Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about polytheism.
Speaker: We'll discuss the history, the concept, and how polytheism can help us think more clearly about gods.
Speaker: Welcome to our fourth episode of Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Today, we're talking about polytheism.
Speaker: And this episode is what we're both excited for, but I think Frank a little bit more so.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm super excited to talk about this because I think about polytheism a lot, not philosophically, though, but I have
Speaker: No, because I have a standing interest in ancient Roman history.
Speaker: So I'm often thinking about, you know, Greco-Roman paganism.
Speaker: I hang out with the Romans a lot in my spare time.
Speaker: And of course, they were very religious people and they were polytheists.
Speaker: But I don't think about polytheism as a philosopher very often.
Speaker: So this is going to be pretty exciting to try to talk about that from a philosophical perspective.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, I mean, how do you think polytheism is regarded in the philosophy religion community?
Speaker: I think it's safe to say for the most part that polytheism isn't regarded at all in the philosophy of religion community.
Speaker: Yeah, so unlike you, who apparently thinks about polytheism all the time, most professional philosophers of religion and non-professional but self-trained philosophers of religion, I think for the most part...
Speaker: They're not thinking about polytheism.
Speaker: They're probably thinking about philosophical theism or Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, the major monotheistic religions.
Speaker: Why do you think, Megan, that contemporary philosophers don't really focus very much on polytheism?
Speaker: I mean, I think there's a lot of factors that polytheism finds itself up against when it comes to being taken seriously in philosophy of religion.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, maybe the most obvious is just not many people are polytheists in the Western world.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So if the question is, like, why aren't we talking about Greco-Roman paganism?
Speaker: It's because the monotheists won, right?
Speaker: Like the polytheism was, at least in the West, was pretty much extinguished.
Speaker: And this is a long, you know, interesting process.
Speaker: And, yeah, we could talk about that.
Speaker: But it seems like that's the short answer, right?
Speaker: Like Constantine, Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the Roman Empire was Christianized, and we're here now, right?
Speaker: The monotheism is more associated with the Western philosophical tradition than polytheism is because of the triumph of Christianity in the West and Islam in the Middle East, etc., right?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, right.
Speaker: And I was going to add, you know, you also see the major philosophical traditions in general.
Speaker: I mean, not entirely, but in general, kind of arising out of the scholarly work done within one of the major monotheistic religions.
Speaker: So, yeah, so I think this does count then as a kind of fringe topic in philosophy.
Speaker: Although, you know, if we were to transport ourselves back a couple thousand years, this wouldn't be a fringe topic.
Speaker: And I'm really excited to talk about this because I think I myself am guilty of ignoring polytheism when I teach philosophy of religion.
Speaker: So I often just sort of begin with, you know, the conception of God that I think most people are familiar with.
Speaker: God is all powerful, all good, all knowing.
Speaker: that kind of god and just sort of ignore polytheistic traditions.
Speaker: And that's why our crops are failing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I think this is a good topic to explore too because not all religious traditions are monotheistic.
Speaker: So lots of strands of Hinduism, for instance, acknowledge many different gods.
Speaker: So worth exploring polytheism.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not a total thing of the past for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I guess we sort of suggested in just now that the reason why polytheism isn't popular in contemporary philosophy is just for like cultural sociological reasons.
Speaker: The striking fact, though, is that before the rise of monotheism, the spread of Christianity, we see critiques of polytheism from philosophers within these polytheistic cultures themselves.
Speaker: So perhaps one of the earliest critics of polytheism was this pre-Socratic philosopher, so this guy before Socrates named Xenophanes.
Speaker: So he criticizes the poets, Homer, Hesiod, for attributing evil deeds to the gods.
Speaker: So a lot of the gods do really, really immoral things.
Speaker: Like Zeus is a serial rapist.
Speaker: He's like a really terrible god, terrible guy.
Speaker: And Xenophanes is, he's saying, well, look, this is, the gods can't do this sort of stuff, right?
Speaker: The gods don't commit bad, don't do evil things.
Speaker: It's slander.
Speaker: Yeah, so it's slandering the gods.
Speaker: Xenophanes has a really interesting point where he says, look, it seems like we're just anthropomorphizing the gods.
Speaker: We're just casting the gods in our own image.
Speaker: And in fact, if animals...
Speaker: could talk and write, they would construct gods in their own images too.
Speaker: The horses would have horse gods, the cows would have cow gods.
Speaker: So this is a really interesting point he's making here about the Greek gods at the time.
Speaker: They're just sort of cast in the image of humans.
Speaker: So he's perhaps one of the earliest critics in the philosophical tradition of polytheism.
Speaker: But most famously, Megan, you like Plato a lot.
