Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (19 page)

The next argument for gods is more pragmatic, and once again familiar to modern eyes. Without a sense of divinity, it is argued, we cannot have various forms of moral behavior: piety, holiness, and justice, all of which are types of action directed toward the gods. If there is no belief in the gods, there is no belief in a universal criterion of moral goodness; ethical behavior will be impossible. What is more, if gods are held not to exist, then nor can prophecy—in which very many people believe. Atheism, then, threatens the moral fabric of society.
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The final set of theistic claims is based on a logical syllogism, which is to say a three-step argument from premises to conclusion. Typically the syllogism takes a form such as: “All mammals breathe air [premise]. Kangaroos are mammals [premise]. Therefore kangaroos breathe air [conclusion].” Zeno, the Stoic founder, had argued, “It would be reasonable for someone to honour the gods [premise]. It is not reasonable to honour beings that do not exist [premise]. Therefore gods exist [conclusion].” Sextus, however, disputes the logic of this syllogism, offering a counterexample, which depends upon exploiting a peculiarity of Stoic belief. Stoics maintained that the ideal for a human is to become truly wise, but that this state has never been attained by anyone. Here, then, is the contrary syllogism: “It would be reasonable for someone to honor a truly wise person; it would not be reasonable to honor someone who did not exist; therefore truly wise people exist.” (To update the example in contemporary terms, we could substitute a morally perfect person.) The point of this alternative syllogism is to show the weakness of the original, by parodying an opponent’s argument so as to produce an unpalatable result. Zeno’s successor, Diogenes of Babylon, responded to such criticisms by amending the second premise of Zeno’s syllogism to “it is not reasonable to honor those who could not, in their nature, exist.” The revised version rules out the existence of the truly wise (who could not exist) and rules in the existence of the gods (who could). Eagle-eyed Sextus, however, notes that the assumption that it is possible for gods to exist is simply asserted here; it remains entirely unproven. So the syllogism demonstrates nothing if we are not already inclined to believe in gods. Sextus adds an additional objection: honoring gods, in the sense of performing ritual activities, is not the same as believing that they exist. We may remember that he has already argued that the Skeptic should take part in religious activities without actually committing philosophically to believing in gods. It might in fact be perfectly rational to honor the gods publicly without believing that they exist (which is in fact exactly what the early Stoic Persaeus did).
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Sextus now switches to arguments on the other side, against the existence of gods, beginning with a series of attacks on the notion of a divinity as an absolute ideal. The first we have already met: it is Carneades’s proposal that if the gods are capable of sensation then they are capable of sensing negative stimuli, so they are subject to change for the worse, and hence decay. Next: Is a divinity finite or finite? If it is infinite, then it cannot move, since it encompasses all the space into which it could possibly move. If it is infinite, moreover, it must lack intelligence (or “soul”), since intelligence is a form of motion from the mind to the rest of the organism. But the idea of a deity that cannot move or think is counterintuitive. Conversely, however, we cannot imagine a god that is less than infinite, since that god will then be lesser than the cosmos around it.

Sextus’s following atheistic argument depends upon commonsense Greek assumptions about the nature of the body. Does the god have a body or not? Sextus asks. If not, then it cannot have a soul (and hence the ability to reason), for only bodies can have souls. But if it does, then it is subject to decay, for that is the nature of bodies. Next comes an extended version of Carneades’s argument about morality. If the gods are perfect, then they must be moral. But morality depends by definition on the suppression of nonmoral impulses: you cannot, for example, display bravery in a situation where you are not threatened; you cannot display sexual continence unless you are experiencing sexual temptation. So if the gods are moral they must also be morally fallible. Similarly, if the gods are capable of reaching good decisions, they must have the capacity to make bad ones (since decision making necessarily involves selecting the best option from a range of possibilities). In fact, gods cannot even possess any kind of virtue. Virtue is not born in us. We do not call the ability to breathe or eat virtuous. It is only when we carefully and laboriously develop certain features in our character—say, the ability to resist temptation, or self-sacrifice for others, or a rigorous training regime or work ethic—that we can be said to be virtuous. But gods, in their very nature, can see or do anything. They cannot be virtuous, because they do not need to work on anything. If, however, a deity can be said to lack virtue, it is morally deficient and therefore not a god.
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Sextus is not finished yet. If gods possess moral virtue, would we not say that virtue is separate from them? After all, you cannot be said to “possess” something if that thing is actually identical to you. But virtue must exist on a higher level than its possessor: we would not say that any individual is as courageous as courage itself. The abstract virtue of courage is always more courageous than anyone who possesses it. So gods are deficient in that they are less virtuous than the virtues themselves. This argument is a rather specialized one and depends on an idea that ultimately goes back to Plato’s metaphysical theory according to which qualities like courage, beauty, and so forth exist as abstract “forms,” whereas individual courageous and beautiful beings and things have only a share in the forms themselves.
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The next stage in the demolition, however, is more familiar from modern atheistic arguments: it involves subjecting the claims of the religious about their gods to the laws of the known, physical world. Sextus concentrates, initially, upon language. We all think of the gods as speaking, both to one another and to us (through prophecy, dreams, and so forth). Do they, then, have lungs, windpipes, tongues, mouths? How, otherwise, would they speak? Exactly what kind of anatomical endowments do we imagine that gods have? (We could extend Sextus’s line of reasoning further: Do they have saliva? Do they then spit? And do they have teeth? Do these teeth accumulate plaque? And so forth.) And then again: What languages do they speak? And which dialect of that language? Do they need interpreters when they communicate with different language groups? Indeed, what is a god’s body made of? Is it formed from one single substance, or is it a compound of many different ones? If it is a compound, surely it is capable of dissolution? After all, any process of compounding is capable of being undone. But if the god’s body is made of a single substance, then that substance must be one of the elements, which Sextus takes to be earth, fire, air, or water. If that is the case, then the god cannot have a soul or a rational faculty. A god without the ability to reason is unthinkable.

