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Welcome to the 118th Carnival of the Godless! Today, May 31st, marks the anniversary of the ascent of that great Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II, to his throne. Not something that has much import in this day and age, you say? Shelley thought the same thing, hence his famous poem “Ozymandias”. So, inspired by Socratic Gadfly waxing poetical, I’m going to try and shoehorn this Carnival into Shelley’s masterpiece… wish me luck…
I met a traveller from an antique land
Sometimes it does feel as though the theists we meet have wandered in from an antique land. maussie ponders the divide between the respect we give the religious and the reaction we get back. Rick Foreman, meanwhile, considers how one might communicate with such travellers, and Ron Britton analyses their strange language.
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Has your statue fallen over? Benjaminista looks at the best way to knock down idols.
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Sand, or more precisely, silicon, is at the heart of our computing industry. Computers are getting pretty smart these days – as Rick Foreman finds when he investigates Artificial Intelligence and the future of human evolution.
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
A frown usually indicates some form of doubt or disapproval. Magdalune examines the hypocrisy inherent in the Christian view of doubt. And speaking of shattered things, Jason Stotts has some wise words regarding the shattering of illusions.
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Well, if it’s amusing/terrifying facial expressions you want, The Whited Sepulchre has found possibly the funniest exposition of heaven ever! Wrinkled lips and sneers of cold command also put me in mind of a certain G.W. Bush, and Glowing Face Man takes a look at one of his more ludicrous legacies.
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Passions can mess up your logic, so the Spock-like Russell Blackford stays calm and controlled as he demonstrates that evidence does not require faith. Meanwhile, Seth Manapio observes that sculptures do not always necessitate a sculptor. Nonetheless, points out revatheist, in order for Christianity to work, they’ve got to have a sculptor on board.
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
One poor girl who didn’t survive was Madelaine Neumann. Archvillain discusses the Madelaine Neumann case and the intolerance of religion, whilst (((Billy))) sees how the evidence of “lifeless things” works against creationism.
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
Mocking hands and voracious hearts – that’s good parenting! Living with Mormons looks at the perfect age to make a major spiritual decision. Most mocking of all is the insidious leakage of religion into law, as vjack explains.Mind you, mockery can sometimes be justified, as Greta Christina discovers.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
You need a pedestal to support your statues – but what happens when you have nothing solid to stand on? Mike Volmer wonders how many turtles you would need.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
“King of kings”? Rather an extreme title, but as Luke Muehlhauser points out, just because it sounds ridiculous doesn’t mean it’s not accurate.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Ah, the pomp and bombast of the powerful. Christine experiences something similar when she accidentally goes to Mass.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Nothing remains of the Spanish Inquisition, either, but Uncredible Hallq shows that actually, some people rather regret that.
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
Creationists would love to believe the theory of evolution is a colossal wreck, but GrrlScientist looks at Jerry Coyne’s latest book, Why Evolution Is True, and demonstrates that it isn’t so.
The lone and level sands stretch far away
And in the end, there’s nothing left – CyberLizard muses on death, depression and – to avoid getting overy morbid – delight.
Hope you enjoyed this installment of the Carnival – next month it can be found at Sunnt Skeptic. See you there!
I often find it slightly incredible that more attention isn’t given to the subject of forgery in the Bible. Occasionally I attempt to redress the balance, but generally it just seems taken as read that Christians are happy to ignore the fact that the three Pastoral Epistles, the book of Hebrews and most probably Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are all – to put it politely – pseudonymous. This is on top of the fact that the Gospels were not written by their named authors, that the histories in the books of Kings and Chronicles appear to contradict the archaeological evidence, that the prophecies of Daniel were written long after their actual “fulfillment”, and that the books of Job, Esther and Ruth bear all the hallmarks of early historical fiction. None of this appears to matter to those who wish to believe the stories found therein.
