Christian Agnosticismworried that confessing a belief in God would be to compromise
his rational powers, he is worrying about the wrong thing:
reason alone cannot decide one way or the other. In fact,
I suspect that admitting this was as much a blow for Pascal as
it may be for the atheist. Probably the most famous quote from
this section, and the whole of the Pensées, is: ‘The heart has
its reasons which reason itself does not know’. As it happens,
Pascal wrote this upside-down and in a margin. This is, I think,
signifi cant. It seems to be a sign of despair stemming from a
keen insight: it is as if he were saying, ‘for all that I can reason
about my faith, ultimately my reason cannot get to the crux of
it. That comes from my heart, the organ of an altogether dif-
ferent kind of knowledge.’ (He continues the famous sentence
with the far less poetic clause ‘we know that through countless
things’, suggesting again that he did not think he was crafting a
memorable aphorism, merely making a blunt observation.)
In other words, in spite of the force of Pascal’s argument, he is
also forced to remind himself that reason is barely a start. Like
the rudder of a ship, it may point the boat in the right direc-
tion, but it is the wind of faith that fi lls the sails and propels the
believer forward. To wager on God is therefore to do something
necessary but minimal: it is to do no more or less than take the
stance that talking about God is worth it. At the very least it is
not unreasonable to do so; at most there is, possibly, everything
to gain. Implicitly, then, the argument also gives support to the
reasonableness of the agnostic position.
The charge of deism
Having said that, Pascal would have had no truck with agnos-
ticism. His wager might cohere with the agnostic stance but,
he would argue, it is no more a reason for remaining uncertain
than it is a reason for believing or not believing – it is not a suf-
fi cient reason for anything. What the agnostic is accused of is
what he accuses the atheist of too. It is not reason that stops
you believing, Pascal says, since there is no good reason not too.