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Episode 248 - Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods - Part 23 - Cotta Pushes The "Argument By Design" Against The Epicurean View That All - Including Gods - Is Natural.

Date: 09/28/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4066-episode-248-cicero-s-otnotg-23-cotta-pushes-the-argument-by-design-against-the-e/

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Transcript

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Cassius: Welcome to episode 248 of Lucretius today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean text and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we have a thread to discuss this and each of our podcast episodes. Before we get started, I’d like to make a quick apology for the audio quality of today’s episode. We were affected in our recording session by the hurricane Helene and I did not have access to my normal microphone and studio set up. We’ll remedy that next week. In the meantime, let’s get on with the episode today We’re continuing in Ciceros on the nature of the Gods. We’re at approximately the middle of section 34. Last week we finished the discussion by talking about how the ultimate agenda of kata includes attacking the idea of pleasure and that one of the subtext is that kata would not have wanted to have pleasure associated with the gods because of course they don’t like the idea of pleasure as associated with humans in general, either the happiness of the Gods ADA’s viewpoint is likely not going to be involved with pleasure, whereas you would expect the epicurean viewpoint of happiness to include pleasure. And we talked about how this was possibly a motivation for the epicureans to insist on a bodily nature for the gods since the bodily aspect of pleasure is such an important part of human happiness. This week we’ll go further into section 34 and come back to a more general issue of epicurean reasoning. So let’s get started back with the text. As we left off last week in the middle of section 34, kata says this, therefore, I cannot sufficiently wonder how this chief of yours came to entertain these strange opinions, but you constantly insist on the certainty of this tenant that the deity is both happy and immortal. Supposing he is, so would his happiness be less perfect if he had not two feet or cannot that blessedness or beatitude call it, which you will, they’re both harsh terms, but we must mollify them by use. Can it not? I say exist in that sun or in this world or in some eternal mind that has not human shape or limbs. All you say against it is that you have never seen any happiness in the sun or the world. What then? Did you ever see any world but this? No, you will say why therefore do you presume to assert that there are not only 600,000 worlds, but that they are innumerable reason tells you so will not reason tell you likewise, that as in our inquiries into the most excellent nature, we find that none but the divine nature can be happy and eternal. So the same divine nature surpasses us in excellence of mind and as in mind. So in body, why therefore as we are inferior in all other respects, should we be equal in form for human virtue approaches nearer to the divinity than human form? Okay, that paragraph sort of sums up what we discussed at the end of the episode last week. Ada is attempting to pin down the epicurean position that a God is exactly like a human being and he’s trying to assert that that makes no logical sense to assert that and why can’t the divine nature so surpass us in excellence of mind that it also excels us in body? Again, as we pointed out numerous times, this is the main text we have for the details of Val’s argument. And so we don’t know whether Cicero is overstating the equivalence of the human body to a divine body, and I would have to think that he likely is. And that Valle, as we’ve talked about in the past, is just making the general point that a God according to Epicurus is a living being all living beings and in fact all that exist in nature has a physical basis to it and that the epicure position is likely at root, that the gods have some kind of physical basis, but that the details of that physical basis are open to alternate possibilities just so long as the possibilities that are suggested remain consistent with what we know about physics in general, the gods are not supernatural, omniscient, things like that that would be impossible under epicurean physics. So as we move to section 35, kata is going to pick up this argument and carry it further, but our starting point is this basic disagreement about the epicurean saying that the gods have a physical nature to them while kata laying the groundwork for his supernatural argument is insisting that there’s no reason for them to have any kind of human relationship whatsoever. And so all of that about the gods has set the stage for what we’re about to hear in section 35 as a general attack on epicurean reasoning. Ada says To return to the subject I was upon, what can be more childish than to assert that there are no such creatures as are generated in the Red Sea or in India? The most curious Enquirer cannot arrive at the knowledge of all those creatures which inhabit the earth, sea fins and rivers, and shall we deny the existence of them because we never saw them? That similitude, which you are so very fond of is nothing to the purpose, is not a dog like a wolf. And as Anya says, the monkey filthiest beast, how like to man, yet they differ in nature. No beast has more ity than an elephant. Yet where can you find any of a larger size? I’m speaking here of beast, but among men, do we not see a disparity of manners in persons very much alike and a similitude of manners in persons? Unlike if this sort of argument were once to prevail, Valle, observe what it would lead to. You’ve laid it down as certain that reason cannot possibly reside in any but the human form. Another may affirm that it can exist in none but a terrestrial being in none but a being that is born that grows up and receives instruction and that consists of a soul and an infirm and perishable body in short, in none but a mortal man. But if you decline these opinions, why should a single form disturb you perceive that man is possessed of reason and understanding With all the infirmities which I’ve mentioned interwoven with his being abstracted from which you nevertheless know God, you say if the lineaments do but remain, this is not talking considerately, but at a venture for surely you did not think what an encumbrance, anything superfluous or useless is not only in a man but a tree. How troublesome is it to have a finger too much and why so? Because neither use nor ornament requires more than five, but your deity has not only a finger more than he wants, but a head, a neck, shoulders, sides, a punch back, hams, hands, feet, thighs, and legs. Are these parts necessary to immortality? Are they conducive to the existence of the deity? Is the face itself of use? One would rather say so of the brain, the heart, the lights and the liver for these are the seats of life, the features of the face contribute nothing to the preservation of it. That takes us to section 36 continuing largely on the same lines as before, that there’s not only no reason to presume that a God is a physical being that we would recognize as human, but that there’s really no reason to presume that a God has any physical nature at all seems to me to be the heart of where he’s going. What do you think about what we’ve read so far? Ja?