There is a precedent for accepting forged documents in Christianity, though, possibly the largest and most profitable fraud in all history. It post-dates the Bible, but still stands as a perfect example of how inconvenient truths can be ignored for the sake of the Church’s “greater good”. To better understand this mentality, let me take you back to the Europe of the Early Rennaissance, when Italy has become the treasurehouse of Europe and scary Islamists are nosing round the corners of the Mediterranean, waiting to pounce. The Crusades have failed, the power of Papal Rome is waning, and France and Spain are jostling for control of the central continent. In this atmosphere, the Roman Popes still command substantial lands and power, most notably in the form of the Papal States – a substantial tract of territory in central and Northern Italy, which were handed over to the Vatican in the 9th century by the excellently-named Emperor Pippin, father of the slightly better-known Charlemagne. The Catholic Church’s ownership of this mini-Empire rested on an ancient document called the Donation of Constantine, a hangover from the early days of Christianity. Shortly after his conversion, the text relates, Emperor Constantine was stricken with leprosy. Previously this would have been the end of the line for His Imperial Majesty, but thanks to his newfound faith he was the lucky recipiant of a miraculous healing, credited to Pope Sylvester I. As a token of his gratitude and piety, Constantine then willed his Western empire (he had enough to be going on with in Byzantium) to the Church, in whose hands it remained. This legacy formed the basis of the Pope’s power. It granted him the right to raise armies across these territories, to levy taxes, to anoint bishops and even to have a say in the appointment of kings and emperors. Good stuff, and boy, did the Popes ever milk it! The Holy See was the political powerhouse of medieval Europe, commanding respect and fealty from virtually every state on the continent.
Except, of course, it was all founded on a lie. In one of the first known examples of textual criticism, a Florentine linguist named Lorenzo Valla (previously known for his work on ancient philosophy and Latin grammar reform) proved conclusively that the Donation was a fraud. In De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio, he demonstrated that Constantine’s legacy was written in the Latin vernacular of the 8th Century – putting its authorship about 400 years too late for it to be legitimate. Unsurprisingly, the Church put the frighteners on Valla (who, fortunately, enjoyed the protection of the powerful Duke of Aragon, and so escaped any serious retaliation) and heavily suppressed the essay, which was not publically circulated until 1517 – more than seventy years after its composition. Naturally, it became a key weapon in the fledgling Protestant arsenal, and, thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, was made widely available. Valla’s scholarship has since been vindicated by modern techniques, and it is now universally accepted that the European powerbase of Catholicism was founded – like so much of their religion – on a lie. But then, should anyone be surprised?
So much of our modern system of thought is derived from the work of Ancient Greece that it’s hard to come up with a concept which those clever Greeks hadn’t already posited. Heliocentrism? Aristarchus of Samos predated Copernicus by about 1800 years. Atomic theory? Leucippus and Democritus had the idea 500 years before Christ. Longitudinal measurement? Eratosthenes had such navigational theories figured out more than two millennia ago, and managed to work out the circumference of the globe at the same time. Hipparchus was the first cosmologist, Theophrastus the first taxonomist, Galen (a Roman, but of Greek origin) the first brain surgeon. They seem to have gotten there first in almost every field.
What about atheism, though? As everyone knows, the Ancient Greeks were certainly not short of gods. Zeus and his Mount Olympus posse were surely right there at the forefront of every Greek’s life, so atheism must have been a more recent development, right? Well… no. The so-called “first atheist” hailed, as you might imagine, from the Greece of classical antiquity. His name was Diagoras, he lived on the island of Melos, near Crete, during the fifth century BCE, and he was the first person in recorded history to have openly espoused a strong and emphatic form of atheism.
