Abstract

Modern Christian apologetics can be traced back to Pascal. Like Descartes, from whom he is otherwise so different, Pascal took seriously the new world view opened up by navigators like Columbus, astronomers like Copernicus, and the incomparable underminer of old certainties, Montaigne. For his part, Pascal sought to reinvent not philosophy, like Descartes, but rather Christianity itself, by scrutinising the human condition candidly and showing it to be most persuasively accounted for by Christian revelation.