Episode 067 - Did The Gods Wake Up One Day To Create The Universe?
Date: 04/19/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1948-episode-sixty-seven-did-the-gods-wake-up-one-day-to-create-the-universe/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Charles returns and reads Book Five lines ~146 onward: the gods’ abodes are too subtle to be perceived by the senses; it is madness to claim the world was made by gods for humans and will last forever; the gods’ perfect happiness gives them no reason to wake up and create a world; and the universe was assembled not by any divine blueprint but by atoms agitating one another from eternity. Discussion covers the gods as physical beings in the intermundia (between worlds), and Martin identifies “nothing has the power to touch that is incapable of being touched itself” as an anticipation of Newton’s Third Law.
Further topics include the modern-sounding quality of Epicurean arguments against divine creation, Lucian’s satirical dialogues as a parallel, the anti-natalism question (“what evil had we suffered if we had never been created”) as linked to the gods’ motive for creating rather than standing alone, and the question of whether gods would need a model (exemplum) to create anything — debated as rhetorical device versus genuine Epicurean physical principle.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 67 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’s poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this Episode 67 we continue with our discussion of Book Five with Charles reading today’s text starting at approximately Latin line 146. Now let’s join the discussion.
Charles:
Nor are you to believe that the sacred mansions of the gods are placed in any parts of this world of ours, for the nature of the gods is so subtle, and at so remote a distance from our senses, that it can scarce be apprehended by the mind. Since therefore it cannot be touched or felt by our hands, it can touch nothing that is the object of our senses, for nothing has the power to touch that is incapable of being touched itself. For this reason, the abodes of the gods must be far different from ours; they must be subtle and answerable to their own nature; but the truth of this I shall more fully prove in another place. And then to say that the gods designed this noble fabric of the world for the sake of man, and therefore we are to speak honourably of this excellent work, and conceive it to be eternal and shall remain forever, and that it is impious to prove that this frame of the world contrived by the gods to continue forever for the use of man shall fall to ruin, or to offer to disturb its duration by words or arguments, and so overturn things from the very foundations, to pretend and enlarge upon this and more such stuff, my Memmius, is all madness. For what advantage can any acknowledgements of ours bestow upon divinities happy and immortal, that they should give themselves any trouble upon our account? Or what new pleasure could prevail upon the gods, who lived at rest for so many ages before, to desire to change their former state of ease and tranquility? Those generally rejoice in a new condition who have been unhappy in the last, but the man who has felt no misfortunes in his former state but has lived pleasantly and undisturbed — what could excite the love of novelty in such a one as this? Was the life of the gods spent in darkness and melancholy till the structure of the world shone out and cleared their spirits? Or what evil had we suffered if we had never been created? Indeed, when we are once born, we should strive, whoever he be, to preserve our life so long as we find an engaging pleasure in our being. But he who never tasted the love of life, nor was enrolled among the living — what harm could he complain of if he had never been? Besides, what model had the gods to work by when they set about the creation of the world? For whence had they any previous knowledge of man to inform them and give their mind an idea of what they proposed to make? How could they become acquainted with the powers and forces of the atoms and with what they were able to affect by the changes of their sight and order, if nature itself had not afforded them first a specimen of creation? For the seeds of bodies were from all eternity so variously agitated by blows from without, and driven so about by their own weight, and tried every way to unite, and attempted all sorts of motion that might end at last in the formation of things, that no wonder they at last fell into such dispositions in so decent order as to produce the universe and continually preserve and renew it.
Cassius:
Thank you Charles for reading that. There’s so much in what we’ve —
Don:
Yeah, that was a lot in just those two.
Cassius:
There is so much. We could probably spend the whole time talking about the first paragraph. However much time we invest in one, we’ll just let it happen. Boy, this is some of the key argument about the existence of gods and the existence of supernatural creation that we need to pay attention to in detail. So let’s kind of go in order almost by sentence. It seems like the first thing that I can see is that he’s trying to get across the fact that the gods that he’s talking about are so subtle and so remote from our senses that we can barely apprehend their very existence, and then he just goes on from there about how they have no relation to us and they don’t really care about what we’re doing. That’s the starting point. Why don’t we just start with that point then where it says that it can scarce be apprehended by the mind. That’s a very deep issue of the whole Epicurean theology. Is he implying here that it’s so hard for our minds to even get any information about the gods that we certainly aren’t seeing them or touching them? Is that part of what’s going on? “Since therefore it cannot be touched or felt by our hands, it can touch nothing that is the object of our senses, for nothing has the power to touch that is incapable of being touched itself.” Is he basically saying the gods are incapable of being touched themselves or touching? Does this go back to the images?
