Episode 068 - This World Was Not Made By The Gods For Humanity
Date: 04/28/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1969-episode-sixty-eight-this-world-was-not-made-by-the-gods-for-humanity/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads Book Five lines ~195 onward — Lucretius’s argument that the earth was clearly not made for humanity: two-thirds is uninhabitable (mountains, seas, heat, cold), crops require constant toil and still fail, wild beasts and disease abound, and the helpless newborn infant contrasts sharply with animals who need no nurse, no rattles, no seasonal dress, and are provided for abundantly by nature. Discussion covers Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” the anthropic fine-tuning counterargument, the Latin tanta stat praedita culpa, exoplanet discoveries, the phosphine-on-Venus finding, and the Mars helicopter.
The Matthew 6:28-29 parallel (“consider the lilies of the field”) is flagged via a Stallings footnote, prompting discussion of whether early Christians were explicitly responding to Epicurean arguments about the world not being made for man. The episode also revisits last week’s question about whether Lucretius’s “what model had the gods to work by” targets Plato’s Theory of Forms, and closes with discussion of the Demiurge and Norman DeWitt’s St. Paul and Epicurus.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 68 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 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 68 we’ll continue with the passage we originally planned for last week, starting at approximately Latin line 195, with Martin reading today’s text. Now let’s join the discussion.
Martin:
From where I, wholly ignorant of the origin of things, yet could prove this truth from the heavens, and by many other reasons, that the frame of the world was by no means raised by the gods for the use of man, so faulty it is and contrived so ill. And first, the earth, covered over by the violent whirl of the heavens — huge mountains and woods, the harbor of wild beasts, and rocks and vast lakes, and the sea, which widely separate the distant shores — take up great part of it. And then the torrid heat and continual cold rock mankind almost from two parts, and make them uninhabitable. The fruitful fields that remain, nature of herself would spread over with thorns if the labor of man did not prevent it. If he did not, to preserve life, force the earth by constant toil with strong tools, and cut it through with a plow. If he did not turn up the fruitful clod with the crude share, and compel the soil to exert its strength, of its own accord it would produce nothing. And yet when the fruits are raised with great labor, when they look green upon the ground, and all things flourish, either the sun’s rays burn everything up with their fierce heat, or sudden showers, or piercing frosts destroy our hopes, or the blast of wind with terrible hurricanes blow them away. And then why does nature nourish and increase the dreadful race of wild beasts, by sea and land, the professed enemies to humankind? Why do the seasons of the year bring disease with them? Why does untimely death wander every way abroad? Besides, a child, like a shipwrecked mariner, on shore by the cruel tide, lies naked upon the ground. A wretched infant, destitute of every help of life, as soon as nature, by the mother’s pangs, has thrown him from the womb into life. And then he fills the air with mortal cries, as he has reason to do, since in the course of life he has such a series of evils to pass through. But cattle of every kind, and herds and wild beasts, grow up with ease. They have no need of rattles to divert them. They have no occasion for the kind nurse by her fond and broken words to keep them in humor. They require no difference of dress for the several seasons of the year. They have no need of arms, no high walls to secure their property. For the earth, this curious contrivance of nature, has produced everything in abundance for the whole variety of creatures to feed and support them.
Cassius:
Okay, thank you for reading that, Martin. Our text today is a little bit shorter than normal, but Lucretius after this turns to a different subject. So probably today let’s just go through this part of the material and discuss the overall argument that’s been made up to this point about the earth not being supernaturally created for the benefit of men or for any other reason, before we move on to the next topic for next week. And maybe go back and cover some of the issues that might not have been touched on last week as well. But first, we can just go through this text sentence by sentence and make sure we get the most out of it. So the argument today focuses on nobody in their right mind should suggest that the earth was made for the benefit of mankind because it’s screwed up — it’s faulty as it is and contrived so ill for the purpose. And there are so many ways it can kill us.
Don:
Yes.
Cassius:
I don’t know that we hear this particular argument that much nowadays because I guess the creationists and the different religionists don’t frequently anymore talk about how perfect — what is it, the best of all possible worlds — what’s the cliché I’m looking for there? I bet Don knows it.