Speaker: Plato.
Speaker: Big fan.
Speaker: Big fan of Plato.
Speaker: So I mentioned so that we should keep a list of the philosophers I've said that Megan doesn't like.
Speaker: So thus far, it's like Descartes, Locke, Kant.
Speaker: But she really likes Plato.
Speaker: So Plato, Megan, what does Plato have to say about the traditional polytheistic religion?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, Plato has a really similar critique to Xenophanes.
Speaker: He just sort of blames the poets.
Speaker: In Plato's Republic, he has the character of Socrates.
Speaker: Isn't a big fan of the poets, famously, in that work.
Speaker: And one thing the poets do that Socrates thinks is really bad, really harmful, like Xenophanes' critique is that they make the gods into these kind of morally terrible, in some instances, beings that are basically...
Speaker: like humans except they have magic powers um and plato or at least plato socrates in uh the republic wants to um talk about the gods or god more in ways that are actually pretty familiar to how like modern day monotheists talk about god uh god or the gods are all good they're not they're unchanging they're indivisible perfect um
Speaker: uh even maybe transcendent he has some stuff in a later part of the republic where it seems like he's talking about like transcendence um so so plato's uh idea of the the gods is really not anthropomorphized um at all which i always found funny and actually i find this critique of xenophones really interesting because i think of greek polytheism as i think of the gods of greek polytheism as as as like by nature anthropomorphized like
Speaker: Really, that's like a main feature of it for me.
Speaker: So I'm wondering if like, if there's any clues, it's like pre Homer, they had a less anthropomorphized idea of the gods.
Speaker: I mean, that would be interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Plato criticizes the gods for being in the traditional religion for being not good enough.
Speaker: We see the same sort of thing in Aristotle.
Speaker: Aristotle says the gods are good, eternal, pure act, thought thinking itself.
Speaker: God is the prime mover, the first cause.
Speaker: So, yeah, this is a common critique that we see in a lot of the ancient schools.
Speaker: You can find the same sort of stuff said by, you know, Stoics as well.
Speaker: For instance, Cicero has a dialogue called On the Nature of the Gods, and his Stoic spokesperson says the same sort of stuff.
Speaker: He says, these...
Speaker: myths that we get from the poets are just old wives tales.
Speaker: They're all fictional.
Speaker: They're superstitious.
Speaker: What God is, is the soul of the world.
Speaker: God is the logos, the sort of rational ordering principle of the world.
Speaker: And God's this sort of supreme being that's all good.
Speaker: That's really interesting.
Speaker: So we have all these critiques from these thinkers in these philosophical schools that it sort of makes me think that maybe like the stuff we associate with ancient polytheism, at least in large part, was more just like folk religion.
Speaker: Like it wasn't really like the people who we might call the theologians of the time.
Speaker: They were sort of like, oh, no, that's that's for like the lay people to think.
Speaker: But really, really, that's not how things are.
Speaker: Yeah, so we just mentioned a bunch of philosophical critiques of polytheism, but that did not mean necessarily that the philosophers would refuse to engage in the traditional practices, like do the sacrifices and the like.
Speaker: So, for instance, we have a copy that has come down to us of Aristotle's last will and testament.
Speaker: And the last line of this really interesting document, the last line of his will... Is that he's leaving everything to me.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: So yeah, to Megan, because Megan loves Aristotle so much.
Speaker: No, the last line of the will says, hey, look, make sure you make a statue to Zeus and Athena in fulfillment of my vow.
Speaker: So I think this also was a kind of not unpopular thing among the philosophers.
Speaker: We find this in Cicero, too, even though he criticizes divination and he has characters in his works, criticize the pantheon of gods that we see in Homer.
Speaker: Cicero still says, look, I want to preserve the institutions of our forefathers because they're useful.
Speaker: They're politically expedient.
Speaker: We ought to be respectful of tradition.
Speaker: So they did criticize these beliefs in their philosophical works, but it does seem like they would still engage in the traditional practices.
Speaker: I mean, to some extent, you might think there's a bit of social pressure there.
Speaker: Yeah, certainly.
Speaker: I think they probably thought it was just necessary for society.
Speaker: I think it was more like that.
Speaker: Or necessary for their legacy to be preserved, too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But then, of course, we have the rise of Christianity, which came to, after a few centuries, really dominate the Western world.
Speaker: And out of this, we have one of the most famous thinkers that kind of rides the bridge between the ancients and the medievals,
Speaker: Augustine of Hippo.
Speaker: And he wrote a lot.
Speaker: And he has this one really large work called City of God, where he is trying to kind of explain the concepts of Christianity by comparing the ideal Christian city to the city of Rome.
