"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist"
About this Quote
Pascal traps you between two kinds of dizziness: metaphysical awe and metaphysical absence. The line lands because it refuses the cheap comfort of choosing a side. God’s existence is “incomprehensible” not as a casual shrug, but as an indictment of human equipment: if an infinite being exists, our finite minds can’t scale to it. Yet nonexistence is equally “incomprehensible” because it leaves a vacuum where meaning, order, and moral gravity still behave as if they have a source. Pascal isn’t offering a syllogism; he’s staging a cognitive crisis.
The subtext is deeply Augustinian and intensely modern. He’s writing in a 17th-century Europe where the new sciences are expanding what can be explained mechanically, while religious certainty is being contested by skepticism and sectarian conflict. Pascal, a mathematical prodigy turned religious thinker, understands the seduction of proof. He also understands its limits. This sentence functions like a pressure test on rationalism: if reason is honest, it admits it can’t close the case either way.
That’s the sneaky intent. By equalizing the incomprehensibility of belief and disbelief, Pascal lowers the status of philosophical certainty and raises the urgency of choice. It’s the psychological preface to the Wager: you are going to live as if one of these incomprehensible options is true. The brilliance is the tonal pivot - not pious certainty, but frank vertigo - that makes faith look less like ignorance and more like a response to the human condition under conditions of permanent uncertainty.
The subtext is deeply Augustinian and intensely modern. He’s writing in a 17th-century Europe where the new sciences are expanding what can be explained mechanically, while religious certainty is being contested by skepticism and sectarian conflict. Pascal, a mathematical prodigy turned religious thinker, understands the seduction of proof. He also understands its limits. This sentence functions like a pressure test on rationalism: if reason is honest, it admits it can’t close the case either way.
That’s the sneaky intent. By equalizing the incomprehensibility of belief and disbelief, Pascal lowers the status of philosophical certainty and raises the urgency of choice. It’s the psychological preface to the Wager: you are going to live as if one of these incomprehensible options is true. The brilliance is the tonal pivot - not pious certainty, but frank vertigo - that makes faith look less like ignorance and more like a response to the human condition under conditions of permanent uncertainty.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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