The Riddle of Epicurus

Great Debates
41

I wonder who Erik Hoepfinger is. When I Google the name, I get the two websites you mention. One is a crackpot site, and the other is at a site about “positive atheism”, some sort of new age materialism, I guess.

It has a couple of unattributed Epicurus quotes. I’ve no idea why they didn’t go ahead and look it up. I recognized one of them right away. I don’t know. I think the riddle is a sham.

It ought to be called something else. But alas, things like this and that business about can’t prove a negative — these things start on the Internet and spread. Even Straight Dopes ignorance fighters apparently can’t stop it.

42

—If I could not understand that an amoral mis-en-scene might provide a context for making moral decisions, I would just keep my mouth shut.—

If someone argued that, if we can’t understand why ad hominem is relevant to the validity of an argument, we should keep our mouth shut, would that be a satisfying answer? It would not. For all we know, maybe it IS relevant for some reason we’re unaware of. But we can still disagree with the idea.
You’re pre-judging the key question of whether what is going on is really a lack of understanding, or a disagreement. If you accept that other people can misunderstand you, you can also accept that you could misunderstand their objections.

This topic has been covered before, and recently.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=158980&pagenumber=2

43

Why, thank you Apos. But Robert and I have made peace. Would you like to dance?

44

Have you considered that what you think is good is evil, & what you think is evil is good? Or that evil may be a meaningless term?

I suggest reading God’s reply to man in the book of Job.

45

I have considered just that. Regardless of whether I am properly qualified to determine what evil is, if it exists in any form, and god can stop it, then he is malevolent. Since we are now citing the bible, I will provide a counter cite that shows that god knows what evil is and allows it to exist:

Here, in Genesis 3-5, we learn that God knows the difference between good and evil, yet all through the Bible accounts of evil exist.

So, if you take the bible as true and believe god to be omnipotent and omnicient, then he allows evil when he could stop it, which makes him malevolent.

DaLovin’ Dj

46

Inasmuch as we permit “IMHO” as a usable and noncensorable abbreviation on the SDMB…

I’ll mention a few of mine.

  1. There may be no solution to the so-called “problem of free will” that incorporates as premisses (a) that there exists an actual and determinate future, and (b) that there exists “God,” an entity partially defined by his omniscience.

If my reasoning is sound; if God exists; if mortal persons have “free will”; then what must give way is premiss “a”. The resultant picture is not very disturbing. One adopts the view, which happens to be my own, that “things of the future” have something like the ontological status of “that which might have been, but wasn’t.” They are real-inactuals; they do exist, but as “superposed” possibilities. God’s omniscience does not allow him to “know The Future,” for there is no such thing as THE future for God to know it.

  1. All these arguments on this subject appear to assume that it is always possible to perfectly harmonize the wills and needs of some number of free-willing individuals sharing the same World (as opposed to being separate brains in separate vats, each with his virtual “reality” show). But IS it possible? If “A” freely wills X, and “B” freely wills non-X, not even omniscience can accomodate both.

Let us suppose that the Self that looks out through our eyes is only one feature of a larger, “higher” Self that may have motives, wishes, and needs distinct from its lesser part. It perceives a broader tapestry, a horizonless vista. And it is not some “other”, privileged being; it is indeed oneself, but oneself writ large. Think of the way a moviegoer momentarily “takes on” the persona of an engaging character. We “are” that person, and that person’s sorrows and pains mean something to us; yet we’re not going to recut “Psycho” to forestall the evil that befalls poor Marion. Because there is no “evil” and no “Marion”: just us in the dark.

In that sense, perhaps we ourselves choose the evil that our lesser personas experience. No one has to remind me that this is no comfort to the spouses of the lost astronauts, or the starving children, or AIDS sufferers. Marion didn’t want to die either. But we ourselves demanded it: and evidently God gives priority to the person, not the persona.

47

Not so fast. I’ll see your quote and raise you two.

Positive Atheism’s Big List of Quotations

Normally I would put much effort in claims and counter claims to try to ‘recruit’ a particular historic figure to one side or the other, but it does irk me to see Libertarian’s seemingly off-handed attempt to dismiss Epicurus as one of the earliest known founders of atheistic thought. I detected more than a pinch of arrogance in his post.

