Blaise Pascal was born on June 19, 1623 in Auvergne, France. His mother died when he was only three years old leaving his father, Étienne, to raise Blaise and his three siblings. In 1632, Étienne and his four children, settled in Paris where Blaise developed a passion for geometry and, by age 15, was engaged in the work of Desargues. This led him to write a paper presenting a number of theorems in projective geometry, including his famous mystic hexagon.
In December 1639, the Pascal family moved to Rouen where his father was a tax collector, and between 1642 and 1645, Blaise developed the first mechanical calculator, the Pascaline, capable of performing the four arithmetic operations, and designed to facilitate the computation of taxes. In 1648, Pascal observed that the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with height and deduced, in spite of prevailing denials, that a vacuum does, indeed exist above the atmosphere.
By the 1650’s, gambling had become a fashionable pastime in French society and large sums of money were often wagered. It was not suspected until the mid-seventeenth century that chance and “luck” might actually be subject to mathematical patterns. A passionate gambler, the Chevalier de Méré, sought the help of his friend, Blaise Pascal, in resolving a probability question now called the problem of points. Pascal shared this problem with his friend Pierre de Fermat, and together they developed the theory of probability.
From May 1653 Pascal worked on mathematics and physics, publishing in 1653, Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids in which he enunciated what is now called Pascal’s law of pressure–a paper that laid the foundations of hydrostatics. However, sometime in 1654, Blaise was involved in a near-death experience when a horse pulling his carriage bolted and left him hanging helplessly suspended over the Seine River. Following this incident, he pledged his life to Christianity and wrote his famous philosophical treatise Pensées (“Thoughts”). In this document, published posthumously in 1660, Blaise presents what is known today as Pascal’s Wager which some believe is perhaps the most compelling reason for believing in God. In this, he reasons as follows:
• God is, or God is not.
• If God exists, any human who denies his/her existence may face eternal damnation, while a believer may earn eternal happiness in heaven.
• If God does not exist, a denier loses nothing, while a believer makes sacrifices over a finite lifetime to comply with the perceived expectations of God–a small sacrifice in this risk-reward scenario.
Pascal asserted that, in the face of uncertainty, each of us must enter into this wager with God. We can either assume there is a God, or assume there is not, but a measure of the risks and rewards argues in favor of believing.
Pascal, who had been frail throughout his life suffered intense pain as a malignant cancer in his stomach spread to his brain and he ultimately succumbed at age 39. Among the many philosophical gems found in the Pensées is his observation, “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves, than by those which have occurred to others.”
