Frequently denying reason's necessary truth and absolute certainty, conflating reason with the intellect (part of the mind which can grasp reason rather than reason itself), and making a wide range of false or utterly unverifiable statements, Blaise Pascal puts his sheer irrationalism on full display in Pensées. In this series, I will highlight a handful of miscellaneous excerpts from this asinine work and touch on the errors articulated therein. Since Pascal does not write about just one focused subject in Pensées, the quotations will concern diverse topics, none of which he approaches rightly. As a Christian and as a broader philosopher, this insect of a man has had a significant impact on the world since his death, but, as is so often the case with other irrationalists like Aristotle and David Hume, stupidity unfortunately does not mean a person and their philosophy is not influential.
"Injustice. It is dangerous to tell people that laws are not just, because they obey them only because they believe them to be just. That is why they must be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, just as superiors must be obeyed because they are superior. That is how to forestall any sedition, if people can be made to understand that, and that is the proper definition of justice." (18)
Justice is what an action or person deserves, and so any deviation from this, if morality exists, is itself injustice. If there are no actual objective moral obligations, then human laws are in full mere social constructs that have no true authority. If there moral obligations, and human laws do not perfectly align with them in accordance with reason (for what is good is what should be done regardless of cultural norms and personal preference or gain), then to that extent that they deviate from reason and morality, human laws also have no authority. Of course, conflicting laws of various nations cannot all be correct at once anyway, and it cannot be evil to gleefully trample on social constructs and despise those who hold to them. Human laws are not accurate or obligatory because a leader or consensus appointed them.
Also, contrary to what Pascal seems to say, a moral nihilist or skeptic could obey laws out of irrationalistic love of society despite not thinking them righteous or could obey even just laws only for personal benefit. It is not true that someone can obey laws only because they think them just. Of course, if he was truly a rationalistic person and Christian, Pascal would unhesitatingly affirm that on the Christian worldview, the only valid laws are those revealed by God and those which follow from them by logical extension (Exodus 21:1, Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Psalm 119:1-3, 89-91, Matthew 5:17-19, Hebrews 2:2, and many more verses teach this). He does not ever say such things, and he says completely contrary things about the Bible and general moral philosophy in Pensées, as exemplified above. He is an irrationalist who does not know logical axioms, the necessary truths about any particular subject, or what the Bible really teaches--all of this will come up again below!
"One must know oneself. Even if that does not help in finding truth, at least it helps in running one's life, and nothing is more proper." (19)
Knowing oneself, which can only be done by forsaking assumptions and looking to the logical necessities that govern all things and allow for knowledge in the first place, is to know a part of reality [1]. After all, a being cannot know itself if it does not exist as a consciousness, which would make its mind a real existent. Moreover, to reject or deny or doubt one's own mind requires that one exists in order to do such things. The existence of the conscious self is in this way self-evident, though logical axioms are more foundational. It is in fact true that, along with strictly logical truths about reason and other matters, that one's own mind is all that can be known, in the sense that daily life and immediate perception does not prove that everything one perceives really exists, or that it has the exact nature it seems to. For instance, seeing an apple hang from a tree does not mean the fruit or the tree exists as anything more than a visual hallucination. A rationalistic person still knows that at least the perception exists as a mental experience that cannot be illusory. Also, nothing could be more legitimate than knowing reason and all that it entails, so the pragmatism of running one's life is utterly trivial by comparison, not that a person can know anything about their life apart from looking to pure reason without making assumptions.
"And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind . . . Even if someone were convinced that the proportions between numbers are immaterial, eternal truths, depending on a first truth in which they subsist, called God, I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation." (141)
There is a multitude of errors put forth here. Reason, not the natural world, proves things because truth itself only exists due to the self-necessity of logical axioms, which God is governed by (for instance, God cannot exist and not exist at once or be both honest and deceitful at once, and he cannot make necessary truths false because they are true in themselves) [2]. Yes, the existence of an uncaused cause is by logical necessity both true and demonstrable [3]; however, reason is true whether or not someone is persuaded by it. Logical axioms and other necessary truths cannot be false, so they cannot be psychological constructs or merely true of other things like the external world. Nothing is true apart from reason and nothing is knowable apart from it. If someone does not know reason, they are the charlatans or the hollow slaves to assumptions and falsities.
Thus, it is the other way around from what Pascal asserts about salvation being more important than metaphysical reason and epistemological proof. Without knowing reason, one cannot know Christianity (as well as the evidences for its probable truth), and since reason is more foundational to reality than all else, salvation cannot possibly be the most important thing in reality whether or not Christianity is true [4]. Furthermore, salvation is secondary to morality because there can be no righteous damnation to be delivered from if there is no sin, and sin is deviation from moral obligation. If something is morally obligatory, then one should do it no matter what. Still, whether for the sake of salvation or not, the person who assumes anything for or against theism or Christianity is a fool because only a fool makes assumptions, which require that a person has either believed more than what logic necessitates (or in what contradicts it) or has believed something that is demonstrably true without actually discovering the proof.
Also, the Bible does not teach a Trinity or an inherent immortality of all human souls, things Pascal presents as if they are genuinely part of Christian doctrine. Jesus is not Yahweh, which the Bible makes very clear unlike what Trinitarians pretend (Matthew 24:36, John 5:19-30, 10:25-29, 1 Corinthians 15:27, 1 Timothy 2:5, 6:14-15). Other than having dissociative identity disorder, a being cannot be three beings in one, for either it is one being with three personas (thus not the literal three gods are one god bullshit of Trinitarianism) or three separate entities altogether. Classical Trinitarianism is logically impossible. If the Bible taught otherwise, the Bible would be wrong, not the necessary truths of reason. Similarly, the Bible teaches that only God lives forever by nature (Daniel 12:7, 1 Timothy 6:15-16), hence why people have to be given eternal life (John 3:36, Romans 2:7-8). Without this, they will literally perish (John 3:16, Romans 6:23), killed in hell for their sins (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15). Eternal torture for finite sins is by necessity unjust according to the inherent truths of reason and according to the Bible (Deuteronomy 25:1-3, Exodus 21:22-25, Romans 2:6). Indeed, it is the greatest possible kind of injustice, for it would be the worst category of treatment. No, the Bible does not say the wicked will live forever in torment, but if it did, again, the Bible's philosophy would be what is false and not reason. Again and again, Blaise Pascal is a total fool who could not deserve to not be mocked or loathed for his betrayal of reason.
No comments:
Post a Comment