Category: Apologetics

Finding Hope in Death: Lessons from Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare, Pascal, and C.S. Lewis

What the inevitability of death and our response to its inescapable grasp suggests

kevingdrendel2 Comments
Man in historical attire writing Shakespearean sonnet with quill and candle

I have been listening to Pensées by Blaise Pascal, who has become a favorite philosopher, theologian, and thinker for me. I resonate with his sentiments about reason and intuition in particular. He was brilliant in science, mathematics, and theology – way ahead of his time. He lived during the initial headwind of the Enlightenment. He was a contemporary of René Descartes, yet he was able to remain objective. He wasn’t swept up in the current of the Enlightenment. He managed to remain aloof from it.

I am inspired to think of death today from my reading of Pensées. Death is the great equalizer. It will come to all of us. The longest-lived among human beings may live to be 110. Most of us will not see 100 … or even 90; and many of us will not see 80 or 70 or even 60. Try as we might, we do not control our fate. We will die, and that reality is inescapable.

Pascal talks about the people who distract themselves from the reality of death. I suppose it’s natural to want to ignore something that is as grim as death. We can’t add a day to our lives by worrying and being anxious about it. Yet, anxiety about death is also natural for the same reason – we dread it, but we can’t avoid it.

I imagine that my cat has never thought a day in its life about the fact that it will die, but I have rationality, consciousness, and awareness of myself that my cat does not seem to have, certainly not in the same measure. To the extent that we have that ability, it seems to me that ignoring the reality death that we can certainly grasp is to be something less than human. To ignore the reality of death is, therefore, beneath us. It denies the qualitative difference between us and other animals.

The proverbial deer standing frozen in the headlights of a hurtling vehicle has little idea of the imminent impact those headlights impend. Like the deer we might shut our minds off in the grim headlights of death … but we know better. The deer doesn’t know any better.

Not that we should have any pride in the fact that we have greater capacity than the other animals. It wasn’t anything we did. It simply is what it is.

Thus, to live into our capacity seems only fitting. Our anxiety about death is fitting for creatures with rationality, consciousness, and awareness of themselves.

I was first impressed about this humanly poignant characteristic – preoccupation with death – in college as an English Literature major. Death was the subject of many a novel, sonnet, and other forms of literature. Death is a common theme across the literary ages. The desire to escape the inevitability of death runs strong in creative and artistic minds living into the fullness of what it means to be human.

It was in a class on William Shakespeare, focusing on the sonnets, that the reality of the creative preoccupation about death crept into my own awareness. In that same time period, I must have been reading Ecclesiastes, because I associate Ecclesiastes 3:11 with that time in my life. Indeed, it has become my favorite verse in the Bible:

“For God has made everything beautiful in its time, and eternity has been set in the heart of man, but not so that he could see the beginning from the end.”

We do live in a world full of beauty, even if the world is also full of pain, struggle, and anxiety. The contrast between beauty and the ugliness of pain and death does not escape us. Ultimately, these things are painful reminders of our own finitude that we would rather not face.

To put it in biblical fashion, the reality is that we are like a mist. We are like a flower that blooms one day and dies the next. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “Everything is meaningless” in a world like that.

In that sense, we are no better off than the animals. From dust we were born and to dust we will return. We end up in the ground just like they do.

Everything that we accomplish fades into other people’s memories when we die. Most if not all of those memories will long be forgotten in a few generations. The things we accumulate that do not rust or rot while we live will be left to rust or rot for someone else. In more modern, poetic terms, no one tows a Cadillac to the grave.

And yet, the very fact that we wrestle with the poignance of death is something that arouses hope. This was the realization I made in that class on Shakespeare.

Why do we even care? Why does it even enter our mind to be anxious about it? Why aren’t we, like my cat or a deer in the headlights, clueless about it? The fact that we think about it and long for a different reality suggests the possibility of such a reality.

Continue reading “Finding Hope in Death: Lessons from Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare, Pascal, and C.S. Lewis” →

Blaise Pascal on the Finitude of Man and the Transcendence and Hiddenness of God

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Young man with long hair writing geometric theorems with a quill at a wooden desk

According to Britannica, Blaise Pascal was a french mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who lived in the 17th century (1623-1662). He died young but he accomplished much. He revolutionized multiple scientific and mathematical fields1.

