Ancient Polytheism and the Concept of Evidence Reconsidered (More Briefly)

The issue of whether the ancient Greeks could have had good evidence of the existence of their gods comes down to the issue of whether a theistic explanation of their religious experiences can be a better explanation than any naturalistic one.

Image found at Ancient Greek Gods for Kids

My previous entry on this blog (“Ancient Polytheism and the Concept of Evidence,” August 2, 2013), written in response to a piece by Gary Gutting (“Did Zeus Exist?”, The New York Times on line, July 31, 2013), grew out of a couple of paragraphs that I had posted in a discussion of Gutting’s piece on Facebook. I thought at the time that I needed only to add some circumstantial explanation to what I had written to make an entry for this blog but instead I ended up writing a completely new piece twelve paragraphs long. It is bad enough to put so much time and so many words into commenting on someone else’s blog post; what makes matters worse is that by writing at such length I make it all the more unlikely that anyone, even among the small number of people who ever see this blog, will read what I wrote. Today I will try to make up for the verbosity of that entry by setting forth my main thoughts in this matter concisely and without much reference to the details of Gutting’s piece. I have on some points modified the position that I took in the earlier piece, as I have come to a more charitable assessment of what Gutting does with the concept of evidence, but I do not bother to indicate the modifications here.

(1) If some people, such as the ancient Greeks in Parker’s account, have experiences that they take to be theophanies (manifestations of a god or of gods), these experiences may be the basis of their belief in their gods. But that does not mean that they take these experiences to be evidence of the existence of those gods.

(2) In fact, no one who experiences what seem to him to be theophanies can coherently regard his experiences as evidence of the existence of gods, since the presumption of the existence of gods is inherent in the experiences themselves. An ancient Greek who claims to have experienced a theophany might say, e.g., “Zeus manifested himself to me.” To make such a statement is not to cite anything that can possibly count as evidence of the existence of Zeus, as the statement presupposes the existence of Zeus.

(3) For an ancient polytheist to be in a position to cite his religious experiences as evidence of the existence of his gods, he must renounce the naive conviction that originally characterized his experiences in favor of a skeptical attitude, and must redescribe his experiences in terms that are neutral with respect to the existence of gods. So he must say, e.g., not “Zeus manifested himself to me,” but rather, “It seemed to me as though Zeus manifested himself to me.”

(4) Note that such a person would have to do this across the board with regard to everyone’s putatively theophanic experiences. The issue is not the veracity of this or that person’s religious experience but rather the existence of the gods themselves. It would be no effective argument to say, e.g., “What I saw and felt during the ritual agrees with the accounts of others to whom Zeus has appeared; therefore, Zeus exists”; for the statement that Zeus has appeared to others presupposes that Zeus exists. To cite religious experiences as evidence of the existence of gods, one must describe all such experiences in terms that are neutral with respect to the existence of gods.

(5) For an ancient Greek apologist for polytheism to get from the premise “Such and such Greeks have had such and such experiences” (the experiences being described in terms that are neutral with respect to the existence of gods) to the conclusion “The gods exist,” he would have to supply some further premise or premises. Otherwise, the premise of his would-be argument provides no reason to accept its conclusion. That is to say, the cited experiences do not constitute evidence of the existence of the Greek gods unless a further premise or premises can be supplied that makes the argument cogent.

(6) What might this premise be? One possibility is: “So many pious Greeks can’t be wrong.” That, of course, invites the rebuttal: “Yes, they can.” The issue, as far as I can tell, comes down to the question of what sort of explanation of the Greeks’ religious experiences is most compelling: a theistic one, according to which the gods really did appear to the ancient Greeks, or a non-theistic one, such as one in terms of natural causes. If the polytheistic apologist can establish the claim that the best possible explanation of the data that he has cited is that the Greek gods really have appeared to him and to his fellow Greeks, then he has a cogent argument, and the religious experiences of ancient Greeks do indeed constitute evidence of the existence of the Greek gods. But can he establish such a claim?

(7) Gutting argues, in effect, that we have no rationally compelling basis for rejecting such a claim. The modern rejection of supernatural causes, he holds, is not a finding of science but an a priori presupposition of scientific procedure. Therefore, we have no rational basis for dismissing the possibility that the ancient Greeks had good evidence of the existence of their gods. Therefore, we have no rational basis for dismissing the possibility that their gods existed.

I have further thoughts on the last point, but rather than include them in this entry I will simply post this part by itself.

