Point of View October 14, 2024 – Hour 1 : Beyond the Wager

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View, and now, Kirby Anderson.

[00:00:20] You know on Point of View we talk so often about worldview and certainly how to defend a biblical worldview which is apologetics, and so we get into issues like theology and apologetics, and so this hour we're going to focus on an individual that you need to know more about.

[00:00:34] You can learn a great deal from the very short life that he lived. Blaise Pascal, a 17th century French philosopher and scientist, those of us that studied science know him for example as an individual that did a great deal of work on conic sections.

[00:00:52] I remember in mathematics he used to talk about the Pascal Triangle, but at the same time others are familiar with him because of the SoCal Pascal's Wager, an argument about the existence of God.

[00:01:03] Well, there's a lot more to cover, and a book that came out more than 20 years ago by Doug Groteis called On Pascal has been updated.

[00:01:12] It is now called Beyond the Wager, The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal, and Doug Groteis is a good friend of this organization and ministry.

[00:01:20] He has of course been for many years at Denver Seminary now.

[00:01:24] It's the first time we have a chance to talk to him as the Distinguished University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University.

[00:01:33] He's an individual who has his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oregon, his master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[00:01:40] Best known probably for those of you in the area of cult and research writing the best-selling book Unmasking the New Age and many of those books.

[00:01:48] For those of us that are so appreciative of the work he's done in the area of apologetics, of course his book Christian Apologetics, which is now in its second edition.

[00:01:57] And even a memoir that he wrote after his wife's passing, Walking Through Twilight.

[00:02:02] But today we're going to talk about this new book, which has been updated, has additional chapters beyond the wager.

[00:02:09] So Doug Groteis, welcome back to Point of View.

[00:02:13] Thanks Kirby, it's nice to be back.

[00:02:15] Has anybody kept track of how many times I've been on the show?

[00:02:19] It's been a few, going all the way back to the 1980s with Unmasking the New Age.

[00:02:24] Well, let's if we can say, and I'm just going to be real honest, I probably know more about Pascal because of you than anybody else.

[00:02:31] Because you quote him so often in your books, and I think I read nearly every one of your books.

[00:02:36] And also you got interested early on, if I remember right, by just reading about him in a great book series.

[00:02:44] Is that true?

[00:02:45] Right.

[00:02:46] Yes, I think it was the summer of probably 1977.

[00:02:49] I was in college and I went home to visit my mom.

[00:02:52] And she, like many people of her generation, bought the great books.

[00:02:57] This large selection of classic Western books, Martin Rather and others got together.

[00:03:02] And I knew Pascal was a Christian.

[00:03:05] I had heard a little bit about him at that point.

[00:03:07] I had only been a Christian for a year.

[00:03:09] So I pulled down the Pascal volume and started reading.

[00:03:12] He was quite captivated by his ideas.

[00:03:15] So that has continued all these years with me citing him many times in various ways and apologetics.

[00:03:24] And then I first wrote about him in 2002, this little book called On Pascal.

[00:03:31] That was part of the Wadsworth Philosopher's Series.

[00:03:34] I also wrote one called On Jesus in that series as well.

[00:03:38] And for a long time, I owed InterVarsity an update.

[00:03:41] And eventually I thought, you know, it's time I finished this book.

[00:03:45] My life had settled down a little bit.

[00:03:47] So I was really heartened and encouraged to go back to the book and do quite a bit of new research.

[00:03:52] I think I've got four new chapters in the book.

[00:03:55] Everything has been updated.

[00:03:57] And really, besides Ken Samples, there aren't a lot of Christian apologists, evangelical apologists today that refer that much to Blaise Pascal.

[00:04:06] Bill Craig does a little bit once in a while.

[00:04:09] But I really want him to be better known in the evangelical world.

[00:04:14] Well, and I think you have done a really good job in that regard.

[00:04:18] And again, if my memory is correct, I think he died at the age of 39.

[00:04:21] So when we talk about some of the things that we will know about him, some of those were published after the time in which he lived.

[00:04:31] And we'll talk about his first and second conversion in just a minute.

[00:04:35] But one of the things that helped me very early on to try to get my handle on him was the fact that I knew he was Catholic, but he was different.

[00:04:44] And you put a section in there about caught between the two ages.

[00:04:48] So in one sense, he's different than medieval Christianity.

[00:04:54] But he isn't necessarily tied completely to the Enlightenment.

[00:04:58] He came during what might be called the Reformation.

[00:05:02] But help us out with that, because in some respects, understanding what he says comes from understanding who he was.

[00:05:09] Right.

[00:05:10] Well, he's sort of in the middle between the medieval period and what you might call the modern period, to put it very broadly.

[00:05:18] He was a Roman Catholic, but he identified with a movement called Jansenism that was very Augustinian.