As a teenager, his essay on conic sections became known as Pascal’s Theorem in projective geometry. He invented mechanical calculators. He didn’t invent Pascal’s triangle, a three-sided arrangement of integers such that every number equals the sum of two diagonal numbers above it, but he found novel uses for it, including calculating probabilities. He also laid the groundwork for modern probability theory2.

Pascal did pioneering work in the physical sciences, laying the foundations for hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. Because of this work, a unit of pressure is named after him. Pascal’s Law – that pressure applied to a confined fluid is transmitted undiminished in all directions – underpins modern hydraulics. Experiments with vacuums and fluids led him to develop the syringe and the hydraulic press.

Blaise Pascal is known as much for his philosophy and theology as he is for his mathematics and science. Pascal’s Wager is a brilliant critique of atheism based on probability theory. Many people misunderstood Pascal’s Wager to be an apologetic argument for the existence of God. Pascal believed in God, of course, but he doubted the ability of finite human beings to prove the existence of God with logic and reason.

Pascal maintains that people perceive the existence of God on an intuitive level. He would argue that we use our reason to support or deny that intuition, but the reasoning power of a finite being is insufficient to establish proof.

Pascal did not eschew the reasoning capabilities of human beings. He used his own brilliant mind in the advancement of science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Rather, he was mindful of our limitations as finite beings.

All of this is nothing, however, but setting the stage for my own summary of a point Pascal makes in his work Pensees. The fact that Pascal had a brilliant mind is not proof of the existence of God to be inferred from the fact that he believed in God. Pascal would be the first person to deny that kind of proof, yet Pascal had confidence in the existence of God.

Blaise Pascal says that we cannot find happiness within us as the Stoics suggest. Neither can we find happiness outside of ourselves in amusements, nature, or anything else. These things are fleeting – temporal. We can only find true and lasting happiness in God, who is both within us and outside us.

God makes himself available to us in “the inner man” (my words), and He makes himself available to be known in and through the world He created. God is neither part of us nor part of the world. He is not contained in us nor contained in the world. Yet he is present; He is transcendent in everything.

Blaise Pascal talks about the fact that the Bible reveals a God who hides himself. Pascal says we have no obligation to provide proof of such a God, because such a God is revealed as one who hides himself. What proof can we then give? To undertake such proof is to deny such a God, says Pascal. To accept that God is hidden is to affirm Him.

Yet, Pascal spoke about God, as I do. I also have come to the same place Pascal reached in my own thinking, which perhaps is why I resonate with him as much as I do.

He is not completely hidden, of course, to the extent that men like Blaise Pascal – and many other people before him and since him – are convinced that such a God exists. Such a God however cannot be known by proofs that finite beings demand.

As I think about these things, it occurs to me that a hidden God will remain hidden to the man who demands and requires proof. What proof should such a God give? What proof should a finite man require?

The God of the Bible is revealed as not being such a God. Such a God does not reveal himself to a man who makes demands.

Indeed, we make no demands on nature. We seek only to discover, to understand. We don’t make any demands on gravity. We don’t create the natural laws, neither do we control what they should be or how they should prove themselves to us. Such a task would be a fool’s errand, and we would know nothing to undertake it. Why would we then make similar demands of God?

Indeed, if God exists, and I believe He does, we can only undertake to learn who God is on His own terms, just as we learn what nature is on its terms.

Neither should we expect God, who created nature, to be revealed in the same way nature is revealed to us. A God who creates nature is a God who is “other” than nature. Such a God must “stand apart” from nature in order to create it. Such a God must have agency. Such a God must have capacity to determine to create or not to create. Such a God does not exist according to a law like gravity. Such a God may only be known in a way that corresponds to who such a God must be to have created this universe.

Skeptics say that people have created God in their own image. The person of intuition and faith says that we know God because He has created us in His image. He has created us with capacities that are like Him, that allow us to know Him as He is.

Not that we have the same capacities as God. We don’t because we are created beings. We can only have some aspect of God’s capacities and not all of them. We sense, though, that we do have some divine-like aspects because we can think. We can perceive. We can reason. We are self-aware. We understand things like beauty and love, science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology.

These capacities are not the same as the capacity of a thing like gravity. It may be more like a thing like dark matter or dark energy, but only in the sense that we do not understand those things. Yet we know they exist because we see evidence that they exist, and so we may know that God exists because we see evidence that He exists. We know He exists, however, in a way that is different from the way the universe exists – as different as a created thing is from the creator of that thing.