Speaker: And in this work, he offers some critiques of the pagan religions
Speaker: I should mention why he wrote this work.
Speaker: So in 410, Rome is sacked by the Goths.
Speaker: And some people, although Christianity is now on the rise, and it might even be the case at this time that the majority of the Roman Empire is Christian, but there were some people saying, hey, look, maybe Rome was sacked because we have turned away from the old gods.
Speaker: We adopted this foreign religion.
Speaker: We rejected the religion of our forefathers, and we're being punished for that.
Speaker: So Augustine wants to respond to these pagan critics.
Speaker: So this shows that at least at that time, like the return of paganism was at least a live option for Augustine.
Speaker: He still steals himself on the defense.
Speaker: He still has to write this work.
Speaker: So, Frank, you've been reading this book.
Speaker: Why don't you tell us about Augustine's critique of the, I guess it would be of Roman polytheism, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, at this time, it's like the Greek world and the Roman world become like inextricably linked.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, so, well, one thing he says I found really interesting, we talked about this before, is at the beginning, at the start of the work, he says, look, you guys shouldn't really believe this because the gods have not lived up to their end of the bargain.
Speaker: You think that you should do these sacrifices and then the gods will reward you.
Speaker: This is consistent with the kind of underlying ethos of Greco-Roman.
Speaker: Wait, you guys shouldn't believe what?
Speaker: Believe in the gods.
Speaker: Believe in the gods.
Speaker: Yeah, you guys shouldn't believe in the gods.
Speaker: Greco-Roman paganism is kind of like transactional.
Speaker: It's very transactional.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Very transactional.
Speaker: In fact, there's a Latin phrase that people often use to describe the polytheistic religion.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: Do ut des, I give so that you give, right?
Speaker: You sacrifice to the gods, you give them what they want, they'll give you what you want.
Speaker: So Augustine says, look, Rome often lost wars throughout its history.
Speaker: It has been invaded before Christianity was even around.
Speaker: So yeah, I mean, you guys shouldn't even believe in this anyway if you looked at the history of ancient Rome.
Speaker: The gods have not consistently rewarded the Romans for
Speaker: doing the sacrifices.
Speaker: They've been very fickle.
Speaker: So yeah, like, so I guess when we talked about this, I said, it is kind of a weird argument for Augustine to give because it kind of sounds like a problem of evil argument, something similar to that for the pagans, right?
Speaker: So he's saying if paganism is true, then the world should be thus and so, right?
Speaker: There shouldn't be so much calamity in
Speaker: in the Roman civilization.
Speaker: But there is, and so you shouldn't believe it.
Speaker: Isn't that kind of a weird argument to give, given that the problem of evil is also something that people often talk about when it comes to monotheism?
Speaker: So I think you had a pretty good response to this, Megan.
Speaker: As far as I remember, this is what Augustine says, too.
Speaker: Something to the effect of like, well, you know,
Speaker: The idea of Christianity is that God actually isn't this kind of transactional being.
Speaker: It's not like if you do the sacrifices and do the prayers and do the whatevers, then he's just going to give you everything you want.
Speaker: And if you fail to do that, then he's going to smite you or whatever.
Speaker: It's sort of like you're supposed to do what God wants you to do because you love God, not because you're like going to get something you want or avoid something you don't want.
Speaker: Another thing that, you know, one could say is like, well, something that like Christianity does or something is just like maybe it is you could think of it in like this transactional way, just where like the rewards or punishments are meted out in the next life, not in this one.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So that's kind of a critique of the historical Greco-Roman religion.
Speaker: But Augustine does have more abstract philosophical critiques that might apply even to other, you know, just polytheism in the abstract.
Speaker: So throughout the...
Speaker: the beginning of the city of God, especially in Book 4.
Speaker: So he seems to take quite a lot of delight in discussing just how many gods the Romans believe in.
Speaker: So I think we're all familiar with the main ones, or at least their Greek equivalent.
Speaker: Zeus is the Greek one, Jupiter is the Roman equivalent.
Speaker: You have Ares and Mars, Venus, Aphrodite.
Speaker: So these are like the main gods, like 12 Olympians.
Speaker: But the Romans acknowledged a bunch of gods.
Speaker: So I think perhaps the most famous instance of this is the three gods that are associated with...
Speaker: the entryway to a house.
Speaker: So there's a god of the door, a god of the threshold, and a god of the hinge.
Speaker: And when reading this, you can really see Augustine's having a good time talking about this.
Speaker: He's like, why do they need three gods for the door?
Speaker: Why can't there just be one?
Speaker: So he mentions that there's just too many gods.
Speaker: That's the sense in which he is talking about this.