Don:
Yeah, it could. I mean, that seems to be it — at least in this translation it says “barely able to be touched by the mind,” but of course Epicurus was saying that’s the only way that we get information about the gods, through the images impinging on our minds. And so there’s enough there, at least in the general theology, that that’s the way that we receive information about the gods, but that’s it. And we can barely even do that.
Cassius:
Exactly, exactly. Which would, in my mind, just be another example of where you’re ruling out in Epicurean philosophy any contact physically — by hearing or seeing or touching — with the gods or the places that they live.
Don:
Yeah, because they literally live between worlds, between the ordered parts of the universe. We were talking last week about the local cosmos as opposed to the larger universe, and he doesn’t even say that they live within the cosmos. They live between the cosmoses and the wider universe. So they don’t even live in the same — to use a modern phrase — dimension that we do.
Cassius:
Charles, I think you were going to say something earlier.
Charles:
There’s something here with how it cannot be touched and how the gods were in their own self-contained — I forgot what word we used a few episodes ago — about how they’re constantly taking in atoms around them. I forget what we used for that, but I wonder if that’s what he’s saying here as well. They survive through the flow of atoms and not by any stable accumulation of atoms.
Cassius:
But then when you highlight the part about “nothing has the power to touch that is incapable of being touched itself” — that’s a sort of sweeping statement there that also catches my attention on the subject of Epicurus drawing conclusions from his observations that go beyond the observations themselves. He’s actually forming what appears to be a rule that we should think about and apply. I continue to struggle with that principle of deriving a rule from observation. That seems to me to be what he’s saying though. Don, is that what you would draw from that statement — that he has reached a conclusion that nothing has a power to be touched that’s incapable of being touched itself?
Don:
Right, right. There has to be a physical object involved. And remember too, I guess, that the images that Epicurus talks about are physical manifestations coming off of things and impinging on another physical thing. It’s not a Platonic ideal — it’s a physical thing impinging on another physical thing. So just like the sense of touch with your fingers, your mind is literally touching other atoms that impinge on it from outside. So there has to be a physical thing. Even when he talks about how the gods couldn’t have made the universe, he’s still talking about the gods as physical beings rather than some supernatural thing. But the way that he’s couching it is in terms of them living in another dimension — they’re physical beings but you can barely touch them — there’s sort of a halfway thing. It’s like they’re not supernatural, but they’re their own kind of thing.
Cassius:
It’s certainly different in nature than we are. There’s a similar rule in the Diogenes Laertius biography that I have here: “for all thoughts have their origin in sensations by means of coincidence and analogy and similarity and combination, reasoning too contributing something. And the visions of those insane and those in dreams are true, for they cause movement, and that which does not exist cannot cause movement.” That which does not exist cannot cause movement — that seems parallel right to the line that we just read.
Don:
Yeah.
Cassius:
Martin, what’s your thoughts on a rule that nothing has the power to touch that is incapable of being touched itself? Is that just something that’s so obvious as to not need comment, or what do you think?
Martin:
I see this as an anticipation of Newton’s third axiom, the third law of Newton.
Cassius:
Go ahead and explain that.
Martin:
Yeah. So if one object perceives a force which has its cause in another object, then that exerts the opposite, equal force on the first object. So from this reasoning, if we were close enough to the gods that we could touch them, then we could possibly do them harm. But because they are imperturbable and have achieved what we cannot achieve here on earth, that means they have to be somewhere else.
Cassius:
I can kind of follow what you’re getting at. With Martin bringing up Newton, one of the things that strikes me about the two paragraphs that Charles just read is how modern it sounds. It seems like somebody writing an essay about the creation of the world today, and it just strikes me as so modern sounding. It always surprises me at that.
Don:
And also continuing on Newton — Martin, you may know a lot more about Newton than I do. Did Newton have anything to say about this issue? Did he consider what he was concluding to be laws of nature?
Martin:
I mean, I guess he was actually a Platonist idealist, but that’s only a guess. I don’t know.