[00:05:27] It emphasized the depravity of human beings, the need for God's grace and salvation, and an ardent pursuit of Christ in the Christian life.

[00:05:36] And Pascal really sparred with the Jesuits who were trying to water down what the Christian life was all about.

[00:05:44] And he dealt with that in one of his books called The Provincial Letters.

[00:05:48] So I'm certainly a man of the Reformation, as you are.

[00:05:51] But I find so much in Pascal that resonates with my knowledge of Scripture and my Christian faith.

[00:05:58] He had a deep love for Christ.

[00:06:01] One of my new chapters in the book is on the excellency of Christ.

[00:06:05] And he had some marvelous insights into the reality of Jesus and the centrality of Jesus Christ to all of reality and understanding all of reality.

[00:06:15] He was very Christocentric in all of his perspective.

[00:06:20] As a matter of fact, I might just mention for just a minute that this book has a number of new chapters on Jesus Christ, miracles and prophecy.

[00:06:28] So we'll probably try to cover that, excellence of Christ, which you just mentioned.

[00:06:30] One that, again, just got my attention, Christianity, Muhammad and the Jews.

[00:06:36] And then, of course, a critique of culture and politics.

[00:06:38] So in some respects, though it was written in the 17th century, Doug, I see a number of things that he said that were almost prophetic and make sense to us and maybe are helpful to us in the 21st century.

[00:06:53] What are your thoughts?

[00:06:55] Well, certainly on so many levels, he was really a key person in the philosophy of science in the modern age.

[00:07:02] He said we need to go out and see what nature is doing, not just assume that nature abhors a vacuum or kind of reason from the armchair about what nature will do and not do.

[00:07:14] So he was a pioneer in experimental science.

[00:07:18] He was an inventor.

[00:07:19] He invented the first working calculator, really, you know, the ancestor to the computer.

[00:07:27] And he didn't write a lot about Islam, but what he wrote was really quite insightful.

[00:07:34] So when you read books about Pascal or articles, you almost see nothing about what he wrote about Islam.

[00:07:41] But I was able to go into what he said and develop it into some apologetic arguments related to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

[00:07:51] So he's certainly a man who speaks to our age.

[00:07:54] I think the greatest thinkers have a perennial appeal.

[00:07:58] Of course, more than anyone, Pascal's Lord and our Lord Jesus Christ.

[00:08:02] But the great philosophers speak to these perennial and significant human issues down through the ages.

[00:08:10] Well, let's take a break.

[00:08:10] When we come back, we'll talk about his conversion.

[00:08:12] And I postponed it till now.

[00:08:14] Of course, you've heard about the Pascal's Wager.

[00:08:16] But this is a lot more than that.

[00:08:18] It's Beyond the Wager.

[00:08:20] And it's a book published by InterVarsity Press.

[00:08:22] As you know, we have, of course, a link to the web page for Doug Groteis.

[00:08:26] We also have a link so that if you have not been able to find this book in your local bookstore, you can get it there.

[00:08:31] And if you're interested in knowing how to defend the Christian faith and maybe thinking a little more deeply about the Christian faith,

[00:08:38] this is a book that I think you will find very helpful.

[00:08:41] We'll continue our conversation right after this.

[00:08:58] This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson.

[00:09:02] The authors of their book, The Sovereign Individual,

[00:09:04] explained that we are entering into the fourth stage of human society.

[00:09:08] First, there was the hunting and gathering societies.

[00:09:11] Then came the agricultural societies.

[00:09:13] More recently, we've had the industrial societies.

[00:09:16] And now we live within informational societies.

[00:09:18] Although the book was written in the 1990s,

[00:09:20] there are sections of the book that are quoted even now in the second decade of the 21st century.

[00:09:25] The authors predicted we would use our phones for news, information, and financial transactions.

[00:09:30] They predicted more people would be learning online.

[00:09:33] More and more people would be working remotely.

[00:09:35] And they predicted the rise of cyber cash and privatized money.

[00:09:39] But let me also add that they were also like a typical baseball player and had both hits and misses.

[00:09:45] But we should appreciate the predictions that were on target.

[00:09:48] The accuracy of these predictions resulted in part because of the pandemic and lockdowns.

[00:09:53] The last two years accelerated the trends of remote working and online education.

[00:09:57] A federal government that printed so much money increased consumer interest in cryptocurrencies and digital cash.

[00:10:04] The authors say we can learn lessons from the past as we see what happened when the agricultural revolution changed society.

[00:10:10] We can see parallels between the decline of the church and what they predict will be the decline of the nation state.

[00:10:16] Mass production of books ended the church monopoly on scripture and information.

[00:10:20] They predict that the information revolution will destroy the power of the nation state

[00:10:25] and allow people to change locations if laws, taxes, or regulations are unfavorable.

[00:10:30] Although the book was written two decades ago, it predicted many of the changes we're seeing in our world today

[00:10:36] during the fourth stage of society.

