Reason, Authority and Science

Abstract

Despite his numerous mathematical and scientific achievements, Pascal is perhaps most famous for his posthumously published Pensées, and also for his pseudonymously written Provincial Letters. The former is an incomplete set of notes which Pascal had been preparing as an apology, or defense, of the Christian religion prior to his early death. The latter are a series of polemical letters, published in Paris during the years 1656 and 1657, which satirized the casuistry of Pascal’s Jesuit opponents, and which defended a Jansenist understanding of salvation, to which Pascal himself adhered. Pascal’s concern with theology, and specifically its relationship to other fields of inquiry (such as natural science) is apparent in his Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum.

We must strengthen the courage of those timid souls who dare discover nothing in physics, and confound the insolence of that temerity which introduces novelty into theology.

—Blaise Pascal