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.

Article

Belief

Creed

Education

24 January 2025

7 min read

The myth of secular neutrality

Where academia went wrong.

Alex Stewart

Alex Stewart is a lawyer, trustee and photographer.

A phrenology head is shown with its eyes closed.

David Matos on Unsplash.

In the recent horror-thriller Heretic, Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed, a sharp-witted psychopath who imprisons two missionaries, subjecting them to ceaseless diatribes about the supposed irrationality of all religions. Mr. Reed is also a terribly smug, self-righteous bore, a caricature of the fervent atheist who dismisses faith as mere superstition while assuming atheism is objective and neutral.

This kind of assumption lies behind the criticisms directed by secularists at those who argue from a position of faith, as we saw recently with the debates on the Assisted Dying Bill. Yet, the notion of secular objectivity is itself a fallacy. Secularism, like any worldview, is a perspective, ironically one that is deeply indebted to Christianity, and humanity’s history of abandoning faith and its moral foundation has had disastrous consequences.

Secularism is a bias, often grounded in an ethical vanity, whose supposedly universal principles have very Christian roots. Concepts like personal autonomy stem from a tradition that views life as sacred, based on the belief that humans are uniquely created in God's image. Appeals to compassion reflect Jesus’ teachings and Christian arguments for social justice throughout history. Claims that the Assisted Dying Bill was "progressive" rely on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of time as linear rather than cyclical. Even the separation of the secular and sacred is derived from Jesus’ teaching to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. Authors like Tom Holland in Dominion and Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe have shown how Western societies, though often disconnected from their Christian roots, still operate within frameworks shaped by centuries of Christianity.

The antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty. Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method.

A political secularism began to emerge after the seventeenth century European religious wars but the supposed historical conflict between science and religion, in which the former triumphs over superstition and a hostile Church, is myth. Promoted in the eighteenth century by figures like John Draper and Andrew White, this ‘conflict thesis’ persists even though it has been comprehensively debunked by works such as David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu’s Of Popes and Unicorns and Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria. Historians now emphasize the complex, often collaborative relationship between faith and science.

Far from opposing intellectual inquiry, faith was its foundation. Medieval Christian Europe birthed the great universities; this was not simply because the Church had power and wealth but because knowledge of God was viewed as the basis for all understanding. University mottos reflect this view: Oxford’s "Dominus illuminatio mea" (The Lord is my light), Yale’s "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth), and Harvard’s original "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" (Truth for Christ and the Church). This intertwining of faith and academia fuelled the Enlightenment, when scientists like Boyle, Newton, and Kepler approached the study of creation (what Calvin described as ‘the theatre of God’s glory”) as an affirmation of the divine order of a God who delighted in His creatures “thinking His thoughts after Him”.

Their Christian beliefs not only provided an impetus for rigorous exploration but also instilled in them a humility about human intellect. Unlike modernity's view of the mind as a detached, all-seeing eye, they believed man’s cognitive faculties had been diminished, both morally and intellectually, by Adam’s fall, which made perfect knowledge unattainable. Blaise Pascal captures this struggle with uncertainty in his Pensées.

“We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty....This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive from whence we have fallen.”

For Pascal and his believing contemporaries, the antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty. Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method, the process of systematic experimentation based on empirical evidence, and which later became central to Enlightenment thinking.

Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them.

Although many of its leading lights were believers, the Enlightenment era hastened a shift away from God and towards man as the centre of understanding and ethics. Philosophers like David Hume marginalized or eliminated God altogether, paving the way for His later dismissal as a phantom of human projection (Freud) or as a tool of exploitation and oppression (Marx), while Rousseau popularised the appealing idea that rather than being inherently flawed, man was naturally good, only his environment made him do bad things.

But it took the nihilist Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, to predict the moral vacuum created by the death of God and its profound consequences. Ethical boundaries became unstable, allowing new ideologies to justify anything in pursuit of their utopian ends. Nietzsche’s prophesies about the rise of totalitarianism and competing ideologies that were to characterise the twentieth century were chillingly accurate. Germany universities provided the intellectual justification for Nazi atrocities against the Jews while the Marxist inspired revolutions and policies of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes led to appalling suffering and the deaths of between 80 and 100 million people. Devoid of divine accountability, these pseudo, human-centred religions amplified human malevolence and man’s destructive impulses.

By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed, leading Francis Fukuyama to opine from his ivory tower that secular liberal democracy was the natural end point in humanity's socio-political evolution and that history had ‘ended’. But his optimism was short lived. The events of 9/11 and the resurgence of a potent Islamism gave the lie that everyone wanted a western style secular liberal democracy, while back in the west a repackaged version of the old Marxist oppressor narrative began to appear on campuses, its deceitful utopian Siren song that man could be the author of his own salvation bewitching the academy. This time it came in the guise of divisive identity-based ideologies overlayed with post-modern power narratives that seemed to defy reality and confirm Chesterton’s view that when man ceased to believe in God he was capable of believing in anything.

As universities promoted ideology over evidence and conformity over intellectual freedom, George Orwell’s critique of intellectual credulity and the dark fanaticism it often fosters, epitomized in 1984 where reality itself is manipulated through dogma, seemed more relevant than ever. Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them. Other commentators like Thomas Sowell are equally sceptical, critiquing the tenured academics whose lives are insulated from the suffering of those who have to live under their pet ideologies, and who prefer theories and sophistry to workable solutions. Intellect, he notes, is not the same thing as wisdom. More recently, American writer David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, questions the point of having elite educational systems that overemphasize cognitive ability at the expense of other qualities, suggesting they tend to produce a narrow-minded ruling class who are blind to their own biases and false beliefs.

It was intellectual over-confidence that led many institutions to abandon their faith-based origins. Harvard shortened its motto from "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" to plain "Veritas” and introduced a tellingly symbolic change to its shield. The original shield depicted three books: two open, symbolizing the Old and New Testaments, and one closed, representing a knowledge that required divine revelation. The modern shield shows all three books open, reflecting a human centred worldview that was done with God.

However, secular confidence seems to be waning. Since the peak of New Atheism in the mid-2000s, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with worldviews limited to reason and materialism. Artists like Nick Cave have critiqued secularism’s inability to address concepts like forgiveness and mercy, while figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Russell Brand have publicly embraced Christianity. The longing for the transcendent and a world that is ‘re-enchanted’ seems to be widespread.

Despite the Church’s struggles, the teaching and person of Christ, the One who claimed not to point towards the truth but to be the Truth, the original Veritas the puritan founders of Harvard had in mind, remains as compelling as ever. The story of fall, forgiveness, cosmic belonging and His transforming love is the narrative that most closely maps to our deepest human longings and lived experience, whilst simultaneously offering us the hope of redemption and - with divine help – becoming better versions of ourselves, the kind of people that secularism thinks we already are.

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