Episode 256 - Epicurean Gods: Real, Or Ideal Thought Constructs?
Date: 11/18/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4146-episode-256-epicurean-gods-real-or-ideal-thought-constructs/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 256 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 discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. We’ve now completed book one of Cicero’s on the nature of the Gods, and today we have with us our podcaster friend, Dawn, who is going to help us summarize some of the issues that we talked about during the last several months, primarily this question of whether Epicurus thought that his gods had a real physical existence or whether they are more on the order of thought constructs, things that come from our minds as opposed to having an independent external reality. Last week, Cicero closed his attack on epicurean theology by citing an allegation that had been made by Pius about Epicurus his true views. And let me remind us all of that quote, it’s doubtless, therefore truer to say as the good friend of all of us, Polonius argued in the fifth book of his, on the nature of the Gods that Epicurus does not really believe in the gods at all, and that he said what he did about the immortal gods only for the sake of deprecating, popular odium. Indeed, he could not have been so senseless as really to imagine God, to be like a feeble human being, resembling him only in outline and surface, not in solid substance and possessing all man’s limbs, but entirely incapable of using them, an emaciated and transparent being, showing no kindness or beneficence to anybody caring for nothing and doing nothing at all in the first place. A being of this nature is an absolute impossibility and Epicurus was aware of this and so actually abolishes the gods, although Professorly retaining them now, Cicero is reminding us that there was an argument that Epicurus did not really believe that his gods had an independent physical existence and that he was just making them up largely to avoid the unpopularity of seeming to be an atheist.
Joshua: And if you don’t mind, I’ll just jump in there and say that I do think from everything that I’ve read, that Epicurus took his position seriously, whether part of that was an awareness of what had happened to Socrates and that sort of thing. It may have been in the back of his mind, but I think the positions that he took concerning the gods he took seriously and that he sincerely believed what he was teaching. The thing is we’re not quite sure what he was teaching, but the fact that we know that he took part in the religious ceremonies and rituals of the city and within the community of the garden too with his commemorations of his parents and brothers and that sort of thing, I think that he had a sincere religious practice and that he took his ideas seriously and that’s how he approached these ceremonies and rituals and things like that. He may not have been participating in the same way that the rest of the city was doing, but I think that he took his position seriously,
Cassius: Right Don? I think all of us who today take epicure seriously also believe that he wasn’t just coming up with something to protect himself, but that he actually sincerely believed in what he was talking about. Now, as you said, there’s much lack of clarity about exactly what he was talking about, and that’s what we’ll be discussing today, but at least among those who take epicurus seriously, I don’t think that’s the primary argument. What has developed over the centuries since the ancient world and especially in the last a hundred years or so, is a different argument about epic U’S intent. And that argument is what we will be discussing today primarily based on the works of a couple of major commentators. One thing I’ll go ahead and say is that while we’ll be expressing our own opinions today as we discuss all this, I don’t think any listener will find that we have the final answer on this because some of the smartest scholars of Epicurean philosophy even up to the present day take very different positions on this. One of the philosophers who is most identified with the position that Gods are a thought construct instead of having an independent existence is Dr. David Sly from Cambridge, and we’ll be talking a lot about Dr. S’s article today. He wrote a book some number of decades ago with another major scholar by the name of aa long entitled The Hellenistic Philosophers that put this point out there in modern discussion, and we’re going to be referring to that book today as well as a more recent book called Epicurus and the Epicurean tradition, which contains a more recent article by Dr. Sedley entitled Epicurus Theological in Aism, which is chapter three of that book, which is followed by chapter four by Dr. David Constan entitled Epicurus on the Gods in which Dr Constan from Brown University takes the position that Epicurus thought that his gods did in fact have a real existence and that they’re not simply thought constructs. So when you’ve got the biggest names in Epicurean scholarship taking the opposite positions, there’s obviously a lot of subtlety that has to be absorbed when you go through the topic. And what we probably could say at the very beginning of this episode is that if you really want to understand this issue, simply go get that book Epicurus and the Epicurean tradition read chapters three and four, and you’ll get all the information in a much more detailed form than we are going to be presenting here today. But we’re going to be distilling a lot of that information down into what we hope will be an informative presentation that you can at least understand the major aspects of both sides of the argument and come to a conclusion yourself as to which you think is more likely correct and is more useful to you.
Joshua: I respect the fact that the editors of Epicurus in the epic Curian tradition put those two chapters literally next to each other and give both positions their due. I think it’s a great exposition there that this has definitely not been resolved. So I think that’s one of the important things to see. I do want to add right at the beginning that whether you take an idealist position or a realist position as they’re sometimes called or you think that Gods have an independent existence or their thought constructs, Epicurus definitely places primary importance on getting the ideas about the gods right in your head, several places in the extent text, he mentions the God’s first thing at the top of the list. And I think that the primary reason for that is that he wants us to remember that we have no reason to fear God’s no matter what form they are. They have not created the universe, they do not control the universe. They do not bestow punishments or benefits to anybody. And to get that straight in your head is I think one of the primary things that you have to get straight for an understanding of epicureanism too, because he has definitely some idiosyncratic views that aren’t the same as the other people from his culture. But I think that getting that straight that the first line of the Tera Pharma causes, there’s no reason to fear the gods is one of the primary things. You get. The details can come later, but I think having that general idea is one of the most important things.
Cassius: Yeah, let’s hit that point very hard here at the beginning and then we’ll get Joshua in on this as well because this question of why this discussion matters is extremely important. It’s not just an academic issue of getting epicurus right, just so that we can say that we get Epicurus right, obvious that he thought that this was a very important subject for the happiness of virtually everybody. In fact, everybody. And it does not involve simply a conclusion that we can write down on a piece of paper and file away on the shelf. It involves basic questions of how you arrive at that conclusion. And much of what we’re going to be talking about today is a dispute about what Epicurus is saying about how we reach any conclusion at all. We will be discussing this issue of prolapses or anticipations or preconceptions, which is one of the three legs of the epicurean canon. And you really can’t unwind the significance of prolapses without going through how it’s discussed in this context of the gods. You’ve got this issue of paralysis, which is complicated enough. And then you have this issue of images, which is the idea that all bodies give off films of atoms which come to us directly and apparently according to Epicurus, are received by the mind directly without even going through the eyes or the ears or the other bodily senses. And this issue of images and prolapses has itself a very deep and important origin in responding to Plato and an issue that’s known as the paradox of Menino in terms of how we can really know anything at all. Plato came up with this idea that people remember things from past lives and that’s how they can actually know something. They’re remembering something that they knew correctly in a past life that obviously was not going to be acceptable to Epicurus, nor was it to the stoics. And there are some very good articles out there about the development of the ideas of prolapses, which to some extent is shared with the stoics. Now, we’re not going to get far into that detail here today in terms of comparing it with stoics, but this issue of how something plays directly into the issue of epicurus as a view of the gods. And so that’s another reason why it’s particularly important to not just simply dismiss the subject, but to go through and try to reconstruct Epicurus is process of thinking about the gods as that’s going to help us understand epicurus entire canon of truth and how he comes to decide that anything is true or false or real or unreal or affects us or does not affect us.
