Blaise Pascal

It takes love to stand up to the storms.

Yes, says Blaise Pascal in a profound bit of Psychological and spiritual insight.

The heart has its reasons.

Which reason knows nothing of.

in 1656, I didn't know this, but here we go.

Blaise Pascal, whoever he was, French philosopher, said, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not time.

Oh,

I like that.

This seems like it's real to me.

And I've always resonated with what Pascal said in saying that there's enough evidence to believe rationally, but not so much that you can believe based on reason alone.

And I think that kind of speaks to that sense of God gives us all the evidence that we need, and yet there is still an act of the will there.

that needs to take place.

And by the way, and if time permits, I'll ask him to talk about this as well, was a faculty member for a while at Princeton and then for several years at Oxford.

So one of the questions I would love to find out is whether or not that was pre or post his decision to follow Christ, because I would imagine one's approach to philosophy and theology, which is what he taught.

would be markedly different with a biblical worldview or one without a biblical worldview? Would you subscribe to the ideas posited by Nietzsche and David Hume, or would you realize that nothingness and existentialism don't fill the blaze Pascal described whole in the human heart? theology, obviously, when Christ isn't the center of it, is just a study of thinking about religious systems.

But it isn't the same as having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Then gambling gave us a bunch of mathematics.

In 1654, a French writer and gambler, the Chevalier de Marais, put a question to the mathematician Blaise Pascal, which, you know, the Pascal language was named after him.

If a game is stopped halfway, how do you split the pot fairly? Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat, you know, as in

Fermat's Enigma,

about that.

Some other time.

All right, so wrapping up here.

So the dice got fair because players wanted dice they could trust, and Pascal and Fermat turned the house edge into arithmetic.

What kind of probability theory do we need to know about?

I would say we try and think like Fermat and Pascal, as if they'd never heard of modern finance theory.

Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal are two 17th century mathematicians who, in an exchange of letters during the time, laid the foundation of probability theory.

Their correspondence discussed probability trees and conditional probabilities, among other things.

And do not turn off the video now, because this is not as difficult as it sounds.

We're learning.

A philosophical and pragmatic argument created by French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Blaise?

Yeah.