Is it still possible to bet on God?

Let's face it: we like prepackaged answers and we love to find ourselves in absolute truths. We also tend to flock and make our own the ideas that are popular. It is, after all, the mechanism that feeds communication on the web, where the writer goes in search of “likes” and the reader pursues the comfort for his own opinion.

In this climate of general flattening the short essay "God in the uncertain" (Leg Edizioni, 2021, pp. 120) by statistician Roberto Volpi represents a healthy ripple in the intellectual calm waters in which we are immersed, a necessary breath of fresh water in general conformism. It is, in fact, a book really out of the chorus compared to the mainstream of contemporary thought, a book that tries to give an alternative reading with respect to certain conceptions on the origin of everything, on the role of man and his impact on the planet where it lives.

Volpi reminds us how by now “we have been educated by the blessed neo-Darwinism which has so many merits (along with some demerits) to think about it downwards. Our galaxy? Peripheral. Our star, the sun? Anonymous. Our planet? Small. The genus Homo? A twig among many of the bush of life. Our species, Sapiens? A leaf among the many of that twig of that bush. Sapiens? A living creature whose mind is but a variation of the mind of animals. And so on and on always diminishing, so that we are led to ask ourselves how it is possible that this model, so to speak, of proven mediocrity could be unmatched in the world universe ".

Yet, Volpi suggests, for now this is what has happened and despite the fact that space has been scrutinized for decades by increasingly powerful telescopes and visited by probes that are increasingly lavish with information, the uniqueness of the human being has not been - always for now - scratched.

The book then, without wanting to impose literal readings of the Holy Scriptures or bizarre theories or various terrapiattisms, challenges us to accept a bet: that there may be space in our model of thought for God, for creation, for faith. It offers us a chance to imagine alternative answers to what not even science has been able to fully explain, that is, what is the origin of that whole to which we belong and of which we are, despite errors, protagonists. Is the origin in the Big Bang as many scientists claim, or was the first breath of life something else? Roberto Volpi does not have a prepackaged answer. The goal is something else, higher, as the author writes: "We would like more clearly and explicitly, but without partisanship, to relaunch the great challenge between creation and evolution, between God and chance - concepts and terms that the culture of the time wants antithetical and mutually excluding each other without being in all respects - framing it in the context that, according to the writer, suits her best: that of probability and bet, the bet that Blaise Pascal resorted to at the time to talk about God and move men to embrace God. A context in which other decisive problems also find their place, which complete the discourse, which have come to light particularly in our years of great scientific discoveries and equally great ecological fears for our future ”.

The themes addressed by Roberto Volpi are therefore very topical, but proposed with a surprising reading and capable of stimulating debate and also neurons. An even more stimulating reading because it is accompanied by the simplicity of the writing and the language used. While also addressing technical topics related to the author's field of study - statistics and the calculation of probabilities - or philosophical issues, Volpi does not indulge in technicalities and focuses on a flat, controlled, deliberately sparse writing, far from any mannerism.

All without bias and without shouting theses, but simply proposing the idea that there may be positions other than the dominant ones or that the search for truth passes from having no preconceptions ... giving oneself the possibilities and probabilities to choose.