Don:
He was definitely one of the proponents of the whole clockwork nature of the universe, right? That there were specific laws and mechanisms, and he was going to find out what they were — here are the universal laws of motion that apply all over the place.
Cassius:
Yeah. It just strikes me that Lucretius and presumably Epicurus are just so very comfortable in observing what’s in front of them about touching and being touched, and then deriving from that a conclusion they are going to apply to the furthest reaches of the universe and to the nature of the gods. That strikes me as something significant in itself — not just the conclusion that he reaches, but the fact that he’s doing it. Because in Christianity, or what many of us are taught when we grow up, man’s wisdom is just different than God’s wisdom. Anytime you’re thinking you understand something and you’re going to apply that to God, you’re just way off base, because God’s ways are different from our ways. And you just can’t even begin to apply your standards of proof or of thought to the gods. But that’s exactly what Lucretius is doing here, in very great detail. Unfortunately he says “but the truth of this I shall more fully prove in another place.” So whether it was book seven or some other poem he was going to write, I don’t think we have that proof in as much detail as we would like.
Charles:
The stuff about the cosmos in Book Five — that’s a part I usually didn’t read too much on compared to the history sections, so I can’t say for sure. But I do have to agree with Don that especially the second paragraph, it does sound very modern, like a lot of those atheist argumentation threads you’ll find.
Cassius:
Yeah. Well, before we get to that argument — the second paragraph talks about the fact that they’re eternal and why would they wake up one day and decide they needed to create a world. But before we get to that, we’re still on the argument about “to say that the gods designed this fabric for the sake of man, and therefore we are to speak honourably of their work and conceive it to be eternal, and it shall remain forever, and it’s impious to prove that this frame of the world contrived by the gods to continue forever for the use of man shall ever fall to ruin.” Lucretius is saying it’s madness to claim that — and yet he is perfectly willing to engage in what these other people call madness.
Don:
It’s very preacher-like, that reading. Yeah. “For what advantage can any acknowledgements of ours bestow upon divinities who are happy and immortal, that they should give themselves any trouble on our account?” Now that of course is the Epicurean perspective, because if the gods are eternal and perfectly happy, what in the world kind of advantage could they gain from Cassius and Don and Charles and Martin paying them respects in a podcast in 2021? But that’s the first of these modern-sounding arguments. It really doesn’t rest on atoms and void or many of the other details of the physics. It’s more of a conceptual argument. Yeah, if the gods have achieved their total pleasure and happiness and eudaimonia and all of those good things that Epicurus talks about that we want to strive for, what possible reason could they have to want to micromanage a universe? You don’t even really have to base it on Epicurus’s description of the gods. I think you could use this argument against most religious people who think that their god is so omnipotent and omniscient — why would a being like that have any need to stoop to micromanaging the world? The fall of every sparrow and all that sort of thing? Numbering the hairs on your head? What in the world would he have any business doing that for? He’s omnipotent. That sounds terrible.
Cassius:
Well, was it Lucian who wrote one of the stories about Zeus and all the prayers that came to him and how he was overwhelmed by the prayers and that sort of thing?
Charles:
I think you’re probably on the right track. I don’t remember the particular episode though. When I think Lucian I think of Alexander the Oracle Monger or A True Story. But if you haven’t read some of the other ones — the ones about Zeus — there are several about Zeus and so forth that are just excellent and entertaining reading.
Don:
I would agree. And again, it’s surprising how modern it sounds with the satire. Depending on the translation, it’s just spot on.
Cassius:
That has struck me too, Don. I don’t remember which one I generally refer to, but I caught myself several times thinking these translators must be taking extreme liberties because it sounds so modern in the way this is being expressed. And I’ve not known to what extent there were liberties and to what extent the original sounds like that, but it sounds like the original was pretty sharp and pretty creative. So Martin, have you read much of the — no, I’ve been saying Lucian and Don said Lucian too.
Don:
Yeah, either six and one half dozen of another. I reserve the hard C for Lucan.
Cassius:
Now, how do you say that one? Would you say “Lucan”?
Don:
Yeah. The other guy.
Cassius:
Yeah. Martin, have you read the Lucian material?
Martin:
No, not seen.
