Blaise Pascal’s opening line “Our soul has been cast into the body, where it finds number, time and dimension” I find both melancholy and beautiful. By Pascal’s logic, the soul is a separate component from the body, which draws parallel to Rene Descartes concept of dualism, or the separation of two parts: body and mind.
However, is Pascal claiming that the soul is synonymous with the mind? From my interpretation, Pascal defines the mind as the decision-maker.
‘No; I will not blame them for having made this choice, but for having made
one at all; for since he who calls heads and he who calls tails are equally at
fault, both are in the wrong. The right thing is not to wager at all.’
Pascal states:
“There is not so great a disproportion between human and divine justice as
between unity and infinity.” So my question is, what is unity in this context?
“It’s better to bet on this life than on the next.” — Albert Camus
“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither
parts nor limits, He has no affinity with us.”
I think Pascal really hits an element of the human spirit here — that humans are empirical learners. We need to “see it to believe it” — or by Pascal’s logic, the nature of something versus its existence. Furthermore, how does this explain faith? Is faith a concept believed more by nature or by existence?
Additionally, I am curious to explore how does Pascal’s logic interact with the sciences? More specifically, physics.
“We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.” —Stephen Hawking
My attempt to exercise Pascal’s logic with the concept that there is life beyond the scope of planet Earth à la Pascal’s Wager:
“If there is life outside of Earth, it is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, this alternative life has no affinity with us.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” —Carl Sagan
Are we incapable of knowing either WHAT or IF life outside of Earth exists? If we get closer to answering this question, how can we be certain that we will not get closer to answering the question that there is God?
...or maybe Carl Sagan had it right when he said “the Universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
Qu’est-ce que vous pensez?
Hi Rana. In my opinion, if there are other life forms out in the universe, we won't come into contact with them or even know that they exist for quite some time until a completely different method of travel through space (and perhaps time) is discovered. A disclaimer- everything I'm about to say is based off of an intro to Astronomy course I took two years ago so please excuse any errors. However to my knowledge as far as humans know the universe is infinite, and the fastest that anything can move is the speed of light. It is hypothesized that between our galaxy and other galaxies that we can observe is this stuff called dark matter, which is expanding, therefor causing the entire universe to grow larger as time progresses. Therefor the celestial objects farthest away from us are not only billions of lightyears away, but are also progressively moving farther away. Even the star closest to us is something like 4.5 lightyears away, which given todays technology is still so far as to be essentially unreachable. On top of all of this, the part of the universe that we can observe is in fact only a fraction of its entirety. Everything that is visible from earth is close enough that its light has reached our planet since the creation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago. This is to say, we can only see as far as 4.5 billion light years away from our planet, because the light of every other star that is farther than 4.5 billion light years away has not yet reached our planet. Trippy thought right? This means that not only is it impossible to travel to other stars given todays technology, it is exceedingly difficult to travel to any other stars even if we can somehow reach the speed of light, which we are very far from being able to do. I believe that there is technology that allows us to approximate if certain planets relatively near to the earth could sustain life based off of size and other factors. However the chance of a planet being the right size, distance from its sun, combination of elements, and all the other insanely precise things that need to be perfectly aligned for life to be possible is incredibly small. Even if such a planet exists, the chance that it is even within viewing range of our planet is equally slim. Maybe there is other life out in the universe, and maybe they are even alien lifeforms that can communicate and build spaceships and such. Perhaps there are even evil aliens who want to conquer the universe and destroy all other life. However I'm not really concerned either way, because unless they've figured out a science above and beyond physics, we're wayy to far away for them to even know we exist.
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