Don:
It seems like it has a couple of different phrases to it, but yes — the best of all possible worlds. I believe that was Leibniz.
Cassius:
Leibniz. I forget how to pronounce his name. Okay. And of course one of the ones I’m familiar with from my local people would be “all things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” And that’s not exactly the same point, but it’s kind of similar. I guess maybe just with the modern world, people aren’t as quick to suggest that everything is a bed of roses for mankind.
Don:
There’s one argument with cosmology and stuff that goes that the universe is so finely tuned, and it’s obviously made for people because people are here. But what everybody sort of counters that with is that if it wasn’t finely tuned, then we wouldn’t be here to realize it wasn’t anyway. So it just so happens that the one we’re in is the one we’re in because that’s the way things worked out. If there’s an infinite number of permutations and universes and that sort of thing, we’re going to end up in the one that’s tuned to our existence.
Cassius:
I had one of my friends hit me with that one just within the last week or so. Their version of it was that of course the solar system is set up so precisely that if the path and the orbit of the earth were slightly higher or lower from the sun, there’d be no way for life to survive. The precise balance of everything just obviously shows you that it was set up by a divine creator for purposes of our being alive here on earth. The counter to that is: if it wasn’t, then we wouldn’t be here anyway, so it just so happens that that’s how things go.
One of the things I wanted to bring up that I didn’t want to forget — I think the Latin line where there are so many faults in the universe is so great because it’s tanta stat praedita culpa, which is “so great is the fault the world stands charged with.” The fact that culpa is the Latin word he uses for faults — I get this image in my head of the universe wiping us out and shrugging, going “oh, mea culpa, my bad.” And how much do you get into this argument from design, Martin? Do you have particular perspectives on that?
Martin:
Yeah, meanwhile — because it has become a hot topic in recent years to look for signs of life far away from us, because now we have the means to detect it. And it’s surprising how many planets we have discovered within a couple of years around stars which are far away from us. Until say ten years ago we didn’t know of hardly any other planet outside our own solar system, but now we have thousands of them, and some of them are rocky planets like us in the habitable zone. And even so, we can detect those only within some circumference which is small compared to all what we can see of the universe. That means if we extrapolate this, there are billions and many billions of planets all across the universe which we can see that ought to be within the habitable zone.
Cassius:
Yeah. Okay, how many of course of these billions are in the rocky, habitable zone. And of course if you were to take the Epicurean position that the universe is infinite in size, then you would presumably take the position that there’s an infinite number of planets with habitable zones revolving around suns of their own — that would not theoretically be a limit.
Martin:
That is not the only thing. I mean, they can get things out of tune. The current theory basically assumes that the constants of nature are really constants, but we are looking at possible changes in those constants, and there are few constants. If they change over time, our physiology will go haywire. That means this will put an end to us eventually. And so there are many ways that the universe can turn in a way that is no more fine-tuned for us, and then we will go extinct.
Cassius:
Yes. In what you just said, you probably brought the discussion back exactly where it needs to be in terms of the fine-tuning. And at risk of getting us off track again, I was about to say to you that some of what you were saying brought to my mind the arguments about — well, we found all these planets out there, why haven’t we found life somewhere else in the universe? Because I know that’s a current argument as well, right, that you would expect that we’ve already found enough evidence to violate what we would expect if indeed life was widespread through the universe.
Martin:
Yeah, I mean, maybe what I said was a bit too optimistic. So we have methods to detect planets, and we have some methods to also detect signs of life, but this will be indirect evidence. The type of evidence we had recently from Venus, where they discovered phosphine there, which is unexpected and still not yet explained — how this can happen without there being something like life or a life-like mechanism. Anyway, some mechanism which can keep producing phosphine, because it will be oxidized very quickly, so that means it needs to be replenished by some mechanism, and that mechanism is not known.
Cassius:
Yeah, that was a fascinating finding there — the possibility of life on Venus. That was wild.