[00:10:38] I'm Kirby Anderson and that's my point of view.

[00:10:46] For a free booklet on biblical reliability, go to viewpoints.info slash biblical reliability.

[00:10:53] Viewpoints.info slash biblical reliability.

[00:10:58] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth.

[00:11:04] Continue our conversation today with Dr. Doug Groteis, again, professor of apologetics and Christian worldview at Cornerstone University.

[00:11:11] At a university I've spoken at and would certainly commend to you up there in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[00:11:16] This book is entitled Beyond the Wager.

[00:11:19] And Doug, just in passing, you mentioned that he was an inventor.

[00:11:22] And it is amazing to me because his father, first of all, you know, Pascal was a child prodigy.

[00:11:28] But his father was doing taxes.

[00:11:31] And as a result, the argument was this was getting so tedious.

[00:11:35] So in some respects, just as some people will say that Charles Babbage was the father of the computer,

[00:11:42] you could almost say that Pascal was the father of the calculator.

[00:11:46] And they, to this day, have some examples that are found in museums of a calculator that, of course, is not electric,

[00:11:54] but is certainly something that was the, if you will, prototype for some of the calculators we use today.

[00:12:01] Right.

[00:12:02] There were some others around at the time, but none of them worked very reliably.

[00:12:07] So Pascal developed one.

[00:12:09] He called it the Pascaline.

[00:12:10] And he also developed a marketing program.

[00:12:13] Yes.

[00:12:14] It's just amazing.

[00:12:15] Just a brilliant individual.

[00:12:18] Yeah, in so many ways.

[00:12:19] Well, let's get into the spiritual stuff.

[00:12:21] Because, first of all, I did not know there was kind of a first and second conversion,

[00:12:26] but apparently a lot of people didn't know either.

[00:12:28] So take us through that part because then I want to get into some of the things we can learn from Blaise Pascal.

[00:12:35] Yeah.

[00:12:36] Well, he was raised in a Catholic family, and his father had an accident.

[00:12:42] I think he dislocated his hip.

[00:12:44] And there were two bone setters who came in to help the father,

[00:12:48] and they were members of this group called the Jansenist community.

[00:12:52] And as I mentioned, they emphasized the radical need for God's grace and the seriousness of the Christian life.

[00:12:59] And the family was very influenced.

[00:13:02] In fact, one of Pascal's sisters became a Jansenist nun.

[00:13:07] And sadly, the church turned against the movement,

[00:13:09] and they even destroyed the nunnery where she was in residence.

[00:13:15] But he was a Christian at that point on, maybe even before.

[00:13:20] But after his death, it was discovered that he had sewn something into his coat,

[00:13:27] which was a record of an experience he had with God, which is called the Night of Fire.

[00:13:32] It was in 1654.

[00:13:34] And he recounts this very profound experience with God.

[00:13:38] It's not a statement of prose.

[00:13:40] It's almost like poetry, where he recounts this night of fire and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

[00:13:49] not the God of the philosophers, and so on.

[00:13:51] So that is probably what sparked him to begin to write his apologetics for the Christian religion,

[00:13:59] which he never finished, sadly.

[00:14:02] He passed away before it was done, but the fragments were so brilliant that they've been brought together.

[00:14:10] I think the first collection was something like 1670 as an apologetic for Christianity.

[00:14:17] So even though he didn't leave us a system of apologetics,

[00:14:20] he left us enough for us to take that material and develop a lot of very winning and profound apologetic arguments, I think.

[00:14:29] Well, let's talk about the wager, because that's, of course, the title of the book.

[00:14:32] And I would dare say that if people know anything about Pascal, it's the Pascal's wager.

[00:14:38] So I thought we'd start with that and then work our way into some of the other things that he developed

[00:14:43] in terms of helping us know how to defend the Christian faith.

[00:14:47] Right.

[00:14:48] The wager is often caricatured, and you get a straw man version of it,

[00:14:53] which goes something like, Pascal didn't think we had any reason to believe in God.

[00:14:57] But just in case the Christian God is real, you should believe in God so you'll go to heaven and not go to hell.

[00:15:04] And since there are no reasons to believe in God,

[00:15:06] you basically just have to go to church and get brainwashed to believe in God, just in case there's a God.

[00:15:11] Okay, that's about as bad as the caricature gets, but the reality is very different.

[00:15:16] Pascal is dealing with what's called prudential reason,

[00:15:19] and that has to do with the outcomes given certain beliefs.

[00:15:23] Because not all beliefs are that important, but given the Christian claim of heaven and hell through the gospel,

[00:15:31] the message that we are redeemed from hell through the work of Jesus Christ,

[00:15:36] belief in Christ or refusal to believe in Christ is of great significance.

[00:15:41] So if it is true and you fail to believe, then you miss out on eternal life.

