What remains of the divine order?

Rouen, autumn 1642. My father spent twelve hours a day calculating tax assessments by hand, and twelve hours were not enough. He was Commissioner for Taxes in Normandy, responsible for verifying the arithmetic of every collector in the region, and the work was destroying him. I was nineteen. I built him a machine.

The Pascaline carries and borrows automatically. The operator turns a wheel; the gears handle the rest. It does not make errors of fatigue. It does not become distracted. I built fifty of them over the following decade, each one more reliable than the last, and sold almost none, because the calculating clerks rightly perceived that a machine that did their work was a machine that replaced them. The instrument was superior. The institution resisted it. This is not unusual.

What I did not anticipate — and should have — is that a machine which computes without error does not eliminate uncertainty. It eliminates a particular category of error, the arithmetic kind, while leaving every other uncertainty intact. My father still had to decide which assessments were valid, which collectors were corrupt, which appeals were legitimate. The Pascaline handled the sums. The judgement remained irreducibly human, and irreducibly fallible, and no mechanism I could build would change that.

The wager I am working on now is a different kind of problem. Whether God exists cannot be computed. The stakes are infinite; the probabilities are unknown; the decision must be made with the instruments available, which are inadequate. This does not excuse us from deciding. It is the structure of all serious questions: insufficient evidence, unavoidable choice, asymmetric consequences. We build the machine for the arithmetic. We sit with the uncertainty that remains.