Cassius:
Okay. I think it’s fun — it’s literally fun. It’s like reading Aristophanes. The first time I ever read any of Aristophanes’ plays, it just struck me as how bawdy and irreverent and just — I was like, oh my heavens, this is from 500 BC or whatever. It was just amazing. It really is comedy.
Don:
And I completely agree. It’s enjoyable to read on its own, even if you aren’t really just digging into the philosophy. It’s just so creatively written that I would think anybody could pick it up and find it entertaining to read. And a lot of it is coming from this perspective that I think we’re seeing in these passages today. This is sarcastic, not in a bitter way, as much as a fun-poking kind of way — more like satire. Like National Lampoon for 500 BC.
Charles:
More of a Monty Python guy, myself.
Cassius:
There you go! Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, the point of that part we just read is “what advantage can any acknowledgements of ours bestow upon divinities who are happy and immortal” — so it makes no sense to be sacrificing or asking the gods for things because they’re just not going to be of any mindset to be paying attention to us. But before we just spend all our time on that, I think the second paragraph could be even more interesting. “What new pleasure could prevail upon the gods who lived at rest for so many ages before to desire to change their former state of ease and tranquility? Those generally rejoice in a new condition who have been unhappy in the last, but the man who has felt no misfortunes in his former state but has lived pleasantly and undisturbed — what could excite the love of novelty in such a one as this?” I think that’s an excellent argument. Martin, what do you think about that argument?
Martin:
I got distracted looking into Newton and Hobbes and mechanistic philosophy. I’m familiar enough with Newton’s reputation that I bet he had some interesting things to say about these philosophical issues — about translating his observations into a rule or law of nature, and what he really thought a law of nature would mean. I bet we’ll find something on that at some point. But this issue of an eternal supernatural God in a presumably happy and perfect state —
Cassius:
I would be careful there when you say a supernatural God, because the gods we’re talking about here are naturally occurring beings, at least according to Lucretius’s theology.
Martin:
Right.
Cassius:
You don’t have to presume supernatural as part of this argument. The Epicurean gods, as they are described by Epicurus, would not have any reason to change their former state of ease and tranquility. I think it applies probably even stronger to a supernatural God, but it certainly applies to both.
Don:
I think the word “supernatural” itself does sort of an injustice to Epicurean gods. That would be an impious belief. “What could excite the love of novelty in such a one as this? Was the life of the gods spent in darkness and melancholy until the structure of the world shone out and cleared their spirits?” That’s a great argument. And bitingly sarcastic to somebody who believes that their god is so holy and supernatural that all of a sudden he needed to wake up so he could be entertained by humans walking around killing each other.
Charles:
Oh, exactly. That’s the thing. Some of the arguments are that the gods made humans to worship them. I’m thinking — how conceited do you need to be to wake up from eternity and say, oh yeah, by the way, I need somebody to sacrifice some goats to me? From the other perspective, how demeaning to a god would it be for them to have a nature like that? That they’re so perfect and blissfully happy and all of a sudden they’re going to wake up one day and decide they need to put some lesser beings through a life of torture and pain. That’s really insulting from that Epicurean piety point of view to think that they were ever in such a position. That’s why Lucretius says the common interpretation of the gods is madness.
Cassius:
“Those generally rejoice in a new condition who have been unhappy in the last.” Right. That’s again another one of those observations about the way things are here on earth that he is perfectly comfortable applying to the gods living in the intermundia. And that just rolls around in my mind as a very deep philosophical issue that we have to confront when arguing with somebody who’s religious — they’re going to say, well, that’s just ridiculous for you to even compare yourself to a god. A god is so above you that you just can’t compare your own expectations and your own rational analysis to the life of gods. But Lucretius is definitely doing that and expecting that argument to be persuasive.
Don:
Because I think he’s seeing the gods as living beings. And if we compare any living being — it goes back almost to the whole argument that Epicurus used with babies and animals, trying to go towards pleasure and away from pain — just follow that continuum all the way up through animals and one-cell organisms to humans to the gods. It’s a continuum. He’s using the same analogy he did for animals and babies and adult humans, and placing the gods on the same spectrum.