Joshua: Yeah. We’re right back into the argument that Cicero left off for a moment as to whether a rational being can have any other body than a human body. Cicero is telling us that Epicurus had asserted that the gods have to have a human body because that is the only body in which reason has been known to exist. And as you rightly said at the beginning, as we keep saying this, text is our main source for a claim that goes that far. In the letter to Menno, Epicurus said, believes that a God is a living being. And the Greek word for that is Zoe, but everything that is alive or at least animate can be considered a living being. So the text here is going much farther than the text we have from Epicurus himself, but again in the last line of 34 when he says, why therefore, as we are inferior to the gods in all other respects, should we be equal to them in form for human virtue approaches nearer to the divinity than human form. And I think for cerone, for kata, it’s that conflict between virtue and pleasure between those who seek virtue and who wish to live virtuously and those who wish to live in the pursuit of pleasure, which was seen generally in the ancient world to be a immoral or non-virtuous act. And we heard from Cicero in book two of on ends, this tirade against the pursuit of pleasure. He thinks it’s revolting for a cultivated human being, for a cultivated Roman to spend his life in the pursuit of pleasure is something gross and effeminate and disgusting. What we should be doing according to Cicero is cultivating virtue. And if we should be cultivating virtue, how much more should the gods be living virtuously? And so don’t come at me epicurus with all this nonsense about the gods having bodies like humans. They should instead have minds superior to humans and moral behavior that is far beyond the moral behavior of humans. The gods should be more virtuous, they should not experience more and better pleasure. That’s the standard. And then immediately after that, as you just read, he goes right back into this same question and he appears to be challenging Epicurus reasoning on this point. He says, what can be more childish than to assert that there are no such creatures as are generated in the Red Sea or in India? I think it was two weeks ago, Cassius, we had from Kada again the argument that if we follow the reasoning of the epicureans, then an inland person wouldn’t believe in the sea because they’d never seen the sea or someone living on an island in the Aian wouldn’t believe in elephants and lions and these larger animals, what we now call charismatic megafauna, that if you live on an island in the Eugene, you wouldn’t believe in these things because you’ve never seen them. And to my surprise, this is pretty much the argument that he sticks with throughout most of this. Most of the texts for today, he’s not willing to let this go.

