The "Epicurean Paradox" Is Not Epicurean - An Excellent Article By Eikadistes

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

These lines appear on posters, in atheist debates, and all over the internet, nearly always with the name “Epicurus” attached. Most people who repeat them assume Epicurus was arguing that God does not exist. He was not.

Eikadistes has written an excellent treatment of this confusion: The “Epicurean Paradox” of the Skeptics. We recommend the original highly, since what follows covers only a few of its important points.

Epicurus Said The Gods Exist

The starting point is Epicurus’s own words. In the Letter to Menoeceus he tells his student to think of god as “a being immortal and blessed,” and he states plainly: “For gods there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision” (Letter to Menoeceus 123). The impious man, Epicurus says, is not the one who rejects the gods of the crowd. It is the one who believes what the crowd says about the gods.

A man who writes this is not trying to prove that there are no gods. Whatever the riddle is, it cannot be Epicurus’s argument for atheism.

Where The Riddle Really Comes From

Eikadistes traces the riddle backward through three writers.

• David Hume made it famous in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779): “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered.”
• Lactantius, the Christian writer of the early fourth century AD, is Hume’s source. In On the Anger of God 13 he calls it “that argument of Epicurus.” Lactantius wrote nearly six hundred years after Epicurus and was openly hostile to him.
• Sextus Empiricus, the Pyrrhonist skeptic of the second century AD, gives the oldest surviving version (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3.9-11). He presents it as his own skeptical argument, not as Epicurus’s.

Sextus uses arguments of this kind as tools of his skeptical method. His goal was to show that “we cannot apprehend whether God exists.” That is the opposite of Epicurus’s position that knowledge of the gods is clear. Sextus spends much of the same chapter attacking Epicurean views of the gods. Eikadistes suggests that the argument may go back even further, to an Academic skeptic such as Carneades in the second century BC.

Sextus Misunderstood The Epicurean Gods

Eikadistes shows that Sextus gets the Epicurean gods wrong in several ways:

• He treats them as idle and lacking energy. The Epicureans held that the gods lack nothing and live in complete happiness, enjoying each other’s company.
• He claims that Epicurus made “the blessed” impossible to conceive. In fact Epicurus and Philodemus described blessedness in detail: a being that is free from want, never shares in pain, and is never bad-tempered (Philodemus, On Piety).
• He argues that because people disagree about what god is like, god cannot be clearly known. Epicurus held that the widespread human idea of a perfectly happy, imperishable being is itself evidence, even when the crowd adds false beliefs to it.

The basic difference is one of definition. For Sextus, god is unknowable. For Epicurus, the gods are natural beings, limited by nature like everything else. Eikadistes points out that they are not all-powerful, because nothing is greater than nature. They are not everywhere, because only the void is everywhere. They are not all-knowing, because no being in one place can know everything. What they have is complete self-sufficiency and constant happiness.

What The Epicureans Did Argue

The modern use of the “riddle” to deny that any god exists is not Epicurean. But the Epicureans did argue from the evils and flaws of the world against divine providence, the claim that the gods made the world for us and govern it.

Lucretius says that “by no means has the nature of things been fashioned for us by divine grace: so great are the flaws with which it stands beset” (On The Nature of Things 5.195-199). He asks who could control the whole universe and hurl thunderbolts that “often make havoc of his own temples” and that pass by the guilty and kill “the innocent and undeserving” (2.1090-1104). Lactantius reports that Epicurus reasoned from the misfortunes of good men and the success of bad men to the conclusion that there is no providence (Divine Institutes 3.17).

Notice how Sextus’s own version ends: “Therefore, god does not take care of the things in the cosmos.” That conclusion is Epicurean doctrine. The Epicureans agreed that the gods do not run the world. What they rejected was the next step that Sextus and Hume took: that because the gods do not run the world, we cannot know they exist, or that they do not exist at all.

So the finer point is this: The Epicureans used the existence of evil to show that the gods do not govern the world. They never used it to show that there are no gods. The skeptics, and later Hume, turned an argument against providence into an argument against divinity itself, and then attached Epicurus’s name to it.

Why This Matters

The false use of the “Epicurean Paradox” does real damage to those who are trying to understand Epicurus. It teaches people that Epicurus was an atheist who spent his time trying to disprove God. In fact Epicurus was a confident teacher who held that the gods exist, that they are blessed and imperishable, that they do not punish or reward us, and that the right way to think of them is as models of the happiest possible life. Eikadistes’s article sets the record straight, with the primary sources laid out in order. Read it in full at The “Epicurean Paradox” of the Skeptics.