Joshua: I think that one of the things, Cassius, that you’re really bringing to the fore is that this isn’t just a matter of the gods. There’s a lot of other things that come into this and it’s a complicated subject and can go a lot of different ways. And so hopefully we’ll be providing people with not only an informative podcast today, but hopefully a pleasurable and enjoyable one to listen to as well.
Speaker 3: That’s right. Norman DeWit mix the point that this subject in particular the subject of the gods, this is our largest gap or Una you might say, in the transmission of the philosophy from the ancient world to the modern. And so care must be taken, but that is not to underestimate its importance to the philosophy. It’s a paramount importance, how you answer the question as to whether the gods exist because it touches on so many different questions. It touches on Aristotle’s teleology. If you think that there is a prime mover, for example, you might be tempted to be swept up into a teleological view of nature. If you think that morality precedes from the gods, you might be tempted to be swept up in Cicero’s view that there is a natural moral law. And so how you answer this question touches as you mentioned, Cassius, the canon, how we know what’s true, but it touches every other aspect of the philosophy and perhaps none more so than the telos of pleasure itself, the goal of life because people who look to the gods as needing to be assuaged or propitiated tend to think that humans are guilty of sin and that being guilty of sin, we are not here for pleasure. We’re here to expiate our sin and to seek absolution for our crimes and for the crimes of our ancestors. And so like I said, every aspect of the philosophy is touched by this question and it’s all the more challenging because it’s a very difficult question. Monta in one of his work says this, the true field and subject of imposter are things unknown. For as much as in the first place, their very strangeness lends them credit. And moreover, by not being subjected to our ordinary reasons, they deprive us of the means to question and dispute them for which reasons as Plato in Crius, it is much more easy to satisfy the hearers when speaking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men because the ignorance of the auditory, the hearers affords a fair and large career and all manner of liberty in the handling of abrus things. Then it comes to pass that nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know, nor any people so confident as those who entertain us with fables such as your alchemists, judicial astrologers, fortune tellers, and physicians. And so we are walking here in a world today where the very strangeness of the question of the nature of the gods presents a number of challenges in an issue of such importance. And Cicero began his book, the book we’ve been going through on the nature of the Gods by pointing out how important a question it is, and yet everyone seems to have a different opinion as to how we should answer the question. So that’s some of the surrounding detail, but it touches everything. Whether you’re going to continue to exist after you die or not is one of the many aspects of this that requires some kind of an answer, even though the answer is difficult to find.
Cassius: Right Joshua? And one of the things you just touched on is that it involves issues such as how do we know that pleasure is to be desired and pain is to be avoided? One of the things that Dr. Sedley goes into much more detail about is that Cicero in on ends talks about how some epicureans of his time believed that there could be a prolapses of pleasure as well. So let’s go ahead and get started digging into this by talking about what our basic fundamental text is and how we think that Prolapses is involved in it. Don has done a lot of work on Epicurus letter to Menoras.
Joshua: Yeah. And the letter to Manus Epicurus specifically says that a God is a zoan. Zoon is the word that he uses, and that is usually translated as a living being, which it does mean that, and that’s where we get our word zoology and that sort of thing. But one of the interesting things about that word is even during Epicurus time, it didn’t necessarily mean a living being, it also meant the image of a living being. So if you made a painting or something like that, that image could also be referred to as a zoon as well. The wiggle room that’s there. I found intriguing that Epicurus uses that word that he could very well mean the basic literal meaning of a living being. But there’s also some other connotations to that I think that are important. There’s a way to see that word as not necessarily meaning an animal all the time.
Cassius: Can you also touch on where Epicurus says that our knowledge of the gods is clear?
Joshua: Yes, that’s the in arga one. Yeah. Another section in the letter is that he says that the knowledge of the gods is in arce and in arga is usually said by clear vision or that sort of thing. And I find it interesting that that word also is either visible or palpable or in a bodily shape. And that Homer actually used that words whenever he talked about the gods, but it also means that it’s manifest to the mind’s eye or distinct in your mind. And I think that epicurus really mean the first meaning because he’s adamant that the gods don’t interact with us humans and we don’t see them with our eyes, that they’re intelligible to us through our minds. And the second definition coincides with his contention and the idea of the prolapse of the gods, that the gods are apprehended by the mind. So I think that we can use that. And in the first principle doctrines, Scalia, that little ratt note we can read, forgive me here, I’m just going to translate. The Greeks, the gods are conceived of through contemplation, by reasoning, and we can’t see the epicurean gods with our physical eyes even if we take a realist position. So Homer’s the one that says that they can be seen in that way, but homer’s gods are in narus in that sense of the word, and epicures are in the other sense of the word. So the truth of the God’s existence in Epic’s philosophy takes place entirely in our minds by reasoning, through their existence, by means of contemplation. And through that contemplation epicurus inserts that their existence is en arga, which is the Greek word which is clearly discernible to us or manifest to us in our minds. That’s my take on that. I know others may have other takes on that, but that’s where I come down with the idea that the gods are available to us through clear vision.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Let me recap an argument that I’ve made about this passage specifically because one of the things that always bothered me about the letter to Menno Equus in this passage is the use of the singular when he says, first of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed. And then a little bit later he says, for God’s there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision, and I did a post on the forum in which I tried to break this down as best as I could, but it’s a very difficult passage, isn’t it? And as you’ve been pointing out Don, even words like Zan, which to me is living being, even that is subject to interpretation, it’s subject to understanding the context in which the word is being used. It’s not nearly as clear cut as I thought it was, but my reading of this passage was that the following sentence is basically a definition of what a God is we’ve seen in the letter to Herodotus. Epicurus says, first of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words in order that we may be able to refer to them. And so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning. And what I see epicurus here doing in the letter to Menno is saying when he says, first of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a God is engraved on men’s minds, I think what he’s doing in that passage is saying this is the definition, this is the barest definition of what can reasonably be called a God. There are problems with many of these words, not just living being but also immortal, which Cassius I think you would prefer to substitute incorruptible, but the bare definition of a God is that it is a being that is incorruptible and blessed. And because we have that definition, we have the second part of the sentence which is do not assign to the gods anything alien to his incorruptibility or ill suited to his blessedness because if you were to do that, you would be violating the definition of what the thing is. And then he says, but believe about him everything that can uphold his blessedness and immortality, which is a continuation of the same theme. If the definition of a God is blessed and incorruptible, then anything that upholds blessedness and incorruptibility can be attributed to the gods. And then he says this, for Gods, this is his first use of the plural in the word gods. Before this in letter, he uses the singular. He says, for God’s there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision, I don’t have a very good sense of what he means by that. And you’ve set up Don the paradox here, which you could say results in the conclusion that God’s are thought constructs, but we’ve now left the definition and now he’s making a positive claim. God’s exist and humans have knowledge of them. And so to me, most of the questions surrounding this issue are on that one last sentence for God’s there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision, this is where all the trouble is, I think, or most of the trouble.