And while it is fair to say that Epicurus may not have called himself an ‘atheist’ I think it just as fair to call him one in respect to the Greek gods of the time. He clearly rejected imperfect gods such as the ones depicted by Hesiod, Homer, and others – thus the riddle – and he is also quite clear in his alck of belief in any sort of afterlife. Which leaves you with something very close to what we now call ‘atheism.’ What particular kind of atheism, strong, weak, pragamatic, etc., is topic for a different discussion.

In the end, “atheist” is simply a label, one oft tied to negative connotations by those using it to describe a non-believer, and one we use to describe our lack of belief in any one particular god. I get the feeling that some of the more pious folk actually pinch their noses in disgust when saying it. Funny how most of these theists don’t seem to realize that they are all atheist with respect to all those other gods they don’t happen to believe in.

Anyhow, here’s a much more current quote that adresses the problem of evil with great clarity and in modern terms:

Credit Woody Allen for that one ;j

48

We have to be very careful not to use the fallacy of Mr. Lizard’s "God as a Parent (wht do people insist on citing that guy in these things?) Mr. Lizard’s basic argument assumes that he knows what God should do, and since God didn’t do that, he must not exist. Here, I believe you may be making a similar mistake in logic. Why assume God is malevolent just because He doesn’t do what you want?

49

Hell, I know what God should do. So do you.

Hey, God! You know all those diseases you keep creating or allowing to come into creation? They really suck! There are much, much better ways of keeping the population down without horrible deaths!

If it is morally wrong for a scientist to create a virus (or put AIDS and the flu in a bowl and “let” an airborne version of HIV come into being) and then releases it into the general populace, then it is just as morally wrong when God does it.

And, as Lizard said, IF God exists, then His keeping us in ignorant of His plan is harmful, in that ignorance sucks. If we are incapable of understanding his plan, then it is again his fault for not making us capable of understanding it. Lack of comprehension of why the universe sucks sometimes which is easily remediable = evil.

And no saying that God has an unknowable reason for keeping his reasons unknowable. Down that path lies recursion.

50

Look, if I can’t understand the futility of a public schooled 12 year old (Man) questioning the engineers (divinity - whatever it is) who designed and maintain the jet that takes them someplace they have never been before, and if you buy in to the fallacy that thinks that the twelve year old can design a better jet, I give up.

51

And if you buy into the fallacy that just because that 12 year old can’t design a better jet, that renders him incompetent to notice that the jet he is on is, f’rinstance, crashed, then I… Actually, I don’t give up. Here’s another: Is God bounded by rules the same way that aeronautics engineers are bounded by physics and materials science? If those engineers could design a jet that never crashes and doesn’t have uncomfortable seats, but don’t, then isn’t the 12 year old justified in complaining?

And, if those engineers could build a jet that never crashes, but don’t, are they by any stretch of the word good engineers?

52

Have we crashed? If so, I wouldn’t trust a 12 year old’s analysis.

But enough, no more decidely imperfect analogies. We are doing a disservice to DaLovinDJ by debating analogies. I have made my points, and will wait till the ever lovin’ vinyl spinner* gets back before I post again.
*no offense meant there, DJ, I dig ya.DJ.

53

Fair and agreed. Such analogies are not accurate or helpful tools in such debates, anyway.

Anyway, you started it.

54

—Would you like to dance?—

No. I really would like to discuss the issue. I’m not trying to trick you or insult you. You are under no obligation to respond to me if you aren’t interested in anything I have to say.

55

Lib- I suppose I better start by saying that I am not trying to pick a fight with you, or denigrate your thinking, and so on,but since one of the main reasons I was unable to make myself believe in a benevolent creator was that I cannot reconcile such a belief with the state of reality (I studied tropical medicine at one time, and was utterly horrified at the idea that any being could create,or allow evolution to create, the- fiendish is the only word that seems appropriate- array of parasites that torture humans and animals) I would like to understand how you manage.
You have mentioned many times your (perfectly justifiable) outrage at the story of the Trail of Tears; if the atoms don t matter, why do you care about the suffering of your Cherokee ancestors?
Further: money nowadays isn t even atoms most of the time; just electrons flipping diodes somewhere in cyberspace. So why is it important if the IRS flips a few more diodes and transfers some of your income to their accounts?
And to all of the theists who bring up what amounts to the “God works in Mysterious Ways” argument: if we can t agree that allowing children to die a slow and agonizing death by cancer, or by filling their intestines with roundworms, or burying them alive in boiling mud, etc. is evil, how can we possibly decide what IS evil?

