Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (18 page)

Part of the reason for the attraction Carneades still exerts is the mystery around his views. Like Socrates, he wrote nothing down. This absence fed the wonder, curiosity, and contentiousness of his acolytes. Nowhere was the debate more intense than in discussion of his views about the gods. The later tradition knew him best for his arguments that belief in gods is illogical.

His first went as follows. If gods are superior to humans, then they must be able to sense things, because they cannot lack any capacity that humans have. In fact, they must have more senses than humans, because they are better than us. Yet sensation is a form of vulnerability to outside influence: if the gods can taste sweet things and bitter things, they can experience pleasure and distress in response to factors beyond their control. This means that gods are vulnerable, in that other forces can make them feel pain, and if they are vulnerable, they are in principle subject to decay.
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Another of Carneades’s arguments attacked the idea that divinities can be morally rational. Its central principle was that the gods cannot be both entirely good and moral, since morality depends upon the possibility of doing wrong. If a god is good, Carneades reasoned, he cannot be prudent, because prudence implies the ability to choose among different available courses. If the god is entirely good, the wrong course will never occur to him. He therefore has no capacity to make rational moral choices. The same goes for justice: only humans can be just, since justice depends on the capacity to make wise judgments between options that present themselves. A perfect god simply would not have the option of taking the unjust path. Similarly with the avoidance of bodily pleasures: gods, surely, never display temperance because they are never tempted. Nor can they be brave, since they can never feel pain or suffering. The target of this argument was the Stoics, who saw rationality as defined by the capacity to make correct moral judgments. Since the argument proves that the gods cannot make moral judgments, it follows that the gods also (on the Stoic model) lack rationality.
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His most famous argument, however, sought to show that gods cannot exist at all. It is a variant of the so-called
s
ō
rit
ē
s
or “heaping” argument, which seeks to destabilize our belief in categories (such as the idea of a heap) that we normally take for granted. In its most basic form it goes as follows. I can get you to agree that a single grain does not make a heap. I can also get you to agree that two grains do not make a heap. Nor three. We then proceed like this sequentially, never reaching a cutoff point between a pile of individual grains and a heap. It is not the case, for example, that 300 grains are a heap, whereas 299 are not. I can get you to accept that there is no point where adding a single grain makes the pile become a heap. And the reverse is also true: if we begin with what we both agree to be a heap, there is no point where removing a single grain will cause the heap to stop being a heap. Therefore, since we feel we know what a heap is but cannot define it systematically, any claim that “this is a heap” is neither true nor false. The concept of the heap cannot be securely defined. Similarly if I have one coin I am not rich, nor if I have two, and so forth, so richness is not securely defined either. Carneades ingeniously applied the
s
ō
rit
ē
s
argument to gods. If we accept that the Olympians are gods, then what about nymphs? And if we accept nymphs, then what about Pan? And what about the satyrs that follow Pan? But no one would call satyrs gods. So where does the dividing line exist between one kind of immortal and another? Or take water. Poseidon, identified with the ocean, is a god; so are many rivers; but would we say that every trickling stream is a god? How much water is required to qualify for divinity? As with the classic version of the
s
ō
rit
ē
s,
there is no single point where adding an ounce of water will convert a mere stream into a deity. No secure definition of “god” is possible, since there is no sharp boundary that separates the divine from the nondivine.
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It is often assumed by modern scholars that Carneades was not atheist, merely a Skeptic wishing to prove the weakness of traditional arguments for the nature. This, indeed, is what the great Roman statesman Cicero, who preserves many of his arguments, thought. Late in his life, in the midst of the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar (he played a major role behind the scenes), he took time out to write a philosophical dialogue,
On the Nature of the Gods.
The three speakers are Velleius (representing the Epicureans), Balbus (the Stoics), and Cotta (the Skeptics, with whom Cicero affiliated). “Carneades used to say these things,” says Cotta, “not in order to remove the gods (for what could be less fitting for a philosopher?), but to convict the Stoics of explaining nothing about the gods.”