Cassius: Joshua, lemme jump in there and say, yeah, I think you’re right. And I think that points to why this is so important. We’re not limiting the issue here to the existence of Gods. It’s very similar, it seems to me, to just the general debate between the stoics and the epicureans or the regular non epicurean Greeks, the platonists, the risan and everyone else as to the superiority and existence of virtue over pleasure and pain is given by nature. We’re very familiar with the argument that pleasure is despicable and deplorable and something that’s not even a part of the correct human life and that virtue is what everything should be about. When we compare that argument to this argument about the nature of the gods, I think it’s very similar in fundamental presumption because they are asserting as to virtue a abstraction that they have no evidence really exists other than in their minds, than the way they construct it using rationalistic arguments or divine revelation or something that does not ground itself in nature. They’re asserting the existence and superiority of virtue over pleasure in a very similar way to the way they are saying, you should not limit yourself to talking about god’s as being physical. You should be talking about Gods as being any way you wish to talk about Gods as so surpassing in excellent human beings is to not have any connection or similarity to us whatsoever. And so I think you can lay those arguments side by side and just as they try to intimidate on pleasure as the goal and say that virtue is so much more excellent. And again, the Ian’s argument that making virtues the handmaidens of pleasure is so revolting a thought that all we have to do is really think about it to see how absurd it is they’re attempting to divorce the nature of gods from reality and asserting that we should be able to free ourselves from any constraints whatsoever about how a God might exist so that we can have any kind of God we’d like a supernatural omni intelligently designing universe, creating type of God without any kind of grounding for that in observation of nature

Joshua: That is clearly the direction that Cicero and kata are going here. Another one of the arguments that we had in book two of on ends was this argument between Cicero and Torti as to where one should look to find an example of the life guided by the telos guided by the particular end goal or the good as described by these disagreeing philosophical sex and epicurious answers that you should look to the young of all species, right? That we should look to newborn animals. You should look to animals as close as possible to a state of nature and see what they do and see the way in which they pursue pleasure and avoid pain. And Cicero on the other side of that said, no, we don’t look to the young of all creatures. Instead we should look to illustrious men of the Greek and Roman past. These men have lived lives of virtue that they have left for us as an example that we can follow and when we see the fruits of that in their life and in the republic and so forth, we can see that virtue not pleasure, virtue is what we should be pursuing here as the goal or as the good. I kind of see a connection between ADA’s distaste for the filthy ast beast, the monkey and so forth. I kind of see a connection between that and this other argument about Pat telos and where you find the best living example of it. But as you rightly say, Cassius, all of this here in this text is in service of his broader claim, which is why are you unprepared epicurus to accept the existence of a God that is not a body but a mind and that has all of those powers, the power of omnipotence and omniscience, the power to create and destroy the power to save as we see in other religions. We come back to that as his main point in all of this.

Cassius: Joshua, that’s a great analogy and I think if Epicurus would hear, he would say something to the effect that I reject your supernatural God kata for the same reason that I reject your essentially supernatural virtue as the goal of life instead of pleasure. I am not going to accept your abstractions which are not grounded in nature. Your suggestions, your speculations, that revolt against nature that don’t ground themselves in the evidence of our sense. I am going to pursue as my goal in life pleasure because nature tells me to because that’s what I get through observing nature and I am not going to suggest anything is possible about a God or about anything else unless I find some sanction for that in nature and I find no sanction in nature kata for your imaginary gods who create universes and do all these other things that physics tells us. Our observation of nature tells us are impossible. So yes, Joshua, that analogy that you brought up there is probably one of the best so far and helps us see how important it is that this type of reasoning be understood when Kata tries to talk about, you’re saying that Gods have necks and shoulders and sides and pot bellies and hands and feet and maybe they have an extra finger that they don’t really need. That’s not the point, and I don’t want us to sound like a broken record on just not trusting Cicero’s rendition of the epicurean argument, but I don’t think Valle is reasonably read in any of this to be staking out the kind of positions that kata is alleging that he is, especially when we consider how Cicero seems to refuse to accept the epicurean argument that pleasure involves more than sex, drugs and rock and roll. When Cicero refuses to accept all the things Tous explains to him about how when you’re not in pain you’re experiencing pleasure. I wouldn’t expect Cicero to accept and relay the epicurean argument as to the gods with any more specificity and accuracy than he did about pleasure In all ends, Cicero does preserve for us the basics of some statements that when we go in and dig out the implications, we can reconcile them. I think that’s basically what we have to do here with Valle as well. He is preserving through Vallejo some basic points that can be interpreted in multiple ways and he’s not going to give us the favorable explanation that the Epicureans would’ve used among themselves on the gods any more than he did as to pleasure. It’s there if we dig into it, but it’s not presented in the eloquent persuasive way that he allows kata to attack. It’s just impossible to accept that epicurus or the LAIs has said anything that would justify the harsh conclusion that just because you’ve never seen a thing before, it cannot exist. These statements about animals in the Red Sea or in India are intended to evoke just that kind of a conclusion and for the man who Lucius says travel through his mind throughout the entire universe and came back a conqueror to tell us what can be and what cannot be such a man is not going to be so narrow-minded as to say that only those things I’ve seen can exist. He’s going to say that what I’ve seen allows me to deduce rules that tell me what cannot be in basic terms such as nothing supernatural, nothing outside of nature, nothing that is not composed of matter and void those kind of basic conclusions. Epicurus is certain of, but as to how the matter combines how the atoms and void come together in different ways, Epicurus himself has said that throughout the universe there are places where life exists, some of which is like and some of which is unlike our own. So again, without belaboring that point too much further going through ADA’s argument can be extremely helpful to remind us of those basics that we have to return to if we’re going to understand Epicurus at all fairly.