[00:15:46] And this is really what Pascal is emphasizing in one of the larger fragments called The Wager.

[00:15:52] There's several different parts to it, and it can get kind of complicated.

[00:15:58] But he says in the first part that because God is so different from us,

[00:16:02] it is difficult to prove God's existence, at least for some skeptics it seems difficult.

[00:16:07] So he says, let's consider the benefits of believing in God if God is there,

[00:16:12] and he means the Christian God.

[00:16:14] And they're just tremendous.

[00:16:16] They really swamp the alternative of getting some finite pleasures in this life and denying Christ.

[00:16:23] So he says, and this is a dialogue in The Wager fragment,

[00:16:28] he says to the unbeliever, you really should believe.

[00:16:31] And the unbeliever says, well, I'd like to, but I can't.

[00:16:34] And then Pascal says, well, there are reasons, the scriptures and the rest,

[00:16:38] but it could be that what's hindering you is really not your reason, theoretically.

[00:16:44] It's more your affection.

[00:16:46] It's more your way of life.

[00:16:48] So we should be involved in religious practices and see if you end up believing.

[00:16:53] And the uncharitable way of putting this is, as Pascal is saying,

[00:16:56] go brainwash yourself by going to church, which is not what he's saying.

[00:17:02] In fact, I have an adage.

[00:17:03] When you think Pascal has said something really stupid or dumb, remember this adage.

[00:17:08] Pascal is smarter than you are.

[00:17:11] Very true.

[00:17:12] Yes.

[00:17:13] But again, I think that Wager is something that all of us at one time or another said,

[00:17:17] look, you know, I might be wrong.

[00:17:19] You might be wrong.

[00:17:20] If I'm wrong, I still live a wonderful life.

[00:17:22] If you're wrong, there are eternal consequences.

[00:17:25] And sometimes I make it stronger.

[00:17:26] And that's something to think about because I want to move on to some of your other chapters.

[00:17:31] And one of those is, let's recognize that he really is both a philosopher, a scientist, and inventor.

[00:17:37] But as a scientist, he understood the nature and limits of science.

[00:17:42] And if he were alive today, or if, say, I don't know, Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker were alive then,

[00:17:50] he'd have some things to say to them because the idea today that's espoused by a lot of people that believe in naturalism,

[00:17:58] that nature is all that there is, there's no supernatural, is that science has explained everything.

[00:18:03] And Pascal really takes on that idea, doesn't he?

[00:18:06] Well, he does, and he does so as, I think, the greatest scientist of the century.

[00:18:12] But he realizes that there are several sources of knowledge.

[00:18:16] One source of knowledge is what we can gain from experimental science.

[00:18:20] Another source is what he calls the heart or rational intuition.

[00:18:25] We know some things about logic and about the world just through this a priori ability that we have as human beings.

[00:18:36] And we can know God in that way, too.

[00:18:38] We can know God in a direct kind of experience.

[00:18:42] But he also thinks that there are reasons to believe in the Christian God.

[00:18:47] He thinks that the biblical account of humanity is the best of all understandings of both our greatness and our misery.

[00:18:54] So there's a positive case for Christianity.

[00:18:56] He believes the Bible contains a lot of fulfilled prophecy, especially for Christ and other things that show that it's a supernatural book, not merely a natural book.

[00:19:06] But he doesn't limit our knowledge to what can be known through science.

[00:19:12] So he was a critic of what we now today call scientism, that knowledge comes only through science.

[00:19:20] And Pascal doesn't make this point, but, of course, that's a contradiction, because the idea that knowledge only comes through science is not a discovery or a theory of science.

[00:19:29] So Pascal's epistemology is very rich.

[00:19:33] He knew the science of his day and also the mathematics, the physics, hydraulics better than anybody.

[00:19:40] But he also realized there are a lot of things that we can't know through what could be called unaided reason.

[00:19:47] Biblical revelation, but that biblical revelation is not against reason.

[00:19:52] It's simply a source of knowledge beyond what we could know simply through science or rational investigation.

[00:19:59] But he thinks believing in Christianity is rational, but we have to go beyond what we could know merely as human beings poking around the world.

[00:20:09] We need the Bible to fill out the picture.

[00:20:12] Let's take a break.

[00:20:12] When we come back, we'll continue our conversation on Beyond the Wager, published by InterVarsity Press.

[00:20:17] I'll get into an individual that was certainly around in his day, and that is another individual by the name of Ray Descartes.

[00:20:25] As a matter of fact, there's an interesting in the appendix kind of an argument that could unfold in heaven between those two.

[00:20:32] And then I thought we'd get into some of the newer chapters, because this chapter on Jesus Christ, miracles and prophecy really gets back to some of the things we've talked about before.

[00:20:43] And if you think that, well, this idea of seeing Old Testament prophecy fulfilled in the life of the Messiah, that is Jesus, is something new.