Added August 7, 2013:  Upon further consideration of Gutting’s piece, I have concluded that its arguments do not merit further close attention. We have abundant reason to prefer a naturalistic explanation of Greek or any other religious experiences to a theistic one. A naturalistic explanation can be thoroughly well-integrated with everything else that we know about how the natural world works, while a theistic one cannot be. A naturalistic explanation needs to posit no entities that act in contravention of the known laws of nature, while theistic explanation (at least as understood by Gutting) does so. The principles of a naturalistic explanation admit of the derivation of predictions that can be empirically tested and confirmed, while those of a theistic explanation do not. The theistic explanation may have an advantage in simplicity (though even that may be contested: see this piece at Philosophical Disquisitions for reasons why the notion of simplicity of explanation is not itself simple), but it is a clear non-starter in all other respects.

Gutting’s insistence that the Greeks may have had good evidence of the reality of their gods because we have not got decisive evidence that they did not have such evidence is as fatuous as the assertion that the Greeks may have had the technology to build nuclear reactors or that it may have been possible for human beings to fly by attaching wings made of wax to their bodies in those days, since we have no decisive evidence to the contrary (by the standard of decisiveness that Gutting’s reasoning seems to presuppose). In each case, the assertion of what “may have” been the case amounts to nothing more than the proposal of a fantasy in which there is no obvious logical incoherence. It provides not the slightest reason to take such fantasies seriously as real possibilities or to set them alongside the contrary assertions—viz., that the ancient Greeks had no nuclear technology, could not fly with waxen wings, and had no good evidence of the reality of their gods—and to say that there is no sufficient reason to choose between the two.

Agnosticism about the existence, past or present, of the Greek gods seems to me a defensible position; but Gutting’s argument for such agnosticism, founded as it is on the assertion of agnosticism about the former availability of now-unknown evidence for the existence of those gods, is itself indefensible.

Ancient Polytheism and the Concept of Evidence

Gary Gutting offers a double-layered agnosticism about the existence of the gods of ancient Greece: we are in no position to say with assurance that the ancient Greeks did not have good evidence for the existence of Zeus and company, he argues, and therefore, we are in no position to say with assurance that their gods did not exist. The first claim is mistaken, and it is mistaken because the facts that Gutting marshals to support his case have nothing to do with evidence at all.

 In a piece recently published in The Stone, a part of the Web site of the New York Times, Gary Gutting poses the question whether we are in a position to deny the existence of the gods of ancient Greece. If, he says, we cannot “eliminate the very real possibility” that for the ancient Greeks “divinity was . . . a widely and deeply experienced fact of life”—and he goes on to assert that we cannot—then “shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?” After considering and rebutting several arguments for a negative answer to this question, he opts for an affirmative one: a denial of the existence of Zeus, he says, is “ungrounded,” and, although “there is no current evidence of his present existence,” we have no reason “to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.”

Gutting recommends agnosticism, and even what one might call adoxism (absence of belief one way or the other), on two distinct questions: (1) whether Zeus and the other gods of ancient Greece existed and (2) whether the ancient Greeks had good evidence of their existence. He holds that we lack sufficient evidence for either an affirmative or a negative answer to the second question, and that for that reason we lack sufficient evidence for either an affirmative or a negative answer to the first. In other words, we are, according to Gutting, in no position to answer the question of whether the ancient Greeks had good evidence of the existence of their gods, and in consequence we are in no position to affirm or deny that the Greek gods existed. (Gutting has further considerations on the question whether we are in a position to affirm or deny that Zeus and company do (now, still) exist, but they seem to me secondary and I prefer to leave them aside for the sake of simplicity.)

Clearly, then, the weight of Gutting’s position falls on his claim that, for all we know, the ancient Greeks may have had good evidence of the existence of their gods. His argument for this claim is contained in a paragraph that begins thus:

Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? Robert Parker, in his recent authoritative survey, “On Greek Religion,” emphasizes the role of what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. “The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,” with by far the most emphasis given to the perils of ignoring the gods.

One might wonder whether Parker, in the quotation within this quotation, is making an assertion of his own about evidence or is merely reporting on what the ancient Greeks took for evidence. Is he saying that, in ancient Greece, piety toward the gods produced good effects and impiety or disregard of the gods bad effects? Or is he saying merely that the Greeks experienced the world as if it worked in this way? The first, stronger claim surely goes beyond anything that can be justified by historical evidence. Presumably Parker is making only the second, weaker claim—and so, presumably, is Gutting. No doubt, ancient Greeks, like other theistic believers, took note of instances in which pious conduct was followed by good fortune or the lack or the opposite of it by ill fortune, and tended to disregard counterinstances. No doubt, like other theistic believers, they were very resourceful in finding correlations where none was obvious, and in positing unobserved acts of piety or impiety to make sense of occurrences of good or ill fortune that seemed to lack the required antecedent. But these are simply the common tricks of confirmation bias, not instances of following evidence in any serious sense.