Joshua: That’s right, and in section 36, which we’re coming to next, we’re going to see a bit of where Kata is going with this. He’s saying that you epicureans won’t believe in elephants if you’ve never seen one because the argument that kata is going to make next is we see wonderful things on this earth that humans have made and from them we can infer the existence of a designer. And so how much more excellent must be the designer of the cosmos in which humans are able to operate and this is what he says in section 36, you ced those who the holding those excellent and stupendous works the world and its respective parts, the heaven, the earth, the seas and the splendor with which they are adorn who contemplating the sun, moon, and stars and who observing the maturity and changes of the seasons and vicissitudes of the times inferred from then that there must be some excellent and eminent essence that originally made and still moves, directs and governs them. Suppose they should mistake in their conjecture, yet I see what they aim at, but what is that great and noble work which appears to you to be the effect of a divine mind and from which you conclude that there are gods. I have say you a certain information of a deity imprinted in my mind this is referring I think to the paralysis and Kada says of a bearded Jupiter I suppose and a helmeted Minerva mocking the epicureans for thinking along those lines as he’s suggesting they did. While what kata has in his mind is probably Aristotle and his first mover, his first cause, the arguments that he made for the existence of a designing and creating and sustaining mind that governs all things. That’s I think where he is going with all of this. You epicurean centered those who beholding all of the excellent things that we see in nature and inferring from those excellent things that we see in nature that there must be some excellent and eminent essence that originally made them and instead of this you give us gods that don’t create gods that don’t sustain gods that don’t even interfere and Gods that have merely a human form rather than a mind beyond comprehension.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. Now we could spend hours going through the argument from design, but this is a great presentation of that very argument that we see today over and over in every direction that everything that we see is so stupendous that it must have had a designer and this is the place where you could not get a more violent disagreement from the epicureans because they reached the conclusion that it’s your failure to understand that a designer is not necessary, that the evidence does not support the existence of a designer and this is the reason that you have shackled yourself to the chains of supernatural gods because you failed to see the illogic, the non-sequitur of your argument that just because these stupendous and complex things exist that does not prove, that does not even give any evidence that a intelligent designer set it all in motion and I think you’re certainly correct when he says of a bearded Jupiter, I suppose and a helmet of Minerva that absolutely is mockery and sarcasm because Valle has been very clear that what is given to humans through persis is the notion of gods as a living, being blessed and imperishable. Nothing about Minerva, nothing about zoos, nothing about beards, nothing about men and women, none of that is what Epicurus insists in the letter to. Menaces is so important to understand about the nature of God’s ADA’s. Ridicule plays well as you would expect from Cicero being a lawyer, making a closing argument and trying to inflame a jury against a criminal defendant, but it ultimately does not make sense when you drop back and think about the nature of the evidence and what you’re really suggesting.