[00:20:53] You'll realize it was around quite a while before that.

[00:20:55] And so then we'll talk about a chapter on the excellence of Christ, a new chapter that Doug has introduced into this book as well.

[00:21:04] And I think you will find that quite interesting and quite readable.

[00:21:08] 200 pages, including not only these chapters, but very enlightening and kind of humorous interact of what would happen if Descartes and Pascal indeed were engaged in some kind of debate in heaven.

[00:21:21] We'll talk about all that right after these important messages.

[00:21:30] It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority.

[00:21:36] They say men can be women and women men.

[00:21:39] People are prosecuted differently or not at all, depending on their politics.

[00:21:45] Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens.

[00:21:49] It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing.

[00:21:53] You feel like giving up, but we can't.

[00:21:56] We shouldn't.

[00:21:56] We must not.

[00:21:58] As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II,

[00:22:02] Never give in.

[00:22:04] Never give in.

[00:22:05] Never, never, never.

[00:22:06] Never yield to force.

[00:22:08] Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

[00:22:12] And that's what we say to you today.

[00:22:15] This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join point of view in providing clarity in the chaos.

[00:22:22] We can't do it alone, but together, with God's help, we will overcome the darkness.

[00:22:29] Invest in biblical clarity today at pointofview.net or call 1-800-347-5151.

[00:22:38] Pointofview.net and 1-800-347-5151.

[00:22:47] Point of view will continue after this.

[00:22:51] You are listening to Point of View.

[00:23:02] The opinions expressed on point of view do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station.

[00:23:09] And now, here again, is Kirby Anderson.

[00:23:13] To enter our conversation today with Dr. Douglas Gottheis.

[00:23:16] Again, he is the professor of apologetics Christian worldview at Cornerstone University.

[00:23:20] You can find out more about him on our website at pointofview.net.

[00:23:24] And Doug, as an individual that has, of course, written a very significant Christian apologetics book,

[00:23:32] and even before that wrote in what was called the New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics,

[00:23:38] we know that Pascal was trying to develop and wanted to eventually develop an apology of the Christian religion.

[00:23:46] But one of the things that's interesting was whether or not to use or to not use what's called natural theology.

[00:23:55] And that is, we have certain arguments, which are not biblical arguments,

[00:23:59] but they reinforce biblical arguments about, we have technical terms like cosmological argument,

[00:24:06] teleological argument, moral argument, and the rest.

[00:24:08] But the bottom line is how to begin to talk to a non-Christian who is either not necessarily convinced that God exists,

[00:24:19] maybe not convinced that the Bible is true.

[00:24:22] And it seems to me that Pascal had a sort of a different view than what had been developed up until that time.

[00:24:30] Can you explain that?

[00:24:32] Yeah, he did.

[00:24:33] He did.

[00:24:33] He didn't accept the traditional medieval arguments for God's existence,

[00:24:38] which were pretty much the cosmological argument or the design argument.

[00:24:43] He also does refer to Augustine's argument from truth.

[00:24:48] And I want to go back to what I said about if you disagree with Pascal, remember he's smarter than you are.

[00:24:53] And this is one area, Pascal, that I disagree with.

[00:24:56] In fact, I wrote my PhD dissertation on why Pascal rejected natural theology.

[00:25:02] And I concluded that none of his reasons were sufficient, but it took me 300 pages to do it.

[00:25:09] So he probably wrote like 500 words on it.

[00:25:12] It took me 300 pages to make the case against him.

[00:25:15] But you can even bracket that aspect of Pascal.

[00:25:17] He basically thought that the argument didn't go far enough,

[00:25:22] that even if you argue that there's a first cause of the universe or a designer of the universe,

[00:25:28] you haven't made much progress towards your salvation.

[00:25:31] So he was so Christocentric, he wanted the apologetic to always include Christ.

[00:25:36] And that's commendable.

[00:25:38] And I want the apologetic to eventually and as soon as possible get to Christ.

[00:25:43] I remember John Montgomery, who we just lost a couple weeks ago, used to say,

[00:25:48] the goal of apologetics is to bring people to the cross of Christ as soon as possible.

[00:25:52] I agree with that entirely.

[00:25:56] But even if you don't use natural theology, there's still so much in Pascal that is of apologetic benefit.

[00:26:07] And I say, let's use it.

[00:26:08] And I've got 250 pages of natural theology in my apologetics book.

[00:26:13] And then let's also use the arguments that he gave us, which are very profound,

[00:26:18] like the anthropological argument, the argument from prophecy, and so on.

[00:26:23] Another one that comes to mind is his use of skepticism.

[00:26:27] And it does seem to me that that's an important issue.

[00:26:30] Of course, I've oftentimes used the phrase, and I'm sure you have as well,

[00:26:34] that sometimes you run into people that are raising questions, but they aren't really that serious.

