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.

Review

Belief

Books

Creed

6 November 2025

7 min read

Alice Roberts’ new book is the Da Vinci Code without the pretence of fiction

Tomes like Domination are part of the problem of public discourse about Christianity, not the solution

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Alice Roberts.

alice-roberts.co.uk.

Alice Roberts would like you to read her book, thank you very much.

She recently took to X to bemoan the “epidemic” of people offering thoughts about her latest offering, without actually having read it. The person who prompted Roberts’ exasperation was a senior lecturer in Biblical Studies and the latest in a long of professional scholars of Christianity who had greeted the release of the book with little more than a weary eyeroll.

The reason so many people felt as though they didn’t need to read it is because it is utterly predictable. Even a cursory glance at any of the marketing that has accompanied the publication of Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity really does tell you all you need to know. It really is the book you think it is.

You already know what this book is going to argue. Just like you already know how this review is going to go. I’m a theology lecturer who works for the Church of England; Roberts is an outspoken atheist and former president of Humanists UK. Of course I’m going to disagree with this book. It’s hardly the sort of plot twist you endure an M. Night Shyamalan film for.

But, for the avoidance of doubt, let me be clear: I don’t dislike Alice Roberts’ book because I’m a Christian and she’s not. I dislike Roberts’ book simply because it’s not very good.

Roberts seeks to “lift the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight.” (Always be wary of someone who claims to have noticed something no-one else has for the last 2,000 years). These ‘secrets’, she suggests, are that “the main reasons [Christianity spread so successfully] were not to be found in the pages of the Bible, but in a powerful alliance born of complex – and very human – incentives”.

For Roberts, the central, overriding reason why Christianity flourished was simply economic and political power. In her own words, “the worldly aspects of the Church are undeniable. Wealth and power go hand-in-hand, and the Church had both in abundance.” It’s never clear who actually is thought to be denying this, except a vague group described as “apologist historians (including some who claim not to be Christian, but seem to be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome) and theologians”.

And this power-grab has been the aim since the earliest moments of the Church’s existence. The Apostle Paul is painted in cartoonishly Machiavellian tones: “As a Pharisee, a member of an established Jewish sect, Saul would have been a small fish in a big pond. The switch to this new breakaway sect [Christianity] would make him a prominent figure in a small but rapidly growing movement”.

A few pages later – in a section that made me laugh so hard I had to put the book down for a few minutes to collect myself – Roberts offers a genuinely baffling reading of one of Paul’s early letters, to a group of Christians in the city of Corinth. In the letter, Paul speaks about divisions in the Church, with Christians claiming to ‘follow’ different leaders (such as Paul and Apollos). Roberts writes that “there’s a hint that Paul may have viewed Apollos as competitor” and continues:

“When Paul wrote his first letter to ‘the Corinthians’ … he exhorted them to see themselves as united, whether they were following him, [or] Apollos … Paul, however disgruntled he might have been about the competition represented by other, potentially more eloquent, preachers, had decided it was best to team up. Still, he couldn’t quite resist suggesting his superiority – or at least, his priority – to Apollos: ‘I have planted, Apollos watered.’”.

See?! SEE?! It’s all about power!!

Well, that last bit is a quote from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the third chapter and its sixth verse. Now, what Roberts doesn’t tell the reader is that she has left off the rest of the verse, and the verse that follows. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

But this is very different indeed to the impression Roberts gives us. Paul is quite clearly not claiming any sense of superiority over Apollos. No, he claims they’re both nothing, and that God alone deserves credit for anything good done by either of them. Not that you would know this from Roberts’ butchering of biblical texts.

(As a slightly technical aside, the bit Roberts does quote should read ‘I planted,’ not ‘I have planted’. This sounds trivial but in the Greek text, Paul writes in a different tense than the one Roberts translates it as. This made me wonder what translation of the Bible was using or whether it was her own. However, there are no notes in the book. At all. And no mention of Bible translation that I could find. If we’re engaging in character assassinations of folk no longer alive to defend themselves, we might think that attention to the precise wording of their thought might be important. Apparently not).

And there’s the rub. Roberts leave precisely zero room for earnest belief in God. Not her belief in God, obviously, but that the people whose words she has hacked and placed before us might earnestly think that their actions seek the betterment of those around them because of their belief in God. No. It’s all about power. I’ve highlighted her treatment of Paul in particular (again, because I found it genuinely hilarious), but time would fail me if I tried to recount all the ways that other figures in Church history are treated similarly.

Roberts’ has complained about Frank Cottrell-Boyce (whom, she notes, is “a Catholic” as though this is in any way relevant to whether he’s right) for describing Domination as ‘cynical’. But how else could we possibly describe this? Yes, it is – of course – completely reasonable to highlight the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in and around the development of Christianity (is anyone actually suggesting otherwise?). And yes, of course some people have used Christianity for personal gain (seriously: is anyone actually suggesting otherwise?).

But Roberts goes far beyond both points. Instead, she is simply stripping back the theological content of Christianity and claiming to have found “secrets that have been hidden in plain sight” having done so. But of course human motivation is all that is left once you strip belief in God out of religion, because what else could there be? Roberts’ prose may be captivating, but her argument is deeply immature and reductive. It’s like a toddler who’s just read Michel Foucault’s work on social power for the first time: an impressive toddler, to be sure, but a toddler nonetheless.

Roberts does acknowledge that “people are complex, human societies are complex”, but this is little more than lip-service to nuance. None of this complexity is found in the actual argument of her book. It reminds me of someone saying, “no offence, but …” before going on to say something deeply offensive. A fleeting caveat doesn’t redeem a simplistic argument.

In this respect, it’s quite telling that the front-cover endorsement comes from Stephen Fry who describes it as “a historical thriller of the highest quality.” In one respect, he’s not wrong. It reads like a thriller and – questions of content aside – might easily grip read readers with its compelling prose and rhetorical flourishes. But that’s because this is The Da Vinci Code without the pretence of fiction. A compellingly told conspiracy theory dressed up in just enough spliced-together reality to feign plausibility.

Public discourse about religion and faith is too often conducted with a sneering cynicism that seeks to ride roughshod over the sincerely held beliefs of actual people who would actually describe themselves as religious. Books like Domination are part of the problem, not the solution.

Maybe this is why I find Domination bordering on offensive. Not because of its content. (If I got upset every time someone ascribed bad motivations to the Church I’d never leave the house.) No, I find it borderline offensive because of its sheer existence. Whether you like it or not, religion has been and is an irrevocably vital part of who we are and where we’ve come from. Religious belief deserves at the very least to be understood, even if not agreed with. And so, when I finished Domination, I was left wondering: is that is? Is this the highest standard of discourse society can really be offered about religion? Dan Brown in an academic gown? Heaven help us, if so.

The covers may be similar, and the titles may sound alike, but this is not Tom Holland’s Dominion. Where Holland’s work remains one of the most insightful and thoughtful accessible books about the development of Christianity and modern society, Roberts’ cynicism (for that is what it is) is both tiresome and tiring. (Moreover, that Holland’s book is not even mentioned once speaks volumes about Roberts’ work. That Roberts insists she has read it only makes that absence more baffling).

The Church deserves more rigorous champions of atheism to scrutinise its belief; society needs a better class of conversation about religion and its role in our history. I fear Alice Roberts is not the former; Domination is certainly not the latter.

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