56

RedFury

I don’t know why offering evidence for a position is considered “arrogant”. I quoted Epicurus as stating an unequivocal belief in God. The quote you offered does not contradict the quote I offered. Epicurus merely believed that man is mortal, but he believed that God is immortal. His ethic was hedonism, and he thought that man, within reason, should do whatever will bring him pleasure.

The “positive atheism” site, as I said before, is dubious. It does not even bibliograph its Epicurus quotes. Some of them are legitimate. But I listed his entire surviving works in this thread, and nowhere in them is any mention of this riddle. It is not his. Period. If that makes me arrogant, then so be it.

In my opinion, shuffling definitions of “atheist” in order to find one that suits Epicurus is ridiculous, given that he himself said, “First believe that God is a living being immortal and blessed, according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind; and so believing, you shall not affirm of him anything that is foreign to his immortality or that is repugnant to his blessedness.” Atheists — of any variety — do not say these things.

Some of his contemporaries did charge him with being a heretic, but not because he really was. They didn’t like his hedonism and what they saw as his disrespect for their gods. But he actually had a deep and abiding respect for the gods, as is obvious from his surviving letters. I get the same thing from Christians who, because I don’t believe the Bible is infallible, think I’m not a Christian at all.

57

Apos

I’m not sure what you mean when you say that you’d like to discuss “the issue”. The only “issue” you raised was that I was prejudiced in my discussion with Robert and that I had engaged in ad hominem with him. I told you that that was cleared up. If you have some other “issue”, you will have to specify it. I can’t look at your butt and read your mind. :slight_smile:

58

Mapache, Robert, and others concerned:

You think that when I say the universe is a mis-en-scene that I am minimizing the significance of what happens to people, but that is not the case. You are missing the companion point that this mis-en-scene serves as a context for morality.

Take the Trail of Tears, for example. There was great tragedy in this event, but the tragedy was one of spirit. Women wept, children suffered, old men fell down and died. But that does not even begin to describe what happened on the Trail of Tears. It wasn’t about bones and flesh. It was about hard hearts and evil souls.

When you look at a man, Jesus teaches, you see a dual being. There is his body, and there is his essence. If you fail to see his spirit, then it is quite natural that you see only his body. But we’re discussing God here. And you cannot hold God to a perspective where He does not see spirit. After all, He IS spirit.

If you want to consider His viewpoint, then discarding from consideration what He has said is the very essence of man is a sure-fire formula for failure. God created man in His likeness. That does not mean that He has arms and legs, but that man has spirit.

The body is mortal, but the spirit is not. You lament physical tragedy, and yet who will not die by some method or the other? If you blame God for a serial murderer, why not blame God for the whole problem of death? Bodies die. That’s what bodies do. Eventually, they all die.

But we’re discussing God here. If there is nothing but physcial bodies, then why discuss God at all? And if there really are spirits, then it is the spirits that, like God, are eternal. It is the spirits that, like God, are morally significant. Jesus teaches that spiritual life is eternal. How can you summarily ignore the very premise of what life is from God’s perspective while discussing how God deals with life?

Assume, for agrument’s sake, that there is a man whom we know is evil. Let us say that we can see into his heart, and we know that he rejects love and severs goodness. Let us say that he takes an ax to the head of an innocent woman and murders her.

You say, “How can God let that happen!? He is surely malevolent!”

But in saying that, you are completely ignoring the very nature of God. And of the man and woman. It is equivocal to speak of God as a divine being when it suits you, and then as one of the mere mortals when people’s bodies get hurt.

The evil from the man was not in his deed, but in his heart. There were countless ways he could have expressed his evil intentions. Axing her head was but one of them. Any deed he might have done, coming from an evil heart, would have been an evil deed. Even if he had kissed her rather than killed her, it would have been an evil kiss.

