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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/

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

Episode 248 works through Sections 34–36 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, with a note at the opening about reduced audio quality due to Hurricane Helene. Cotta closes Section 34 by asking why, if divine happiness is possible, it could not reside in the sun, the world, or some eternal mind — and concludes that human virtue approaches nearer to divinity than human form, signaling the Platonist agenda to divorce gods from bodies and pleasure altogether. In Section 35, Cotta returns to the “you wouldn’t believe in what you haven’t seen” argument — could the Epicurean deny creatures found in the Red Sea or India? — while noting that a monkey resembles man in form yet differs utterly in nature, and that an elephant has memory despite its great size. Cotta then lays the groundwork for the Argument by Design: those who behold the stupendous works of nature — heaven, earth, seas, sun, moon, stars — and infer from them a supremely excellent designing intelligence were right to do so. Section 36 intensifies the attack: the Epicurean gods have body parts (head, neck, shoulders, limbs) that serve no purpose; at least the “ignorant vulgar” give their gods useful tools (bow, arrow, trident, thunderbolts); and at least the Egyptians honor beasts like the ibis for conferring real benefits — destroying the flying serpents that menaced Egypt. Joshua researches the ibis-and-flying-serpents story in Herodotus’s Histories and notes that the flying serpents probably never existed, the myth likely arising from exposed fossil remains. Cassius draws the central parallel of the episode: the Stoic/Platonic elevation of virtue over pleasure and the Platonic elevation of supernatural god over physical god employ the same argumentative move — asserting abstractions disconnected from nature. Both Torquatus’s presentation of pleasure in De Finibus and Velleius’s presentation of the gods in On the Nature of the Gods require the reader to dig past Cicero’s framing to find their true content. Callini offers a closing reflection on how much clarity has been gained about Epicurean views of the gods through this close reading of Cicero.

Transcript

Section titled “Transcript”

Cassius: Welcome to episode 248 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, 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 at 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 Hurricane Helene, and I did not have access to my normal microphone and studio setup. We’ll remedy that next week. In the meantime, let’s get on with the episode.

Today we’re continuing in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, at approximately the middle of Section 34. Last week we finished the discussion by talking about how the ultimate agenda of Cotta includes attacking the idea of pleasure — that one of the subtexts is that Cotta 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 from Cotta’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, Cotta 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 tenet 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 the 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. Cotta 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 — and why can’t the divine nature so surpass us in excellence of mind that it also excels us in body? Again, as we’ve pointed out numerous times, this is the main text we have for the details of Velleius’s argument, and so we don’t know whether Cicero is overstating the equivalence of the human body to a divine body. I would have to think that he likely is, and that Velleius, 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 exists in nature, have a physical basis to them — and that the Epicurean 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, Cotta is going to pick up this argument and carry it further. But our starting point is this basic disagreement about the Epicureans saying the gods have a physical nature to them, while Cotta — 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.

Cotta 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 inquirer cannot arrive at the knowledge of all those creatures which inhabit the earth, seas, rivers, and streams — 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 Ennius says, the monkey — filthiest of beasts — how like to man? Yet they differ in nature. No beast has more memory than an elephant, yet where can you find any of a larger size?

I’m speaking here of beasts, 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, Velleius, 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? 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 paunch, a 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 lungs, 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. That seems to me to be the heart of where he’s going. What do you think about what we’ve read so far, Joshua?

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 Menoikeus, Epicurus said that he believes 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 further than the text we have from Epicurus himself.

But again, in the last line of Section 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” — I think for Cicero, for Cotta, 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 an 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 — it’s 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 Epicurean 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 Cotta 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 Aegean wouldn’t believe in elephants and lions and these larger animals, what we now call charismatic megafauna. And to my surprise, this is pretty much the argument he sticks with throughout most of the texts for today. He’s not willing to let this go.

Cassius: Joshua, let me 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, and everyone else — as to the superiority of virtue over pleasure, versus pleasure as 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 — an abstraction that they have no evidence really exists other than in their minds, in 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 gods as being physical. You should be talking about gods as so surpassing human beings in excellence as to have no 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 Cicero’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, omnipotent, 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 Cotta are going here. Another one of the arguments we had in Book Two of On Ends was this argument between Cicero and Torquatus 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 sects. And Epicurus 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 lives 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, as the good.

I kind of see a connection between Cotta’s distaste for the filthiest of beasts, the monkey, and so forth — I kind of see a connection between that and this other argument about the 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: 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 it, he would say something to the effect that: I reject your supernatural god, Cotta, 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 senses — 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, Cotta, for your imaginary gods who create universes and do all these other things that our observation of nature tells us are impossible.

So yes, Joshua, that analogy 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 Cotta tries to talk about “you’re saying that gods have necks and shoulders and sides and paunches 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 Velleius is reasonably read in any of this to be staking out the kind of positions Cotta is alleging 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 Torquatus 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 On 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 Velleius as well. He is preserving through Velleius 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 have 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 Cotta to attack.

It’s just impossible to accept that Epicurus or Lucretius 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 conclusion. And for the man who Lucretius says traveled 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 kinds 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 Cotta’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 Cotta is going with this. He’s saying that you Epicureans won’t believe in elephants if you’ve never seen one — because the argument Cotta 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 censured those who, beholding those excellent and stupendous works — the world and its respective parts, the heaven, the earth, the seas, and the splendor with which they are adorned — who, contemplating the sun, the moon, and the stars, and who, observing the maturity and changes of the seasons and the vicissitudes of the times, inferred from them 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 prolepsis. And Cotta 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 Cotta has in his mind is probably Aristotle and his first mover, his first cause — the arguments that Aristotle made for the existence of a designing, creating, and sustaining mind that governs all things. That’s where I think he’s going with all of this.

