Alessandro Mingione's Reviews > The Nature of the Gods

What you’ll learn from this book has less to do with the subject matter itself—the nature of God(s), the cosmos, and well, nature itself—and more with the philosophical fistfights between the Stoics and the Epicureans. The two take turns in arguing the existence of God(s) and the interest and influence they have over our lives: by discussing this, they give insight into their understanding of the natural world and what questions kept intellectuals busy in a world without microscopes.

I read this book for a philosophy class on Stoicism, but ironically it made me more curious about the Epicureans: while the Stoics believed that the mere sight of the pretty night sky makes the existence of God self-evident, Epicureans applied a great deal of intellectual rigor to questioning the existence of superior beings, going as far as posing the “problem of evil” that has plagued the Christian religion ever since.