Joshua: I mean, it almost seems that co has been setting up a trap this whole time. He’s saying you wouldn’t believe in the sea unless you had seen it yourself. You wouldn’t believe in an elephant unless you had seen it yourself and you’re supposed to respond to that by saying, no, no, no. I would. I mean if I had good information that those things existed, of course I would accept their existence and then he turns it around and says, well, on the same reasoning, you ought to be able to say then that because we observed things in this world that we know are designed, we should infer from that the much greater things that exist in nature like the earth and the sun itself and the stars that they must have a designer that far surpasses the best sculptor in Greece,

Cassius: Right? Because you’re accepting that it is possible for things to exist which you’ve never seen before. You should also accept that it’s possible for anything to exist, which is not at all the epicurean position because we are saying that it is possible that other things exist as long as they are consistent with nature, as long as they are consistent with the operation of atoms and void. There are certainly many combinations of atoms and void that are possible that we have never seen before, but there is a limit. There is a deep set boundary mark between what is possible and what is not possible. And that limit is what we’re attempting to get through our natural philosophy, but which starts with the atoms and the void and the observations we make through the census. That’s the starting point and that’s the basis from which we are going to determine what is possible and what is not. It is not anything goes Ka. You cannot just simply suppose that a supernatural God that you’re trying to suggest exists without some evidence for it beyond your own assertion and your own imagination. As you said, kata is laying a trap here trying to get the epicureans to say that just because it’s possible for things that have never seen to exist, anything can exist and if you’re an epicurean and you’ve studied your natural philosophy, you’re not going to fall for that. But if you’re pretense the type of epicurean who just believes in being happy and that’s all a curators have to say about anything, then you’re not going to be prepared for that kind of an argument. You’re going to simply say, well, I don’t know. Physics is not my specialty. I really just want to be happy. And you’re ending up taking the position that your assertion because it’s yours should be accepted as valid. Just like ADA’s taking the position here that his assertions about the God should be accepted because they’re his assertions. Well, epicurean reasoning ultimately gives priority to nature, and it is the evidence that nature gives us through the senses and through the feelings and through the anticipations that an epicurean is going to say is the basis for all legitimate reasoning. Kata is not using that basis. Kata is just throwing out what he wants to throw out as a possibility. And as Lucrecia says, Epicurus has come back from his discoveries of nature, from his exploration of nature to tell us what can be and what cannot and how to find those deep set boundary mark that will give us confidence that supernatural Gods cannot exist

Joshua: Right now in the proceeding sentence, he had started on this discussion of these human form gods of the epicureans and how they have body parts but they don’t use them, right? And he uses this phrase, he says, because neither use nor ornament requires humans to have more than five. And then he says, but your deity has not only a finger more than he wants, but a head, a neck, shoulders, sides and so forth. I think that initial phrase there has become a commonplace in literature, this conflict between use and beauty, but that’s a separate conversation. He’s going to continue this line in the second paragraph of 36 when he says this. This is immediately after mocking the epicureans for their alleged proses of a bearded Jupiter and a helmeted Minerva. And then Kada says this, but do you really imagine them to be such? How much better are the notions of the ignorant vulgar who not only believe that the deities have members like ours, but that they make use of them and therefore they assign them a bow and an arrow, a spear and a shield and a trident at bolts of lightning, and though they do not behold the actions of the gods, yet they cannot entertain a thought of a deity doing nothing. The Egyptians so much ridiculed held no beast to be sacred except on account of some advantage which they had received from them. The Ibis, a very large bird with strong legs and a horny long beak destroys a great number of serpents. These birds keep Egypt from pestilential diseases by killing and devouring the flying serpents brought from the deserts of Libya by the southwest wind, which prevents the mischief that may attend their biting while alive or any infection when dead. I could speak of the advantage of the mongoose, the crocodile and the cat, but I am unwilling to be tedious. Sure you are kata. Yet I will conclude with observing that the barbarians paid divine honors to beasts because of the benefits they receive from them. Whereas your gods not only confer no benefit but are idol and do no single act of any description whatsoever. If you epicurean are going to be so vulgus to believe that e gods have human form, you should at least give them some human use from that human form. But instead you give them no use or benefit either to themselves or to mankind at all. Now I know Cassius, you will have some problems with that last sentence, that the Gods are idle and do no single act of any description whatsoever.