Sextus completes his anti-theist barrage with Carneades’s “heaping” argument, which he clearly considers the jewel in the crown of the atheist claims. Sextus’s stated intention, naturally, is to prove that the Skeptics should suspend judgment on the question of the gods. In doing so, however, he provides the earliest surviving compendium of arguments against the existence of gods and the earliest surviving treatment of atheism as a unified philosophical tradition. Yet these arguments almost certainly did not all originate with him: many of them, if not all, must go back to Clitomachus in the second century BC, that prodigious figure in the history of atheism.

F
or most of antiquity, if you had asked anyone “Who are the
atheoi
?” the answer would have been immediate: the Epicureans. The modern Hebrew word for “atheist,”
apikoros,
testifies to the enduring nature of this association.

In around 306 BC Epicurus (whose name means “helper”) moved from the island of Samos to Athens and bought a plot of land just outside the city walls, not far from Plato’s Academy. This plot was to be known as the
k
ē
pos,
“garden,” and it symbolized Epicurus’s philosophy. The aim of Epicureanism was to remove psychic disturbance and find
ataraxia,
“tranquility.” Epicureans were not seekers after bodily indulgence, as the English word “epicurean” suggests, although plenty of their ancient enemies accused them of that. Rather, they sought to avoid activities that led to stress and conflict—“Live unnoticed” was a famous motto—and adjust their attitudes so as to remove from their souls all turbulence and fear. Anxieties, Epicurus taught, spring from
kenodoxiai,
“empty opinions.”
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Chief among the false opinions are misconceptions of the supernatural. Epicureans were strict naturalists. Developing the doctrines of the fifth-century BC atomists Leucippus and Democritus, they insisted that everything in the universe is composed of an infinite number of indestructible, unbreakable particles of matter, the atoms, which are continually in motion, albeit not always predictably (thanks to the famous “swerve”), and of an infinite stretch of void. There is nothing beyond the universe (for it has no outer boundary). The human soul, too, is made of atoms, fine atoms that resemble wind and heat. When we die, our souls immediately dissolve, as the body will in time. There is, therefore, no afterlife. This theory of matter is also allied to the larger aim of generating tranquility, since misunderstandings about the nature of death are the biggest cause of anxiety. “Death is nothing to us,” Epicurus wrote, “for that which is dissolved has no feelings, and that which has no feelings is nothing to us.” Death is not painful, for the dead cannot feel anything; it is simply the dissolution of one particular cluster of atoms.
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What of the gods? At first sight, the Epicurean view of the universe has no need for divinity, since everything can be explained in purely material terms. Yet for all that, Epicurus was insistent that gods do exist and was fiercely critical of atheists. “First, reckon that the god is an indestructible and blessed being…do not impute to him anything that is incompatible with indestructibility or blessedness.” (“The god,” to be clear, does not imply monotheism; it is a common philosophical shorthand for divinity in general.) But, he continues, the gods are not as the many believe them to be; in fact, it is more impious to believe in the gods of popular tradition than to deny them. The most destructive misapprehension is the belief that they intervene in the world of humans. Gods did not create the universe, nor do they order it. We can understand nature only if we grasp the physical laws of the world. And when it comes to the way that human beings live their lives, we must take responsibility for all of our choices and not hide behind excuses of external compulsion. The gods live remote from our lives and take no interest in them.