Joshua: Yeah, I would agree you’re getting it. I think at the crux of one of the issues there, because I like your idea of the definitional part because I think many of us on the forum from the study that we’ve done is that we don’t see if there is a prolapses of the gods. It doesn’t include that blessed incorruptible part because epicure says there that you’re supposed to believe that. And belief, I think has to do with opinions and other things that come after the paralysis. So I think that’s kind of an interesting way that he couches that text there and having that in mind whenever you’re reading the rest of him, it’s like, here’s what you should believe. And it almost seems to me, here’s what you should believe about the paralysis that you have that God’s exists. It’s almost like that God’s exist is the one thing that you can get from the paralysis itself, and then you add on that definitional part after that it’s like, oh, yeah, okay, there’s something here. My paralysis is picking up this pattern and my sensations and that sort of thing, and that follows on from that. But he does clearly say Gods exist. He can’t get away from you. Ene is the only way to God’s exist is the only way that God’s there are. So wrestling with those two words sometimes surprises me how much trouble you can get into just by arguing about two words.
Cassius: I like the direction both of you are going in there, and I hope by the time we get to the end of the episode, I can remember to summarize it in that way. At this point in the argument, I think our next step is going to be what most every authority who looks into this question does. They acknowledged that there’s some ambiguity in what Epicurus is talking about in the letter to Menoras and that he has not left us enough detail in that letter to be exactly sure of some of the meanings of the words that we’re talking about.
Speaker 4: What
Cassius: We are left to do after the letter to Menoras is to look at the secondary sources. And it seems that in many cases, the realist versus idealist position comes down to which of the secondary authorities you think are more worthy of emphasis.
Joshua: One of the things that’s always sort of, I don’t know whether annoyed is the right word or not, but I think that one of the things that I’ve always found unsatisfying is whenever in Cicero they talk about the gods living in the inner mindia and the meta cosmos between worlds, because my understanding of that has always been that the worlds that they talk about the cosmos are the ones that you have a planet, you have the shells of the stars and everything around each one. It’s the order that comes out of the universe and each world system has its own earth, its own sky, its own stars. And then if you move along, then epicure says there are an infant number of these world systems out in the universe. And if you’re saying that the gods live between the worlds, there is nothing between the worlds for them to stand on, there’s no place for them to be. And that’s one of the things that always sort of has annoyed me about trying to come to grips with that is that by definition, there are no worlds between worlds because they just don’t exist. There’s atoms flying through the void and stuff between the world systems, but there’s no there for lack of a better way of putting it. And that’s one of the things that I find interesting that even in that introductory paragraph that you had read from on the nature of the gods where he talks about that the gods have no real solidity or that sort of thing, that does seem to be what Epicurus is saying because in another text they talk about that the gods have no nia and that Renia means solidity or firmness or something you can grab onto. And it explicitly says that the gods do not have that kind of solidity. And I think that you two in the other parts on the nature of the gods have talked about is that you’ve compared the images as to a waterfall, that there’s a constantly flowing series of images and in a waterfall, I mean you can stick your hand in a waterfall, but you can’t grab a waterfall, you just can’t do it. And so that idea of that, you can point to it and you can say that’s a waterfall, but you can’t put a waterfall in a jar or something like that. There is no stability, no firm that it’s always changing. It’s always differentiating itself. And I think that that sort of idea that the gods have no real firmness is one of the reasons that I will come out and say I lean towards the idealist position rather than the realist position for those sort of things about the intermedia and the lack of Mia, of the gods and that sort of thing. So I’ll throw that out there for fodder for discussion as well.
Cassius: Yeah, that is a large part of what we get into when you have to make choices between what is said by lucious endogenous Ls on the one hand about images versus what we learned through Cicero and Valle about the reliance on prolapses as the basis for the knowledge of the gods, and of course there’s the issue of whether prolapses is tied directly to images or not, but those people who come down and focus on the gods having a real existence, thereby generating images that come into our minds and serve as the basis for information about the gods. Those people generally look to lucious who has long passages about early mankind, dreaming about the gods and long passages about images themselves and how they go directly to the mind without going through the eyes and how we can have combinations of images that lead to centaurs and other incorrect conclusions and so forth. If you focus on the transmission of images from the gods to us as the basis for your knowledge, you often end up emphasizing what lucious, endogenous lusia have to say about that images process. On the other hand, what Dr. Sedley does and what it seems like most people probably who end up with the idealist thought construct position do is go back to what Cicero has to say, especially in this Vallejo section of on the nature of the gods about the innateness or the inborn aspect of this faculty of prolapses, as Dr. Sudley does. If you interpret prolapses to be a type of inborn knowledge, a type of inborn propositional content, then you can have prolapses generating ideas of the gods without the necessity of there being external independent beings that are generating these images. It is important to take a position on the meaning of prolapses and how prolapses relates to images so that you can then decide whether something external to you is generating images that lead you to conclude that there are gods or whether the entire process of thinking about gods and generating ideas about them operates within the human mind without external stimulus.
Joshua: Well, I think according to epicurean philosophy in the mind as they understood it back then, there will always be an external stimulus because that’s my understanding of how memory and ideas and that thought that sort of thing works, that if you think about something, you’re literally catching some images from outside of you engrave themselves on your mind and the more often you think of something the deeper those channels are that make it easier for those ideas to come in. So I think there’s always an external stimuli, but I think it’s the idea of whether if you were standing somewhere in the world system or in the inner mindia, if you would actually be able to see Gods with your eyes, because I keep coming back to that idea too, that epicure seems to be pretty firm and even the later epicureans that you don’t or maybe even can’t interact with the gods with your eyes, their only perceptible to you through your mind, which I think is an interesting way that they couch that because I find that that’s one of the reasons that I find the idealists position kind of intriguing, and I should say explicitly here too, that whenever we use the term ideal or idealists, we’re definitely not talking about a platonic ideal in the sense of the platonic forms and that sort of thing. So I think just to be clear, we’re not trying to sneak Platonism into the mix here, so it’s unfortunate that word’s been the one that’s been used to talk about the position, but I think just to say that explicitly, and I dunno whether we’ve said that before in this episode, just to make that clear to everybody,
Cassius: Right Don, just as you’re clarifying that this idealism word does not refer to what we generally associate with Plato, we should probably also clarify that there are only a couple of instances in the epicurean text where we are confident that Epicurus is talking about something that is an example of Persis. This God’s situation is clearly one of them. If I remember correctly, there’s really only one other primary one which is justice, and then there is also some mention of time being something we should not consider to be a paralysis, but it might be useful to talk just for a second, and this relates to what you’re saying, Don, about whether the gods have an independent physical existence or not. In other words, if we look to justice as another example of a prolapses, I think that we see things and observe things in the world around us that we assemble in our mind to be a concept of justice, but there’s no objective form of justice out in the world that we can see something that is called justice. The direction I’m going there is I think what suddenly seems to be arguing is that the human mind can construct a concept such as justice that does not have its own separate independent existence, and I think that’s part of Dr. S’s direction is that he’s thinking the same processes going on in regard to God’s.
Joshua: I would agree with that. I think justice is an interesting way to think of it too because we can think of the statue of justice with the blindfold and the scales and personify justice as a God sort of thing, and I think that justice doesn’t exist, but you can personify it in your mind and you can project it and that sort of thing, and you can point it, it’s like go, you have the scales of justice and that sort of thing. So I think that’s an interesting analogy too. You’re right, there’s nothing you can point to in the world that there’s justice and I think if, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that a lot of us have come down to the idea of the paralysis as a pattern recognition sort of thing that at least for me makes sense of all the sensory input and all the incoming images and that sort of thing that are there, that persis is the ability to provide some order to that and then from those, that’s where the concepts and ideas and opinions come from after that organization of the sensations that you have flooding into you all the time.