Don:
One of the metaphors I’ve heard is that searching for life in the universe is like taking a cup of water out of the ocean and looking at it and saying there are no whales in it, so there are obviously no whales in the ocean.
Cassius:
That’s a good one. Boy, I’m just going off on tangents today, but maybe not too far. As we’re recording this today, I know one of the things that’s in the news is that we’ve been flying that helicopter on Mars for the first time over the last couple of weeks. Even though that’s not directly related to life, to me that’s something I really didn’t envision — you’re always told that the atmosphere on Mars is so thin and so forth, but apparently it’s not so thin that you can’t get a helicopter to work if you make the blade large enough.
Martin:
The weight is smaller there, so in the thinner atmosphere you have a better chance to lift things because they’re not as heavy — they’re not pulled down by gravity as strongly on Mars as here on earth.
Cassius:
That’s true certainly.
Don:
Yeah, to sort of pull it back to the text that we were talking about — I thought it was interesting that Lucretius talked specifically about how hard it is to grow crops and how the wind blows away your seeds, and how it’s so hard that even the Judeo-Christian tradition had to have a Garden of Eden at the beginning to make life possible. And then once things went awry, humans were kicked out of the Garden of Eden and life became harder — they had to sow their crops. Even within that tradition, there had to have been some special place set aside that made life possible, and then once you’re thrown out, the universe is trying to kill you again.
Cassius:
I suppose when you’re making a religion, that fantasy about how the labor could be a lot easier makes for a good story.
Don:
There you go. Exactly.
Martin:
The inner tropical areas are a bit like that, at least with food. There’s ample food year round. In virgin forest you will not starve. And also on Pacific islands people had an easy life, but of course there were other threats — hurricanes, which were dangerous. And in mainland areas like Thailand, diseases were then possibly killing people. But it would normally not happen that people would starve here because there was always something you can eat. And even in the temperate rainforest when I went there two years ago in Western Canada, you also have there plenty of food. But of course then you will have the pronounced winter season, so people could theoretically starve to death if they didn’t keep enough food.
Cassius:
Yeah, I should have gone back and read some of the research that I’ve looked at before, but I have a recollection that whenever humans moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary farming lifestyle, that it was not necessarily a boon — that there were other reasons that they decided to plant crops and do a sedentary lifestyle, because life wasn’t necessarily as hard as people think it is from a hunter-gatherer perspective.
Martin:
Is it dependent on what areas there were?
Cassius:
Exactly.
Martin:
So the first move away from virgin forest — in less favorable areas, agriculture would be the better choice. And eventually even people living in the virgin forest started to do agriculture — they would burn down a plot of land, and they even developed a method that they used this burning down to fertilize the soil and then grow the crops for several years until they would move on. But certainly outside those favorable areas, it would be almost a necessity. On the other hand, if you look at the opposite — Greenland — the Inuit basically still survive as hunter-gatherers because under those cold conditions agriculture is not possible.
Cassius:
Yeah, the Inuit examples are really interesting to show the extreme of the difference from the tropical area you’re talking about — no crops at all up there.
Don:
One of the novels that I remember reading years ago was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I don’t know if anybody’s ever read that one, but it talks about the moving from a hunter-gatherer to a sedentary lifestyle and the benefits that came from the earlier lifestyle, being closer to nature and all that sort of thing. It was an interesting book. It was actually narrated by a talking gorilla, so that gives you some idea of the fantastical nature of it, but it was an interesting read.
Cassius:
Well, I seem to remember that there may have been some earlier sections in Lucretius here about how when the earth was younger, things grew up more easily. But at least here in this section he’s making the point that even when the earth was younger, he’s not carving out an exception for there being a Garden of Eden type of time period.
Martin:
Around which is time? Basically the Mediterranean was already devastated by an ecological catastrophe. So the forest which used to be there had largely been replaced by what he calls here thorny bushes, and if they had not cut down lots of that forest, it would not have become that bad.
Don:
And I don’t know whether you wanted to talk about the second paragraph yet or not, but I thought it was interesting that he sort of brings in the fact that animals don’t need a lot of nurturing and upkeep with their children and stuff, because nature provides what they need, whereas people come into the world very helpless and need all the help they can get to grow up.
