L’altra scommessa

Pascal’s wager, whose 400th anniversary of his birth falls in June 2023, was about God. Man is a tragic being, without hope, argued the pessimist Pascal, so it is better to bet on the existence of God: nothing is lost and everything is gained. Antonio Pascale’s bet is a different one, and it is not about the existence of God, but it starts from the following question: can we use Pascal’s pessimism to investigate human nature in a secular way? To understand why human beings have invented God and stories? How do we move and why do we ask ourselves what is convenient and what is not? So the other wager is to link pessimism to the search for the reasons that make life worth living. Moreover, pessimism is the lever to answer: did the idea of God arise from the empty stomach of us humans? If the idea of God was born to honor those who feed us, if the idea of God is to fill an emptiness, then it makes sense to ask what happened to the emptiness from which everything was born. Antonio Pascale, with the sharpness and irony of his pen and head, thinks about how we are trying to fill that void. A pamphlet on the necessity of pessimism and the novelty of atheism.