Cassius: Yeah, Don, that’s exactly what I’m thinking about prolapses when you describe it that way. I don’t know that it makes any difference to call it pattern detection versus pattern recognition, but I’m thinking that Prolapses does not have propositional content to it
Joshua: Agreed
Cassius: That by the time you start talking about anything being true or false, you have already moved to a propositional thought reasoning level, which is a level that occurs after this faculty of prolapses does whatever it does, and that really is a major aspect of the questions that we’re trying to circle around. In fact, I guess this is the point to say that there’s two other aspects. We may not go into them very far, but I at least want to mention them as part of Dr. S’s argument that we need to be aware of. Dr. Sedley draws a parallel as well between this prolapses of the gods and discussion again in Cicero through Torti about the potential of there being a prolapses of pleasure as well. It appears that some epicureans, at least even if not Epicurus himself held that the arguments about why we find pleasure to be desirable and pain to be undesirable can be a matter of a proleptic process as well. That’s a question that is controversial, but Dr. Sedley raises it in his article. He also raises the analogy of how we think about Adams, the distinction between things that are intelligible but not sensible. Dr. Sly says that God’s may be in this regard unique as the only intelligible objects of a prolapses. In other words, for something to be intelligible like the atoms, we firmly believe that atoms exist because of the indirect evidence that we have and the reasoning process that we can conduct based on things that we can in fact observe through our census. Atoms in that sense are not sensible, but they are intelligible to us as a result of data that we do get from the census. It’s not something we can directly ever see or touch or feel or hear, and atom, we have to rely on bodies, which we conclude to be things that come from Adams. Dr. S says that there’s a parallel here as well that may exist with the gods in that we clearly are deducing things about the gods using our minds, at least in regard to whether the gods speak Greek or any other details that different epicureans may have come up with over the years. But those conclusions, those opinions about the gods are arguably, depending on how you look at it, matters that come to us through paralysis. For example, we firmly believe that Adams exist in the epicurean scheme of things, and yet we cannot sense them at all. Is that a direct parallel to Gods or is it not a direct parallel to Gods? Most people would probably say that we do not have a prolapses of atoms. Prolapses generally being something regarding, as Don said earlier, involving a pattern or some abstraction of things that relate to each other,
Joshua: And I think Epicurus brings up the idea whenever he starts talking about atoms. I think I’m remembering this correctly, that things like if you see a statue whose toe has been rubbed away by people touching it over the decades and that those particles must have gone somewhere, and that was sort of the idea where things are made up of smaller parts and smaller parts and smaller parts, it’s not infinitely divisible, but that I think is one of the analogies that he used for the idea of atoms, that things have to be composed of something even if they’re worn away, that something has to go somewhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say that aism is a conclusion of a process of reasoning.
Joshua: Yes, I would agree.
Speaker 3: And looking at the issue of is Sonoma, which we get in Cicero, there’s an element of that as it applies to the gods as well, isn’t there because is Sonoma holds that there are an infinite number of mortals, then there ought to be an infinite number of Immortals as well. That’s probably oversimplification, but this would be a non-canonical way to get a hold on. The question is his use of, is Sonoma as strong as the foundation by which he reasons out? That’s a separate question, but I think to the extent that we can gain knowledge about both the atoms and the gods by processes that are, let’s say posterior to canons, that you have to see the statue and you have to see the change in the statue over time before you can know that something has been rubbed off gradually throughout the centuries, and it’s the analysis of that based on your sensation of the statue of itself. It’s reasoning upon that sensation that allows you to infer the existence of Adams. Right.
Joshua: Yeah. Well put Joshua. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don’t know if there’s a directly equivalent way of reasoning out the existence of God. Of course, if you didn’t think that the universe was eternal and you didn’t think that the atoms themselves were eternal and that the confluence of Adams was sufficient to produce everything that we see around us in nature, then you would do what religious people of all times have done and reason from the existence of nature itself to the being that must have certainly created nature,
Joshua: The whole divine watchmaker sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Exactly. But that avenue is not open to Epicurus because he firmly rejects the conclusion that nature is created as usual. Cassius, I continue to be confused about the prolapses and I don’t think I’m going to solve it before we finish our discussion today. Certainly
Joshua: One of the things that struck me recently is that all of us I think, who study ancient philosophy, whether they’re stoics or epic hearings, we’re like, oh, we have so much that we’ve lost and we have so much text that we don’t have anymore and this sort of thing. And I started thinking the other day that there are only seven undisputed letters of Paul in the New Testament, and we’re getting close to that with the letters that we have from Epicurus. So just from the most pivotal person in Christian history we’re buttoned up against what we have from Epicurus as the Christians have from their most important person in their history. So I’m like, all in all, we’re doing okay, but we do have so much that’s lost. One of the things that struck me from s Lee’s ideas and from the ideal idealist position was the idea that the Gods represents some sort of ideal towards which you can, this is the ideal life or this is what I’m striving for, this sort of thing. And I always thought that it was some sort of thing that was idiosyncratic to Epicurus, but I came across a section in and it really struck me, I’ll just read one tiny little section of it here, but the dialogue includes the lines, and so it is with the follower of each of the other gods. He lives so far as he’s able honoring and imitating that God so long as he’s uncorrupted and is living his first life on earth, and in that way he behaves and conducts himself towards his beloved and toward all others. So right there, he’s talking about the gods were seen as models to pattern your life after and that sort of thing, which seems to me is really analogous to the idealist position that the Gods represent this sort of thing. And I can see Epicurus approaching the ceremonies and rituals with this sort of idea in his mind that he’s joining with everybody else in the city and the processions and that sort of thing, but in his mind he’s like, I’m not going to believe that Zeus is assaulting women and all this sort of thing, but I can see the God is representing some sort of higher ideal, and that’s how I’m participating honestly in these rituals and ceremonies of the city. In my mind, I have the right way to approach this whether everybody else does or not, whether the holy pallo has the right idea or not. This is how I am approaching these rituals that I’m taking part in and that I’m enjoying. So I think that’s kind of an interesting way, and I had not realized that that was even rolling around in the culture with others before this.
Cassius: Yeah, Don, that’s an important part of Dr. Sud Lee’s argument here because once you reach the conclusion that Epicurus probably was not talking about there being real physical gods somewhere out there in the universe generating images that come to us, you do have to ask the question about where does this prolapses of Gods come from? That epicurus clearly does seem to think exists. In Dr. S’s article, he says that all animals have an innate desire to maximize their own pleasure and for human beings that maximization is identifiable with a life of blessed tranquility, untainted by fear of death, and that makes the god’s and ideal model of just such a life. Each of us has an innate propensity to imagine and in particular to dream about the being we would ideally like to become. So that really becomes a major part of this thought construct idealists position that the propensity or the disposition or prolapses that is in born within us is not really about something that’s external, existing in the intermedia or anywhere else, but is an internal aspect of what it means to be a human being that just develops over time after birth again. Is that the way you read Dr. Sly? Would you agree with that?
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, I would definitely agree that
Cassius: It’s around page 49 of this article that we’ve been going from.