Speaker: He says, why not just have an economical picture, a natural reason commends a single god to us?
Speaker: Why this superfluous multitude?
Speaker: Why this crowd of gods?
Speaker: So, yeah, I think this is maybe a common critique you might see that a monotheist might give of polytheism.
Speaker: Just too many gods.
Speaker: Why do you need that many gods?
Speaker: It seems like you can just do with one.
Speaker: Why do you need so many?
Speaker: Yeah, so this critique of Augustine seems right on to me.
Speaker: I mean, I think you could even take it further.
Speaker: So like, right, I mean, you could talk, maybe you could be like, well, this is an excess.
Speaker: Surely the door, the entrance doesn't need three gods.
Speaker: But it also seems to me like there's kind of like a problem of evidence, right?
Speaker: So we have like, say we have some evidence that there's like,
Speaker: divine activity related to the house entryway.
Speaker: And we're like, oh, that's evidence of a god.
Speaker: It seems like that data doesn't distinguish between being data for polytheism, where maybe there is a god of the entryway, or three of them, or data for just like monotheism.
Speaker: There's one god and just that god is also able to affect things in the house's entryway.
Speaker: So I'm not really sure how one could get data for there being, you know, whatever number of gods you think there are.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think this is this is like an interesting critique, I think.
Speaker: The why are there so many is kind of like obvious, but this is kind of a different objection.
Speaker: It's sort of like in virtue of what?
Speaker: Do you say there's a God?
Speaker: How do you individuate the gods?
Speaker: Why one for this function rather than three?
Speaker: It's a question of arbitrariness, not a complaint that there's too many.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think I was reading the writing of someone who is a polytheist.
Speaker: He's on Twitter.
Speaker: And he was kind of talking about how he came to be a polytheist, how he came to become devoted to a particular kind of paganism.
Speaker: And his reason was like, I started praying to various gods and they answered me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I guess like maybe that kind of data, I guess like if you have that kind of data, maybe that's like the only kind of data I can see as being something that could like really be evidence in favor of like polytheism over.
Speaker: Just like a personal religious experience.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: With like multiple gods.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I'll find him and tag him on Twitter.
Speaker: So we have like two objections we just discussed.
Speaker: There's too many.
Speaker: And also, like, why?
Speaker: How many are there and why that number?
Speaker: I find that one to be like the most the most pressing question.
Speaker: Like, what's the number?
Speaker: I mean, I guess the Romans were just sort of they were they were rising up to this challenge by just being like, to be safe, we'll just include them all.
Speaker: Yeah, they were very, very inclusive when they conquered a people.
Speaker: They were like, well, take your gods too.
Speaker: That's perfectly fine.
Speaker: There's room for everybody.
Speaker: Maybe they would have been fine with some of them not being real.
Speaker: They were just going to worship all of them just to cover their bases.
Speaker: Yeah, my sense is they just have this attitude of openness.
Speaker: I guess they're open to there being an infinite amount of gods.
Speaker: I mean, they haven't named them all yet, but they're...
Speaker: They would probably be happy to get to like an arbitrarily large number.
Speaker: Yeah, actually, I plan on teasing Twitter with this later by saying, oh, guess which famous 20th century philosopher was a polytheist.
Speaker: So if you have seen the tweet and were intrigued, I'm not going to tell you.
Speaker: The answer to this is David Lewis.
Speaker: David Lewis, probably the most famous metaphysician of the 20th century, was, as it happened, a polytheist who believed that there was an infinite amount of gods that
Speaker: One for each possible world or not one for each.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: My bad.
Speaker: Not one for each possible world because he thought our world didn't have a God.
Speaker: But there were other possible worlds that did.
Speaker: And there's an infinite amount of possible worlds.
Speaker: And they all had gods besides ours.
Speaker: There was no God in our world.
Speaker: I guess there's also an infinite amount of possible worlds without gods in which he thinks this is one of them.
Speaker: Yeah, so Strangeview, I'm not sure how committed he was to it.
Speaker: He just mentions it in a footnote at the beginning.
Speaker: I had to look this up.
Speaker: This was just so surprising.
Speaker: But he does claim to believe it.
Speaker: He claims to be the most extreme polytheist that ever was.
Speaker: Does it count as polytheism, though, if you don't think that gods exist in the world you're in?
Speaker: That's, yeah, that's, I mean, this is a weird view.
Speaker: But you were a modal realist, so he thinks they're real, but not in this.
Speaker: I guess we should mention, like, for people who don't know, like, so David Lewis thought that, like, every possible world, right, a possible world is just sort of a way things could be.
Speaker: He thought those were all, they weren't all just abstract ideas.
