Entries that relate to Pascal’s wager.
There’s a new book out, A Summer with Pascal, by Antoine Compagnon. I have not read it, but I did read a review of it in the Wall Street Journal last week (July 27-28, 2024, at page C12), and it looks interesting. I feel I should note the book’s publication on this blogsite — after … [Read more…]
I recently posted this on National Review Online‘s “The Corner”: I very much enjoyed Kayla Bartsch’s Corner post on Friday (“Sociology Comes for Sundays”) and would like to add a bit to it. It is certainly true that “religious practice” can have a variety of secular benefits, even if one lacks solid faith, and that noting … [Read more…]
Joseph Epstein is what used to be called, and I guess still is, a “man of letters.” That is, he is a writer of his own books, essays, and shorter pieces, on a wide variety of nonscientific subjects, as well as a literary critic. If you’ve run across him lately, it’s probably through short columns … [Read more…]
This is a very engaging book, with an exciting premise: It imagines what it would be like if St. Paul and the prophet Muhammad were to have a formal debate on whether or not Jesus was resurrected (!). The idea is that MIT has been able to create two opposing lifelike holograms that, by computers … [Read more…]
I’m a Lee Strobel fan, and would put his trilogy of The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for a Creator near the top of my apologetics list. The book that is the subject of this post follows the same template as his others: The author makes an intelligent division of … [Read more…]
I’m a Lee Strobel fan, and would put his trilogy of The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for a Creator near the top of my apologetics list. His book that is the subject of this post follows the same template as his others: The author makes an intelligent division of … [Read more…]
Here are four basic points that I think apologists should make: (1) There is a variety of strong evidence that a Supreme Being — that is, God — exists. (2) There is also strong evidence for the historicity of the Gospels, and in particular their core message that Jesus is God. (3) Pascal’s Wager makes … [Read more…]
This book’s author, Michael Novak, was erudite and rightly acclaimed. He was around for a long time; he cites in this 2008 book a few times his own book Belief and Unbelief — which he wrote in 1965, more than forty years earlier. And I enjoyed the book I’ll be discussing here. *** The book’s overarching … [Read more…]
I thought it worthwhile to include this link to T.S. Eliot’s introduction to an edition of Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. As the name of this blogsite indicates, I am a great fan of Pascal’s — and T.S. Eliot is, well, T.S. Eliot. I learned about the introduction from a recent Wall Street Journal review by Joseph … [Read more…]
This 1975 book is essentially a beautiful 191-page essay by Malcolm Muggeridge, giving us his take on the Gospels. Now, when you think about it, those four mini-biographies of Jesus are together the most important 80,000 written words (the length of a quite short novel) we humans have, and of course Muggeridge is one of … [Read more…]