When Blaise accepted Christ
“Who needs God? Man can make it on his own.” So claimed Reason, the philosophy that captured the imagination of seventeenth-century France. Its champions, Voltaire and Descartes, among others, tried to fashion a worldview ruled completely by reason. French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal, though raised in the heyday of Enlightenment thought, found reason inadequate: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” He concluded, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know at all”—a statement that soon became the chief critique of rationalism and the starting point for a defense of the Christian faith that still influences people today. Scientific prodigy Pascal’s mother died when he was 3, and his father moved the family from Clermont-Ferrand, France, to Paris, where he homeschooled Blaise and his sister. By age 10, Pascal was doing original experiments in mathematics and physical science. To help his fat...