Battered women understand this. Their evil lovers beat them and kiss them both. In God’s eyes, the kiss is as evil as the beating. The kiss is not an expression of goodness, but merely a calculation intended to supplicate the woman so that she will willingly stay around to endure more beatings. A kiss can be either good or evil. Morality comes from a man’s heart.

When the woman in our hypothetical “dies”, she is not in reality dead. As Jesus teaches, what is significant about her lives on. The murderer has succeeded at nothing other than expressing his own evil intent. It is he, and not she, who is dead. And in a very few short years — a blink of time — his body will be dead as well. Evil does not survive, because light puts out the darkness, and goodness fills the vaccum left by evil.

All those who marched on the Trail of Tears and whose bodies died live on in spirit. The tragedy was not in their deaths, because they did not die. The tragedy was in the hearts of those who killed them, and their moral decisions to reject goodness. Those who murdered them are dead. Truly dead. Where there is no goodness, there is no life.

You might disagree with me, and that is fair. I’m not trying to convert you. But if you are going to disagree with me, then disagree about the relevant part — that a man’s essence is not his body but his spirit, that he is immortal, that evil dies but goodness lives on. It is the acceptance of these principles that is the whole foundation of presuming the atoms to be scenery.

If you do not accept that man is a spiritual being, then you will not accept that God is good. That is understandable. Neither would I. But if you accept that man is a spiriual being, as I do, then you must accept, as I do, that God is good, because the spirit that is good never dies while the spirit that is evil is dead already.

59

But Lib, if God set up the physical universe, which includes many things which are bad, could I not make the case that God values our acts of goodness towards each other more then he does total goodness in general?

Take the metaphor of the gardener. God values beauty, so he plants flowers and watches them grow. Except, the fact that the gardener did not go out and plant full-grown flowers implies that God values the growth of the flowers more than the end result of the successful ones. Does that not imply that God cares about more then the total goodness quotient of His creation?

60

Robert

What you call “acts of goodness” sounds a lot like what I call “love” — except that I do not believe it is the act itself that is the facilitator of goodness. It is my view that the morality (or immorality) is not in the act but in the agent that carries out the act. The act could be circumvented, but the agent could not, except in a manner that I’ll cover shortly where actions may not correspond to intent.

For example, suppose in your ax-murderer scenario, the agent could not avail himself of an ax. He would then find some other object from among the universe’s selection of objects to carry out his murder. The universe is serving as his mis-en-scene. It stands to reason that the agency of morality, then, is not in the act of axing or shooting or stabbing. The agency of morality is in the man, in his heart (his spiritual essense). He will express his morality using whatever objects and by whatever action is most convenient.

Inaction, or failure to act, is then just as understandable in a context of morality as action. An evil man might, for example, allow someone who cannot swim to sink in the water by simply doing nothing. So again, the morality or immorality is not in the water, but in the heart of the man who decides to watch someone die while not even lifting a finger to act.

If actions mattered more than decision, then God could contextualize His morality play without the need for sentient creatures. Goodness could be defined by actions that are arbitrarily good between a planet and a moon, for example. But I believe that volition (spiritual volition) is an essential element of morality.

Another way that actions fail to remonstrate morality, and that I said I would discuss, is that some people cannot help their actions. They may highly value goodness, but their brains are damaged, and the actions they carry out are not at all indicative of what is in their hearts. Sometimes, people’s entire personality may change because of a damaged brain. So, moral decisions aren’t made by the brain; they’re made by the spirit. People may also fail to act, not because they are evil, but because they are afraid. Jesus cared deeply about those who were weak and afraid. He did not condemn them. He healed them.

The metaphor of the gardener is useful in that it illustrates two important considerations: (1) beauty is not an aesthetic that can be volitionally obtained, i.e., you can’t decide to be beautiful; and (2) beauty is not an aesthetic that can be shared via some means of facilitation, i.e., you can’t imbue someone else with your beauty. Therefore, freewill is not a mechanism that applies to beauty.

Freewill is, however, a mechanism that is suitable for a context in which goodness is the most valuable aesthetic. A man may choose (or choose not) to be good, and he may choose (or choose not) to share goodness with others. It is the moral decision to share that is love. Once that decision is made, the universe provides abundant means to carry out the decision. It is okay to appreciate a gift, but it is more to the point to appreciate the giver.