Whitmarsh argues that atheism did not begin with the Enlightenment thinkers, but had been around as a philosophy since before the Abrahamic religions. He points to the traditions of ancient Greece. As early as the mid-sixth century BC, Anaximander, shunning the traditional creation myths, believed that all life started in water, moved to land, and eventually evolved to become human. Xenophanes, describing the anthropomorphic nature of the Olympian gods, suggested, “now if cows, horses, or lions had hands, and were able to draw with those hands and create things as humans do, horses would draw gods in the form of horses, and cows in the form of cows, and create bodies just like they had.” Democritus founded the tradition of atomism, the belief that the entire universe was composed of tiny indestructible particles of matter amidst an empty void. Prodicus proposed that it was the first human inventors who were once viewed as gods, so that “they treated as gods those who discovered certain nourishing foodstuffs, so that the inventor of wine was worshipped as Dionysus, that of bread as Demeter, those of shipping as Castor and Pollux.” He stated emphatically, “the gods of popular belief do not exist, nor do they have knowledge.”
In the classical period of Greece, playwrights like Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides poked fun at and indirectly questioned the gods’ existence. This had to be done in a circumspect fashion. After all, in classical Athens, Socrates had been condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles has the chorus say, “if divine predictions do not come true, then the gods are not in control of the universe and what need is there to worship them?” In another play, Euripides has Heracles state, “I do not believe that the gods enjoy illicit unions, or that they chain each other up [in reference to the myth where Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite and Ares having an affair]; I do not think, nor will I ever be persuaded, that one god can be master over another. A god has no need of anything, if he is truly a god. These are the wretched tales of singers.” In another of his plays, Bellerophon, Euripides has the title character question, “I reckon that tyrants kill very many people and deprive them of their property and break their oaths to sack cities; and despite this they prosper more than those who live piously in peace every day. I know too of small cities that revere the gods which are subject to larger, more impious ones overcome as they are by a more numerous army.”
In the later Hellenistic era, philosophy became even more of a direct rival to religiosity. The skeptic, Carneades, suggested it was impossible for the gods to be moral since to be moral you have to be capable of also doing wrong. He also questioned whether the gods could be just since, “a perfect god simply would not have the option of taking the unjust path.” Sextus, another skeptic, suggested, “the gods exist no more than they do not.” The Epicureans had a complicated relationship with the gods. Living just outside Athens following the trial of Socrates, it made sense for Epicurus to pretend to heed the common myths. However, most contemporaries regarded him as an atheist. The Hebrew word for atheist, apikoros, is derived from their word for Epicurean. In general, Epicureans moralized, “Gods did not create the universe, nor do they order it. We can understand nature only if we grasp the physical laws of the world. And when it comes to the way that human beings live their lives, we must take responsibility for all of our choices and not hide behind excuses of external compulsion.” Epicureans were also atomists and they squared away their reluctant belief in the gods by claiming that there were an infinite plurality of universes.
Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean poet, described thus man’s relationship with the gods, “here is another thing that you should not possibly believe: that the sacred abodes of the gods exist in any part of the world. For the nature of the gods, which is super-fine and far removed from our senses, is dimly seen by the mind; and since it eludes the touch and pressure of the hands, it cannot touch anything that we can touch (for anything that cannot be touched cannot itself touch). For this reason, their abodes must be different to our abodes.” Another Roman, Lucian, was a cynic who used humor to poke fun at the concept of gods. He asked if the gods were all-powerful why did they need human offerings? And why were they so greedy as to seek vengeance on those humans who failed to sacrifice? In his play Lucian has Zeus worry, “if people are persuaded that there are no gods at all, or that we have no thought for humans, we shall go without sacrifices, presents, and honors on earth, and will sit idly in heaven beset by famine.”
Whitmarsh expertly shows that atheism was not a modern invention, but was rife in ancient Greece and Rome. Although it was later obscured by the forceful rise of Christianity and only “rediscovered” by Enlightenment thinkers, there was always a tradition in the western world of thinkers who questioned the authority and existence of the gods.
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