Pascal's night terrors

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”...

We discussed Blaise Pascal's distress at the conclusion of class last night. What an odd attitude, it struck some of us, for a scientist to admit to. But most scientists don't spend a lot of time in public rationalizing and cultivating belief in traditional religious dogma, either. 

This study confirms that "scientists are indeed more secular—in terms of beliefs and practices—than those in their respective general populations, although in four of the regional contexts, over half of scientists see themselves as religious. And surprisingly, scientists do not think science is in conflict with religion. Instead, most see religion and science as operating in separate spheres."

They've bought Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisterium (NOMA). Most philosophers I read and talk to reject it. Have sociologists studied the philosophers by geography and specialization? I'll bet more Jamesian pragmatic pluralists are sympathetic to it, or at least to its spirit of "hands off" others' impassioned commitments. They're more likely to endorse Mark Vernon's summation: 

The panoply of Pascal's experiences and convictions were drawing him towards Christianity. But that weight of evidence "ran before" his rational mind, because Christianity demands real not notional assent. Moreover, as "the mere appreciation of syllogistic logic" cannot of itself decide the case, the wager was never meant to stand alone. (It was originally just a note in a private commonplace book.) What the wager represents is Pascal justifying his religious intuitions to his mathematic mind. It's one strand in the cable of his belief.

Understand the wager in this way, James concludes, and "instead of being powerless, [it] seems a regular clincher". It works for Pascal. It might for others. But it's never going to work for everyone. It doesn't work for James. But nonetheless, he respects Pascal's attempt to integrate his whole person into his desire – his will – to believe.

They might even be prepared to call Pascal's bet rational. But also Bertrand Russell's and Richard Dawkins's. They occupy different rooms off of the pragmatic corridor, which we all must share and navigate. The corridor is a far better way (I think) than Gould's of acknowledging the varieties of human experience. 

Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees Praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.

But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Pragmatism lecture 2

Speaking for myself and others whose temperaments welcome stellar speculation and cosmic curiosity: bring on more images from those "silent infinite spaces," Webb telescope! Sooner or later they're going to speak eloquently of a universe we can feel at home in. A rational universe. I don't know if James really said this, as Vernon says he did, but I will: "Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe." 

Just keep talking and listening, I'd have told Pascal, and see if you don't begin to get over those night-sky terrors. 

 

"just the beginning"

Postscript. Speaking of hotel rooms and night terrors...

Some people might find the level of detail in the images less like a Vermeer and more like a Hieronymus Bosch—everywhere you zoom in, you get an image that is frightening, alien, or sublime. There’s something vertiginous and confusing about taking one’s life seriously, until a new sense of scale alters that perspective. I spoke with Rieke while travelling with my daughter, who made an observation about our hotel room that I found relevant to, well, cosmic beauty. “You know what I like about small hotel rooms?” she asked. I didn’t know. “There’s less there to be scared of in the dark.” Of course, such experiences of scale can be comforting at other ages, too. Rivka Galchen

Post-Postscript. Neil Armstrong made his "giant leap" 53 years ago today. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” TW