Aside from his views on religion, little is known of Diagoras’ life and works. He was purported to be a pupil of Democritus (the aforementioned Atom-Man of antiquity), may have been a passable poet, and could well have been the lover of a certain statesman called Nicodoras. Beyond that, all we can safely say is that he was born in Melos, spent part of his life in Athens and eventually fled to Corinth to escape a lawsuit (for, unsurprisingly, the crime of impiety). He was certainly scathingly sceptical; among the most famous anecdotes about Diagoras is the story of how a friend tried to convert him to religion by showing him a shrine in which were placed portraits of all those whom the gods had saved from drowning. Cynically, Diagoras noted the absence of a shrine with pictures of those who had actually been drowned at sea. He seemed to have a thing about storms at sea; on one occasion when the ship he was travelling on got caught in a squall, the crew bemoaned the fact that they had taken this godless man on board. Diagoras wryly pointed out that the other ships in the storm must therefore have also been transporting atheists, otherwise they should have escaped the wrath of Poseidon.
It was during this time that the principles of naturalism were first being expounded by philosophers, and whilst the scientific method would be long in coming, the pre-Socratics were already finding natural reasons for previously mysterious phenomena. Diagoras belonged firmly to the Naturalist School, and posited scientific explanations for observed events without invoking the powers of the gods. The Naturalist movement gained considerable weight in Greece and later in Rome, and had it not been for the onset of established Christianity, we might have seen atheism becoming a dominant worldview far sooner than it actually did, as more and more epistemological gaps were filled by science rather than the supernatural. However, denying the influence of the gods was not the offence which led to our hero’s eventual downfall.
Diagoras main crime against the Athenian state was his interference in the Eleusinian Mysteries. These cultic rituals were an important part of Greek religious life, invoking the goddesses Demeter and Persephone to ensure agricultural prosperity. Little has been passed down to us as to their nature, because a principal feature of the Mysteries was their secrecy. Participants had to be specially initiated into the cult, and once they had experienced the rites of Eleusis, were forbidden to speak of what they had seen, on pain of death. Diagoras clearly thought this all very silly, and made numerous direct attacks on the practice, discouraging people from becoming initiates and publishing what he knew of the secret practices of the cultists. It was this which led to the Athenian decree against him, although his political affiliations may have had as much to do with the pogrom as anything else. Diagoras was a Dorian and hence rather unpopular with the Ionian majority in Athens at the time (this political/racial divide would eventually escalate to become a contributing factor to the Peloponnesian Wars), so it’s likely that his political enemies would have used the accusation of impiety to get him out of their hair. Whatever the motivation behind it, the ruling forced Diagoras to flee from Athens for good. A search was raised throughout the empire, but he managed to evade the clutches of the authorities long enough to make it to Corinth, where he passed the remainder of his days.
I haven’t been there since my university days, but back when I was a student one of the top nightspots in Bristol was the Thekla, a club based on an old Baltic transport ship which is now permanently moored in the city’s harbour. Interesting as it is to have a floating nightclub, Thekla’s namesake from the first century is far more fascinating. The Acts of Thecla, a text which made the rounds of the early Christian church in the second and third centuries, recounts the adventures of Paul’s first groupie, a besotted wench called Thecla whose exploits made her a popular saint right up to the Middle Ages.
The narrative kicks off with Paul preaching a variation of the Beatitudes at a house in Iconium (modern day Konya, in Turkey), which include the lines:
“Blessed are those who have kept their flesh chaste… Blessed are those who have wives as if they did not have them… Blessed are the bodies of virgins…” (Acts of Thecla 5 and 6)
In the crowd is a young woman named Thecla, who hears Paul’s anti-sex rantings and immediately decides that no dirty male member is coming near her lady-bits in future. This comes as a bit of a blow to her fiancé Thamyris, who was no doubt looking forward to getting his end away on the wedding night, and also to Thecla’s mother, who was hoping that a family alliance with the wealthy Thamyris would sort the family’s cashflow problems once and for all. The two of them conspire to have Paul summoned before the governor of Iconium, on a charge of “corrupting men’s wives”, a move backed by many prominent (and now sexually frustrated) men of the city. Paul naturally falls back on his usual, “God’s on my side, so fuck off,” approach to legal defence, and gets tossed in the dungeon for his trouble. Her, he is visited by the besotted Thecla, who bribes her way into the prison and increases her faith by “kissing his chains”.
