In seeking to persuade, either in apologetics or in academic writing, what is our task? It is not, Pascal warns us, simply to stack up the facts in favour of our case. That will never penetrate to the heart of the matter, because it will never penetrate to the human will. It is the will that directs and marshals which facts we choose to dwell on, and what meaning we give to them:
There is an universal and essential difference between the actions of the will and all other actions.
The will is one of the chief factors in belief, not that it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect in which we look at them. The will, which prefers one aspect to another, turns away the mind from considering the qualities of all that it does not like to see; and thus the mind, moving in accord with the will, stops to consider the aspect which it likes, and so judges by what it sees.
To persuade is not to change the “things” we see (or at least should not be, on pain of dishonesty) but to change the way that people look at and understand those things, which things they see as important, and which things they use as interpretative frameworks to understand others. This is true of the way people see Christianity; it is true of political positions; it is true of debates within and between academic disciplines.
The way we see things is not determined solely by the things themselves, any more than the way a young love-struck romantic sees his beloved is determined solely by the beloved herself. Pascal says “The will is one of the chief factors in belief”: if we want not to believe a given thing, or if we want to reject a given position, then we will find reasons and “facts” that induce us to do just that, and the hapless apologist who addresses such a rejection with yet more facts is merely throwing wood on a fire in the hope of dampening it down.
To persuade is to change not what is seen, but the aspect in which it is seen. One consequence of this fundamental realisation about human belief formation is that it is no mere appendage to an apology for the Christian faith–or to any argument that seeks to persuade for that matter–to show how it is not simply true, but also good and beautiful. In fact, seeing a position as good and beautiful more often than not precedes any assent to its truthfulness.
Pascal will have much more to say about the importance of convincing people that they should want Christianity to be true before convincing them that it is true. Much the same could be said of any argument in the arts and social sciences: if we have not convinced someone that they should want something to be true, they will not invest the effort in finding out whether it is true, and if for some reason they do investigate the matter they will likely see the “facts” in its favour as supporting the view of things in which their will has been truly invested all along.