(February 24, 2014 at 5:50 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(February 24, 2014 at 1:59 am)Minimalist Wrote: Then again, he was a catholic so dumb comes naturally.
Pascal was a genius of the first order. To imply that his off-again-on-again Catholicism made 'dumb' his natural state displays a stunning ignorance of his contributions to mathematics and physics.
Yes, his Wager his a hideously flawed argument, filled with holes you could drive an articulated lorry through, but so what?
Study up on Pascal. He was anything but 'dumb'.
Boru
Even if his wager was meant as a serious argument, instead of trollbait, it would only be an example of dumb in the religious sense. Pascal was indeed a genius, but how many other bright individuals have had a blindspot where religion - or some other intellectual short-circuit - is concerned? Newton's contributions to physics is incalculable, but he was still a practising alchemist. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while arguably a literary genius, still wanted desperately to believe in fairies.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
