Abstract

The third chapter of the Thoughts of Blaise Pascal is presented as a letter that leads us to seek God. The seventeenth century, however, is not yet the ideal space for the freely passionate personal conscience to trace the Spirit wherever it wants to be found. The sensitivity of the philosopher intends first of all to emancipate the religious discourse, to lighten it from the diving suit of terror, which is unjustly placed on it by the most widespread preaching. This leads itself to fueling terror, thus hoping to cause man, small, miserable, and sinner, to take refuge in the faith forcibly induced for a sort of merchandise, which guarantees, in exchange, salvation. Pascal reverses the itinerary and recovers within it the tools of reason and conscience. The search for God appears as a flame lit not by terror, but by what, in comparison, looks like the refined tool of autonomous thought, namely doubt. The certainty of the existence of God is not affirmed either as a dogma or as evidence, it is not a presupposition of reasoning. The presence of God is a hypothesis. It is not irreverent, it does not devalue the value of the research or its purpose. It does not disown the person-God relationship. Rather, he wishes to nourish it from a different perspective, which allows the person to perceive the irreplaceable value of his soul. Following Pascal's discussion on the matter, it is useful to ask ourselves a question that can bring it up to date: why does human life change, based on the hypothesis of whether God exists or not? Keywords: Pascal, God, soul, philosophy of religion