Heroes of the Intellect: Unbelief and Enlightenment Values across the Ages

We have a slightly diminished group today because of the memorial service

for Tom Powers going on at the same time. And also a lecture on

Japan. So we are a little fewer softening, but nonetheless very interested

in both the speaker and the topic. James D is a

stalwart of British studies. He got his B.A. in

comparative literature from the University of Rochester and his p_h_d_

in classics from the University of Texas. He arrived here just shortly after

the Whitman shooting from the tower in nineteen sixty six.

And this was at a time when most of the books in the library were still in the tower.

So in that sense, James is a kind of relic because

there are not very many of us who go back that far. Except for David. Yes,

David. David not only subscribes to more newspapers than anyone else, he’s been here longer

than anyone else. So he holds the record. James

has been the he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago

from 1972 to 1999 and served as the departmental chair

for eight years. And today this afternoon, he’s going to talk to us about

heroes of the intellect, unbelief and enlightenment values

across the ages. James.

There is, as you may fear, a handout if you know my tradition. So I will, son,

and I brought enough for you to have to apiece. So you may read in stereo.

Now it’s seven. Fear not.

But they’re packed with information that I’m sure you’ll be happy to have on down.

All right. Over the past four decades, I’ve delivered

almost 70 presentations to non captive audiences, and I

regard the three done here in Chronicle or chronological order as gold, silver, bronze.

When the idea first occurred to offer Roger this paper, I felt sure it couldn’t compete

with any of them. And surpassing them with platinum is beyond my powers. So there was

already a downward spiral and this one would be even worse. Happily, a solution

was in plain sight when I said gold, silver, bronze. Most of you thought of the Olympics,

but for someone with a classical background, there’s another possibility. The archaic PO’d Hesiod

recounts five ages of mankind in his works and days later won a

an odd text with a famous passage. Pandora’s box wasn’t a box. It was a pit

boss, a large jar. He CID’s five ages are gold, silver, bronze, heros

iron. The last being he see its own time filled with misery and corruption.

The intrusion of heroes into the medal sequence reflects the well-established traditions of

the Argan Nordic expedition, the Theban Cycle, the labors of Heraclitus and the Trojan War, all

known to have taken place hundreds of years before he CID’s 8th century BCE.

So I embraced the historic sequence and accordingly dedicate this talk to heroes

of the intellect, those brave individuals who have rejected conventional religious opinion

since the ancient world. By delightful coincidence, I was recently reminded that

an eminent classical scholar had already shown the way for the Heroes image in a colloquium

for the Classics Department February 22nd, Jason Nethercote, sung son

of U2’s longtime professor Bill Nuther Cut, gave a fine paper on the Roman poets,

Anya’s and Lucretius in conversation after Rudy mentioned that there was an article on

Lucretius also won a written by Vincent’s Buchheit titled Trilled

Desk Geist US Triumph of the Intellect, referring to one of the most remarkable passages

in Latin literature. Coming up shortly, I’m not the only one who thinks that unbelief has

a heroic quality. Some of you may have been lured here by the announcement, which has

five teaser phrases. I’ll highlight each one when we get there. Today

I’ll be discussing the development of certain ideas, often described as enlightenment values, said

to be under attack from opponents, religious and secular, claiming they have failed one way

or another. Among the chief defenders of these values is Steven Pinker, whose new book Enlightenment

Now One B focuses squarely on this issue. I’ve added a companion volume

also B by the late Hans Rosling, a celebrity of PBS and TEDTalk

fame known for his moving colored circle graphs that move from lower left to upper right

and forced sword swallowing. Pinker pays of a heartfelt tribute

because both have spent years trying to persuade people that things have gotten almost incredibly better

in what used to be the third world in the last century. Rosalind’s book is short,

very accessible and really worth your time. Also at letter B are just a few

recent discussions of secularism, liberalism, rationalism, athie ism, etc. My focus

will be on skepticism and outright unbelief and divine beings as cardinal elements

in the emergence of critical thought. Claims about divinities will be assessed from the vantage

points of reality through science and critical scholarship and more reality through

philosophy, since they provide the strongest arguments against divine beings and in favor

of human independence. Among the pivotal moments in this rapid fire survey

will be two of the stereotypical three modern revolutions Copernican and Darwin, in which

focus on reality. Leaving aside Freudian, perhaps now neuroscientific for

lack of time. By contrast, the principal arguments against divinities from capital

and more reality were already laid out in the ancient world because the general

trajectory is fairly well known. I’ll offer some sidebar stories unusual or downright

exotic bits that illustrate the main themes, but come, as they say in baseball, from left field

number to classical period. My principal resource in this is the first book in English

on ancient athie ism in more than 90 years. Cambridge Professor Tim Whitmarsh

is battling the gods to a. He notes contrary to what many have suggested,

that belief in divine beings is not the default setting of human minds and societies.