God is hidden to those who set the parameters on where God should be found. God is hidden to those who assume that God is found in the same way that a thing like gravity is found. God is hidden to those who demand that God be known in the way they want to know Him.

As creatures made in the image of God, who have some capacity to know God and be like Him, perhaps, it shouldn’t be surprising that we attempt to be like Him in the way of making such demands. To demand that the world bow down to us, that even God bow down to our demands for proof, is the natural danger of God making a creature in His own image.

And so God hides himself of necessity because such a creature would be a danger to any universe God created. Indeed, if God is true to Himself, He could not allow such a thing. He must, of necessity, be hidden to such a creature so that only a creature who is willing to humble itself, to set aside its desire to be like God, may know Him – a creature who is willing to know God on God’s own terms, and to know God for who He really is and not for what such a creature wishes him to be.

It seems to me it could be no other way: that God would have to hide Himself so that He would be discovered and known by those people willing to know Him on His own terms, to know Him for who He really is and not for who they wish He was – a god they can control.

We cannot anymore demand that our spouse be the person we want them to be and make them to be it, than we can demand that God be the god we want Him to be and make Him dance to the tune of the music we play. It is a fool’s errand even to conceive of it and to entertain it. Such a god that we can manipulate and control would not be the true God.

So the fact that God is hidden is not surprising. The fact that God is hidden is expressly disclosed throughout the Bible. It is not hidden to us that God is a hidden God.

What proof, therefore, should we give of such a God?

Perhaps, the only proof we can give is the hope that such a God can be found, and indeed, that some people have found Him – that He has revealed Himself to people to whom He desires to reveal Himself because they desire to know Him as He truly is.

And so we can offer this proof: that the one who seeks God, the one who seeks to know God as He reveals Himself to be, the one who seeks God with his whole heart and his whole being, yielding all that he wishes to demand to such a God, that such a person can and will know Him, as the Bible says, and that such a God who is approached that way promises to be found.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  1. Blaise Pascal, Brittanica.com, Lucien Jerphagnon, May 1, 2026 ↩︎
  2. What were the famous Blaise Pascal inventions? (How Stuff Works, by Nicholas Gerbis) ↩︎

Making Sense of Science and Theism: Evolution, Engineers, and Category Errors

As the engineer is to a clock so is ___________ to the natural world?

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The first episode of the Uncommon Ground podcast with Justin Brierley is titled “What is Behind the Poetry of Reality?” The podcast features a conversation with Richard Dawkins and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Dawkins of New Atheist fame has a purely materialist view of reality – maintaining that reality is comprised only of materials things that operate on their own without the aid of God or any immaterial thing.

The discussion is amicable and informative, if not predictable. Rowan Williams accepts the evolutionary paradigm, but believes in God – an immaterial, personal creator of the universe. They seemed to agree on the science. The only difference is that Williams believes there is a God behind the science and the universe.

When Brierley asked Williams to summarize Richard Dawkins’ view of reality, Dawkins graciously conceded, “Rowan… understands so well that he can summarize what I think better than I can.”

Dawkins should be given credit for reading Williams’ recent book that was the backdrop for the discussion, but Dawkins admitted to being “baffled” by it.

Dawkins was unable to provide a cogent summary of Williams’ view of reality. He succeeded only in criticizing Rowan’s view, and Dawkins conceded, “I think Rowan understands where I’m coming from much better than I understand where he’s coming from.”

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis, who says that the Christian worldview can take in science and make sense of it, but a view of the world limited to the constructs of science cannot take into Christianity and make sense of it. One is robust enough to hold the other, but the other is not sufficiently robust to do the same. (I have provided the whole quotation in its context below.)

I will admit that the robustness of Christianity to be able to make sense of science does not necessarily make it true. Conversely, the limited scope of science that is unable to account for Christianity does not necessarily make it untrue. If reality truly consists of nothing but matter and natural processes, then the limitations of science are the limitations of reality itself.

I think that reality is not sufficiently explained by science, which is limited to natural explanations. I am also fascinated with Dawkins’ attempt to explain his own worldview as follows:

“I see the world as a very complex thing, like a clock or like a car or like a computer, and in the case of a clock or a computer or a car, I know how it’s made. It’s made by engineers with drawing boards and they… put together the parts and those parts all work together. [T]he equivalent of the engineer in the world of nature is evolution by natural selection.”