You Epicureans censured those who, beholding all of the excellent things that we see in nature and inferring from those excellent things 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: 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 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 an 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 helmeted Minerva” — that absolutely is mockery and sarcasm, because Velleius has been very clear that what is given to humans through prolepsis is the notion of gods as a living being, blessed and imperishable. Nothing about Minerva, nothing about Zeus, nothing about beards, nothing about men and women — none of that is what Epicurus insists in the Letter to Menoikeus is so important to understand about the nature of gods. Cotta’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 Cotta 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. 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 that because we observe things in this world that we know are designed, we should infer from that that the much greater things that exist in nature — like the earth and the sun itself and the stars — 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 senses. 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,” Cotta. You cannot simply suppose that a supernatural god exists without some evidence for it beyond your own assertion and your own imagination. As you said, Cotta is laying a trap here, trying to get the Epicureans to say that just because it’s possible for things they’ve 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 the type of Epicurean who just believes in being happy and that’s all Epicureans have to say about anything, then you’re not going to be prepared for that kind of 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 Cotta is taking the position here that his assertions about the gods 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, through the feelings, and through the anticipations that an Epicurean is going to say is the basis for all legitimate reasoning. Cotta is not using that basis. Cotta is just throwing out what he wants to throw out as a possibility. And as Lucretius says, Epicurus has come back from his explorations of nature to tell us what can be and what cannot — and how to find those deep-set boundary marks that will give us confidence that supernatural gods cannot exist.

Joshua: Right. Now in the preceding sentence he had started on this discussion of these human-form gods of the Epicureans and how they have body parts but don’t use them. And he uses this phrase: because neither use nor ornament requires humans to have more than five fingers. 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 — the conflict between use and beauty — has become a commonplace in literature. But that’s a separate conversation.

He’s going to continue this line in the second paragraph of Section 36 when he says this. This is immediately after mocking the Epicureans for their alleged proleptic image of a bearded Jupiter and a helmeted Minerva. And then Cotta says:

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, a trident, and 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 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, Cotta! Yet I will conclude with observing that the barbarians paid divine honors to beasts because of the benefits they received from them — whereas your gods not only confer no benefit but are idle and do no single act of any description whatsoever. If you Epicureans are going to be so bold as to believe that the 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 we’ll 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 thoughts on that sentence for later episodes.

But again, it’s the same thing. Velleius and the Epicureans are not saying that the gods are idle in the sense of doing nothing, in the sense of experiencing nothing, in the sense of experiencing no pleasure. Because we know from Philodemus that the gods speak a language similar to Greek. There’s no reason to believe from what Epicurus had to say, or Velleius has had to say, or we have from Philodemus, that the gods are simply thinking and actually doing nothing. You have to get to the meaning of what the word “do” really means in a context of a god. But I would suggest that the main focus of Epicurean concern about the gods doing things is what we know from the other texts 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 superintend 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 Cotta 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 or not, whether what we’re talking about is consistent with what we know about the nature of all things being composed of atoms and void?

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 what you’re doing, Velleius, in your typical ungrateful Epicurean way, 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 ibis 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, 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 Cotta, ignore these creations, ignore these benefits, and simply say that it all happened by chance.

Joshua: So Cotta mentions this relationship between the ibis — 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 related by Herodotus the Greek historian. And apparently these flying serpents don’t actually exist — it’s thought that possibly there was an exposed fossil site, and they may have seen pterodactyl remains or something similar, and the myth spun out of that. But here’s what Herodotus has to say in his Histories:

There is a region moreover in Arabia, situated nearly over against the city of Buto, 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 plain, which plain adjoins the plain of Egypt. And the story goes that at the beginning of spring, winged 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 — so say the Arabians — that the ibis 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 ibis 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, there are two several kinds. In these the head is bare and also the whole 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 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 and 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, we should be able to infer the existence of a creator whom we couldn’t possibly even 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. 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 imagined what it might be like if they had seen one. And then the myth takes hold. And now we have Cotta, the skeptic, relaying it as if it is a statement of fact and saying that that’s the reason Egyptians honor the ibis bird — for his utility in destroying these non-existent serpents. Why do you Epicureans honor gods that are even less useful than an ibis bird? is his question.

Anyway, I think it’s an interesting question anthropologically. Herodotus is not a historian to be relied upon on everything, and I will post two good sources related to this question that kind of give the whole breakdown. I’ll post those to the thread.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. I think that’s another good example of what we’re talking about today. Cotta 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 on sensory documentation to support them.

Okay, we’re coming to the end of our episode here today, and there have been a couple of really important things that we’ve discussed. The Argument from Design — which Cotta 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, and that they approached that in a similar way to the way they’re approaching the nature of gods: in each case, speculating rationally, asserting that things exist without evidence of the senses or evidence in nature. And both of those observations are things 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?

Callini: 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 things — because it’s been a journey, really. I feel like we’ve been 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 Torquatus and Cotta’s presentation of pleasure — if you really dig into what Cotta had to say about pleasure, if you dig into what Velleius had to say about the gods, there’s an awful lot of detail that points in directions that are not often discussed.

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 find here. I mean, it’s right here in the text. This could have been written by a Christian in the 21st century: looking at nature, at the stupendous works of nature and the splendor with which they are adorned, and by that inferring the existence of a designer 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 Cotta’s 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 Epicurus. Thanks for your time again. We’ll be back next week.