Joshua: One of the things that I’ll throw in here too, one of the things that always comes up for me along these lines about the god’s not existing independently is the lines from Lucious, and if you’ll let me do that here, it’s just a brief section and here who so decides to call the ocean Neptune or the grain crop series and prefers to abuse the name of Bacas rather than pronounce the liquor’s proper designation, him let us permit to go on calling Earth mother of goddess if only he will spare. And so it’s okay to use these names of the gods to refer to wine or the grain crop or the ocean or whatever, but always keep in your mind that that’s what you’re doing. You’re personifying them as an idea, as a quote thought construct, and it’s okay to do that as long as you keep that proper understanding in the background.
Speaker 3: Don, I think that’s a great passage from Lucretius and it’s echoed in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare in Friar Lawrence’s monologue when he says the earth nature’s mother is her tomb. What is her burying grave that is her womb and from her womb, children of diverse kinds and so on. And so I agree with you that this is certainly relevant to the conversation just like we can personify justice, we can personify the earth itself if we can personify the grain and the grape, and I do find that very alluring as an idea, perhaps more so than Lucious would even want me to, but when he says abusing the name of ba when we apply it to wine, how do you connect that back to this idea of the gods is thought constructs,
Joshua: At least in my mind, it sort of is the idea that we’ve been dancing around so to speak, that it is sort of a personification of the ideal life that you’re striving for or what you can see. And I think that it’s important to remember, at least from my readings, is that humans can never become Gods because he talks about in one of the letters or in one of the texts that there are two kinds of happiness, one for mortals and one for gods, but the fact that he keeps bringing up that you can live as if you are a God. I think it’s keeping that ideal in mind and keeping that foremost in your mind that this is what we’re striving for and I think that you can have a personification of it and like Plato says in his dialogue, if you see these gods as ideals with which to pattern in your life after and that sort of thing, I think that that’s a way that it’s a personification. It’s that thought construct that to be able to talk about it easier. You haven’t actually been talking about it easier during our dialogue here, but it gives you an object towards which to point. It’s an easier way to sort of talk about a personification of something or to name something if you can sort of put it into an image. And I think that’s at least the direction I think I’m heading in. Does that make any sense at all?
Speaker 3: It does make sense. And since I know Don that you’re a fellow Lord of the Rings fan, there’s a scene, isn’t there? And I think it’s probably the third movie when Frodo is stumbling through a cave and he falls face first and rather than falling on the floor of a cave, he falls into a soft forest floor and he looks up and it’s gala glad there. And that’s kind of how I connect this in my mind with the idea that the God might be mental constructs. It’s something that you hold up and aspire to and it gives you maybe strength or courage. It’s not a perfect analogy because the elves have that weird psychic thing going on, but that scene from the Lord of the Rings I think is to me kind of cements part of how this idea might have value.
Joshua: And I think that’s one of the things too. I always come back to the fact that Epicurus culture that he moved and lived in is so much different than we have in the modern world because I think that he did the best that he could in trying to make sense of the world and saying that we live in a material world and Gods are not in control of it and all this and he so many prescient sort of ideas, but I think that we can still use those ideas in the modern world and not have them sloughed aside or say, oh, well this isn’t relevant anymore because we see a lot of people I think in still the modern world that are fearing the gods and fearing what’s going to happen to them after they die and having these, I need to act in this particular way because if I don’t, God is going to strike me or send terrible things to me or these things that I’m experiencing or God’s test my purity and all this kind of thing. So we’re still living with the exact issues that Epicurus was dealing with back in the day, and I think that having this sort of solid idea of the Gods as this ideal sort of existence that we could strive for, I think that that’s as helpful nowadays as it was 2300 years ago.
Cassius: Okay, speaking of ideals that we should strive to attain, let me call upon the ideal of equal time and say that we need to turn to Dr. Stan’s position before we run out of time in our episode today, but let me conclude this section with a couple of words from Dr. Sedley himself who is best able to encapsulate his views. He summarizes his views this way on page 49 of his article. What seems to me altogether beyond doubt, however, is that the process by which we are said to form our paralysis of the gods cannot according to the principles of Epicurean philosophy amount to our witnessing via dream contact actual God’s leading actual lives, nor does it even require that somewhere in the universe there should exist such beings indeed, if the existence of Gods is proven as Epicurus and Valle jointly aver by our innate and self-evident cognition of them, that cognition can hardly amount to anything more than our intuitive grasp of a graphically visualized ideal and could not possibly be or depend on telepathic access to a privileged extra mundane life form. Hence, the most basic epistemological prop for the realist interpretation cannot in fact serve any such purpose. Dr. Sadly says, maybe nevertheless Epicurus did believe that there are somewhere in the universe living beings who in conformity with the paralysis of God are literally immune to death. That is who not only will definitely never perish no matter what foreign bodies crash through or accumulate in the space they occupy, but who also by a principle of symmetry advocated by the school must have already been alive from infinite times past. I myself continue to doubt that he seriously entertained this view, but I do not deny that his forthright statement there are Gods lent itself to a realist interpretation, perhaps not unintentionally, at least so far as the school’s public reputation was concerned. They did after all seek to participate in local religious worship. It may well also have misled certain of his own followers into the same error. Now, Dr. Sedley then goes on and says that he doesn’t think that the fact that Lucretius and Phil Edemas or other subsequent epicurean seem to really believe that this was true is a good argument that they understood Epicurus better than we do because he says that misunderstandings and changes of theological doctrines happens all the time and happened indeed with Plato’s TEUs as well. And he says at the very conclusion of his essay that he doesn’t think Epicurus would even have minded if his later readers misunderstood him because he was primarily concerned about how to live happily and not indeed suggesting that he could accurately speculate what might be happening in some other part of the universe. He thinks that the purpose of living happily overrides whether in fact we should be arguing about the physical existence of God’s.
Joshua: And I would just add there real quick that that is part and parcel of the whole idea. If he have multiple adequate explanations, then until more information comes out, go ahead and accept the fact that there are multiple interpretations and get on with your life.
Cassius: That’s exactly right, Don. I think that’s a very important point to make in this whole discussion. You wait before making specific opinions about things that you have very limited information about. And it should be clear, I think, in everybody’s analysis that certain contentions about the gods, such as whether they speak Greek, is clearly not as central to what Epicurus is talking about as is the idea that a God is blessed and imperishable
Joshua: And that we don’t fear them,
Cassius: And if we don’t fear them, they’re not going to send us to heaven or hell, they’re not intervening in our lives. Those are the key aspects of what Epicurus is talking about and whether we can construct some deductive logic about what they might look like and so forth is pretty clearly a secondary issue that Epicurus himself is not including in the lit menoras because it’s not critical, certainly early in your process of learning about Epicurean philosophy. Yeah,
Joshua: That’s good.