[00:26:39] But I do run into many people because the heart cannot accept what the mind rejects.

[00:26:45] And so having a clear understanding of what you want to present, presenting the gospel,

[00:26:52] and certainly this whole idea of skepticism, I think is interesting because it shows up a little bit later

[00:26:58] in that hypothetical debate between certainly Pascal and Descartes, doesn't it?

[00:27:05] Yeah, and there are various ways of dealing with skepticism.

[00:27:09] I call it the ghost that haunts the history of philosophy.

[00:27:13] And you get it today where people say, well, if God really wanted us to know him and he's all-powerful,

[00:27:19] then why are there so many atheist agnostics and skeptics called the problem of the hiddenness of God?

[00:27:25] Right.

[00:27:26] And I think Pascal's greatest insight on that, well, two insights.

[00:27:29] One is, because of the fall, God's existence is a bit hidden to us.

[00:27:36] It's not because God has removed himself or God is not available.

[00:27:40] It's because we are fallen and we have a proclivity to worship the creation rather than the creator,

[00:27:49] as Paul puts it in Romans chapter 1.

[00:27:51] But then another really good insight he has is that we need to seek God.

[00:27:56] And, of course, Jesus said to ask, seek, and to knock.

[00:27:59] And Pascal believes that God has made the universe such that if we want to ignore God, we can.

[00:28:07] We can pursue our own ends.

[00:28:09] We can pursue concerning.

[00:28:12] We can be concerned with the creation at the expense of the creator.

[00:28:15] But God has given us enough clues, enough signs that we can find him.

[00:28:22] And I would amplify that by building in a lot of natural theology.

[00:28:26] But I think the skepticism problem can be solved by virtue of the Christian worldview.

[00:28:31] Yes, it's harder to know everything because of the fall.

[00:28:34] The most important things in life may not be just immediately obvious to us all the time.

[00:28:39] We may need to seek them out, especially the existence and nature of the one true God.

[00:28:45] But God is available.

[00:28:47] And given the wager, we have every incentive to seek out whether or not Christianity is true or not,

[00:28:54] given the realities of heaven and hell.

[00:28:56] Let's look at some of your new chapters, one on Jesus Christ, miracles, and prophecy.

[00:29:01] And I was encouraged to see how much that he used miracles.

[00:29:05] Years ago, I had individuals say to me, well, you sometimes cite these miracles, but people discount them.

[00:29:11] And I said, well, yeah, you can discount them.

[00:29:13] But the people at the time that Jesus lived believed that miracles had taken place and tried to come up with alternative explanations.

[00:29:22] And then the other part of that is the fact that you have biblical prophecies fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

[00:29:28] And these, if you will, biblical arguments are quite profound and are still very useful to us today here in the 21st century, aren't they?

[00:29:41] Must have lost him.

[00:29:42] So let me, if I can get him back, get to talk about that.

[00:29:46] Go with me.

[00:29:46] Go ahead.

[00:29:48] Yeah, I'm sorry.

[00:29:49] Yeah, Pascal defined a miracle as any effect is miraculous when it exceeds the natural powers of the means employed.

[00:29:55] I think that's one of the best definitions of a miracle I've seen.

[00:29:58] Now, notice that doesn't say anything about violating a law of nature or making the universe haphazard.

[00:30:05] It's simply where a supernatural agency is inserted into the world.

[00:30:09] And when you read the Gospels, you see that you can't separate out the miracles from the teaching and the character of Jesus.

[00:30:18] They're so intertwined.

[00:30:19] So if you're going to accept them as historical at all, you really should accept the miracle account and then have a proper understanding of what a miracle is.

[00:30:29] Because the skeptics, the naturalists, sometimes will say, if we allow miracles, then somehow this undermines science because the universe is not regular and intelligible anymore.

[00:30:41] By no means.

[00:30:42] I mean, Pascal was the greatest scientist of his century, and he believed that natural laws exist because God imprinted them on creation.

[00:30:51] And we can discover a lot about the world, but also in the realm of history, which is different than science, like chemistry, physics, biology.

[00:31:01] We find in the biblical record this figure, Jesus, whose teaching and character and life cannot be separated from the miraculous.

[00:31:10] And he also had some good quotes, although they were not developed, about the resurrection as well, that the idea that the disciples made up the story would be absurd.

[00:31:22] He also shows that the fact that we have accounts that are somewhat different from each other is not a liability but actually an asset because that shows there was no collusion.

[00:31:32] There's not just one flat story.

[00:31:35] There is so much in what Pascal left us.

[00:31:40] And so one of the things I'm trying to do in this book is say the wager is brilliant and we need to understand it properly, but there is so much to Pascal that is often not considered.

[00:31:51] And I, as you know, Kirby, do a lot of work in apologetics.

[00:31:54] I've taught it for over 30 years.

