Thor's Day

“Did Zeus Exist?”

By Chuck Smythe

I stumbled on to the above headline in the New York Times Opinionator. Thinking it a natural for “Thor’s Day,” I sent it on to Morris. He asked me to write about it, so after some foot-dragging, here goes.
    The article is by Gary Gutting, Notre Dame Philosopher. He argues that we have no evidence that the Classical Greeks did not have supernatural experiences denied to most of us. Maybe we’ve forgotten how. Maybe different Gods were active then, in different ways. Maybe almost anything. In any case, a high civilization believed in Zeus with no apparent dissent for centuries. Gutting argues, therefore, that atheism regarding Zeus cannot be defended, and only agnosticism is justified.

    My basic response is one that I offered and Morris rejected several years ago. I mostly agree with Gutting: it is apparently impossible to disprove the existence of any particular god. If the Believers make a specific prediction that I can test, I can produce strong evidence one way or the other, but Proof, in the totalitarian sense that a mathematician or a philosopher usually means, is hardly ever available in the real world. Therefore confident atheism is hardly ever justified, especially in matters as doubtful as religion. I’m an agnostic about God, Yaweh, Krishna, and Zeus, for instance. Personally, I’m betting on Cthuthu.
    I’ve been told that when Thomas Huxley coined “agnostic,” he defined it as “one who knows that men [and women] can know nothing of gods.” In this sense, I’m not even agnostic. I know no such thing. Mind you, I strongly suspect this is true. But the gulf between “suspect” and “know” is vast.
    One of Gutting’s responders said that agnosticism is merely an evasion, that the real question is, “What are your commitments?” Very well, I’m committed to trying to speak the truth. Very often, including the present instance, the truth is “I don’t know.” I try to say it often and fearlessly.
    Gutting goes on at length about the Greek’s experience of epiphanies, good fortune after honoring the gods and disaster after neglecting them, and spiritual experiences at religious ceremonies. I can’t, of course, prove that their experiences were not different from those of modern believers, but most believers that I’ve asked, regardless of their particular religion, offer what appear to be exactly the same sorts of experiences to justify their beliefs. This seems at least plausible evidence that the Greek experience of the divine was similar to the modern, so Zeus seems precisely as plausible, or im-, as Allah.

“The Freedom of Faith”
    While surfing around in the Opinionator, I also stumbled on to an article by that title (with the subtitle, “A Christmas Sermon”), by Simon Critchley, philosopher at the New York New School for Social Research. It is a very different critter that the previous essay. It’s a bit esoteric, but bear with me. He speaks of an episode in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The scene turns on Jesus’s forty nights in the desert, and the temptations of Satan there. In Chritchley’s explication, Jesus is encouraged to make the masses love them by giving them bread, or by giving them a miracle, or by giving them Authority. Jesus refuses to do any of this.
    Why does Jesus refuse to do these things? Because he offers this instead: “Believe, and the truth will make you free.” Critchley explains,

...truth does not consist of the empirical truths of natural science or the propositional truths of logic. It is truth as a kind of troth, a loyalty or fidelity to that which one is betrothed, as in the act of love. The second is the idea that truth, understood as the truth of faith, will free.

    All this is background. Now the tale gets interesting. The character Ivan Karamazov has written a poem set during the Spanish Inquisition. In this, after the burning of a hundred heretics, Christ appears, and is immediately recognized and celebrated. The Grand Inquisitor has him arrested. At this point, it seems best just to quote:

Later, the Grand Inquisitor enters the cell and silently watches Jesus from the doorway for a long time. Face-to-face, they retain eye contact throughout. Neither of them flinches. Eventually, the cardinal says, “Tomorrow, I shall condemn thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the people who today kissed Thy feet tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it.” He adds, “Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us?” Jesus says nothing.
    The Grand Inquisitor’s final question appears paradoxical: how might the reappearance of Jesus interfere with the functioning of the most holy Catholic Church? Does the Church not bear Christ’s name? The answer is fascinating. For the Grand Inquisitor, what Jesus brought into the world was freedom, specifically the freedom of faith: the truth that will free. And this is where we perhaps begin to sympathize with the Grand Inquisitor. He says that for 1,500 years, Christians have been wrestling with this freedom. The Grand Inquisitor too, when younger, also went into the desert, lived on roots and locusts, and tried to attain the perfect freedom espoused by Jesus. “But now it is ended and over for good,” he adds. “After fifteen centuries of struggle, the Church has at last vanquished freedom, and has done so to make men happy.”
    …Jesus refuses miracle, mystery, and authority in the name of a radical freedom of conscience. The problem is that this freedom places an excessive burden on human beings. It is too demanding; infinitely demanding, one might say. As Father Mapple, the preacher in the whaleboat pulpit early in Melville’s Moby Dick says, “God’s command is a hard command. In order to obey it, we must disobey ourselves.” If the truth shall set you free, then it is a difficult freedom.
    …Knowing that he knows, the cardinal says, “Perhaps it is Thy will to hear it from my lips. Listen, then. We are not working with Thee, but with him—that is our mystery.” The Church is league with the Devil. It sits astride the Beast and raises aloft the cup marked “Mystery.” The Grand Inquisitor is diabolical. This explains why he is so fascinated with the temptations that Jesus faced in the desert. The Church has been seduced by those temptations in Jesus’s name.
    …At this point, the Grand Inquisitor stops speaking. Silence descends. The prisoner Jesus continues to look gently into the old Cardinal’s face, who longs for him to say something, no matter how terrible. Jesus rises, approaches the old man and softly kisses his bloodless lips. The Grand Inquisitor shudders, but the kiss still glows in his heart. He stands and heads for the door, saying to Jesus, “Go, and come no more…Come not at all…never, never!”
    …doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, it is certainty. If faith becomes certainty, then we have become seduced by the temptations of miracle, mystery, and authority.
    …The Grand Inquisitor’s dilemma is, finally, tragic: he knows that the truth which sets us free is too demanding for us, and that the lie that grants happiness permits the greatest good of the greatest number. But he also knows that happiness is a deception that leads ineluctably to our damnation. Is the Grand Inquisitor’s lie not a noble one?

    What to make of all this? The startling thing, of course, is the suggestion that the Church has, by making of itself an Institution, full of mystery and authority, betrayed Jesus’s teachings. More outrageous still is the suggestion that the Authorities know this. Over the top: they may be right. Outrageous at a whole different level: “Happiness is a deception that leads ineluctably to our damnation.” Hmmm....
    At another level, of course, I have little to say about a belief system that dismisses evidence as irrelevant. Still, there is food for thought here. Perhaps I need to read more Dostoevski. Critchley says that Dostoevski certainly didn’t believe any of this. What game was he up to, then?
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Copyright © 2013 by Chuck Smythe

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