I am an English literature major and an attorney. In both disciplines, the ability to draw connections, and distinctions, and juxtapositions between and among word meanings and concepts is essential. Attorneys are professionals in comparing and contrasting facts and circumstances to argue (consistent with clients’ interests) that laws either apply in the same way or do not apply in the same way to similar but different sets of facts and circumstances. Perhaps, this why I noticed that Richard Dawkins made a category error. Or did he?

Continue reading “Making Sense of Science and Theism: Evolution, Engineers, and Category Errors” →

Unveiling the Mystery of the Hiddenness of God

Why would God be hidden to us?

kevingdrendel3 Comments

I have been meditating on the hiddenness of God lately and leaning into the mystery of God’s hiddenness. I am intrigued by it. The Bible is forthright about the hiddenness of God.

As I think about the hiddenness of God, the mind of the skeptic plays in my ear: “How do you know God exists? Why does God seem hidden? Maybe it’s because He doesn’t exist!” Believing in a “hidden” God is belief without evidence; it’s belief in the teeth of the evidence (as Dawkins says).

My response is that we all have faith in our basic assumptions about reality. The scientist assumes only matter and motion. He sees evidence for things like gravity and neutrinos, and dark matter and dark energy that cannot be seen. The scientist reasons to the best explanation for the things that cannot be seen in order to make sense of the reality in the world, and he does so within the “limitations” of materiality.

Science, after all, is the study of the material world. That is is the scope of science as it is defined in the modern world. Science is based on what is quantifiable, measurable, observable, and reproducible.

When I do theology or philosophy, I also start with assumptions. I start with an assumption, or a theory if you like, that God exists. The proof of God, however, is necessarily different than scientific proof.

God is not a substance in the universe to be quantified, measured, observed, or reproduced in the way we can study the natural world. He is not a component of the universe. He is not comprised of matter and motion like the universe. God is not a principle of physics that can be observed in its regularity and tested by its regularity.

If God exists and created the universe, He is separate and apart from the universe. That does not mean that God is not present in some way; it means that He is not present in the same way that you and I are present. Rather, God is transcendent. He is imminent (near in some way), but not contained within the creation.

God also must have agency to have determined to create. We understand the necessity for agency by our own agency. This makes sense of the question: why is there a universe; why is there something, rather than nothing.

For the life of me, I can make no sense of the assertion that a universe can create itself. What kind of voodoo magic is that? That conclusion is based on an assumption that matter and motion is all that exists, but we cannot prove that assumption.

To say that God must have agency is not to be anthropomorphic about it but to reason to the best explanation based upon what we know, which is our own agency and the way we conduct ourselves in the world. Where does a universe come from? The simple answer is that it comes from a creator who has agency, who has intentionality, and the ability to will and to act according to His purpose and design.

Where does intricate, fine-tuned complexity that is complex to the nth degree come from? It comes from a mind, from a creator who conceives a plan and then implements it. We know that from the way human beings create things. Where did we get that capacity? Like things produce or reproduce like things.

We know that the universe is “winding down”. That is what the law of thermodynamics tell us. Entropy is the rule. This means the universe is not getting more complex; it is breaking down, evening out, cooling, and becoming less complex over time.

Over course, this is occurring over a very, very long period of eons, so (perhaps) there is enough energy in the universe for complexity to form in areas of the universe even while entropy is working its very long way toward the inevitable heat death of the universe as a whole.

Maybe, but where did the energy come from to cause the so-called Big Bang? What triggered the universe to begin to begin with?

No one can explain that who doesn’t believe in a “Big Banger”, a Creator. It is the best explanation that we have. It makes the most sense of the reality that the Universe had a beginning.

The multiverse doesn’t solve the “problem” of a beginning. It just kicks the can back down the road further. What triggered the multiverse into being? It’s an endless regression.

The Christian (Jewish and Muslim) conception of God is that God is the timeless, eternal being who always existed and was never created who chose to trigger the universe (or multiverse) into existence.

This, frankly, makes much more sense than a past eternal, non-sentient universe that just poofed life into existence. How do you get life from nonliving matter? What animates that matter?

But the questions don’t stop there. What triggers consciousness from inert, non-conscious matter? How do the fundamental “building blocks” of matter develop consciousness? It’s a complete mystery, and there is no mechanism known to modern science to explain it – other than the brute fact that human beings and (to some lesser degree) animals (and maybe plants) are conscious beings.