Cassius:
Yeah. That kind of approach just permeates all of this philosophy. He’s expecting that he’s talking to somebody who reasons and thinks that way — someone who is not just a supernaturalist religious person who divides the universe between the reality of the earth and some supernatural realm that has totally different rules. The root presumption here is that what we observe here is usable and reasonable to apply even in those instances where we haven’t seen it. That reminds me — last week I was using the example about fish not living in the fields, but somebody might say “but you haven’t seen my fields,” and I bit my tongue after the episode because the argument isn’t necessarily that this other person has actually seen these things themselves. All the argument has to be is that it’s wrong for you to think fish can’t live in fields because you haven’t seen every field that exists. The other person doesn’t have to tell you he’s seen it himself — all he has to say is, “Well, you haven’t seen every field everywhere, so how can you reach the conclusion that it can’t happen?” And that’s the argument that has to be dealt with across the spectrum of a lot of these issues. That kind of person is going to say to Lucretius, “Well, you haven’t been to the intermundia. You don’t know that your rules apply there.” You hit them back by asking the same thing.
Don:
I was just thinking the same thing.
Cassius:
And that’s so basic to the whole issue. It’s kind of like earlier in Book Four where he talks about the man whose head is where his feet should be and who says that nothing can be known. We’re constantly rolling around that issue of what is the standard of proof that is sufficient for you to be confident in your conclusion. Lucretius and Epicurus are taking the position that you can apply a standard of proof knowable to you here on earth to a condition that exists in the intermundia that he’s already said you can never apprehend with your senses and can scarcely apprehend with your mind. There’s a mindset here of practicality — materialism, I would say — as opposed to idealism. That’s just so critical to the whole analysis. If you don’t accept that kind of analysis, you’re just wasting your time to have a discussion like Lucretius is presenting here.
Don:
Yeah, materialism is a good way to describe it. I mean, what I hear you saying is the things that you see work here on earth, as far as you can observe, are going to work the same way in the intermundia or wherever else you go. If organisms experience pleasure and pain, it’s going to work the same way.
Cassius:
I think that’s exactly the issue. Whether the fish are crawling in the fields or whether some stone on another continent has water in it or not, you’re constantly confronting the issue of how to translate the things you have observed into a prediction about things you’ve not observed. And I’m getting concerned that I’m beating a dead horse by constantly talking about that, but I have a feeling that this particular horse is one of the most important ones in this discussion. Somebody tell me if I’m wrong.
Don:
Thank you for the piñata metaphor.
Cassius:
I was starting to go down the race horse analogy and it was getting a little ugly, so thank you. Piñatas are good. Martin, any comment at this point?
Martin:
No, not at this.
Cassius:
Okay. And I think it does have analogies. We brought up Newton. I think it has analogies to the laws of motion — things that you observe, like the apple falling from the tree, have applications to the black hole rotating around another black hole light years and light years away. It’s the same laws of motion that apply to both of them. And I think it’s the same thing with Lucretius — if you see things work on this scale, it’s going to apply to the scale over there. Yeah, that’s what we discussed as being the Philodemus on methods of inference question, and it’s just constantly underlying everything that we’re discussing.
Well, let me take a tangent, because the next part we’re going to come to here is where he starts talking about “what evil had we suffered if we had never been created.” Now that’s a huge issue people debate — would it be better if I’d never been born? But the tangent I have to highlight before we get to that is his comment after that: “when we are once born, we should strive, whoever he be, to preserve our life so long as we find an engaging pleasure in our being.” I would almost pull that sentence out as one of the ones I’ll use in the future on a continuing question in Epicurean philosophy — the question of how long you should seek to live, and how do you analyze somebody who lives ten years versus somebody who lives fifty years, and how much value should you put on maintaining your life. To me this is a clear statement that he’s accepting the premise that you should strive to continue to live so long as you find pleasure in your life. Don, do you agree or disagree?
Don:
I would agree with that.
Charles:
I’ve seen that quote pop up before when people have tried comparing the philosophy to be compatible with anti-natalism. I would say that generally I agree with what you said, but there’s some clauses in there about suicide.
Cassius:
Yeah. The issue is actually in the Principal Doctrines too, isn’t it — about the person who is using proper reason will realize you don’t need an infinite time to live? That’s the relationship I’m looking for — the question of how long is necessary in order to be happy with your time alive, because you’re not going to have an infinite time. It’s also in the Letter to Menoeceus — it’s about taking the most pleasant route.
Don:
Yeah, not the longest but the most pleasant.