Cassius:
Yeah, I was looking for a transition to move us to the second paragraph, and I thought the transition was going to be something about the first one talking about how hard life is and how quickly death comes. But really I think you’re right, Don — the transition is not the period of life, it’s the contrast between the rest of the animal kingdom and humans. Not only is it not contrived for our benefit — if you wanted to make an argument as to whose benefit it was contrived for, it looks like it was contrived for the animals and the things that kill us.
Don:
Exactly. I thought it was so interesting with that one section where he talks about how nature provides for the animals and how good they have it. It almost sounded biblical in a sense of — I can’t remember the exact verses off the top of my head now — but “neither do they sow nor reap, but nature provides for them,” that sort of thing.
Cassius:
Right. “They do not toil” — I remember that being a word in that section. Yeah. I forget where that is. Probably the New Testament, but I’m not sure where.
Charles:
Yes, it’s in the New Testament, definitely.
Cassius:
So really the second paragraph is mostly focused on that particular issue — that human children are not equipped by nature to survive without a lot of extra effort, but that the young of other animals are much better equipped by nature than humans are to survive, which would again go to the point that it’s pretty counterintuitive to argue that the earth was prepared by the gods for the use of men.
Don:
Exactly. Exactly. I just double-checked one of the footnotes — it’s Matthew 6, verses 28-29, in the King James version.
Cassius:
Okay, great. Did you find that on the Stallings?
Don:
I did. As a matter of fact, yeah.
Cassius:
I’m going to have to get my copy of Stallings out then if it’s got footnotes like that. I was looking at my Martin Ferguson Smith this morning thinking that that would be what I would refer to. But it really did strike me.
Charles:
If it’s in Matthew, it should also be in Luke, no?
Cassius:
Good question. Not necessarily in the other two, but normally if I remember it right, it could well be in Luke as well. Yeah, so it’s interesting to think about the time sequence involved in that because Lucretius was writing in about 50 BC or so. So we can claim precedence in time for Lucretius here as opposed to that, but I’m sure that’s a common argument people make.
Well, that pretty much takes us to the end of this text today. So for the remainder of our time today, let’s go back and see if there’s any other points we wanted to make about the argument we’ve been in for the last several weeks — that the world and the universe were not created supernaturally by the gods. And just to go ahead and get it out of the way, one of the things that I wanted to be sure to remember to bring up that we did not cover last week: when we were talking about the argument that the gods didn’t have any examples to go by when they created the universe, I don’t know that it’s clear that this example argument would be a reference to Plato and his forms or not. But clearly as you bounce back and forth in thinking about Epicurus versus the other philosophers, the arguments that Plato had raised that ideas basically existed in another sort of dimension — and that much of life is involved in sort of remembering that the soul can remember and connect with these ideas from some sort of pre-existence — it seems to me possible that when Epicurus chooses to argue that the gods could have had no example, he’s at least got in mind that Plato has said that examples of things basically all exist in some other dimension. I know there’s an example that Plato apparently argued that you can see four-footed animals with long necks that you can get on the back of and ride — in front of you all day long you can see any number of those animals — but you’re really never sure that it’s a horse, but you can be sure what a horse is because a horse has a specific definition or ideal form that exists in this realm of forms. So in Platonic thought the question always is: is this particular thing in front of you an example of this form that exists somewhere else? And Epicurus did away with all of that kind of analysis when he suggested that there’s nothing eternal out there but atoms and void, and so there’s certainly no ideal forms anywhere. That’s a rambling reference to Plato’s ideal forms that may or may not have anything to do with the argument that the gods would have had no example. Anybody got any thoughts from that part of the discussion last week to follow up on?
Don:
I can definitely see where you’re coming from. I had not thought of that myself when I first read that, but the thing that came to me was that he was basically making the analogy between humans trying to build something like a house or a chair or a box, and that you need a plan before you can do that. And I was taking that as just sort of extrapolating to the idea that the gods needed to have some sort of blueprint, and there was no way that they could come up with a blueprint for something that had never existed before. But I can see where you’re coming from with the Platonic forms.