Cassius: Why don’t we turn then to Dr. Stan’s paper on Epicurus on the Gods, and just quickly go through his general positions. Of course, as you would expect, he points to the letter to Menoras that we’ve been talking about and that Dr. Sedley was just referring to in what I read as lending support to the realist position. Now, Dr. Conan’s argument comes down to this that given all of the evidence out there in Lucretius and the other surviving text, the only way you really get to this issue of there being a thought construct is to have two concerns. Number one, that the idea of an incorruptible God who lives forever contradicts epicurean physics because of course, nothing but Adams and the void itself can survive eternally. Anything that comes together in a body of any kind, including of God, which seem to have a limited lifespan and seem to violate this rule that only the Adams are really indestructible. Dr. Constan also points out that even if you accept that there are images coming from Gods and that we use images to form our understanding of the gods, it’s not clear why you could ever conclude from images that you might receive directly on your mind that a God is in fact blessed and imperishable. Any individual only has a limited lifespan. You may be observing things either visually or directly by your mind during your life, but you’re not going to be able to observe that the God continues on in life indefinitely because you’re going to die. You can’t confirm it through yourself just by receiving images that a God is in fact totally blessed and totally immortal. And so Dr. Constan says those are very good arguments that seem to contradict a realist view of the Gods having an independent existence, and those arguments have to be dealt with. So Dr. Constan in his article presents some arguments to the effect that even in epicurean physics, you can construct a being which is incorruptible and essentially deathless. I’m struck by some of these arguments are really similar to what Norma Dewitt mentions in his book about the gods not being by nature deathless and that they have to act to maintain their own incorruptibility. Dr. Constan says that using arguments that are found in Lucious, one argument would be that some animals are able to maintain their bodies for long periods of time in equilibrium, such as we can observe here on earth that some men live longer than others, some animals live longer than we do, and there’s no reason in logic that you could not extend that time period indefinitely. Just as we talk about the idea of there being possibly giants who exist as something that is extrapolated from things that we do observe here on earth, Constan cites the argument that God’s could be conceived of as a species, which is as far in advance of us in bodily self-control as we are of the animals in emotional self-control. Basically pursuing an argument that as long as you’re able to replace your atoms over time, as long as you’re able to replace the structure of your body, the body has no reason why it should necessarily have to die if it can’t in fact maintain itself. One possibility in that that Stan brings up is that as we know, the Gods are composed of such fine material that streams of ordinary atoms simply pass through them without inflicting any damage, such as, for example, you might suggest that a waterfall with the water flowing over the edge could be pierced by some kind of a log or tree or something that comes into contact with it, but that the waterfall continues when the obstacle is gone without being damaged by something coming through it as the water is falling off the waterfall. And Dr. Constan raises the issue that as to the gods being in the intermedia, the CREs himself doesn’t say that. And Dr. Constan says, perhaps however these lines about the Intermedia refer not to a different location in space. Lucretius, after all, does not speak of Intermedia, but simply to a different kind of habitation, one that could be conceived of as intersecting with our own in the same way that neutrinos unaffected by contact pass through our world. Edemas his own view, as Dr. Constan understands the text, is that the Gods would not be in peril even if they did mingle with things subject to generation and destruction. And if they do dwell in remote locations, it may simply be because they choose to do so. If you’ll read into pages 57 through 60 or so of Dr. Stan’s article, he gives suggestions as to how a being that does not die could in fact be consistent with epicurean physics.
Joshua: And it almost seems like we’re starting to talk about fourth dimensional beings and this sort of thing that the other dimensions can intersect with ours and or the other universes that exist could intersect with ours. And it really going down almost a theoretical physics sort of path here. And it just seems personally, and this is just personally, it just seems like there’s so many hoops to jump through to get to a realist independently existing gods, that as somebody living in the 21st century, it’s hard for me to even conceive of this sort of thing unless, like I said, we go down to the theoretical physics higher dimensional being sort of route. And that’s why I think that the thought construct position, I like that direction better than the realist one, just from an overall idea, which isn’t to say that I don’t find it interesting to entertain the idea of what Dr. Constan is saying here, but it’s just for me personally to try and integrate it into some sort of overall understanding of the philosophy. I’m still drawn toward the idealist position a little bit more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s reasonable. Let me talk about what Lucretius actually says, because Constan makes the point that Lucious, after all, does not speak of Intermedia, but simply to a different kind of habitation. Well, Lucretius does say round 40 in book one, right after the Hempt Venus, he says, I pray to you for peace to Venus, for the very nature of divinity, must necessarily enjoy immortal life in the deepest peace, far removed and separated from our affairs for without any pain, without any danger, its itself mighty by its own resources needing us. Not at all. It is neither propitiated with services nor touched by wrath. And I read far removed and separated from our affairs as there’s some distance in nature that they’re apart. It’s not that they’re in another dimension and they’re sitting right next to me so that I would pick him up on. And I think the point you made Don about we’re getting into fourth dimensional intersecting space, time and so forth. To me that would be an unnecessary addition to your other point that you just made. I think one of the real problems with any position is that once you render them unnecessary, as I was saying earlier in regards to Aristotle, if you no longer have any need of any argument from any prime mover of that kind, we do enter on a very different kind of terrain here with the discussion. And I think it makes it interesting, but it also adds a component, and I’m feeling it here with the god’s live in a different dimension adjacent to our own or whatever. I’m feeling it here, that being unnecessary in that sense also makes the argument in some ways unimportant. And I don’t know if that’s the conclusion I’m supposed to reach.
Joshua: Like I said, I think that the importance comes into the fact that they are maybe irrelevant other than as if you want to use the idealist sort of here’s what we’re striving for kind of thing. But I think that Urist really does kind of just say it’s like, well, you don’t need to worry about the gods because they don’t have any effect on you other than the fact of whatever you want to use them as a way to strive for. Because even if the Gods would physically exist, they still don’t interact with you. They don’t listen to your prayers. There’s no reason to fear them. They didn’t make the universe. All that kind of stuff is what’s of paramount importance. And I think that having that idea straight really does make them irrelevant unless you want to use them as some sort of ideal existence or something that you’re driving for some sort of, this is the culmination of the philosophy or that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Of course, when we talk about this, I always think of, what was his name? Pier Simone de Laplace talking Napoleon. Napoleon asks him why in his magisterial explanation of physics, he has not made any reference to a creator. And Lalas says, because I had no need of that hypothesis. I think this is where
Joshua: That’s a good one. I like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is where I come down, but we’re supposed to be defending the realist approach right now with Dr. Constan, so good point. Good point. Cash is going to want to get us back on track here.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. We’ve been talking relevance in terms of whether the gods are in fact incorruptible or not. So I think Dr. Constance, if he were here, would be saying something to the effect that at this point, all I’m really doing is saying that it is possible to reconcile incorruptible gods with epicurean physics. So whether people find that to be particularly relevant or not is one question. He then turns his argument to something that I think is extremely relevant to all of Epicurean philosophy, and that is beginning on page 61 or so of his article, he turns his attention back to this question of prolapses. And my reading of Dr. Stan’s summary of paralysis is actually probably closer to what I think the three of us are talking about than to some extent what Dr. Sudley is saying. Because Dr. Constan specifically does say that he thinks that paralysis like Pathe, like the feelings, he thinks that those are infallible or trustworthy, whatever word you want to use. And he doesn’t think that a prolapses is ever true or false. And so he goes into a long discussion that proses are not true or false and therefore can’t be a basis for building something as important as a belief in the existence of a God. And he relates it to this question that epicure says in the letter to Menoras, that some people have false impressions about the gods versus true impressions about the gods. And Dr. Constan argues that we should not be talking about epsis in terms of true or falses. We should be talking about lysis in terms of something that we take as a given. And that what Epicurus is saying is that this faculty of lysis is something that is taken as a given and that everything else, every opinion about the gods that we come up with is going to be something that we then test as true or false, but that that’s not a paralysis. And he’s positing this argument in response to Dr. Sedley who was looking for the way to say that this paralysis of the existence of Gods is innate and that Epicurus therefore could have simply been saying that what we have is an innate disposition to visualize our best lives in the form of Gods. And Dr. Constance saying that that’s not really reconcilable and the whole idea of there being ultimately nothing coming from nothing, lucius’s suggestion that the gods could not have created the universe because they had no pattern to go by. There’s always a question of what comes first, chicken or the egg, how do you get to a first position? And Dr. Constan is arguing that prolapses leading to a mental construct does not make sense because it had to have been generated from something from the outside. I think we’ve talked about that a little bit in this discussion already, but it is I think a very important question as to what you take a prolapses to be and whether it contains this propositional content or not. And Dr. Stan has taken the position that the prolapses itself does not contain propositional content.
