He ties together the innate idea and certainty of "I" with empirical sense data that must apply and be subject to Gods reason, thus giving him a mixed epistemology. As shown here, reason can know God and give us an understanding of the universe. Descartes would say we can know the world best ! through God. He sums this up in his statement, "Certainty and truth of all knowledge depend alone on the knowledge of the true God. Without this knowledge we cannot have a perfect knowledge of any other thing."Pascal views the universe as knowable but in a very limited sense. As he says, we are lost between two infinities that of the microscopic and that of astronomy, or the telescopic. Pascal had a respect for reason, but reason alone does not go far enough because of its imitations. Pascal has a positive outlook on reason in that he sees thought is our glory. He views us as thinking reeds. Pascal trusts and uses reason though he sees another side to reason, there is the deception and trickery that occurs between our reason and our senses. Pascal would say that to know the universe is to know God, and this we cannot know through reason. In this case whether God exists or not, reason is absolutely useless. Pascal states this again in the Pensees, "According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions." According to Pascal, to know we must use our heart. Our heart has its reasons, which we cannot know by! reason alone. In section 278 of the Pensees, Pascal writes "It is the heart which experience's God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason." It is for this reason that Pascal would disagree that human reason could know the universe best. Knowledge of God is not available to linear logic. It is beyond reason, we are not dreaming by heart, it is only by the heart that we can really know. The major difference between Descartes ...
