Pascal's Pensees

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true, declared Pascal in his Penseés. The cure for this, he explained, is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623-1662) intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity, in which he argued the inability...