Pascal and apologetics
Many people are familiar with “Pascal’s wager” but Blaise Pascal worked on a Christian apologetics project (that unfortunately was not finished at the time of his death) that has since been compiled into a collection known as Pensees (thoughts).
In it he analyzes the paradox of the human condition - where man is capable of both greatness and wretchedness.
“The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man. … Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.”
Pascal continues…
“What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, the glory and refuse of the universe!”
A recent Christian Research Journal (Vol 27/Number 02) article took a closer look at Pascal’s ‘thoughts’ and what has been dubbed the anthropological argument.
“Pascal argues that Christianity offers the best explanation for this condition based on its teachings that human beings are created in the image of God, yet original sin has tainted their nature.”
The article continues by comparing the anthropological argument to belief systems such as New Age spirituality, nihilism, and humanism:
A staunch humanist, of course, will not readily give in to Pascal’s arguement. Several objections may be raised, such as (1) human beings exhibit qualities of greatness as a result of highly developed brains and (2) wretched behavior is merely the result of humans having evolved from beasts and still possessing beastly tendencies. Over the course of millions of years of evolution, the humanist would argue, time and chance produced the human intellect, which is capable of greatness. Wretchedness, on the other hand, is an unfortunate side effect of our bestial origins.
Such an argument, however, presupposes that human intellect, allegedly a product of time and chance, is actually capable of accurate reasoning. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis astutely observes, “When you are arguing against Him [God] you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all; it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.” If human reason is a product of chance, how do we know it is reliable? Humanists, who deny that God is the source of human reason, are left sitting precariously on a branch of chance and time with no guarantees that their reasoning is sound. In Miracles, Lewis remarks, “If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves.” Christianity’s explanation that humans are created in the image of a rational God and thus are rational beings makes more sense than the chance and time explanation of the humanist. In short, the existence of human reason is more adequately explained by intelligent design than by random chance.
On the other hand, if humanists agree that human beings do, in fact, exhibit qualities both of wretchedness and greatness, then they are making a moral claim. From where does their standard of morality come? The existence of such a standard of morality in humans is more adequately explained by creation in the image of a moral God than by the evolution of mere matter.
Related links:
BreakPoint commentary June 3, 2005
Tags: Theology