Cassius: Yes, Joshua, over the next several sessions will be coming back to this issue raised in the last sentence about whether the gods are idle or not. So I’ll defer most of my wrath towards that sentence for later episodes. But again, it’s the same thing. Valle and the Epicureans are not saying that the gods are idle in the sense of doing nothing and in the sense of experiencing nothing in the sense of experiencing no pleasure, because we know from edemas that the Gods speaking language similar to Greek, there’s no reason to believe from what Epicurus had to say or Valle has had to say, or we have from Phil Edemas that the gods are just simply thinking and actually doing nothing. Now you have to get to the meaning of what does the word do really mean in a context of a God? But I would suggest that the main focus of an epicurean concern about the gods doing things is what we know from the other text of Epicurus that Epicurus denied that they experienced trouble, that they have to work hard to maintain the universe or to create universes or to superintendent the affairs of men. They certainly are not engaging in laborious activity that they find less than pleasant. That would be a deduction about perfect happiness, that you wouldn’t have any kind of activity that you would find painful, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not conducting any kind of activity at all. Again, we’ll come back to that in future episodes for the moment. The theme of the day seems to be that just as you read when Kata is talking about cats and mongooses and crocodiles and so forth, what they’re doing again by all of these details is taking the focus off the ultimate question, which is whether we are bound by the laws of physics that we derive from the atoms and the void, or is the supernatural something that we need to consider as possible when we’re thinking about the nature of gods, are we bound by reasoning through analogy to think about the gods or anything else in terms of evidence that we have available to us or can we simply suggest anything we wish? Whether there are examples of it in nature, whether what we’re talking about is consistent with what we know about the nature of all things being composed of atoms and void, or whether we’re going to allow that to be suspended and say that atoms and void are not relevant to the nature of Gods. This list of cats and crocodiles and different types of animals seems to be expressed in the sense that the Egyptians who are often ridiculed at the very least are appreciating that what the deity has done in creating these animals should be appreciated for conferring the benefits that these animals produce and that what you’re doing in your typical ungrateful epicurean wave Valle is failing to give credit to the gods for the benefits that these creatures provide to us. You are ungrateful for what the gods have done for us, and you triple down by saying, not only are you not grateful for what they’ve done for us, but they don’t do anything at all. And again, that’s not the direction of the epicurean argument in the first place just because the birds devoured the flying serpents from the desert of Libya. That is not evidence that there’s a supernatural God who’s brought all this about just because the mongoose, even crocodiles and cats provide benefits to us. That is not a reason to conclude that there was an intelligent designer who sent those to provide us those benefits. But you epicureans according to kata, ignore these creations, ignore these benefits and simply say that it all happened by chance.