Joshua: I would agree with that. I’ve always taken the proses as evidence that there is an external world to us. The epilepsys come from an innate ability to provide some order to the caco sensations that are bombarding us all the time that we can see that there’s something here that I should pay attention to. And then from that we can reason, well, what does that thing that I’ve identified lead to? What concepts can I get from that? But you’re right, that’s been my idea that it’s evidence that there is an external world as opposed to some of the other philosophies that are out there that’s like I’m living in my head and that sort of thing. But I will say that that is an argument for the realist position that if we are sensing some sort of divine, whatever you want to call it, that there has to be some sort of external existence for it to impinge on our minds and for us to go from there to the eternal and incorruptible and blessed and that sort of thing, that the epsis do not have content in that way. And I will say that my position on this has been evolving and we’ll probably no doubt see some evolution even within our conversation here. So I have no real hard and fast position on this, but it’s something that’s interesting to talk about. But again, I think that those concepts of don’t fear the gods, that’s the number one paramount thing that you have to take from any sort of discussion like this.
Cassius: Yeah. And Dr. Constance says that there’s at least four different ways using epicurean physics that we could postulate that there is something actually existing, which is generating this information inside of us rather than us generating it ourselves. There’s a passage in sexist empiricus against the mathematicians 9 45 to the effect that our idea of the god’s eternity and blessedness is nothing but an extrapolation from images of long lived and happy human beings apparently like the notion we have of the cyclops. So apparently there is some analogy that the ancients were using as to the cyclops that is relevant here, that the idea of eternity and blessedness is not built in the prolapses, but is this extrapolation that we’ve been talking about previously. It’s interesting how there are lines from Dr. Leys and Dr. Stan’s arguments that seem to sort of flow together here because extrapolation from things we do see to conceive of things that are related to them seems to play a part in both arguments. The second alternative is that our belief in the Gods arises from a coalescence of images from different sources, and that’s the example that we talk about in terms of centaurs, that Reis says clearly that the idea of centar comes from images that come to us not generated by an actual centar, but by combinations of images that came together on their path towards us, so that even though the centar doesn’t exist, there is a physical mechanism of images that generated this response within us. A third possibility is that the Gods exist simply as images that drift through the universe and produce a prolapses when they impinge on human minds. And he uses an example, we may imagine certain places in the universe where free floating atoms are configured in an appropriate way without there being an abiding entity that generates them. Think of the images produced by a warped lens. For example. Some such cosmic prism might theoretically be a source of images that could yield a conception of beings that are imperturbable and immune to pain and appearing to be immortal even though those beings do not exist. And out of Stan’s fourth example would be that the Gods are second order abstractions real enough in their way, but something that Epicurus would describe as an accident of a atomic combinations rather than a concretely living thing. That’s an example that we talk about pretty regularly in terms of accidents or events which emerge from the atoms, that Gods are something that emerges from something, but that the gods which emerge are not composed of little gods in the same way that lures argues that men are not composed of little men and so forth, that there are things that are emergent properties that arise from the combinations of atoms that are different from the atoms themselves. As Dr. Sedley remarks, there are truths at the macroscopic scale and truth at the microscopic scale. Neither of those scales have a monopoly on truth, and both can be true at the same time. That’s an argument that Dr. Sly brings up in his discussion of Epicures response to determinism. This emergent property aspect apparently is what Dr. Conan’s fourth suggestion is here.
Joshua: Yeah, there’s a lot of material and a lot of interesting things that come out of this. I’m hoping that on the epicurean friends.com forum for this episode that we can have some feedback from some of the listeners, and I hope that they get something to discuss from that we’ve had today.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s right, Don. And we’ve pretty much accomplished, I think already now today, what we set out to do, at least in terms of presenting the arguments, presenting our initial thoughts about the persuasiveness of each one and bringing to people’s attention that there’s a lot of material out there yet to be explored that they can go into and read the detail and construct more helpful arguments for people who are trying today to apply Epicurean philosophy. It’s not just a matter of academic interest, it’s an issue that involves the deepest aspects of epicurean thought and how you process things and make decisions about how you actually live. And in addition to what we’ve discussed today, of course, we haven’t even scratched the surface. There’s a chapter on the Gods in Norman DeWitt’s book. We’ve had the privilege on our podcast of interviewing Dr. David Glidden about his papers on epicurean paralysis and epicurean thought he provides a lot of interesting analysis to the whole paralysis argument. And even recently, one of the members of our forum brought to our attention that there’s a new book in 2023 entitled Epicureanism and Scientific Debates. Within that book, there’s an article by John Baptiste au in which he discusses how the stoics and the Epicureans both elaborated on this idea of prolapses as a response to what we discussed earlier in terms of Plato’s Menino paradox that you can’t know anything at all unless you somehow knew it already. Una has a very good article on epicurean preconceptions, which goes down the same pathway of analyzing these questions. So there’s a lot of material we don’t have time to begin to think about covering today, but we’ve hit some of the high points of the two arguments. So the people who are trying to understand what Epicurean philosophy is all about and how to apply it in their own lives can get a big picture of the significance of the issues.
Speaker 3: I do sometimes wonder if the question is almost too academic, because it seems to me that the best argument I can make for the realist position would be simply to say this, if Epicurus thought that the gods were thought constructs, why didn’t he just say so more clearly? Because we’re having this infernal passage in the letter to Manus that is so fraught with confusion regarding both the nature of the gods and prolapses, and it’s not much comfort to either side. And you could also make the claim, well, DIY layers just give a whole list of books that Epicurus wrote that we don’t have, and I don’t have that list in front of me, but I assume one of them was probably Perry Theo or whatever on the Gods, and maybe the discussion is there, but we don’t see it in Lucretius really, do we? Why wasn’t Epicurus more clear on this, I guess would be my question?
Joshua: I think, Joshua, you brought up reference to Leonis in our notes that we had put together for this session. I thought that was an interesting thing that he definitely came out against atheism, laid bare. That was Brian.
