Pascal's 'Orders' Viewed Through the Lens of the Philosophy of Rush Rhees

This thesis argues that a close reading of the writings of Rush Rhees on religious belief can offer a deeper insight into Blaise Pascal’s apologetics, in particular his understanding of the three ‘orders’ by which the searcher can come to true faith. It proceeds by close readings of Pascal and Rhees’s presentations of the nature of belief, religious and secular, and its relationship with philosophy and man’s/woman’s place in the contemporaneous world. The views of the two writers on the intelligibility and reality of life and the limits of human understanding of God’s reality are compared. The following synthesis is essentially a study of the epistemology of Pascal and Rhees and brings into comparison Pascal’s presentation of the role of principles with Rhees’s analysis of Moore’s propositions and world-picture/form of life. The role of custom and habit in coming to ‘human faith’ is then compared with language, conversation, community, and ritual. The ‘dawning’ of belief is investigated through Rhees’s, and Wittgenstein’s, views on aspect-seeing and ‘wonder’. It is concluded that Rush Rhees’s philosophy of religion offers a modern re-appraisal of Blaise Pascal’s apologetics. This applies particularly to the role of habit and custom in coming to God-given faith but is by no means confined to it. The thesis reveals how Rhees’s concepts of the nature of God, world-picture, hinge propositions and the unchallenged foundations of belief can be applied to provide an effective challenge to the pervasive scientific ‘spirit’ of modern secularism by offering an alternative epistemology and clearer understanding of the difference between knowledge and belief.