Evidences of the Divine

'But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground....'

'Two of the most influential books of the nineteenth century, still in print, were William Paley's A View of the Evidences of Christianity, of 1794, and his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, of 1802. The first question posed above could be reformulated anachronistically as an attempt to establish what Sophocles' or Pindar's "Evidences" might have looked like. In a sense there is a single, simple answer to that question, and one evidence that easily outweighs all others, even if the Greeks did not formulate the matter in quite this way. When Nicomarchus was charged in 399 with impiety for altering the traditional sacrificial calendar of Athens, the prosecutor argued: 'Our ancestors, who only made the sacrifices prescribed in Solon's code, bequeathed to us a city which was the greatest and happiest in all Greece; and so we ought to make the same sacrifices as them if for no other reason, for the good luck that they brought." In the past, when sacrifices were performed more regularly, the weather too was more regular, says Isocrates. Every dedication set up by a Greek in fulfillment of a vow is testimony that the prayer accompanying the vow has been fulfilled. The greatest evidence then for the existence of the gods is that piety works: the reward for worshipping the gods is ways hallowed by tradition is prosperity. The converse is that impiety leads to disaster; and, the piety-prosperity nexus is not often used as a proof of the existence of the gods, the afflictions of the wicked are indeed a much-cited evidence. "Father Zeus, you gods still exist on high Olympus, if the suitors have really paid the penalty for their reckless insolence", says Laertes in the Odyssey; "The gods exist," delightedly exclaims the chef in Menander's Dyskolos when his enemy, whom he regards as impious, falls down a well. We seem to catch here the tones of excited colloquial speech.

'When fair weather and flourishing crops are seen as a reward of piety, the argument rests implicitly on the assumption that the natural environment is under divine control. Here then potentially is another evidence: if every shower of rain comes from Zeus - and "Zeus" or "god" "is raining" was used more or less interchangeably in Greek with an impersonal "it is raining" - then direct contact with divine power is an everyday experience. It surely will not have felt like that, even for the pious: rain for them was rain, part of normality, as it is for us, not an epiphany. But when rain declined to fall, it could be prayed for; thunderbolts were embodiments of "Zeus who descends," storms could be caused by human pollution, winds could be summoned or averted by sacrifice, an untimely earthquake or eclipse could cause a general to be replaced, military activity to be abandoned or delayed. According to the messenger in Aeschyllus' Persai, when an unseasonable storm froze the Strymon in the face of the retreating Persian army; "people who hitherto paid no regard to the gods (θεοὺς δέ τις / τὸ πρὶν νομιζων οὐδαμοῦ)" then turned to prayers; though ascribed to Persians, the psychology is also perfectly Greek.

'This was the level at which pre-Socratic philosophy, with the premise of a rule-bound natural order, came into conflict with popular religious assumptions; and, for those educated in the philosophical schools, storms and eclipses ceased necessarily to convey any message about the divine. (But there was always the possibility of a both and / or "double determination" explanation, whereby god worked through the natural order.) Even for the less educated, such messages were only intermittently audible; this was the religion of crisis situations. Nature was a great mechanism for the transmission of communications from, and about, the divine, but the mechanism was only recognized as operating occasionally. The vaguer proposition, however, that piety is the soil in which good crops grow was a permanent if unemphatic presumption. 

Germanicus

'The "rewards of piety" argument is in principle empirical: the gods' concern for humanity is confirmed by their differential treatment of the good and the bad. The pragmatism of this approach leads to the theoretical possibility of abusing the gods when they maltreat the good just as one praises them when they punish the bad.  Complaints and even threats against unjust gods are raised by characters in literature, but there are no early Greek parallels for the popular response to the tragic early death of the Roman prince Germanicus, when temples were stoned. Perhaps our sources have censored such incidents; more probably there was a tendency in such circumstances to seek out ritual omissions and so exculpate the gods. The Rewards of Piety is in reality a pseudoempirical argument, deriving its force from selective vision, inertia, and traditionalism. Yet psychologically it doubtless remained for most Greeks the most potent of all evidences.

'Can others be found? Paley's second book, the Natural Theology is a presentation of the argument from design. It begins with a famous comparison:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for anything I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch came to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might always have been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose... The inference we think inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.

'And exactly the same reasoning applies to the universe as a whole. The ancients had no watches, but from a certain point they certainly had the argument from design: its origins are uncertain, but the phenomenon of providential design is alluded to in several passages in the late fifth century, and the reverse argument (because the world is providentially designed, therefore a provident designer exists) is fully worked out by Socrates in two passages in Xenophon's Memorabilia. Thenceforth, "intelligent design" is taken for granted by all philosophers from Plato onward except the Epicureans, who struggle hard to argue against it, and perhaps the Cynics; it forms the core of the Stoic case in Cicero's De natura deorum, where a quite close anticipation of the modern image of a "monkey on a typewriter producing the works of Shakespeare" can be found ("If an enormous number of letter were thrown on the ground, could they ever form themselves into the Annals of Ennius?) In the early mythological cosmologies, however, the world is not made, but simply happens, and though in passing allusions the gods may be said to have "made" this or that, there is no elaborated concept of a creator god. One of the central arguments of David Hume's The Natural History of Religion is that natural man is not alert to those features of the universe that seem to bespeak designedness; philosophical reflection is required to create such an awareness. The caution is certainly applicable to the Greek case. We cannot allow the argument any wide diffusion before the fourth century.'

The above paragraphs are taken from Robert Parker's excellent book On Greek Religion, Cornell, 2011, pages 2-6. Robert Parker is also the author of an earlier now classic text, Miasma, which is a study of the concept of pollution in ancient Greek religion. It seemed to me worthwhile making this lengthy quotation because it draws attention to what he sees as the fundamental drive behind the phenomena that we see as examples of piety. If you do not agree with him, you would I think be hard pressed to come up with a n alternative explanation.