Pascal's Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God

"God does not play dice," said Albert Einstein, but he was wrong. The universe is a probability equation, and the boiling clouds of time are best described by chaos theory, rooted in chance. The laws of probability were first set down by Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician, physicist, and mystic, who discovered that "choosing" is the human condition.A child prodigy, Pascal was to the mathematical sciences what Mozart was to music. Besides establishing the laws of probability, Pascal also invented the mechanical calculator, pioneered mathematical theroms and fine-tuned the scientific method, became a polemicist against the Jesuits, and penned literary works one of which Voltaire described as "the best-written book that has yet appeared in France." But also like Mozart, Pascal's genius would all too quickly burn him up, dying just after his thirty-ninth birthday.One night in 1654, Pascal had a visit from God, a mystical experience that changed his life. Never the dull rationalist, Pascal applied his mathematical work to religious faith and played dice. He argued for the existence of God, not based on rigorous logical principles like Aquinas or Anselm of Canterbury, but on outcomes--his famous wager. By placing the existence of God under the same rules as the existence and position of an electron, as tomorrow's thunderstorm, as the universe itself, Pascal sounded the death knell for Medieval "certainties" and paved the way forward to the new world of modern science.Pascal's Wager is the biography of a man and his revolutionary idea.

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