(Now I’m being completely speculative here, but I do find myself wondering if perhaps there might be a grain of truth behind this fiction. Here we have a rather kinky scene where a chained and bound Paul is being visited at night by a young woman, having been imprisoned on a charge of “corrupting other men’s wives.” Is it possible that perhaps the apostle’s adventures in Iconium were a little more, well, human than the Acts of Thecla suggests, and could this book perhaps be a gloss on a rather more sordid series of events? Especially when Thamyris and his associates go looking for Thecla, and find her in the jail “bound together with Paul in affection.” Maybe I just have a filthy mind, but still…)
Whether there was any sexual aspect to their relationship or not, Thecla is clearly obsessed with Paul. When he is taken to trial, she spends her time rolling on the floor of the cell where he was sitting, and when summoned to give evidence she says nothing, but simply gazes at Paul adoringly.
Having established Thecla as a character, the narrative moves on to the fun stuff. Thecla is sentenced to be burned at the stake (Paul just gets flogged and exiled – again. The man was persona non grata in about half the civilised world – it’s no wonder he had to write so many letters!). God, being impressed by Thecla’s attitude, sends a massive hailstorm to douse the flames, and so our heroine makes her escape. Meeting up again with Paul, who has camped out in an open tomb, she requests that he baptise her. Paul, for reasons best known to himself, refuses, and the two head off to Antioch.
(Again, I’m reading between the lines here, but it could be that Paul’s refusal to baptise Thecla has something to do with their relationship. Thecla claims that, if baptised, “no temptation will touch me”, in response to Paul’s claim that, “you are beautiful; another temptation may overtake you, worse than the first.” In other words, Paul is deliberately leaving Thecla open to “temptation”, and possibly worse…)
The two of them head to Antioch together, where a citizen named Alexander develops something of a crush on Thecla. Paul, proving himself to be a complete arse, claims he doesn’t know her, and abandons her to be raped by Alexander. Being a feisty young thing, she wriggles free of his clutches, and knocks his crown off, making him something of a laughing stock among the local gentry. In a truly horrifying example of the parochial society of the time, Thecla is sentenced to be ripped apart by wild beasts for this misdemeanour – good legal system they have in Antioch!
Luckily for our heroine, she gets taken in by a local queen named Tryphaena, who is convinced of Thecla’s innocence after she sees her unharmed after being tied to a lioness. It takes a small army to storm Tryphaena’s house and drag Thecla off to the stadium, but drag her off they do, stripping her naked except for a linen undergarment and throwing her to the beasts. Once again though, lionesses turn out to be good pets for would-be martyrs, since one of the lionesses protects Thecla from the other animals, at least until it gets killed by another lion.
At this point, the circus director really pulls the stops out, and just chucks every animal in his menagerie at Thecla, including a giant vat of man-eating seals (???). Delighted by the sight of what (to her) is a baptismal pool, Thecla dives into the water to baptise herself. But the seals! The terrible man-eating seals! (seriously, what the hell kind of threat is a seal? The only one which might pose a threat to humans is the Antarctic leopard seal, and how the hell would the first-century Turks have got hold of one of them?) It’s okay, God zaps the pool with lightening, which kills the seals but leaves Thecla miraculously unharmed. Conveniently for the reader’s titillation, it also blows all her remaining clothes off – but raises a large cloud of steam so that no-one can see her naked.
The rest of the wild animals are overcome by perfumes tossed into the arena by the local women, so Thecla is able to emerge unscathed. Alexander the would-be rapist is not too chuffed, however, so he has her tied between two fierce bulls, and then sets light to the animals’ genitalia. Someone made a bit of a cock-up in the process, though, since the fire burns off Thecla’s bindings and she survives one again.