[00:31:56] And there are tremendous apologetic resources in Pascal that a lot of people just don't know about.

[00:32:03] Again, just the one on prophecies.

[00:32:05] We're coming to a break.

[00:32:05] I'll just kind of summarize it.

[00:32:07] We'll come back and pick up another point.

[00:32:08] But here, the idea that prophecies recorded in the Old Testament, first of all, many of those fulfilled in the Old Testament period.

[00:32:16] Then other prophecies in the Old Testament fulfilled in the New Testament, as well as prophecies in the Old Testament fulfilled in the first coming of Jesus.

[00:32:25] Others will be fulfilled in the second coming.

[00:32:27] And I thought it's interesting because Pascal says if a single man had written a book foretelling the time and manner of Jesus coming and Jesus to come in conformity with these prophecies, this would carry infinite weight.

[00:32:39] But there is much more here.

[00:32:41] There is a succession of men over a period of 4,000 years coming consistently and invariably one after the other to foretell the same coming.

[00:32:49] There is an entire people proclaiming and existing for 4,000 years to testify in a body to the certainty they feel about it from which they cannot be deflected by whatever threats and persecutions they may suffer.

[00:33:04] This is quite a different order of importance.

[00:33:07] Just one kind of very clear computed commentation and introduction to this whole idea of messianic prophecy.

[00:33:17] And lest anybody doubt the value of that, recently when I was at a National Religious Broadcasters and I was doing an interview, the person I was sitting across from said,

[00:33:27] the reason I became a Christian is when I saw all these Old Testament prophecies literally fulfilled in Jesus Christ, I knew it had to be true.

[00:33:37] Let's take a break.

[00:33:38] We'll continue our conversation on Beyond the Wager.

[00:33:41] All that coming up right after this.

[00:33:43] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth.

[00:34:00] Continue our conversation for a few more minutes with Doug Grothais as we talk about Beyond the Wager,

[00:34:05] the Christian brilliance of Blaise Pascal published by InterVarsity Press.

[00:34:08] And we have information about Dr. Grothais as well as his book and all sorts of other resources on our website, pointofview.net.

[00:34:17] Let's see if we can talk about this new chapter on the excellence of Christ, because you point out, of course, that Jesus worked miracles, that he, of course, had a prophetic pedigree.

[00:34:27] But more importantly, Pascal had a keen awareness, you say, of the centrality that Jesus had in reality, in teaching, his unique identity, his matchless work for our salvation.

[00:34:40] And in some respects, you wanted to include this because people, I think, have missed how central he made that particular claim in terms of his own apologetics.

[00:34:53] Yes, absolutely. There's a quote I like to give when I lecture on this, and I've got this in the book.

[00:34:59] He's summarizing the offices of Christ.

[00:35:01] He says,

[00:35:02] He alone had to produce a great people, elect holy and chosen, lead them, feed them, bring them into the place of rest and holiness, make them holy for God, make them the temple of God, reconcile them with God, save them from God's anger, redeem them from the bondage of sin, which visibly reigns in man, give laws to his people, write these laws in their hearts, offer himself to God for them, sacrifice himself for them, be a spotless sacrifice and himself the sacrificer.

[00:35:31] Having himself to offer up his body and blood, and yet offer up bread and wine to God.

[00:35:38] And you could write a whole Christology just amplifying on each one of those things.

[00:35:43] I divide it into 12 different sections.

[00:35:46] But he emphasizes the identity of Christ, the achievements of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, and also that in Christ all things hold together.

[00:35:57] Christ is not merely a person in history.

[00:36:03] Let me read another quote.

[00:36:29] So he had a very Christocentric work.

[00:36:39] And I've been reading, and I've been reading and reflecting and writing about Pascal for all these years.

[00:36:49] And I've quoted him throughout my several books over the years about Christ.

[00:36:53] But I thought, I really need to bring this together into a chapter and try to explore the very rich, beautiful things he says about Christ.

[00:37:01] Again, knowing reality through Jesus Christ.

[00:37:04] You just gave us that quote.

[00:37:05] Christ in, for us and in us.

[00:37:08] Of course, the suffering of Christ and our own.

[00:37:10] And really, that's a whole sermon series that people can develop from chapter 10.

[00:37:15] But just to keep the train moving a little bit further, another addition, which, again, surprised me when I turned the pages, Christianity, Muhammad and the Jews.

[00:37:25] Now, again, one of the things we talk about on this program is the rise of Islam.

[00:37:30] But certainly during the 17th century, of course, the Muslim world was well known.

[00:37:36] And even though he didn't write a great deal about that, I think it's kind of interesting that this was a chapter that you felt needed to be added.

[00:37:45] Because he contributes to our understanding there as well, doesn't he?

[00:37:50] Well, he does.

[00:37:51] And you only have a few fragments.