Speaker: They were really real in the concrete sense.
Speaker: They were out there somewhere.
Speaker: They're out there in existence, although not in argument.
Speaker: Not in our universe.
Speaker: They're separated and isolated from us, but they're out there.
Speaker: And he's saying a lot of those worlds have gods.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, yeah.
Speaker: An infinite amount of them actually have gods, but not all of them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's a strange view.
Speaker: But I think it kind of makes sense because when you think about what sort of number of gods would be non-arbitrary, right?
Speaker: Like we don't, it's weird to say there's 12 gods, right?
Speaker: Why 12, right? 12.
Speaker: There could be.
Speaker: Why couldn't there be more?
Speaker: It's weird to say it's 300.
Speaker: I guess it's not that weird to say there's one.
Speaker: Not that weird to say zero.
Speaker: Not that weird to say infinite.
Speaker: Like these are like nice numbers.
Speaker: It still feels weird for me to say infinite.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But they're extreme, though.
Speaker: We like these kinds of extreme numbers.
Speaker: And I guess that's why he liked this idea.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think the most arbitrary number of gods would be like 57,011 gods.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe.
Speaker: I don't know how to respond to you when you say stuff like that.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So when I think about...
Speaker: polytheism versus monotheism, I guess the argument that looms largest in my mind is kind of one that Plato already brought up, right?
Speaker: Which is that it seems like the properties that we think of gods as having are
Speaker: make it such that there can only be one.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So when we think of, you know, if there were gods or a god, what would what would it mean for something to be a god?
Speaker: We think, well, you know, totally perfect, worthy of of worship, you know, all sovereign, things like this.
Speaker: And all of those properties seem like there can't be more than than one of them.
Speaker: There can't be two all-powerful beings, right?
Speaker: Right, because one would limit the other's power.
Speaker: There can't be two beings upon which everything is dependent, right?
Speaker: Because then one has to be dependent on the other, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Under many understandings of perfection, there can't be more than one totally perfect thing.
Speaker: And so the concern is that if there's more than one God, none of them are really God in the sense that we mean God when we say it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But this raises, I think, a really interesting issue.
Speaker: And I think it's one of the coolest things about talking about polytheism is it gets us to think more clearly about what we mean by God, the very concept of God.
Speaker: Because couldn't the polytheist just say, well,
Speaker: Why think God has any of those great properties?
Speaker: They could just say that.
Speaker: This puts pressure on us to think more clearly about the very concept of God.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this idea of God as being sort of tri-omni, being all good, all-knowing, all-powerful, that's not, you know, that's really historically prevalent, but it's not.
Speaker: There have been other conceptions of God that had been popular throughout history.
Speaker: So why that one?
Speaker: Yeah, so the entities that the Greco-Roman pagans called gods didn't have any of those properties.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sometimes the gods change, sometimes gods die, like humans can become gods, right?
Speaker: That sort of thing.
Speaker: So, yeah, like what do we mean by God?
Speaker: Like what is a god?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this is a cool, this is an interesting question, and I happened to come across a paper that was perfect for this occasion.
Speaker: This paper by Dale Tuggy called On Counting Gods.
Speaker: This is in the journal Theologica.
Speaker: In this paper, Dale Tuggy does this really helpful thing where he distinguishes three related concepts that are often conflated in these sorts of discussions.
Speaker: So he distinguishes a deity from God from what he calls an ultimate.
Speaker: So I'll start with deity.
Speaker: That's like the main concept here.
Speaker: So a deity is something that's a self.
Speaker: So it's like you and me.
Speaker: It's something that thinks, right?
Speaker: It takes a perspective on the world.
Speaker: So it's a self, but it's a self that is more powerful than any ordinary human being in domains that human beings care about.
Speaker: So it's no good to be really, really good at like whistling or something like that.
Speaker: That's not something human beings really care about.
Speaker: But being really, really powerful with respect to, you know, the crops or something like that, or with respect to life and death.
Speaker: Things that humans care about.
Speaker: That's part of the concept of deity.
Speaker: Door hinges?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe door hinges.
Speaker: I'm not sure if that would count for Tegi.
Speaker: We can ask him if that's something that... Dale, please help.
Speaker: To the Roman gods, many of them, they count as having power over things humans care about.
Speaker: Is door hinge god a deity?
Speaker: Yes or no?
Speaker: Yeah, so we have selves, right?
Speaker: They're selves.
Speaker: They're really, really powerful with respect to things humans care about.
Speaker: And they are supernatural.
Speaker: Their power is supernatural.
Speaker: So this is supposed to rule out the idea that Superman is a god.
Speaker: So Superman's a self.