Before Alexander and the governor can come up with yet more inventive methods of execution, Queen Tryphaena passes out from the stress of it all. Thinking that she has died, Alexander and the governor are thrown into a panic – it turns out that Tryphaena is a close relative of Caesar, who will be less than pleased to hear of her death. They decide it would be best to release Thecla, and send her on her way.
Where is Paul whilst all this is going on? Well, he’s up the road in the city of Myra. We know this, because Thecla’s first act on leaving Antioch is – surprise, surprise – to go hunting for her paramour. When she tracks him down, Paul is astonished (he thought he’d got shot of the crazy stalker bitch in Antioch). Having established that she hasn’t fallen from grace, he gets rid of her by sending her back to Iconium to preach to the church there. Thamyris has died by this point, so there’s no pesky ex-fiancé to mess things up this time, and Thecla spends the rest of her days recounting her story and spreading Christianity across Turkey.
The Acts of Thecla is a great read, but one has to consider that, whilst it does have a strong message of female empowerment (Thecla is repeatedly rescued by women, even by female lions), it reads at times like a second-century erotic novel, full of sex (even as it condemns sexuality), nudity and a heroine who spends most of the narrative tied up and in peril. And, as I’ve outlined above, if this is indeed a myth based in real events, Paul does not come out smelling of roses. You can read the whole thing yourself here – note especially the great description of Paul in Chapter 3:
“a man… of a small stature with meeting eyebrows, bald head, bow- legged, strongly built, hollow-eyed, with a large crooked nose”.
What a catch, eh, Thecla?
Carla Bruni is a beautiful woman, but she’s just made herself even more attractive in my eyes by roundly criticising Pope Benedict’s medieval stance on contraception in Africa. You all know Ratzinger’s backward (and, given his influence, arguably homicidal) views on condom use, so it’s refreshing to see a prominent Catholic stating emphatically that His Holiness is clearly in the wrong.
“I find that the controversy coming from the Pope’s message – albeit distorted by the media – is very damaging… I think the Church should evolve on this issue. It presents the condom as a contraceptive which, incidentally, it forbids, although it is the only existing protection.” Carla Bruni, in an interview with Femme Actuelle magazine.
Her husband, Nicholas Sarkozy, has been a staunch supporter of the Pope, so it remains to be seen what he makes of his wife’s outburst. She’s taken a lot of flak in the French media for being bold enough to take a stand, but deserves our applause for standing up to the lies and propaganda of the Catholic Church.
Right To Think will be hosting the Carnival of the Godless in two weeks’ time (the current issue is at State of Protest), so get your submissions in!
I think it’s safe to say that the “Darwin led to Hitler” argument, as espoused by Ben Stein, has been well and truly debunked, so I’m not going to dive into it here. I do find it ironic, however, that Christians would love to find the roots of anti-Semitism in their trusty bugbear of evolution. The hatred of Jews can be shown to stem directly from the early days of Christianity, when that fledgling faith was trying to determine whether it was simply an offshoot of Judaism or a whole new religion. Since the eventual winners of the inter-doctrinal debate were the followers of Paul, who preached that the sacrifice of Jesus nullified the old Jewish Law, it was assumed that Judaism was no longer the way to God it had once been, and that Christianity had the truth of the matter. Mix into that the idea that Jesus was killed by the Jews (cf. Matt 27:25) and you already have the makings of a fine old anti-Semitic rant.
There were those among the early Christians, however, who went to an even greater extreme than Paul in denying the tenets of Judaism. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the Epistle of Barnabas, a apocryphal letter purportedly written (though definitely pseudonymous) by Paul’s travelling companion from Acts.