Cassius:
Exactly. Some have confused that as the candle that burns twice as bright — but no, it’s not that. Well, we can put that back on the bookshelf and come back to it, but I’ll be coming back to this as a reference for the answer to how long someone should seek to live if they are an Epicurean. The answer would be that he should want to continue to live so long as he’s able to experience pleasure.
Don:
Until the piñata poofs out dust.
Cassius:
Okay, I’m sorry for my tangent. Let’s put the piñata aside for the moment and go back to the more serious question of “what evil had we suffered if we had never been created,” because I kind of leapfrogged over that. That’s a big philosophical issue. It seems like — in all honesty — such a nonsensical question, and I think it’s important to ask it and I think it’s important that he put it here, but it’s such a nonsensical question because if you’ve never existed, you aren’t anyway. The other way to put it — there’s no way. He’s asking it backwards.
Don:
What evil had we suffered if we had never been created? I mean, pretty much the answer is if you’d never been created you wouldn’t have suffered any evil or any good, because you just simply never would have existed. The “you” there has no basis in reality.
Charles:
Hold on. The Munro translation puts it in a very different light. “Did life lie groveling in darkness and sorrow until the first dawn of the birth time of things? Or what evil had it been for us never to have been born?” So I think the Munro translation at least is sort of pinning that on the gods. Like — would it have been so bad if they never had to create us?
Cassius:
Yeah, Charles, because I was about to ask the question of how this observation even connects with the prior observation about the gods waking up and creating the world one day, because it really seems to go in a different direction if you just analyze it in terms of would it be better for us if we’d never been born. It’s probably linked into the prior argument about the gods waking up. And Bailey’s also says the same: “But for him who has never tasted the love of life and was never in the ranks of the living, what harm is it never to have been made?” So Don, what are you thinking there — is this linked to the prior couple of sentences about the gods waking up?
Don:
I believe so, because what it’s talking about is that the gods are waking up and saying, oh, we need to make something new. And then it goes into — well, we humans would be the ones created. I think Stallings has an interesting take on this. Let me just read a couple lines — “Or what new thing transpired, that could tempt beings, so serene before, to now desire to change the life they had already? For truth be told, who revels in newfangledness is fed up with the old. But what could spark a hankering in someone for the new, who’s never encountered any woe in all time here hitherto, who lives a life of bliss? If we had never been created, what would have been the harm to us? Am I to be persuaded our life lay cringing in a mire of misery and dark, until the dawning of creation lit us with its spark?”
Cassius:
That’s Stallings for you! Yeah. That’s different, right?
Don:
It is a little bit different. But I think it just adds a different light on the idea — she’s talking about the gods looking for something new to do. Were we as humans just sort of lying around somewhere, cringing in a mire of misery and dark, until the dawning of creation lit us with its spark? So — did we not exist at all?
Charles:
I tend not to trust Stallings’s translation if I want to know the precise meaning behind the text. I mean, she’s actually transferring the meaning of those sentences back to the gods. It’s a strange way of wording it. What’s the connection to talking about the gods spending eternity in darkness and melancholy, to the issue of what harm would we suffer if we had never been born?
Don:
Well, I think — and I would have to go back and look at the Latin — but I think what she’s doing is saying that it’s creation itself and it’s human beings that could have been living in melancholy and darkness before we were created. And Lucretius is saying that’s not the case. We just didn’t exist before. So what harm would there be if we never existed, because we weren’t lying around in some melancholy, dark state before we came into being as the creation of the gods?
Cassius:
So the question of benefit to us — the gods didn’t create the world to benefit us because we weren’t suffering before we’d never been created. Is that the argument?
Don:
Right, that’s what I’m getting out of it. Yeah. Because then he goes on later to talk about the way the universe can kill us and that sort of thing — it was definitely not made for us.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Now I’m getting a little bit concerned about the time, because the next sentence is one that’s fascinated me for a long time and I don’t want to just ignore it for today. “Besides, what model had the gods to work by when they set about the creation of the world? From whence had they any previous knowledge of man to inform them and give their mind an idea of what they proposed to make? How could they become acquainted with the powers and forces of the atoms and what they were able to affect by the changes of their sight and order if nature herself had not afforded them a first specimen of creation?” I continue to roll that around in my mind. So does everything have to have a prior model? Is this like a biblical “there’s nothing new under the sun” — that there’s no possibility of creation of something new unless there’s a model to work from? Because the implication of “what model had the gods to work by” is that the gods needed a model to create the world. What’s the implication of asking the question that way? Is he implying that you must have a model in order to create something?