That there is no innate God gene. As some of carelessly said, Whitmarsh

observes that wherever you find claims about theism, you also find skepticism. He

cites mid-century British anthropologist Edward Evans Pritchard, also at 2-A, who says

in his 1937 book on the Sunday, Faith and skepticism are alike

traditional. Wherever it is speaking of which, doctors and not gods, there

may be faint signs of skepticism as early as Homeric epic, which, unlike biblical texts, was never

regarded as sacrosanct or infallible. There is an entertaining moment in the Odyssey to

be where Telemachus maybe the first sarcastic juncture youngster in world literature.

The chronology implies he’s not literally a teenager. His newly returned father, Odysseus,

tells him that in their battle against one hundred eight suitors, they will have as protectors

Athena and father’s zoos and by implication, nobody else. The son’s

response. Those are indeed fine defenders that you mentioned, even though they sit on high in the clouds,

seems a bit snarky. The words translated as indeed.

And even though our subtle particles that reveal a speaker’s real attitude, it doesn’t

diminish the appeal of Telemachus as momentary skepticism that those two divinities do

intervene. And I should say that the most recent scholarly commentator thinks it isn’t

ironical. Professor Whitmarsh begins his survey with the whole Merican Hestarted

Gods, who, as many of you know, did not pretend to be paragons of virtue being

immortal and powerful. They didn’t have to be. They’re described as engaging in all sorts of

non moral activities. And he said Chronos, a.k.a. Sadan, castrates

his father, run on us and swallows his children whole in the Iliad. Xu’s

recounts to his wife Herra, his sexual conquests and then the Odyssey

areas and Aphrodite have a sexual encounter, are caught in a golden net by Hephaestus,

her husband and the male gods invited to view the couple in flood grunted

delicto find it hilarious. Such behavior seems scandalous to

the first A.I.D. Tradition critic sign-off anti’s, who complained in a surviving fragment to see

that Homer and he seem to have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among humans.

Stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other to other fragments are similarly provocative.

One also to see. Maybe the first example of cultural relativism applied to human

societies, quoting Ethiopians say their gods are flat nosed and dark skinned. The

three nations that there’s our blue eyed and red haired, the other to see again more

imaginatively applies the idea to other species quoting. But if Kassell cattle and

horses and lions had hands, or could draw with hands and make things as humans do, horses

would draw the shapes of gods like themselves and cattle like cattle. And each of them

would make bodies such as they themselves have. That skepticism toward one

type of claim about divinities doesn’t mean that’s enough. Anees was an atheist. Another fragment

to see you last time speaks of one god greatest among gods and men. In no way

similar to mortals either in body or in thought. The first to see passage

is our initial example of a more reality based argument against traditional gods. The

ancient healthiness also came up with the first reality based arguments as well. Several

of the philosophers we rather unfairly called Priest craddock’s offered explanations for

effects previously considered divinely caused, thereby removing the gods from the material

world, as Whitmarsh puts it, to deal. The priest craddock’s marked the beginning

of a journey leading ultimately to what modern atheists call naturalism the belief

that the physical world is the sum total of reality that nature rather than divinity structures

our existence. Since this is a rapid fire survey, I’ll simply mention the great

names and their central ideas without elaboration. There was Staley’s 6th century

BCE who presumably using Babylonian information, predicted a solar eclipse

in five eighty five and said that water was the primal element. A next commander also

And he speculated in purely material terms on the origins of animal and human life from water

and symmetries. 6TH Century again preferred air as primary forming

solid objects through compacting. Whitmarsh spends almost two pages on a much

less famous figure a hippo of some us like theories. He argued for water and bore

remarkably seems to have asserted that the mind is entirely corporeal.

He was attacked by contemporaries for being atheist, and as Whitmarsh says also to

D, he may even be the first person in Greek history to have gained this reputation.

The next name on the roll call of Heroes is and Segarra’s, who explored natural phenomena and

proposed mind nutes as the central underlying essence. He was put

on trial in Athens in the fourth thirties for impiety, and here Whitmarsh suggested

to D. Again, this may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted

for heretical religious beliefs. Now the word heretical is a bit anachronistic.

There was no formal orthodoxy to which an Athenian had to subscribe, just a set of conventions

that should be observed. The last of the heroic priest craddock’s are low. Pippa’s

and his student or coworker Democritus, who both flourished in the fifth century and proposed

the idea of the item one the uncomfortable as the fundamental unit of the physical world.

This, of course, is the etymological ancestor of modern stomach theory, and is

quite striking that Democritus reportedly emphasized Touquet chance rather

than divine superintendence as a significant, significant factor in events.