So far, if this is the kind of “evidence” of the existence of the gods that “seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks,” it does not support Gutting’s recommended agnosticism at all. The cited observations of Parker concern how the theistic beliefs of the ancient Greeks influenced their perception of the workings of the world. They do not provide the least reason to believe that the Greeks actually had anything that merits the description “evidence of the existence of gods,” much less “good evidence” thereof. If what the Greeks thought of as evidence was just their perception of correlations between one’s comportment toward the gods and one’s fortunes, then agnosticism about whether they had such evidence is not warranted at all: rather, we have good reason to conclude that they had no such evidence.

However, Gutting offers further observations, still drawing on Parker’s work:

There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.” More broadly, there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure; it may also be used of the continuing disposition of a god or goddess to offer manifest assistance.”

I take it that in the passages quoted within the quotation Parker is, once again, adopting a kind of disguised indirect speech. That “one knows” that the gods exist because “one feels” their presence in the course of ritual observances is what “one” would say if “one” were an ancient Greek. Of course, we moderns, speaking of and for ourselves, will say no such things, and not only because we do not participate in ancient Greek religious rituals or have seeming epiphanies of their gods. Setting aside all ironic, disguised, or “inverted comma” modes of expression, surely what we will say of the ancient Greeks’ experience of their rituals and their epiphanies is not that they (really, literally) felt the presence of their gods but only that they experienced these activities as if the gods were present in them, or that they took them to be experiences of divine presences.

What, then, if anything, in these facts can constitute, or even be a candidate for constituting, evidence of the existence of the Greek gods? Some, perhaps most or even all Greeks, it seems, had certain experiences, which they attributed to the influence of their gods. Is the mere fact that they attributed these experiences to divine influence supposed to be evidence that this attribution was correct? Surely such a suggestion would rob the term “evidence” of all meaning: it would amount to making a belief count as “evidence” for itself.

Perhaps what Gutting has in mind is this: The ancient Greeks had certain experiences which they described in terms of the presence and the influence of their gods. If their gods really existed, then those experiences were evidence of the existence of their gods; if their gods did not exist, then those experiences were not evidence of the existence of their gods. Although we moderns do not believe that their gods existed, we do not know that they did not exist. Therefore, we do not know that the Greeks had no evidence of the existence of their gods. For all we know, they may have had such evidence.

But that won’t do: it reverses the order of argumentation that Gutting sets out. Gutting argues first that we don’t know that the Greeks had no evidence of the existence of their gods, and then in consequence that we don’t know that their gods did not exist.

Rather than try out further interpretations I will simply confess at this point that, if Gutting has a coherent position in this matter, I have been unable to find it. In fact I believe that he has made a coherent position impossible for himself by introducing the term “evidence” where it does not belong. The point in whose service Gutting quotes Parker, namely that for the Greeks “divinity was . . . a widely and deeply experienced fact of life,” has nothing to do with evidence at all. I can gather from Parker’s statements that if I were an ancient Greek, I would experience religious observances as involving the presence or the influence of Zeus and company. That does not mean that I would regard my experiences as having a sort of divine-presence quality to them and then, from the fact that I had experiences of this character, draw the conclusion that I had genuine experiences of divine presence. Such a manner of thinking would be a bizarre case of self-dissociation. In any case, it is certainly not what Parker is describing in the passages that Gutting quotes. If the Greeks commonly had what they interpreted as experiences of the presence and the actions of their gods then it would have been idle and pointless for them in addition to cite those experiences as evidence that their gods existed.

“Very well,” one might reply in defense of Gutting: “the Greeks themselves did not regard their religious experiences as evidence of the existence of their gods, but they could have done so. They could have cited the fact that they had certain experiences as evidence that their gods existed.” Could they indeed? How could they have identified and described the pertinent experiences? If they had done so in terms of the presence of their gods, then they would be building into their statements of the so-called “evidence” the very claim for which those statements are supposed to constitute evidence, namely that their gods exist. To avoid doing that, they would have had to describe their experiences in terms that were completely neutral with regard to the existence of their gods. But how could they have gone about doing that? Would they even have been capable of doing that? As I understand what Parker is telling us, it is in the very nature of the experiences that the Greeks had of their religious observances that, to those who had  them, they seemed to be experiences of the presence of gods. So it is doubtful that those who had such experiences could ever describe them in non-theistic terms. It is therefore doubtful that the ancient Greeks could ever have cited such experiences as evidence of the existence of their gods. Their belief in their gods was not derived from evidence, and Gutting provides no reason to believe that it ever was or even could have been supported by any evidence.

So what comes of Gutting’s argument for agnosticism about the existence of the gods of the ancient Greeks? Its main premise, that we are in no position to say whether the Greeks had good evidence of the existence of their gods, is false: we have in fact good reason to conclude that they had no such evidence. There may be grounds for agnosticism about the existence of the Greek gods, but agnosticism about the existence, in ancient times, of evidence for the existence of those gods is not a support for it.

REFERENCES

Gary Gutting, “Did Zeus Exist?”, The New York Times on line, July 31, 2013.

Robert Parker, On Ancient Greek Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011)