Speaker: He's very, very powerful.
Speaker: But presumably, he's just some kind of mutant or something, or he's manipulating laws of nature or something like that.
Speaker: He doesn't have supernatural power.
Speaker: So too, the wizards like Harry Potter, their selves, they're very powerful, but they don't have supernatural power themselves.
Speaker: They manipulate occult forces.
Speaker: They manipulate hidden laws of nature that we, you know, non-wizards are not good at manipulating.
Speaker: So that's a deity, and most of the Greco-Roman gods are going to count as deities on Tuggie's conception.
Speaker: They're selves, they're very powerful, they have supernatural powers.
Speaker: That's the first thing he distinguishes.
Speaker: He distinguishes that from a god, or godhood, or god with a capital G. So there he has in mind the traditional conception of god that we've already discussed, this god.
Speaker: The god of the philosophers.
Speaker: The god of the philosophers.
Speaker: The god's a person.
Speaker: God's all powerful.
Speaker: God's all good, etc.
Speaker: So god is a deity, but not all deities are gods.
Speaker: So that's a key point.
Speaker: So those are two things he distinguishes.
Speaker: The third one he distinguishes is what he calls an ultimate.
Speaker: The ultimate.
Speaker: So the ultimate is this kind of, you can think of it as a kind of impersonal God.
Speaker: He wouldn't like that sort of term, but it plays the function that the traditional conception of God that we're most familiar with plays.
Speaker: It's the ground of being.
Speaker: It explains the universe.
Speaker: It's the most fundamental thing, but it's not a self.
Speaker: So you can find this sort of thing in, say, certain strands of Hindu philosophy.
Speaker: Brahman is this ultimate reality.
Speaker: It's not a self.
Speaker: It's the most explanatorily basic thing.
Speaker: It's divine, but it's not God on Tughi's conception.
Speaker: And it's not a deity either because it's not a self.
Speaker: So he distinguishes these three things and he thinks these are good concepts that we can use to better categorize various religious traditions.
Speaker: So, yeah, Megan, I mean, what do you think about this conception?
Speaker: I thought this was a pretty cool conception.
Speaker: Yeah, I also really like this paper.
Speaker: I think it's really helpful for helping us think about the concept of God and other kind of related concepts.
Speaker: I mean, one thing someone could say is just sort of disputing this notion of supernatural.
Speaker: So he says that, right, deities are beings with supernatural powers.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, I guess I myself am kind of skeptical about this term supernatural just because, you
Speaker: I don't I don't really think we have a good grasp on what we mean by natural.
Speaker: So even less so on what we might mean by supernatural.
Speaker: Is this a popular view in philosophy religion that this distinction is really troubled because this seems like a pretty intuitive distinction.
Speaker: I don't think it is a popular view.
Speaker: I think it should be because I think the distinction is troubled.
Speaker: You know, I think here's actually what I think is true.
Speaker: I think most people will admit we don't have a good definition of natural and therefore we don't have a good definition of supernatural.
Speaker: But we can use them.
Speaker: We can use the terms unproblematically.
Speaker: I've seen a lot of people say that.
Speaker: Yeah, but isn't like a common conception of supernatural just like contrary to natural law?
Speaker: Like we have an idea of laws of nature.
Speaker: That's how things normally work.
Speaker: And sometimes God intervenes, disrupts the natural course of events, and that's supernatural.
Speaker: What's wrong with that?
Speaker: I mean, one thing that someone could say is like, well, the laws of nature are just what happens.
Speaker: So if God does something in the world, causes some events to happen, then that just becomes a detail of the natural law.
Speaker: It's not like the law is breached or something like that.
Speaker: It's just that now we know a new detail about the natural law that when God does X, Y, Z, something happens.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess this then this depends on a particular conception of a law, right?
Speaker: What a law, what a law of nature is.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So if you have a Humean conception of the laws of nature, then this distinction, you know, where the laws are just sort of just they're just regularity.
Speaker: Then you're going to have a hard time distinguishing natural and supernatural in that way.
Speaker: But if you think of laws as like the cosmic rules, right?
Speaker: There are these sorts of robust entities.
Speaker: They tell things what to do.
Speaker: They govern the world.
Speaker: Then, right, I mean, do you think if you had that conception, I guess the question is, does your critique of the natural supernatural distinction depend on what account of laws you like?
Speaker: Like the conception where the laws govern, there are these like robust ontologically real things.
Speaker: They govern.
Speaker: So can I have the conception of supernatural to have that conception of law?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, that may be a way of cashing out the distinction.
Speaker: I still think that you could have an idea of you could you would be a theist without thinking necessarily that there's this kind of supernatural power in the sense that God can kind of.