The Epistle of Barnabas takes to an extreme the idea that the Jewish religion is wrong. Rather than assuming, as Paul did, that the ways of Judaism were correct until Jesus superseded them, the author of Barnabas argues that they were wrong from the very start, and that the whole of the Jewish faith is based on a misreading of the Old Testament. To demonstrate this, he presents his own interpretation of the Scriptures, based on the Christian theology of the time – it makes for interesting reading…
Barnabas kicks off by establishing the pointlessness of sacrifice. In his worldview, the Jews have been sacrificing the wrong things. God doesn’t want animals to be slaughtered for Him – instead, the requirement for sacrifice demands that we make a spiritual sacrifice. “A sacrifice [pleasing] to God is a broken spirit; a smell of sweet savour to the Lord is a heart that glorifieth Him that made it” (Barnabas 2:4). Fasting, too, has been misinterpreted by the Jews – again, when Yahweh suggested that His people might like to refrain from eating, what He meant was that they “should loose every band of iniquity, untie the fastenings of harsh agreements, restore to liberty them that are bruised, tear in pieces every unjust engagement, feed the hungry with thy bread, clothe the naked when thou seest him, bring the homeless into thy house, not despise the humble if thou behold him, and not [turn away] from the members of thine own family” (Barnabas 3:7). Again, the Torah was supposed to be interpreted allegorically, in a spiritual rather than a temporal sense.
After this, Barney really gets into his stride. Why were the Jews wrong? Well, because they covenant they were so proud of never really existed. See, when Moses came down Mount Sinai the first time, equipped with the stone tablets inscribed with God’s Law, he found the Israelites worshipping a certain gilded bovine idol, and smashed the tablets in a bit of a tantrum (you all know the story, it’s in Exodus 32). This, by Barnabas’ reckoning, was part of God’s plan and invalidates the whole arrangement. Thus, all subsequent attempts to follow the laws of Moses were doomed to failure. This idea is at the core of the Epistle – the Jews have been doing it wrong for centuries, and will be in for a seriously bad time of it come Judgement Day.
The most seriously out-there interpretation of Scripture which Barnabas gets to grips with concerns the ritual of circumcision. Silly Jews! scoffs Barney, God didn’t mean that you had to chop the end of your tadger off! No, the real meaning behind circumcision is much more obvious. You see, Abraham, who was the first to indulge in the practice, circumcised his entire household, which numbered 318 men. If you convert 318 into Greek letters, you get Tau, Iota, Eta. Tau is T shaped, a bit like the cross. Iota and Eta are the first two letters of Jesus name, in its Greek form. So by circumcising 318 men, Abraham was anticipating the death of Jesus on the cross! Nothing to do with foreskins at all. What a cock-up by the Jews! The author is clearly pretty pleased with this bit of detective work: “No one has been admitted by me to a more excellent piece of knowledge than this, but I know that ye are worthy” (Barnabas 9:5-6)
However, the best bit in Barnabas concerns his spin on Leviticus 11, the list of creatures that the Israelites are and aren’t allowed to eat. Admittedly, this is a bit of a weird passage to begin with – how many people ever get tempted to chow down on a hyrax anyway? – but this guy takes what seems to be a fairly straightforward section of scripture and really runs with it. Pigs are off the menu because Moses doesn’t want you to associate with dirty, greedy, lazy people – not so much don’t eat pigs as don’t hang out with them. Hawks, kites and ravens are scavengers, and live off the work of others, so don’t associate with freeloaders. Lampreys and cuttlefish are metaphors for the ungodly, because they live in the mud. It gets better. Hares are verboten because they have too much sex, even growing extra orifices for the purposes of copulation (not that great on the biology, there, Barnabas… He also seems to think that hares are gay child molesters: “Thou shall not be a corrupter of boys, nor like unto such” (Barnabas 10:11)). Hyenas change sex every year (WTF?), so the prohibition on hyena meat is meant to warn us against transsexuals. Capping this big old biology fail, though, is the proscription against weasels. Weasels, y’see, copulate orally, so by warning us off the weasel kebabs (how else would you cook a weasel?), Moses is telling us that blow jobs are a big no-no. And those silly Jews thought he was talking about cookery!