[00:37:54] But what he says is really quite profound in terms of the relationship of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

[00:38:01] And just to summarize it, Pascal found no positive evidence to think that Muhammad was a prophet.

[00:38:08] He was not foretold in scripture the way Jesus was.

[00:38:12] He did not make predictions.

[00:38:16] He worked no miracles.

[00:38:17] So Muhammad actually denied truths that were in the Old Testament.

[00:38:23] And, of course, he denied truths in the New Testament, such as the atoning death of Jesus, the incarnation of God in Christ, and so on.

[00:38:33] And he argues that given what we know about Judaism and Christianity, there's really no positive reason to believe in Islam.

[00:38:45] He also says that Islam contains a lot of very clearly absurd teachings.

[00:38:52] And while Christianity, while the Bible has some things that are obscure, the things that are clear are very profound and very significant.

[00:39:00] So we can deal with some of the more obscure things.

[00:39:03] But he says that in Islam, what is clear is just terrible and obscure, like the treatment of women and so on.

[00:39:10] And so if you use this hermeneutic, you see that you can't equally trust the Koran and the scripture because scripture clearly reveals the plan of God.

[00:39:24] And yes, there's some things that are a little troublesome or obscure.

[00:39:28] But what is clear is true and good.

[00:39:30] And there are clear things in the Koran that are neither true nor good.

[00:39:35] So why should we give it the benefit of the doubt, basically?

[00:39:37] Yes.

[00:39:38] So if that was true in the 17th century, it's probably even more true today in the 21st century.

[00:39:42] But I thought I just might mention that you do have an interesting debate in the end, the idea that maybe what would happen if Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal were together in heaven, which they may be.

[00:39:56] It reminded me of Peter Kreft, who's been on the program before.

[00:39:59] He wrote that book years ago, Between Heaven and Hell, a dialogue between John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huckley.

[00:40:05] And this one is, again, interesting.

[00:40:08] You're talking about Descartes and Pascal.

[00:40:11] But you put that in there just, again, kind of hypothetically, but it shows kind of the difference between the two individuals, doesn't it?

[00:40:19] Right.

[00:40:19] Well, I taught the history of philosophy for many years at Denver Seminary, and I would always teach the history of modern philosophy with Descartes and Pascal, probably spending more time on Pascal than Descartes.

[00:40:33] But they lived at roughly the same time.

[00:40:35] Their lives overlapped.

[00:40:36] They may have met once or twice.

[00:40:38] Descartes was probably a little envious of Pascal because he was such a child prodigy and so on.

[00:40:45] And Pascal was also right about the existence of the vacuum in nature, and Descartes was actually wrong about that.

[00:40:52] Descartes thought that nature abhorred a vacuum.

[00:40:55] So I thought it would be fun to bring them together in a kind of dialogue in heaven.

[00:41:01] And I'm a lot more sure that Pascal's there than Descartes, but we'll give Descartes the benefit of the doubt on that one.

[00:41:07] So what would they say about things like skepticism and philosophical method?

[00:41:13] And I think I make some interesting points there, but it's actually kind of lighthearted and fun to see how they might have involved with each other.

[00:41:22] Well, just about out of time, and I do always want to mention a couple of things, and that is, first of all, there is a website, DougGrotheis.com.

[00:41:29] You might say, well, I don't know how to spell it.

[00:41:31] That's okay.

[00:41:31] We have the link on the website, so you don't have to worry about that.

[00:41:35] You, of course, not only will find this book, but Christian Apologetics.

[00:41:39] Might also mention, I just have great respect for Cornerstone University.

[00:41:44] If you are a young person thinking about going off to college or if you are a parent or a grandparent, that would be another place I might encourage you to go and look.

[00:41:54] Because as I understand, Doug, you're not only helping the undergraduates, but you're even helping future seminary students.

[00:41:59] So to learn from you and many of the other great teachers there I think would be a great experience, wouldn't it?

[00:42:06] Well, I think so.

[00:42:07] We're a very strongly evangelical school, and we're committed to historic Christian ethics on sexual ethics.

[00:42:14] We have an excellent faculty.

[00:42:16] We're growing in numbers, and I'm very excited and happy to be here.

[00:42:21] Yes.

[00:42:21] Well, again, for people who don't know, you grew up in Alaska.

[00:42:24] You spent most of your life in Oregon, although for a while in Washington, always West Coast, but all of a sudden he's now in the Midwest.

[00:42:30] So you can find out a little bit more about Doug, and again, that is all available at our website at pointofview.net.

[00:42:37] One last time, the book is entitled Beyond the Wager, The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal.

[00:42:43] It really tells you the incredible story of Blaise Pascal, but also provides about 200 pages of some great insight.

[00:42:50] And if you want to know more about him, maybe learn some of the lessons and even the apologetic tools that he provides,

[00:42:57] it's all available in this book published by InterVarsity Press.

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