Speaker: tinker in the world and, you know, whatever, switch off gravity in my room for an hour or two when he wants to.
Speaker: So one of the philosophers I do work on, Simone Weil, she has, she thinks, in fact, God can't act in the world at all.
Speaker: And she thinks the reason God can't act in the world at all is, I guess, the TLDR version of it is that if God, because we're subject to different laws than God is,
Speaker: Were God to tinker in our world, he would actually completely destroy it.
Speaker: There's not really any way for him to just like tinker around.
Speaker: It's either he enters our world and destroys it or he stays outside.
Speaker: So I think that that's a coherent view one could have where it's not really clear in that case that God has like supernatural powers, even though it does seem clearly like a conception of God.
Speaker: But anyway, suffice to say, I think the natural supernatural distinction is at least a little bit fraught.
Speaker: So maybe this definition of a deity could be contested by pushing on that distinction a little bit.
Speaker: But I don't, I mean, insofar as I think most people don't question this distinction, I think it's probably fine.
Speaker: But I just personally question the distinction.
Speaker: So I got hung up a little bit there.
Speaker: But anyway, we should move on.
Speaker: So on this definition,
Speaker: view, he talks about Christianity as being a monotheistic but polydeistic religion, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, so that's really interesting because, of course, some criticism, like, you know, famously, Christianity has, is and has been criticized by other monotheistic religions as actually being polytheistic, right?
Speaker: Like, I think, like, Muslim thinkers have at times been like, hey, Christianity, you're pretending to be monotheistic, but you're actually polytheistic.
Speaker: But Tuggy would say, well, no, actually, Christians are polydeistic.
Speaker: And the reason why he says this, right, is that he, on his view, think back to the three conditions for being a deity.
Speaker: You have to be a self, really, really powerful, supernatural.
Speaker: Angels and demons are going to satisfy that description.
Speaker: So angels and demons, on his view, are deities.
Speaker: Is it weird to say that angels are deities?
Speaker: I mean, it's not weird to say they're divine beings, right?
Speaker: Angels are entities, they're divine beings.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Does it sound weird to say they're deities?
Speaker: Well, I guess it sounds weird to my ears because when I hear deity, I think like a thing you ought to worship were the opportunity presented to you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But we're redefining deity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it does seem like in some sense, this is some conceptual engineering here, right?
Speaker: It's not really the colloquial sense of deity because mostly when we think of deity, we think
Speaker: you know, something that should be worshipped or something like that, I think.
Speaker: But at least in Christianity, angels, you know, really shouldn't be worshipped.
Speaker: I mean, maybe they should be venerated or like feared.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, it is a bit of a conceptual engineering, as you note, I think, as he recognizes.
Speaker: But he does point out there is some historical precedent for kind of talking in the way he's talking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I think in the ancient Egyptian polytheism, the main god, at least at one point, they kind of switched which was the main god.
Speaker: But one of the gods who, or at one point, the main god was supposed to have created all the other gods.
Speaker: He was kind of the...
Speaker: He was the man on top, as it were.
Speaker: Yeah, so you might think that that's, in a sense, that's monotheistic.
Speaker: Monotheistic, polydeistic is maybe like a clearer way of describing what we're talking about when we're talking about religions like that.
Speaker: Although I have often heard that kind of hierarchy set up referred to as henotheism.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I've heard that, too.
Speaker: So Tuggy doesn't like this term.
Speaker: He mentions that a footnote that it's used in too many different ways.
Speaker: So my understanding of this is that there is a supreme God and then there's sort of lesser gods, too, is the idea.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think Judaism and it's in its very early, very ancient forms.
Speaker: At least I know this is kind of a scholarly debate, but a lot of scholars think that early forms of Judaism started out as being henotheistic, where Yahweh is like the main god.
Speaker: But then there's other lesser gods or deities that were also like maybe sometimes worshipped.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So much for the conceptual stuff.
Speaker: I think we could definitely continue that conversation.
Speaker: Let's get back, though, to the arguments, though.
Speaker: So we spent a lot of time offering arguments critical of polytheism.
Speaker: I think it's pretty much we haven't really given any arguments in favor of polytheism.
Speaker: Unfair.
Speaker: Yeah, I know.
Speaker: We're just we're monotheistic chauvinist here.
Speaker: But we should at least end the podcast with some arguments for polytheism.
Speaker: So probably the strongest argument in favor of polytheism over monotheism, at least, you know, that I can think of, maybe there are stronger ones, but that I can think of is that one thing that monotheism really walks into head on is, you know, probably the biggest argument
Speaker: the strongest philosophical argument against the existence of God, right?
Speaker: The problem of evil.
