explainer

Creed

Film & TV

Politics

Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the quest for Truth

Space for neutrality is shrinking; two French philosophers explain why

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

BBC.

Watching American news always feels very different from the British version. Changing channels from CNN to Fox News feels like you're switching to a different universe altogether, as on each one you're getting a very different interpretation of events. The BBC has always been thought to rise above this. In the UK and beyond, through the World Service, the Beeb has, until recently, been viewed as an oasis of impartial, authoritative reporting in a world of propaganda and state-run media.

Now, allegations of bias, with evidence that BBC editors doctored a speech of Donald Trump to make it sound worse than it was, one-sided coverage of transgender issues, and perceived anti-Israel prejudice, have led to doubts about the truthfulness of BBC reporting, and the resignations of the Director General Tim Davie and its CEO, Deborah Turness.

It does seem that the BBC has fallen into an echo chamber, reflecting the generally liberal, metropolitan left-leaning ethos of the chattering classes. And that is a problem, especially for a taxpayer-funded corporation. At the same time, it is much harder for media companies these days to be neutral. Once upon a time, there was perhaps a broad space for impartiality and a general trust that institutions like the BBC could be trusted to tell the truth. Trying to be politically and culturally balanced these days, however, is like trying to walk along an ever narrowing mountain arête with an increasingly slim path of independence, while the steep and sheer slopes of the culture wars beckon on either side. The idea of a media platform maintaining strict neutrality is becoming harder and harder to sustain these days.

In Britain, that narrow arête has become smaller and smaller, with the BBC perceived as falling on one side of the debate, and GB News emerging to offer a perspective from the other, offering different assessments on what's going on, increasingly mirroring their American counterparts.

Now there is a reason why this space for neutrality is narrowing, rooted in cultural and philosophical developments over the past 50 years or more.

Foucault’s challenge

In the 1970s and early 80s, French philosopher Michel Foucault taught a whole generation of students - and his ideas became embedded in universities across the world - that claims to truth were in essence assertions of power. Foucault had been a Marxist, believing that power had to be wrested away from the hands of the ruling classes and placed in the hands of the proletariat. After the Paris student riots of the late 1960s, he changed his mind and started to believe that power is never concentrated in one place. It flows in multiple directions in any human relationship or institution. In such interactions, all kinds of power dynamics are at play, and you need to be very watchful to notice how they work. Power produces ‘truth’ - in other words a justification for its existence - and such ‘truth’ produces power, in that this ‘truth’ reinforces the power relations it was designed to justify. He often claimed not to be making a moral judgement – in fact moral judgments were irrelevant: “My point”, he said, “is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.” If all truth is power, then nothing is neutral. Everything is dangerous. You can’t trust anyone.

The result is that there is really no such thing as a neutral, absolute truth. All claims to truth come from a particular perspective on things. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ that stands above all our limited perspectives, and therefore the idea of finding ultimate absolute truth is fruitless.

Foucault’s target was the idea inherited from the Enlightenment that we could find truth through impartial rational inquiry. So for him, the idea that something like the BBC was an arbiter of neutral, rational truth was a mirage all along. The irony is that if the BBC has drifted into a left-leaning echo chamber, it has wandered into space deeply influenced by Foucault’s ideas – ideas which by definition make its claim to any kind of neutrality increasingly difficult to sustain.

The prevalence of these ideas explains why it is harder and harder for news outlets to remain neutral, or claim to offer the truth of things.

Pascal’s perspective

So what does Christian theology say to this? At one point in his Pensées, another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal (unlike Foucault, a Christian one from the seventeenth century), says to the Foucault-type sceptic of his own day:

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

In other words, it's impossible to be a total sceptic about truth. Even the most progressive philosopher puts the kettle on and expects it to boil. He wakes in the morning expecting the sun to rise. There is such a thing as capital-T Truth and an order to the world that we didn’t create, and can be relied upon. We simply have to receive it and be grateful for it.

So far, so conservative. Yet Pascal then casts doubt on our ability to know that truth absolutely:

“Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our reach and is an unattainable quarry, that it is not to be found here on earth, but really belongs in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Pascal agrees with Foucault, that absolute truth is unattainable to us here, at least if we think we can find it by some process of impartial human reason. Only God knows the truth. Our perspectives are inevitably limited and the only way we can know the ultimate truth is if it is revealed to us.

Which points to the heart of what a Christian believes about truth - that ultimately it is not so much rational and propositional but personal. Jesus does not say ‘here is the truth’, or ‘this is the truth’, but ‘I am the truth’.

Truth, in other words, is not just something you read on a page. It is not the product of brainy people sitting in a room analysing the data. Data always has to be interpreted and that's when fallible, inevitable and unspoken human prejudice creeps in. Truth is personal. You see it in a life – most perfectly in the life of Jesus. And if it is to be found here and now, it comes out of a life that has learned to be like Jesus, truthful in all kinds of simple personal interactions, honest even when it's inconvenient, generous even when you have little to give.

Truth, in Christian understanding, is a quality of life. It is not something that can be expected to arise from some august body of clever people – the Royal Society or the BBC. The BBC, like ITN, GB News, CNN, and Fox – and like the rest of us - will always be biased - and maybe it’s better to acknowledge that than try to hide it. To have a limited take on things is part of the human condition.

The only way we can rise above that to the ‘truth that comes from above’ as the Bible calls it, a truth which is “pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” is the spiritual path of inner growth, through prayer, the practice of goodness and compassion.

Truth is not something we possess but something we grow towards. When the BBC – or any corporation for that matter - embraces the spiritual path of yearning for the ‘truth that comes from above’, then we might get nearer to trusting it again.

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