Editing Pensées (section)

==Contents==
The style of the book has been described as [[aphoristic]],<ref>{{cite book |last1=Heller |first1=Erich |title=The importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays |date=1988 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |pages=67}}</ref> or by [[Peter Kreeft]] as more like a collection of "[[saying|sayings]]" than a book.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kreeft |first1=Peter |title=Christianity for Modern Pagans Pascal's Pensees |date=2015 |publisher=Ignatius Press |page=11}}</ref>

Pascal is sceptical of [[cosmological]] arguments for God's existence and says that when religious people present such arguments they give atheists "ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak".<ref>{{cite book |title=God and Nature Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science |date=2023 |publisher=University of California Press |page=144}}</ref> He argues that the Bible actually cautions against these approaches. Scripture says that "God is a hidden God, and that, since the corruption of nature, He has left men in a darkness from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ, without whom all communion with God is cut off".<ref>{{cite book |title=From Plato to Derrida |date=2010 |publisher=Pearson Prentice Hall |page=467}}</ref>

He writes that it is an "astounding fact" that no "canonical" writer ever offers such proofs, and that this omission makes it "worthy of attention."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pascal |first1=Blaise |title=The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal |date=1904 |publisher=J.M. Dent & Company |page=100}}</ref> Pascal claims that atheists [[straw man]] Christianity. He writes, "If this religion boasted of having a clear view of God, and of possessing it open and unveiled, it would be attacking it to say that we see nothing in the world which shows it with this clearness. [...] On the contrary, it says that men are in darkness and estranged from God, that He has hidden Himself from their knowledge". Hence the atheists' arguments are not criticisms of Christianity.<ref>{{cite book |title=Religion, Politics and Law Philosophical Reflections on the Sources of Normative Order in Society |date=2009 |publisher=Brill |page=239}}</ref> For Pascal, Christianity says God is found only by those "who seek Him with all their heart"; but atheists do not do this and their arguments are not related to this process.<ref>{{cite book |editor1-last=Hammond |editor1-first=Nicholas |title=The Cambridge Companion to Pascal |date=2003 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |page=116}}</ref>

Pascal writes that "Scepticism is true; for, after all, men before Jesus Christ did not know where they were, nor whether they were great or small. And those who have said the one or the other, knew nothing about it, and guessed without reason and by chance. They also erred always in excluding the one or the other."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pascal |first1=Blaise |title=Pensees |date=2003 |publisher=Dover Publications |page=119}}</ref> He considers truth to be arrived at "not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them". Sceptics then who only engage by means of reason "labour to no purpose".<ref>{{cite book |title=A Global Church History The Great Tradition Through Cultures, Continents and Centuries |date=2019 |publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing |page=679}}</ref>