Cassius:
Don, do you have a general understanding of how the forms operate in Plato’s system of how thinking operates?
Don:
Not really. My basic understanding, I think, is the same as yours — that there’s some sort of ideal form that lives somewhere out in some other dimension and that what we see in our dimension is just a pale imitation of those ideal forms.
Cassius:
Okay, and that’s the parable of the cave to some extent as well.
Don:
Right, exactly.
Cassius:
Charles, do you have any thought on that?
Charles:
Well, I was thinking — I know we touched upon this last week about if there was nothing there and then there was the gods and they would need to have some sort of blueprint or plan — how that relates back to nothing comes from nothing.
Cassius:
Yeah, there’s certainly that aspect of the question as well. And do we know whether he’s talking there about supernatural gods or whether he’s talking more about the Epicurean gods? And is there a difference in import if he’s talking about one or the other? Because gods like Zeus and Apollo and Athena and all the pantheon of the Greeks is far different than the Epicurean gods that Lucretius and Epicurus talk about.
Don:
They are both in a creation context, right?
Cassius:
Yeah, that was going to be my question too. Even Zeus and the Greek gods had their own creation problem, right? Isn’t that what the young Epicurus was reputed to have questioned from his teachers — that they taught him that chaos was the first thing? Did Zeus somehow come out of chaos? I don’t think Zeus was eternal, was he?
Don:
Yeah, well, he was the son of Uranus and he was definitely born. He was one of the sons that Cronus ate, and his mother hid Zeus away to save him. So Zeus definitely had a beginning.
Cassius:
And Cronus — did he have a beginning? I don’t mean to put anybody on the spot because I still need those answers too. I don’t know much about the Titans. My inference from this discussion about chaos is that the Greeks thought that there was originally a chaos and then order came out of chaos, and Epicurus was needling his teachers saying, “Well, where did chaos come from?” And they basically told him to shut up. So I don’t know — maybe Plato’s forms were themselves sort of an innovation, and not part of any kind of original Homeric or other myth.
Don:
That’s always been my take on that — that it was an innovation from Plato himself, that he needed to explain how the world was imperfect. And his explanation was that there’s a perfect form, a perfect world of everything out there somewhere, and we are just a pale imitation of it. We’re in the cave, and until we break our chains and get out of the cave we can’t really see the wonder of the universe at all — that perfect splendor.
Cassius:
Okay, and then when you talk about it that way, Don — wasn’t there some issue that he had to also explain why the universe was imperfect? And he couldn’t have a perfect god create an imperfect world, so there’s some kind of lesser god that creates the world or something like that?
Don:
The Demiurge, I believe.
Cassius:
The Demiurge — that’s a word I’ve heard in that context. It certainly gets complicated when you have to try to come up with a sequence of events that you have no information about.
Don:
Which is one of the selling points, at least for me, of the whole idea of atoms and void — this is just the way that the universe came about and there is no ultimate purpose. It’s random events that have given rise to things. If you try to impose perfection on imperfection you get into the mental gymnastics that Plato did. The world isn’t perfect, but hey, it’s all we got, so we can just deal with it.
Cassius:
So where are we right now in Book Five? We’ve gotten past the initial discussion of Epicurus which deserves to be considered almost as a god, and we’ve started talking about — I’m looking at an outline from Smith — he says that the sequence is something about the world will be destroyed sooner or later, then the earth and heavenly bodies are not divine, the world is not home to the gods, and then what we had today was the argument that God did not create the world for the benefit of human beings. So Smith puts that under a category heading of discussing the nature and formation of our world. And next week we turn to a fairly long discussion that the four component elements of the world — earth, air, water, and fire — are mortal, and so the entire world is mortal. So we’re going to go off into a long discussion next week of the world being mortal.