Don:
It’s a matter of — the gods couldn’t have come up with the whole idea of the universe ex nihilo out of their experience because they didn’t have any other experience to make those things. What concerns me of course about this is if the gods couldn’t create the universe without a model, I would think even stronger he would take the position that humans can’t create anything without a model either, which has implications — not necessarily of determinism so much, but it’s just an interesting perspective that has deep implications if you take the position that everything new must come from something.
Cassius:
I guess that’s just the implication of “nothing comes from nothing.” I was just going to say I think that’s the direction you seem to be steering in whether it’s on purpose or not. To me that has more profound implications than “nothing coming from nothing.” It’s almost an extreme statement — not only does nothing come from nothing, but even the gods cannot create something that’s totally new. And it all comes back to: nothing comes from that which does not exist. So you have to have something to work with to get something else. Whereas he’s saying that the gods, if they didn’t have anything to work with, there’s nothing they could have done. Martin, this is back into the area of physics and really deep thought about the nature of change and so forth. What are you thinking about this part?
Martin:
I do not see a reason why we should not create something without a model. Because we can — we do not need a pre-existing model. We can even just produce something without a model. I still remember this when I learned to program — some people would draft the program through a structure and then create it, basically creating a model according to which the program is built. But most of the time I didn’t do that. I would just go down and produce code without having created any kind of model first. And in physics we constantly create models of course to describe the world, but when constructing something we don’t necessarily need a pre-existing one — we create our own model just for efficiency. For me this thing about “what model did the gods have to work by” is a bit off. And then he brings up what I think is the real reason: the laws of nature are set such that atoms combine together in all kinds of ways. Without any model, it’s just that the structure of the forces and properties of the atoms create a huge space of possibilities, and in an infinite universe all these possibilities work out an infinite number of times.
Don:
I guess it depends how you define the word “model,” and I’d be curious to go back and see what the Latin word is that they use for model. Because even as you were talking, Martin, about your examples of the code — you could technically see language itself and underlying structures of syntax as a model to create the code. The code exists and so do all of its possibilities.
Cassius:
Right, right. Exactly, exactly. But I was thinking going back to Newton — about how Newton needed to invent the calculus for his research into gravity, as it hadn’t really existed yet at the time.
Don:
I’m looking at the Loeb translation here, and it says “Again, whence was a pattern for making things first implanted in the gods, or even a conception of mankind?” And I think Lucretius kind of answers his own question in the very next sentence.
Cassius:
He does answer the question — and this is what Martin was saying — that he clearly has taken the position that a model is not needed. I don’t think there’s much doubt about that. But then at one point, Martin, you used the word “trick” in the way he’s phrasing the question. That’s kind of what’s interesting to me — is he accepting it as a valid argument that you must have a pattern before you can start work, or is he playing off the error of other people who are just being absurd in the way they’re looking at things? Because there really is a lot in Epicurean philosophy about — and I’m always concerned about the word “determinism” — but clearly in the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus is saying that most things do take place through the mechanical movement of the atoms. Most things are mechanically driven. There certainly is some deviation when you get to the swerve and human action, but most things do follow from necessity from the prior movement of the atoms. And so to include in this argument the presumption that the gods might need a pattern to create something from seems to me to have significant implications. It might not be the right word — “trick” — it might just be a rhetorical question.
Charles:
Yeah, I was going to suggest that it was a rhetorical question. And it shifts away the credit of the creation of humans from the gods to nature itself — the possibility for humans was already there, so the gods making humans wasn’t a stroke of genius.
Cassius:
Yes, because that would also coincide with the “let’s just wake up from our darkness and make things to worship us” — right. I mean, that last sentence is clearly the conclusion of Epicurean physics about the way things are. The seeds from all eternity blowing against each other by their own weight and so forth, ending at last in the formation of things and producing the universe and continually preserving and renewing it — there’s no doubt that that is the Epicurean physics. But the question of whether living beings like gods might need a model to work from is a separate question that might have even more interesting implications for his theory of human activity too. You can relate it back to the images situation, you know. When we’re discussing that part of the passage, it seems to indicate that you do things because of images flowing into your mind. I don’t know that that’s at all what he’s saying here — that the gods would have needed images to flow into their minds in order to create the universe — but there’s a possibility that those things are related. For what it’s worth, the word that Lucretius actually uses is exemplum, and the dictionary definition is “example, for imitation, instruction, proof, a pattern, model, original, example, precedent.”