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Epicurus believed that perceptions that we have of the world around us are accurate; they are caused by atomic flow into our sensory organs, and atoms (along with void) are the constituents of reality. Given that the majority of people, in all cultures, have a conception of a divinity of humanoid form, and indeed perceive gods in their dreams (and occasionally in waking visitations), that conception must—so he reasoned—be true. We must have a built-in, natural ability to grasp the divine. In other words, it is Epicurus’s theory of perception that leads him to believe in gods. If people see gods in dreams and epiphanies, they must be real.
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But what does it mean to say that gods are real? They are obviously not real in the sense that you could choose to visit them or touch them. They are not empirically testable or tangible. For a philosophy predicated on the idea that reality consists entirely of matter and void, this is a serious problem. Epicurus and his successors struggled with this. The perception of gods, they held, was different in kind from other forms of perception. We see gods not with our senses but with our minds alone; that explains why we witness them predominantly in dreams and imaginative moments, when our minds are working but not our eyes. Now, Epicurus thought that we perceive the material world around us because objects emit atoms, which enter our sense organs. To explain the perception of gods, via the mind rather than the senses, he offered an extension of that model: unlike regular matter, gods consist of superfine particles, which can be detected only by our minds, not our senses. Thanks to our natural, built-in capacity to conceptualize gods, the mind processes this atomic flow as indicating divinity.
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There are all sorts of philosophical difficulties with this idea. If Epicurus’s view is that everything in the world is made of matter and void, and that matter can be perceived by the five senses, how are we to accommodate the fact that gods are not corporeal in the normal sense and cannot be perceived through the senses? The solution that we see them in our mind’s eye while dreaming seems unsatisfactory, for not all things that we see in dreams are real: we may dream, for example, of ourselves flying, or of an animal changing shape. Are the gods any more real than all of the other oddities we dream of? At issue here is the question of whether we perceive anything real in our dreams and imaginations. Epicureans believed that all perception is true, in the sense that all sensations are caused by the impact of material atoms. But even on that account, there must surely be some room for brain malfunction through madness or drugs, or for failure of the sensory organs. What is more, on Epicurus’s own account, the nature of the gods can be misunderstood (as it is by poets and the majority of people): the idea that we can encounter gods in our world, in particular, is seen as a fundamental error. Epicurus would no doubt say that in such cases our perceptions are accurate but that our interpretation of them is wrong: we have formed a false belief about the gods on the basis of them. But this leaves open the further problem, which he does not seem to have addressed: Who is to say that these things that we witness in our dreams are gods at all? Could we not simply have misinterpreted a true perception of something quite different? A version of this issue, indeed, is still with us. One of the standard arguments for the existence of divinity is the claim that many the world over have spoken of encountering the divine. The question then becomes whether such encounters mark a real experience, however remote, of the divine (like Epicurus’s dreams) or (as Richard Dawkins and others would put it) a malfunction caused by some combination of psychosis, culturally conditioned expectations, and wishful thinking. What exactly is the status of religious experience? Is it evidence for the truth of religion or for the befuddlement of the witness? Who has the right to judge such matters? These questions will not go away.
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Another problem for Epicurus’s account is the imperishability of the gods, for in the atomistic worldview the only things that are indestructible are the atoms themselves; the clusters into which they form are all destined to dissolve. How, then, can Epicurus instruct us not to “impute to [the god] anything that is incompatible with indestructibility”? Surely the stringent rules of a materialist conception of nature are being bent?