Don:
Yeah, I was just looking at the marginalia notes in my copy of Martin Ferguson Smith’s, and it’s like — the world is too faulty to be of divine origin; two-thirds of it are useless to man; of the rest, much is wild and without hard labor all it would be full of weeds; look at the wild beasts, look at disease, the helplessness of the child. So it’s just — if you look at it with objective eyes, the world was not made for the benefit of human beings.
Cassius:
Was there anything else from last week we wanted to cover? Because otherwise we’ll just change topics and wait till next week. I do think it’s interesting — if you’ll indulge — I’d like to read those couple verses from the New International Version from Matthew that just line up so much with the ideas of that last paragraph we read here today.
Don:
Go ahead.
Cassius:
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin, yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.” I love the fact that he mentions the pagans in there.
Don:
Yeah.
Cassius:
And of course, what does that bring to mind? One of the themes that DeWitt mentions — he’s always going back and forth talking about whether the Christian writings were to some extent inspired by or related to the Epicurean arguments. I would certainly think this is a possibility here.
Charles:
Who is that? Did you say Matthew or Paul?
Don:
Yes, Matthew.
Cassius:
So theoretically Matthew would have been familiar with the Greek — don’t even have to call it Epicurean, but just the general arguments here that the universe was not made for the benefit of man. And this might be an example of the early church wanting to respond to those arguments.
Don:
Yeah, as you know, I’m not always a big fan of DeWitt seeing Christianity around every Epicurean corner, but when it’s this blatant, you have to say yeah, there’s a definite connection here, at least culturally or philosophically.
Cassius:
Yeah, yeah. And Lucretius definitely came before the writing of Matthew. And of course, presumably, what we’re reading today is a reflection of what Epicurus had originally written somewhere in On Nature. Exactly — it could be two hundred years of established argument here. So I guess you could relate that just like I’m constantly looking for examples of where Epicurus may be responding to Plato or Aristotle. That section in Matthew could be a very explicit attempt to respond to an argument that was in the pagan literature that the early Christians were very familiar with. And it’s without a doubt that the early Christians would have to respond to Epicurus and Epicurean philosophy because it was so widespread and they were trying to convert people that had already been exposed to that earlier philosophy. So just like building churches on the old grounds of temples, it’s sort of the same thing.
For somebody who is listening to the podcast and doesn’t know some of the references we’re talking about — I think DeWitt goes to his most extreme development of these arguments in his book called St. Paul and Epicurus. Have you read that one, Don?
Don:
I did, but it has been even longer than I’ve read the other stuff.
Cassius:
Okay, yeah. Well, that’s where he goes through different chapters and verses of the New Testament — it’s literally chapter and verse — and picks out probably an awful lot of arguments, some of which are not quite as strong as others, but some of which I think are relatively strong.
Don:
Yeah, and that’s always been my sort of thing to argue with DeWitt about, that he tries to glue so many Christian things onto Epicurean foundations that after a while it’s just like, come on! I think it would be a much stronger argument if he picked out several that were very explicit, like this one, and just stuck with it.
Cassius:
I always get confused in my Christian teachings as to whether there was supposed to be more than one antichrist or not, but it struck me of particular significance when I was reading those parts of St. Paul and Epicurus where basically DeWitt asserts several instances where he thinks that they were labeling Epicurus to be either an antichrist or the antichrist, due to the difference of his teachings. Somebody who’s really into the Christian antichrist material I think would find a lot of interesting stuff in what DeWitt wrote in that section of St. Paul and Epicurus.
Okay, well we really are kind of rambling now. As we begin to close for the day, does anyone have anything else they’d like to include in this podcast before we turn our attention next week to the destruction of the universe? Charles, any last words today?
Charles:
No.
Cassius:
Martin, we haven’t heard from you in the last ten minutes or so. Anything else from today?
Martin:
No, I’m done for today.
Cassius:
And Don?
Don:
I’m good.
Cassius:
Okay, well I’m good too. I’ll try to put this one together as quickly as possible and we will get it published, and then we’ll be back next week to take up the destruction of the world. So thanks everybody, and we’ll talk next week — if we’re still here.
Don:
Yeah, exactly. Bye.
Charles:
Bye-bye. Thanks so much.