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But should we necessarily be taking Cicero at face value? After Carneades’s death, the Academy split two ways. In the one camp were those who cleaved to what they saw as the older, more fundamentalist form of Skepticism: these, led by Carneades’s successor in the Academy, Clitomachus (ca. 187–110 BC), argued that suspension of judgment (
epokh
ē
) was the ultimate aim of Skepticism. The other, led by Metrodorus of Stratonicea, believed that it was in fact legitimate for Skeptics to take reasoned positions on issues, as long as they accepted that these positions were in principle fallible. Now, Cicero was taught by Philo of Larissa, an adherent of the Metrodoran position. So it is unsurprising to find him arguing (through the mouthpiece of his character Cotta) that Carneades held the view that gods exist despite his arguments. Clitomachus, on the other hand, would probably have made a very different reading; he would surely have argued that Carneades meant to show that belief in the gods was impossible, and we should not commit either way.
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Clitomachus himself was an interesting and important figure. He was born in Carthage (in modern Tunisia) with the name Hasdrubal, like the father of Hannibal, Rome’s famous assailant. Initially he taught philosophy at Carthage in Punic, a Semitic language originating in Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) and closely related to Hebrew. He then relocated to Athens and was recognized for his talent by Carneades, who took him under his wing; eventually, Clitomachus succeeded him as head of the Academy. If Carneades’s fame was built partly on the absence of writing, then Clitomachus more than adequately compensated: he was said to have written more than four hundred treatises. Not one of these has come down to us, but it is clear from later sources that Clitomachus was deeply interested in the question of atheism, and indeed that he compiled a compendium of philosophical atheists: they included Protagoras, Prodicus, Diagoras, Critias, Theodorus, Euhemerus, and Epicurus. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Clitomachus, building on Carneades’s collection of anti-theistic arguments, may have invented the idea of atheism as a coherent movement with its own deep history. It is likely that he wrote a book called
On Atheism,
which distilled the history of religious skepticism up to his own day. Clitomachus can claim one of the foremost places in the history of religious disbelief: he not only identified and named atheism as a distinct philosophical position but also mapped out its different varieties.
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The formative role of Skepticism in the creation of philosophical atheism cannot be overstated. Since there were swaths of arguments for the existence of gods (the Stoics were particularly fond of these), and since for the Skeptic every argument had to have a counterargument, they dedicated themselves assiduously to proving that gods cannot exist. It is a great shame that Clitomachus’s
On Atheism
does not survive, but its influence can be felt in the writings of a major Roman philosopher. In the late second or early third century AD, a man called Sextus wrote several huge works in Greek on Skepticism, which have survived largely intact. These, collectively, are the most important compendium of Skeptical arguments. About Sextus himself little is known. He followed the Pyrrhonian tradition of Skepticism rather than the Academic (that of Carneades and Clitomachus); the distinction is, fundamentally, that whereas the Academics can tolerate the belief that nothing can be determined, the Pyrrhonists reject even that as dogma (in fact, they would not even be willing to commit to the belief that they do not believe in dogma!). Sextus was a doctor, a fact reflected in the nickname Empiricus that still attaches to him today. (The
empeirikoi,
“Empiricists,” believed that observation and trial were a better guide to medicine than theory.) But beyond that, his value to us is primarily as a repertory for Skeptical ideas on all sorts of topics.
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Sextus was an aggressive opponent of the dogmatists, those philosophers who believe they can say things confidently about the world (i.e., all philosophers apart from the Skeptics). Dogmatic views of the gods drew his particular attention, since it is assertions about the supernatural that tend to be proclaimed with the most confidence and the least rigor. He devotes 180 dense chapters to arguments against the existence of gods. Many of these arguments, in all likelihood, reflect the pioneering work done by Carneades and Clitomachus in establishing atheism as a philosophically reputable position. Sextus’s point is not, of course, to prove that gods do not exist, just to prove that you cannot decide the matter one way or the other. “The Skeptics,” he opines, “have declared that, because the arguments on either side are equally strong, the gods exist no more than they do not.” The Skeptic, he asserts, follows the ancestral practice of public ritual but finds that he cannot commit philosophically to believing in any form of deity. To this end, he also lists the claims of the believers, equal weight being given to both. There is no presumption in favor of the religious. In this respect, Sextus really does stand at the dawn of modernity. His catalogue of arguments on either side is arguably the most important evidence for a sustained, coherent attack on the existence of the gods in antiquity.