There’s a whole load more “interpretation” in Barnabas (every mention of water in the OT prefigures baptism, the Sabbath is all about the end of the world, the covenant the Jews were supposed to receive is now given over to Christians), and the book then concludes with a long list of virtues to pursue and vices to avoid. It didn’t make it into the Bible because it was too obvious a forgery (the original dates to about a century after Paul, so it couldn’t possibly have been written by the original Barnabas), but the interpretative tradition which it encapsulated is still common in Christianity today. The author of Barnabas just takes it that one step further, to point out the error of the Jewish religion and to encourage his followers to abhor Judaism and its blunders. In doing so, he sets his feet on a path that would guide anti-Jewish bigotry to the heart of Christian theology, and, in a long and roundabout way, lead to Nazi Germany far more directly than Darwinism ever could.
It looks like postings on Right To Think may be a little thin on the ground in the coming weeks – my access to the magic of the internet has been severely curtailed, and I currently have other writing assignments to devote my typing hours to, plus I’ll be keeping an eye on Bridging Schisms whils Eshu’s on holiday next week. Rest assured that normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, and there’s a Carnival of the Godless on its way before the end of the month to look forward too as well!
I’ve recently been attempting to get my head around the Trancendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG), which is a fairly modern addition to the classical (and much refuted) trilogy of ontological, teleological and cosmological proofs. A tip of the hat is owed to Rhology for providing me with a link to CARM’s version of the TAG, which helpfully boils the argument down to a single postulate, that of logic (other versions I’ve encountered attempt the same proof from morality and from intellect, but the structure is the same). In essence, the TAG says this:
Logical absolutes (such as “a statement cannot be both true and false”) exist.
These absolutes are not a result of physical laws.
These absolutes are not a result of human thought.
Since they are not the result of either physical laws or of human thought, and yet they still exist, something must exist which gives rise to such logical absolutes.
That something is God.
Hence, God exists.
The TAG further argues that logical absolutes are necessary for the existence of knowledge – that in order to know anything about the world, we must rely on logical deductions. As a result, the TAG purports to show that human knowledge is reliant on the existence of a god: without God, goes the argument, we cannot trust to logic and therefore we cannot truly claim to “know” anything.
My principle issue with this proof is that it requires one to assign certain characteristics to the concept of a “logical absolute” which are not necessarily inherent. Such absolutes as, “a statement cannot be both true and false”, or, “a thing is what it is and is not what it is not,” are not, as the TAG requires us to believe, tangible “things” in themselves. The logical absolutes which the TAG postulates are linguistic constructs, pieces of organised language which are designed to convey a particular abstract idea. Such ideas only have meaning in respect of our particular cultural idiom – they connect concepts in such a way that we can relate their meaning. For example, it is not possible in conventional Western logic for the claims of both Christianity and Buddhism to be true, but in the mind of a seventeenth-century Chinese it was perfectly possible to regard both of these systems as equally valid, plus Taoism and ancestor-worship as well. As a result, the third part of the argument as stated above is on shaky ground. Because of the meanings which we attribute to certain words, logical absolutes are a corollary to language, not a Platonic abstract.
To put it another way, we can view logical absolutes as descriptors. One of aspects inherent in “being a dog” is “not being a horse”. This idea of “not being a horse” is as fundamental to the idea of “being a dog” as, say, “having whiskers”, “being furry”, “panting” or “pissing on lampposts”. All the so-called “absolute” of “not being a thing different to that which one is” does is provide an additional piece of information about the dog. It is also possible to conceive the idea of a dog which is also a horse, depending on which descriptors you choose to apply and what meaning you assign to the words. For example, if you consider a horse as “a quadrupedal mammal on which a person can ride”, and then seat a small child on the back of a St Bernard, you have effectively created a dog which is also a horse, in that it fulfils your idea of “horsiness”. My point is, logic is reliant on language and the meanings which we assign to language – and hence it is, in effect, a human creation. No divine mind is required to support a logical axiom, only the existence of human thought and language.
