God of philosophers - God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in Pensees of Blaise Pascal

This paper considers an important topic raised in the philosophical and theological meditations of the important 17th-century thinker, Blaise Pascal. More specifically, it elaborates a particular part of Pascals Penses, one which proved to be controversial and which generated many discussions and debates. Pascal started his career as a scientist, but owing to the trials and tribulations of his unusual life, his path was altered. Pascal underwent an epiphany, and we can read about it in some of the fragments left. These fragments contain the intriguing sentence: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not philosophers and scholars". It may make us assume that Pascal offers us a critique of philosophy. On the face of it, it appears to indicate that Pascal (himself a deep thinker) is dismissing philosophy in favour of Theology. But if we explore a bit deeper, we'll see that Pascal does not discard philosophical thought, but merely criticises the exaltation of mind above unreachable absolute truths. We need philosophy, because it opens questions about the world, as well as about the unreachable, but it cannot offer any knowledge of absolute truth. That kind of knowledge is able to revealed only through a faith in infinite itself, in other words - in God.