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Sextus pitches theist and atheist arguments against each other and lets them slug it out inconclusively. To get a flavor for these claims, and a sense of how influential they have been on the ways in which atheist critique still operates, we should pick our way through them in some detail.

He begins with theories about the origins of beliefs in the gods. First of all he considers the fifth-century BC notion that religion derived from primitive humanity, in its wild and bestial phase. Seeing the need to check wrongdoing, early lawmakers invented the idea of gods as a moral police force (this derives from Critias’s Sisyphus). This argument Sextus dismisses, for it does not explain how all peoples across the Earth came to a similar conception of deity. He then considers the theory, which derives from the sophist Prodicus, that humans began to ascribe divine qualities to things that benefited them, like the sun and the moon, bread (Demeter) and wine (Dionysus). Here too Sextus is unconvinced, since this view attributes too much naïveté to primitive humans, particularly when it comes to things like water and food: Who would think of perishable items as divine? Finally, there is Democritus’s idea that humans are susceptible to
eid
ō
la,
impressive images that contain intimations of future events; early humans confused these
eid
ō
la
with gods. Others attribute thoughts of the divine to dream apparitions, or more generally to the awe that follows from observation of celestial marvels: thunder, lightning, meteors, eclipses. Here Sextus’s primary objection is that this doesn’t explain why people associate these visions with gods in the first place: they will need to have had a sense of the divine in the first place in order to do this. So it doesn’t get to the root cause. The older, sophistic arguments about the invention of religion, then, are in his view not credible.
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Sextus now proceeds to list the atheists throughout history, probably following the catalogue of Clitomachus: Protagoras, Diagoras of Melos, Prodicus, Theodorus, Euhemerus, Critias, Epicurus. He does not delve into their views into any great detail, except to cite the Sisyphus fragment in the most complete form in which we have it. (This is the snippet of Athenian drama that proposes that the police-force view of the gods was the work of a cynical lawgiver.) He pits the atheists against the views of philosophers who assert the existence of gods. These come in four different types.
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First of all in this section is the question of whether the fact that most cultures have a concept of belief in gods is evidence for their existence. (The modern descendant is the claim that humans are neurologically “wired” for religion.) The atheists, however, reply that there are all sorts of misconceptions about the world that are widespread, such as the idea of eternal punishment in the afterlife (how can a body be damaged—presumably progressively—for eternity?). The fact that many people believe in something does not make it true. Some dogmatists (he means the Stoics) come up with the counterargument that popular belief, even if it correctly pinpoints divinity as a higher entity, is simply wrong in this kind of mythological detail. Sextus postpones any direct rebuttal of this claim. The important point for now is just that the Stoics actually agree that popular views of divinity are misguided, and so, he implies, they actually undermine any argument that the near universality of belief offers evidence for the existence of gods.
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Second comes the theist argument from the orderly design of the universe, which Sextus confects from a variety of different sources, mostly Stoic. This is an early version of William Paley’s watchmaker analogy: when we see apparent perfection in the orbiting of the heavenly bodies, for example, we cannot but posit a supremely gifted and benevolent creator behind it. In antiquity this idea was most associated with the “craftsman” of Plato’s
Timaeus.
Sextus’s example is (naturally) not a watch; he chooses as his analogy the orrery invented by Archimedes (of eureka fame), a mechanism that enacted the orbits of the planets and stars around (of course) the Earth. When we see this, we praise Archimedes; by the same token, when we observe the heavenly bodies in perfect motion we should praise the creator of the universe. Sextus also adds some Aristotle into the mix: what explains the orderly movement of the celestial bodies must be a force that is itself not moved by any other thing, in other words the Aristotelian “prime mover.” He then stirs in a generous helping of Stoic cosmology. The explanation for regular movement and for the rhythms of nature is that there is a “power” pervading all things and unifying them into a harmonious entity directed toward a good purpose; this power should be identified with the god of the universe. The recipe is topped off with the argument that the regular order of the universe is similar in kind to the reason that we possess as humans; therefore a rational order pervades the universe, and the reasoning capacity of each one of us is a tiny fragment of that divine totality. In Stoic language, reason is the ruling or “hegemonic” part of us, and what rules the universe must be the cosmic god.
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