Consciousness is proven by the sheer fact that we are conscious of ourselves. It seems to “reside” in or be attached to the brain, but the brain by itself is not consciousness. The brain is a perfect, intricate receptacle for consciousness, but the brain and consciousness are not perfectly coexistent. They are not the same things, and science has no adequate explanation for that.

Because these things suggest looking outside the limitations of the material world for our answers, we have theology and philosophy, which can be “scientific” loosely in method and approach, but defies the limitations of scientific inquiry.

That doesn’t mean that theology and philosophy should be divorced from science (or that science should be divorced from theology and philosophy). All reality must ultimately cohere harmoniously, or we cannot call it reality.

But, I have digressed (only slightly) from the point, which is the mystery of the hiddenness of God.

Continue reading “Unveiling the Mystery of the Hiddenness of God” →

Understanding Pascal’s Wager

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

kevingdrendel8 Comments

Glen Scrivener argues that atheists misunderstand Pascal’s Wager in Episode number 595 of his Speak Life Podcast (Atheists Misunderstand Pascal’s Wager (and so do Christians) I think he is right, and it seems that Christians don’t really understand it, either. Me included … until now. Before we dive in, though, let’s review Pascal’s Wager.

Blaise Pascal starts with the premise that human beings can neither prove that God exits nor prove that God does not exist. This is a concession, perhaps, to the atheist or agnostic, but the atheist and agnostic stand in no better position in relation to proving that God does not exist.

If that is the reality, then whether to believe in God or not is crap shoot. If we can’t prove it one way or the other, are we any better off than a roll of the dice? Pascal says that the truly rational person would choose belief in God based on what is known as Pascal’s Wager.

Believing in God potentially gains a person everything (eternal life, joy, meaning, etc.). If God exists, the believer hits the jackpot. Believing in God also has very little downside. Pascal supposes that a person might forego some pleasures that were not pursued or time and energy spent living in harmony with faith (more on that below), but a person is little worse off for believing in God if God does not exist.

On the other hand, a person who doesn’t believe in God loses everything if God does exist (eternal separation from God). A person who does not believe in God may gain some temporary pleasure, but any pleasure gained is fleeting. Therefore, Pascal said, the rational thing is to believe in God, because the potential gain is infinite and the potential loss is minimal. Given that we cannot prove God one way or the other, the truly rational person would “wager” on God, says Pascal.

Christopher Hitchens calls Pascal’s Wager “religious hucksterism of the cheapest, vulgarist, nastiest kind,” and Alex O’Connor calls it “half-hearted ass-kissing just in case.” Richard Dawkins asks, “What is so special about belief?” And, “Why would God not look for something of more substance from us, like being good?” Matt Dillahunty says, “Pascal’s wager is an apologetic argument that attempts to demonstrate that belief in God is warranted based on decision theory and probability.” But is it?

The often deriding comments beg for some understanding. Dawkins’s legitimate questions call for a response, and Matt Dillahunty’s assumption requires correction.

All of these comments and questions assume that Pascal’s Wager is an apologetic argument for God, and they find it woefully wanting in that respect. Even Christians assume it is an apologetic argument, but everyone who makes that assumption has missed the actual point of Pascal’s Wager.

Glen Scrivener’s summary of Pascal’s Wager taken from Graham Tomlin’s book, Pascal, The Man Who Made the Modern World, exposes the error people make in these assumptions. Pascal wasn’t attempting to assert a rational argument, defense, or proof of God. He was making a very different point altogether.

Pascal was a genius by any measure. He was a scientist, mathematician, geometer, physicist, philosopher, polemicist, and theologian. He invented probability theory; he proved the existence of the vacuum, laid the foundations of integral calculus, performed what is called the first proper scientific experiment, established the principle that made possible the hydraulic press, demonstrated that air has weight, and many other things.

Thus, Scrivener says, “If we think that Blaise Pascal was silly, that might not reflect on Blaise Pascal; it might be a sign that we have misunderstood him.” The podcast featuring Graham Tomlin linked above and embedded below does a great job explaining the misunderstanding. It is worth the 25 minutes to watch and/or listen, but I am going to summarize and add my own thoughts as I continue.

Continue reading “Understanding Pascal’s Wager” →