[asa] Pascal and Natural Theology (was "ID and YEC Arguments")

Finally I found the Pascal reference concerning the "hidden" God that we
were talking about in the other thread. It's #449 in my revised Penguin
edition and #556 in Sellier's system. It's part of a fascinating series
about what Pascal considered two essential truths of Christianity: "that
there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in
nature which makes them unworthy." (#449).

The point of #449 concerning the "hiddenness" of God seems to be that, if
nature constituted a complete revelation about God, men would know that
there is a God but would not know that they are corrupt and lost. Pascal
says that "[a]ll those who seek God apart from Christ, and who go no further
than nature, either find no light to satisfy them or come to devise a means
of knowing and serving God without a mediator, thus falling into either
atheism or deism, two things almost equally abhorrent to Christianity."
Thus, he gives the famous line we've been discussing: "What can be seen on
earth indicates neither the total absence, nor the manifest presence of a
divinity, but the presence of a hidden God."

In context, then, it seems to me that Pascal is *not* saying there is
nothing that can be known about God from nature. In fact, it seems to me
that he's suggesting we can know from nature that there is a God and that we
are separated from him by our own wretchedness -- exactly what it seems to
me Paul says in Romans 1 -- but that we cannot *stop* there because Christ,
the cure for that wretchedness, is not revealed in nature -- exactly what
Paul says in Romans 10 about the need for faith in the Gospel that comes
through hearing the word of God. Pascal seems to make this explicit in #449
in the two paragraphs that follow the "hidden God" line:

Shall the only being who knows nature know it only in order to be wretched?
Shall the only one to know it be the only one to be unhappy?

He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see enough to think that he
possesses God, but he must see enough to know that he has lost him. For, to
know that one has lost something one must see and not see: such precisely
is the state of nature.

Pascal offers a similar thought earlier in #446: "If there were no
obscurity man would not feel his corruption: if there were no light man
could not hope for a cure. Thus it is not only right but useful for us that
God should be partly concealed and partly revealed, since it is equally
dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to
know his wretchedness without knowing God."

Certainly this Pascal reference, coming from a brilliant scientist and
philosopher-theologian, supports an argument that God cannot be fully known
through nature. However, I can't see how Pascal could be read to say that
nature can't say anyting at all about whether there is a God. It seems to
me he's saying exactly the opposite: nature tells us there is a God and
that we are wretchedly separated from Him. He is refuting the Enlightenment
rationalists who claimed nature is all the revelation we have about God, not
the much more modest claim that nature reveals a creator-God.

Thoughts from any Pascal afficianados out there?

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Received on Sat Oct 21 12:52:39 2006