Joshua: So Kata mentions this relationship between the IBUs, a very large bird and the flying serpents that they kill. And I was very curious about this, so I looked it up. This actually comes from a story that was related by Tus the Greek historian, and apparently these flying serpents don’t actually exist. It’s thought that possibly there was an exposed fossil dig and they may have seen pterodactyls or something and the myth spun out of that. But here’s what Tus has to say in histories. He says this, there is a region moreover in Arabia situated nearly over against the city of Butta to which place I came to inquire about the winged serpents. And when I came thither, I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity. So great that it is impossible to make report of the number. And there were heaps of spines, some heaps large and others less large and others smaller still than these. And these heaps were many in number. This region in which the spines are scattered upon the ground is of the nature of an entrance from a narrow mountain pass to a great plane, which plane adjoins the plane of Egypt. And the story goes that at the beginning of spring wings, serpents from Arabia fly towards Egypt and the birds called Ibis meet them at the entrance to this country and do not suffer the serpents to go by, but they kill them on account of this deed. It is or say the Arabians, that the IBUs has come to be greatly honored by the Egyptians. And the Egyptians also agree that it is for this reason that they honor these birds. And then he goes on to say the outward form of the IBUs is this. It is deep black all over and has legs like those of a crane and a very curved beak and in size. It is about equal to a rail. This is the appearance of the black kind, which fight with the serpents. But of those which most crowd around men’s feet where there are two several kinds viruses, the head is bare and also the hole of the throat, and it is white in feathering except the head and the neck and the extremities of the wings and the rump. In all of these parts which I’ve spoken, it is a deep black while in legs and in the form of the head it resembles the other kind. As for the serpent, its form is like that of the water snake and it has wings, not feathered, but most nearly resembling the wings of the bat. Let so much suffice as has been said now concerning sacred animals, the problem is that these creatures don’t actually exist, which is just amusing to me. It goes to show that we’re looking at a particular culture at a particular time in place and their knowledge of the world even so far as it adjoins the Mediterranean is limited. And that’s to be expected. I think we should expect that the Greeks and the Romans would have a limited knowledge of the world that they lived in, certainly far more limited than our knowledge of the world that we live in. But does not that say something about the idea that from this world that we don’t even understand that we should be able to infer the existence of a creator who we couldn’t even possibly understand. Doesn’t it say something about this argument from design if we don’t even understand the thing that we allege to have been designed? There are competing accounts as to how this myth of flying snakes in Egypt came to be. And one of them is that this was a site where fossils of flying dinosaurs had been discovered and like myths of dragons all over the world. Maybe they found this stuff and even though they’d never seen one, they imagine what it might be like if they had seen one. And then the myth takes hold, and now we have kata, the skeptic relaying it as if it is a statement of fact and saying that that’s the reason Egyptians honor the IBUs bird for his utility in destroying these non-existent serpents. Why do you epicureans honor gods that are even less useful than an IBUs bird is his question. Anyway, I think it’s an interesting question. Anthropologically ti is not a historian to be relied upon, and I will post, I found two good sources related to this question that kind of give the whole breakdown. So I’ll post those to the thread.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I think that’s another good example of what we’re talking about today. Kata and these other anti epicurean philosophers are grounding their arguments on things that are very loose and broad, and they’re just as willing to ground their arguments on myths as they are in sensory documentation to support it. Okay, we’re coming to the end of our episode here today, and there’s been a couple really important things that we’ve discussed. The argument by design, which kata clearly understood to have been rejected by the epicureans and the basis for the epicurean rejection of that. And in addition to that, we’ve covered the parallel between the argument that the non epicurean philosophers were using to elevate virtue as superior to pleasure, that they approached that in a similar way that they’re approaching the nature of gods in each case, speculating, rationalistic, that they’re assert exist without evidence of the senses or evidence in nature. And both of those observations are things that we regularly deal with in studying Epicurean philosophy. But why don’t we bring today’s episode to a close Callini, any closing thoughts for today?

Speaker 3: Yeah, as I’ve been listening today, we’ve really come around to getting more and more clear about what Epicurus said about the nature of the gods, and now that we’ve come to this, we can add that onto the forum to help clarify because it’s been a journey really, I feel exploring this, and we really didn’t make any headway on it until we started going through Cicero’s on the nature of the gods. So in some ways the forum has been this exploratory space, but yet there’s now this sense in my mind that there’s so much more clarity coming about because this podcast has just greatly clarified a lot of things, I think.

Cassius: Yeah, I think you’re right. There’s a lot in this material that Cicero left to us, but it takes time and effort to dig out, and until you take the time to go through it, it’s hard to know what to make of a lot of it. But just like with onions and quata presentation of pleasure, if you really dig into what Quata had to say about pleasure, if you dig into what Valle had to say about the gods, there’s an awful lot of detail that points in directions that are not often discussed. Joshua.

Joshua: Yeah, I think it’s a very interesting project. Today is a very good example of that because nestled right in there between the question as to whether the hands of the gods have any utility and whether you would believe in the sea if you hadn’t seen it, is exactly the argument from design that we get today. I mean, it’s right here in the text. This could have been written by a Christian in the 21st century that looking at nature at the stupendous works of nature and the splendor with which they are adorned that by that we should infer the existence of the design even greater than the supposed design. And you don’t get stuff like this unless you’re willing to go through the text and find it. So I think it’s very helpful.

Cassius: That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the podcast and we’ll come back and take up Katas further arguments. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our other discussions about Epic. Thanks for your time again, we next week.