Don:
Could be the atoms constantly beaming to them. Yes, yes. We know that he’s saying the nature of the gods is sustained by atoms that are flowing to them. So he could be applying here that the gods might have received their own images. I guess I haven’t ever considered that question before — he talks a lot about the images and how they affect human activity, and I don’t know that he’s really said anything about the images affecting the gods’ activity.
Cassius:
It’s possible that the phenomenon would apply equally to both, because the gods are natural — just like babies and animals going to pain and pleasure. Yeah.
Martin:
Possibly it is such that it wasn’t addressed because it would be mere speculation which is irrelevant for us in philosophy.
Cassius:
Yeah, you’re talking about the issue of whether the gods would receive images themselves. We’re probably about to run long in time for today’s episode. So if we go the normal route of asking for summary comments, Martin, do you have any summary or overall comments from today’s passages?
Martin:
Yeah, I don’t have an overall comment, but I want to address something so that we do not come up with that wrong example again. I myself have seen fish walking here in Thailand close to my house. I didn’t mention this when fish were mentioned last time because it’s irrelevant for the discussion of the topic, but now at the end I want to mention it’s a wrong example.
Cassius:
Yeah, yeah! I would like to see some pictures of those. I’ve heard of these walking fish and so forth — I guess I’ve seen pictures on the internet.
Martin:
I didn’t know they had them in Thailand, and that’s probably why I bit my tongue last week too, because the issue is not — if somebody backs you up against a wall and says “come on over here and I’ll show you my field and here’s my walking fish in the middle of it,” so therefore you better take back your rule — but you really don’t even need to have the example. You can just say: “Well, you haven’t seen every field that exists. So what gives you the right to say that all fields must be devoid of walking fish?” Clearly you haven’t been to Thailand.
Cassius:
I’m afraid I’ll probably never make it at this point in my life either, but the wonder of the internet — we can converse with people who are there and tell us about their walking fish in their fields. Anything else in conclusion today, Martin?
Martin:
No, no, that wasn’t just a thing.
Cassius:
Very good. Charles?
Charles:
Maybe I’ll have something later about images affecting the gods, but I don’t think there’s any source material on that. I’ve never heard that brought up before — it just kind of popped into my head.
Cassius:
Yeah, it never occurred to me to discuss it until looking at this particular passage today. To apply that to the question of the gods not having a model — but I think there’s a direct possibility. If you take the position that we as humans decide to do what we’re doing to some extent because our mind is picking from among images that are floating through the air, there’s no reason not to think that the Epicureans didn’t consider at least applying that mechanism to their Epicurean gods. Well, I’m wondering too — if we’re talking about before the creation of the universe, there wouldn’t be any images coming to the gods, right? Now that would be a rhetorical question because Epicurus would certainly say there was never a time before the universe existed. Right, right. But that’s what he’s talking about here — was there a model to create the universe? So maybe that’s the answer. Maybe there was no time before the universe was created. And the related issue: was there ever a time before the gods existed? My personal view of reading this material would indicate to me that Epicurus probably took the position that there was never a time when the gods did not exist. I continuously roll around in my mind that we tend to think in terms of evolution here on earth, and at some point there was a beginning. But I think when you extrapolate the Epicurean philosophy to the eternal universe, you pretty much have to take the position that there was no single instance where a first god came into being or a first world came into being. It’s pretty much got to be an infinite regress. Okay, Don, what are your conclusions for these two paragraphs for today?
Don:
Oh, I mean — just our little discussion right there is like you just leave them wanting more. And I just keep coming back to the fact that these passages sound so modern to me. It just always surprises me.
Cassius:
Right. I think we made the right decision to just stick with these first two passages for today, because the next two are going to have a lot of material in them too, and we want to make sure we devote enough time to these issues. So anything else from anybody before we close?
Okay, all right, well thanks everybody for your time today. We’ll do it again next week.
Don:
Sounds great, thanks.
Charles:
Bye.
Martin:
See you, bye.