Even more difficult still is the question of where they are located, for if they are material beings, they must exist in real space. Yet if they exist in real space, there remains the awkward question of where they are. Could you go there and meet them? Lucretius (ca. 100–55 BC), the great Roman poet of Epicureanism, would frame the question with admirable clarity: “Here is another thing that you should not possibly believe: that the sacred abodes of the gods exist in any part of the world. For the nature of the gods, which is super-fine and far removed from our senses, is dimly seen by the mind; and since it eludes the touch and pressure of the hands, it cannot touch anything that we can touch (for anything that cannot be touched cannot itself touch). For this reason, their abodes must be different to our abodes, and must be super-fine in the manner of their substance.” Gods, then, are different in kind from the rest of matter and do not exist in our world. But even so they are still made of real matter, and they still exist in space. How can this be? Is this not more bending of the rules? Epicurus’s followers came up with an ingenious explanation. Epicurus himself believed in an infinite plurality of universes—in what we would now call a “multiverse.” The gods, these later commentators concluded, must live in the places between them, which they called in Latin the
intermundia
(the “between-worlds”). An ingenious explanation, yes, but an unsatisfactory one, because it simply displaces the problem. What are these
intermundia
like? How do the atoms emanating from the gods manage to travel from them to us and into our dreams and imaginations?
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The loss of key works makes it difficult to be certain what Epicurus himself thought. From among his many writings, only three summary letters and a vade mecum of “chief tenets” (
kyriai doxai
) survive, along with quotations and references in later authors. Still, there is enough Epicurus to allow us to piece together some kind of picture of his religious beliefs. He clearly thought that conventional religious ritual was a waste of time. Worshipping, praying to, swearing by, and making statues of the gods, he thought, is ineffectual. We should do these things because our happiness depends in part on living in peace with our fellow citizens, but we should not expend much of our precious emotional energy on these matters. Epicurus, then, seems to have thought that the popular conception of divinity is harmless but misguided. The wiser amongst us, he says, have the truth of the gods—but what that truth is, frustratingly, we are not told.

All of this suggests that Epicurus’s own writings were evasive to the point of obscurity on the matter of the gods. Conventional religion is false but should be followed. We must believe in gods but not gods as usually understood. Gods do exist but not in reality as we otherwise understand it. It is a puzzle, then, why Epicurus insisted so firmly on the existence of gods, when his theories of reality not only had no need for them but also struggled to accommodate them. Part of the explanation may lie in the cultural context. Even a century later, the trial of Socrates still resonated: the charge of “not recognizing the gods” could still hurt a philosopher, as Theodorus of Cyrene found out to his cost when he was exiled from Athens in the later fourth century BC. Perhaps it is as simple as that: having seen the theological implications of his materialist model of the universe, Epicurus realized that he had better arm himself against the counterblast that had swept away earlier thinkers like Diagoras of Melos and Socrates. Scholars of classical philosophy tend to dislike explanations of this kind, partly because they are hypothetical and not especially highbrow and partly because they imply that sordid political reality has intruded distastefully into the life of the mind. Classicists have much invested in the idea that their texts are the product of pure reflection and that ancient cities were spaces of free intellectual expression. It goes against the grain to argue that the magisterial Epicurus might have been motivated by fear of persecution, but that is no reason to discount the possibility.
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There is, however, another way of interpreting Epicurus’s theories of divinity. According to one school of modern criticism, the gods he believed in were not real deities, but idealized abstractions symbolizing the happiness to which we should all aim. Divinity represents a mental image of serenity and tranquility to which the philosopher aspires—and nothing more. Now, this was clearly not the view of those later followers of Epicurus who saw the gods as real beings who lived in the spaces between universes. But perhaps they misunderstood the words of their leader? Did Epicurus in fact believe that gods only exist as expressions of human potential? The best evidence in support of this interpretation lies in the treatment of Epicurus himself, who was venerated with godlike honors by his followers. His will (which survives) made provision for
enagismata,
“sacrifices to the dead,” performed in honor of his parents and siblings, and the community was to celebrate him annually on his birthday on the tenth of Gamelion (late January). They were also to meet monthly to revere his memory and that of his friends. These clauses do not explicitly mention cult, but they certainly do have a close resemblance to the ritual calendar of a Greek city. Epicurus’s garden was, in effect if not explicitly, to secede from Athens and set up its own civic structures, including a polytheistic “religion” based on himself, his family, and his friends. Just as the Ptolemies were doing at the same time in Alexandria, Epicurus was establishing divine credentials for his rule over his “city.” Epicurus seems to have conceived of divinity as something that can be attained by humans.
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But it seems, ultimately, unlikely that Epicurus thought that gods were only role models for mortals. When he writes that “the god is an indestructible and blessed being,” it suggests something superhuman, something divine in the conventional sense of the word. We have to face the fact that the role of divinity in his thought seems to have been ambiguous—perhaps indeed, as we have said, because of the travails that he anticipated for any philosopher who dared to deny the gods altogether.

Despite his opacity on the matter of the gods, however, there was enough that was heretical about Epicurus’s thoughts to win him a reputation throughout antiquity for atheism. In particular, his aspirations to divinity set him on a collision course with conventional civic religion, thanks to the familiar association—which went back to earliest myth—between humans aspiring to divinity and humans denying the existence of divinity. Like Salmoneus and Ceyx in the epic
Catalogue of Women,
or Bellerophon in Euripides’s play, Epicurus was perceived to be a
theomakhos,
a “battler of the gods.”
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