Cassius: Yes, Don. You’re talking about Ener 1 52 and 1 52 says this. It’s from Philas on Frank criticism. The fragment is he will be frank with the one who is aired, and even with him who responds with bitterness, therefore Epicurus two, when Leus, because Les did not admit belief in God’s reproached, Les in moderation, and wrote to him the so-called famous letter taking his point of departure from Les, which seems to be saying that Epicurus wrote a quote, famous letter.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Leon was trying to tell Les that there weren’t any gods, and he came after both of them, one in moderation, and the other one sounds like a little bit more strongly going, what are you doing? What are you doing here? Come on.
Cassius: The famous letter,
Joshua: Which we of course do not have. Of course, of course not.
Cassius: But I do think that we’ve talked about relevancy and irrelevancy and so forth. It’s easy to get so into the weeds that we missed. The big point that clearly in Epicurus is day, and unfortunately for most of us even today, the issue of whether there are gods, whether they’re intervene in their lives, whether they create a fate for us, whether they send us to heaven and hell, those are things that people are concerned about in a very strong way. You can get killed if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place. And so it’s very important to be able to have a confident position. Again, I don’t think that there’s a direct analogy with Adams in the sense that we apparently do have persis of god’s. I don’t think we have a persis of atoms. But there is an analogy in the sense that Epicurean philosophy strongly teaches that there’s a natural basis for the way things work. And we think that atoms are that natural basis. And as we said during this discussion today, apparently most people are concerned about God’s, and there’s an explanation for why they are concerned about God’s and an answer to their concerns that doesn’t lead them down the path of destruction and into conclusions about Gods that are just totally ridiculous and make no sense.
Speaker 4: Right?
Cassius: And of course, I’m referring there about totally ridiculous conclusions being that God’s care about the lives of men and direct us and are involved and intervene in life or create universes. In fact, Epicurean philosophy and physics teaches that that makes no sense. And any gods that do exist are of a totally different nature.
Speaker 4: Well put.
Cassius: Okay. Well, I think we’ve had a great discussion of this today, and I appreciate all of the effort everyone has put into it, especially appreciate Don coming back and joining us for the conversation. Before we close, does anyone else have anything they’d like to add?
Joshua: I would just say thanks again for having me back. I appreciate being the itinerant podcast member here. I will again just emphasize that I think that the reason that Epicurus has stated and primary position in several things, the principal doctrines letter Manus, that the correct understanding of the gods is that we do not fear them. They do not intervene in our lives for benefit or for punishment, and that they did not create the universe. Those are the primary things that we get. I think the ideas of the realist position or the idealist position are very interesting to talk about, but I think having those in your mind, first and foremost for those basic ideas is the most important aspect of a correct relationship to the gods whenever it comes to epicure and philosophy.
Cassius: Don, before we go to Joshua, the additional point that what Epicure says is believe these things, and then he also says, don’t believe anything that’s inconsistent with these things.
Joshua: Correct.
Cassius: I think that’s a very important aspect of things. That is such a far reaching position to take that yes, these facts are important. Maybe there’s some additional other facts that you can consider if you’re interested in the subject, which is the way Valle presents it. But if all you really need is a proper highest attitude towards the subject of Gods, those issues that you’ve raised there, Don are the only ones that you really need to focus on. And you don’t let anything else come into your mind. You don’t entertain even the possibility of anything that conflicts with those things.
Joshua: Yeah. Don’t be led astray by the beliefs of the Hoy pallo,
Cassius: The hoy. Pallo. Yes, indeed.
Joshua: Joshua.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I would just echo what Don said there and what you’ve said. Cassius, and I would only add to that the prescription that is made in Thomas Moore’s utopia when the King of Utopians, when he says that those are not at all to be tolerated, who say that the soul dies with the body and who say that the universe is the mere sport of chance with no overriding or governing providence. And to me, I would add those two to what you’ve said, that the soul does die with the body. There is no life after death. There is no afterlife of either bliss and blessing from God, and there is no place of punishment or torture. And if anything, that to me is even more important to me than the idea that the Gods don’t intervene, that there is no life after death. There is no place of reward or punishment after we die, and that the universe is not governed by these beings. Thomas Moore says that we shouldn’t tolerate anyone who thinks that the universe is the mere sport of chance. I don’t think that Epicurus thought that the universe was the mere sport of chance. He says, something’s happened by necessity, something’s by chance and something’s by our own will. But I would add those two major points also to the overview. These are the concrete things that we have to hold to, that we have to put forward as Epicurus main points on this subject. And we can have the academic discussion as to whether the gods are real or imagined or whatever else. But that is all downstream from these main points. And if we look at some of the other literature that is related to Thomas Moore and his utopia, what he’s really talking about is religious toleration and some of the other texts from the same time period. For example, John Milton in his area, PICA seems to admire the way in which Lucretius is able to express Epicurus system to MEUs and not have his ideas suppressed for that. And Horace Smith was a poet and a friend of Percy Biss Shelley, who was one of the great romantic poets. And he says, should we not feel ashamed that Lucretius can publish his poem in the teeth of an established orthodoxy while martyrs are groaning in perpetual agony for expressing a conscientious dissent from Christianity? So in the literature of the age, and also in John Locke, we find this in his letter concerning toleration in the literature of the age, there’s this desire to get back to a time when people can have these arguments, can have intelligent disagreements about the nature of the gods, and I don’t think it’s expressed anywhere better than in Lucian, and we’ll probably get to that. Cassius, I know you’ve expressed a desire to go through HERIs, but Lucian also has his dialogues of the dead in which he deals with questions relating to the gods. Alexander the Great had gone to the Oracle at Siwa, and they had proclaimed that he was actually a God and a son of Rah, and no, it turns out he also is in the grave at the end and dead. And so all that literature is secondary to the main question, but bears on it in ways that I find interesting. And to have the freedom to talk about this stuff and engage in these discussions intelligently and rationally is to me, one of the real joys of life and of course of doing this podcast.
Cassius: Yes, indeed. Joshua, thank you for all of that. You’re right. It is very enjoyable. Before we come to the end of the podcast, I’d like to point out that I’ve spent the majority of the episode being the facilitator of the discussion, but pointing out all of the great detail that’s available in the articles by Dr. Constan and the articles by Dr. Sedley. Both of those gentlemen are some of the preeminent experts on Epicurean philosophy. And I’ll especially say in regard to Dr. Sedley, who I quote so often that I find his material to be some of the most perceptive that’s available on the subject of Epicurus. I don’t want to end the episode, whoever, without saying that, my own personal disposition is that I think that there’s a lot of truth in both positions. I think that indeed epicurean Gods serve as a thought construction that is very, very important to living the best epicurean life possible. While at the same time, I do think that there are ways that Gods can be reconciled with epicurean physics so as to maintain themselves indefinitely along the lines that Norman Dewitt proposes and Dr. Constan mentions in his article. So I don’t think that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. I do think that there’s important truths in both perspectives about the Gods. And most of all, I’d agree with everything that Don and Joshua have said today about the importance of the subject to Epicurus. It’s probably the number one issue that he is concerned about making sure that everybody has a healthy attitude towards. And I think Epicurus did believe that it was important for everybody to have an understandable grasp of the subject. Just as Adams give you that understandable grasp as to the way the universe operates, Epicurus theory of the Gods can also serve a similar purpose. Well, again, everyone thank you for your participation in the podcast today. We will be back next week. In the meantime, please drop by the form and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other episodes. As always, we thank you for being with us. See you next week. Bye.