Time for a new Right To Think series, I believe. Inspired by my recent post about Xun Zi, I’m going to aim to put together a series of posts about Atheists In History. Oddly enough, we’ll be kicking off with a fictional character, or at least a mythological one. Hands up who loves Vikings! Well, you’ll enjoy the story of Hrafnkell…
Hrafnkell’s Saga is an old Icelandic tale dating back to around the 13th century. It tells the story of the eponymous warrior chieftain, a fearsome fighter who terrorised the valleys around his home, and made a habit of never paying weregild (“compensation”, I suppose, is the best translation) for his victims. In spite (or possibly because) of being a bit of an arsehole, Hrafknkell is a deeply religious man, and dedicates his victory spoils to the Norse god Freyr, the pig-riding, giant-screwing Lord of Fertility. Hrafnkell erects lavish temples to Freyr, performs sacrifices and generally brown-noses the god, to the extent of divinely dedicating his favourite horse, Freyfaxi. It is this which proves to be his tragic error, since when the shepherd Einarr borrows the steed, the terms of Hrafnkell’s dedication require that the hapless herdsman be put to the sword. This Hrafnkell dutifully does, but, feeling some remorse (since it was his orders which led to Einarr’s appropriation of Freyfaxi), he offers to take care of Einarr’s elderly father, Pobjorn, for the rest of his days.
Pobjorn, however, wants the money, and since Hrafnkell never pays out for those he murders, it looks like some legal muscle is required. The aggrieved father gets his nephew Samr to take the case. Samr is no great legal mind, but with the assistance of wandering lawyer (like a wandering minstrel, but much, much less entertaining) named Porkell, he successfully prosecutes the case. (The fact that Porkell’s big brother Porgeirr is a seriously bigwig chieftain may have helped the verdict along…) Under Icelandic law, Samr now has the right to kill Hrafnkell and take his lands – not a big problem for our hero, since Samr is no Conan the Barbarian, and besides, Hrafnkell has Freyr on his side. However, with Porgeirr’s help, Samr is able to capture the miscreant chief and offers him a choice: death or servitude. Being none to keen to meet his god just yet, Hrafnkell goes with the career in the service industry.
With Samr now in charge of Hrafnkell’s home, the boisterous ex-chieftain trots off to a neighbouring valley and begins to carve out a life as a vassal farmer. Being borne to rule, as it were, he quickly becomes a noted leader, and rises back to a position of power. All seems rosy. However, Porkell and Porgeirr, unhappy with Samr’s mercy, push the horse Freyfaxi off a cliff and burn down Hrafnkell’s temple to Freyr. At this point, Hrafnkell experiences an epiphany. Looking back on how his service to Freyr has worked out, he states:
“I think it is folly to believe in gods”
With that, we see a drastic change in the character of Hrafnkell. He ceases his sacrifices and worship of Freyr, but, more importantly, he becomes a much more amenable ruler. He extends his protection to some visiting Norwegians, he treats his vassals with kindness and understanding, and he rapidly gains a reputation as a fair and kind chieftain. Now popular and powerful again, he rides out to avenge himself on Samr, who is now larging it up in Hrafnkell’s old gaff. Waking in the night, Samr is surprised to find himself surrounded by Hrafnkell’s men, and figures his goose is cooked. The new, humanist Hrafnkell offers Samr mercy, though, granting him the same chance to live as Samr once granted him.
The roles are reversed, but Samr no longer has Porkell and Porgeirr on his side (they refuse to go up against Hrafnkell again). As a result, he can never hope to overthrow Hrafnkell a second time, and lives out his days in servitude. Hrafnkell survives to a ripe old age, a venerable atheist Viking lord, and dies peacefully amidst his loyal retainers.
A celebratory horn of mead, anyone?
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