Speaker: You only encounter the problem of evil because of our conception of God, which, you know, is part of the conception of the monotheistic God, the idea that God is perfectly good, all-knowing, and all-powerful.
Speaker: And this is the
Speaker: the wellspring from which all formulations of the problem of evil come.
Speaker: That if these traits really are true of God, then, you know, it takes a lot of work then to explain why we would see so much evil, so much suffering, so much disaster in the world.
Speaker: Because it seems like a God that was perfect along all of these dimensions was
Speaker: should want to prevent all of it, he could, would be able to prevent all of it, would know about all of it that he needed to prevent, so why so much awful stuff?
Speaker: Polytheism does not have this problem because
Speaker: The polytheist seemingly can just say, well, there's a bunch of gods.
Speaker: They have different aims.
Speaker: That means that, you know, one god might be trying to promote your interest because you have done the sacrifice as well, but simply is foiled in trying to protect you because of this other god that got in her way.
Speaker: And, you know, that sucks, but that's just how things are.
Speaker: There's a lot of gods.
Speaker: They've got a lot of people they're trying to serve or a lot of, you know, whatever.
Speaker: nefarious deeds they're trying to do.
Speaker: And so that's why we get evil and suffering.
Speaker: That's why they're not preventing it.
Speaker: Maybe they could, were it not for the fact that they just got blocked by some other god or something like that.
Speaker: So it really seems like the problem of evil, this huge problem for monotheism, really isn't a problem at all for polytheism.
Speaker: And I mean, I think there's really something to be said for that.
Speaker: Yeah, doesn't David Hume say something like this in his dialogues that, well, this is in response to the argument from design, the idea that God exists because the world looks designed.
Speaker: Doesn't Hume say, well, look, doesn't our world bear the marks of a lot of different designers that aren't working together, that are maybe arguing amongst each other, that aren't really that good at what they're doing because our world is kind of crappy?
Speaker: Doesn't he say something like that?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's something to the effect of, I mean, this is my own spin on it, but, you know, you take the seven best architects in the world and you make them all build one building.
Speaker: It's probably not going to be the best building in the world because there's seven different minds working on it.
Speaker: I mean, this is an interesting thing to consider because insofar as one thinks...
Speaker: that there is evidence for some kind of divine being or beings.
Speaker: And insofar as one thinks the problem of evil is a really big philosophical problem, I mean, the best solution to both of these things might be to be a polytheist.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, so we mentioned at the outset that there aren't that many papers written about polytheism and contemporary philosophy, but I did find some.
Speaker: And in fact, I found a paper by Eric Steinhardt who makes this exact argument.
Speaker: He says, my view, my version of polytheism, which is similar to that view that Lewis had, that there's an infinite amount of gods and an infinite amount of worlds or whatever.
Speaker: And he says, yeah, this view is preferable to traditional monotheism because it avoids the problem of evil.
Speaker: Every god in every world does the best that it can.
Speaker: I have no commitment to them being perfect.
Speaker: And so the fact that the world's not perfect is not evidenced against the existence of that god.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Although interestingly, Frank, I think that you have a fun quote by Constantine where he might have not liked this argument because I think from what I remember, Constantine actually sees the world as being like so orderly that there couldn't be like multiple designers.
Speaker: Yeah, this is another interesting document that I found.
Speaker: So Constantine, Emperor Constantine, we talked about him before, first Roman emperor, converts Christianity.
Speaker: He, at least there's a document attributed to him called The Oration to the Assembly of the Saints, been described by contemporary scholars as fourth century pop philosophy.
Speaker: But I think he gives a kind of neat little argument here about
Speaker: for monotheism.
Speaker: So he says, look, if there were a bunch of gods, like the pagans say, then we shouldn't expect the world to be so orderly.
Speaker: We shouldn't expect such a, we wouldn't expect such a harmonious concord, he says.
Speaker: So I guess, at least to Constantine's mind, the world is so orderly that it bears the mark of a single designer.
Speaker: If there were so many, it would be disorderly.
Speaker: So I guess, I guess what you think about this depends on
Speaker: your view of how orderly the world is, which includes not just its orderliness in a scientific sense, but with respect to the moral realm, too.
Speaker: So unfortunately, we are definitely out of time for this episode.
Speaker: There is just way too much to say on this topic.
Speaker: I had a great time.
Speaker: Did you have a great time, Megan?
Speaker: I had a great time, Frank.
Speaker: Thank you for asking.
Speaker: But make sure to swipe right on our podcast next time because we're going to be talking about online dating.
Speaker: Is it swipe right or swipe left?
Speaker: I think you swipe right if you like them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Swipe right.