So the priest craddock’s had already leveled critiques against the ordinary Hellenic view of gods and the

physical world, and it only got worse. The leading intellects of the fifth and fourth centuries

continue into this tradition of doubting or denying the gods and endorsing various forms of skepticism

or materialism. Whitmarsh features three late fifth century figures per Tagaris protocols

and the notorious oligarch Katee us. Tagaris was famous for saying in the first

sentence of a lost treatise titled On the Gods to E concerning the Gods,

I cannot know whether they exist or whether they do not or what form they have.

Similarly, Productize, who achieved proverbial status as a universal genius in his lifetime,

is reported in a papyrus fragment of the later philosopher of Philip Demus to have said also to

E the gods that are believed in do not exist, nor do they have knowledge.

Finally, critics Veeder of the murderous Thirty Tyrants wrote a play called Sisyphus, from which

one long passage survives to E! Last time outlining a completely

secular origin for religion and morality. I caught a small part of the 42 line text

some men of ingenious and wise intellect invented for mankind. The fear of

the gods so that there would be a source of terror for the wicked if they did or said or thought up anything

in secret. At that point, he introduced the concept of the divine.

Those three and numerous others are often lumped together under the term sophists. They are

often maligned as in the negative connotations of sophistry and sophistical, but their importance

in the development of thought is indisputable. I’ve been leskey is monumental. History of Greek literature

plays a striking tribute to these thinkers to F. No other intellectual movement can

be compared with the sophistic and the permanence of its results. What they broke up was never

put together again in Greek life. And the questions which they posed have never been suffered to lapse

in the history of Western thought down to our day. W. Casey Guthrie is the sophists part

of his monumental history of Greek philosophy. Quote, seleski is fine statement, but not

everyone is comfortable with this assessment. I cite a 1992 op ed column

to G of Garry Wills, who has a classic’s p_h_d_, although he left the field

for greener pastures with the Nixon Agnes’s back in 1970.

He read and was appalled by a conversation between Bernard Knox, one of the most eminent

classicists of the era, and Lynne Cheney, then head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Quoting When Knox pointed out what all classical scholars know by now that

the sophists forged the intellectual tools for rational analysis within our tradition, Cheney

expressed shock. She still lives at the simplistic level of history that Triste Sophists,

a term covering many very different thinkers and fifth century Athens as the villains of history.

They were relativists. They did not believe in absolute values. How can he defends such

people instead of learning from a man who knew what he was talking about? She tried to instruct him.

We’ve already seen that the intellectual tools for rational analysis go back before 5th century Athens.

But Wills’s larger point is valid. Rational analysis precludes absolutism,

especially the unexamined kind Whitmarsh in this. The great historian of the Peloponnesian

War through cinetis among the early atheists, noting that he never suggests there are divine

beings except in deluded human minds, much less that they intervene in human affairs

in strong contest to his predecessor, Herodotus, who seems to have had a firm belief

in a divine and ultimately moral cosmos. Quoting to H, the history can

reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.

Some of the most powerful moral arguments against the Divine were posed in the era of Socrates, Plato

and Aristotle. I’ll focus on just two. The first is the youth of dilemma posed

by Socrates in Plato’s earliest dialog. Many philosophers to this day regarded

as the most potent argument against the claim that moral values come from the gods

or capital g god. The text is fairly opaque in the original, so I’m quoting

a compact paraphrase from British philosopher A.C. Grayling in his book The God argument

to I is something good because the gods say it is. Or did the gods

say it is good because it is good independently of them? Grayling adds

that only a super zealot would agree that if God said murder and rape were good, they would be.

But most people have asked would almost certainly say that God is the ultimate authority for morals, and if it was

pointed out this this is this is impaling yourself on the wrong horn of the youth of Frode

dilemma. They would probably say that God can’t endorse immorality. God

has to be perfectly good, rather an infringement on an omnipotence.

And I’ll come back to this. Another attack on conventional ideas was posed by a much more

obscure philosopher in Aristotle’s lifetime. When you bulletin’s also to AI, he’s

not even mentioned in Whitmarsh his book he created seven paradoxes, at least

two of which are still considered extremely challenging. One is the liar. Paradox

is I am lying. True or false? Which duty’s Mark Sainsbury and his

textbook? Also two. I read it as a 10 out of 10 in philosophical difficulty.

The other is the surprises paradox a.k.a. the problem of the heap sort Ross

being Hellenic for heap or pile. This is teaser number one powerful argument built on

sand. Start with a pile of sev-. Take away one grain.

Is it still a pile? Sure. Iterate a bazillion times. When

did it stop being a pile on the way down to zero? The

principle is that there can’t be a justifiable all or nothing dividing line on a perfectly smooth continuum.

After centuries of being dismissed, this paradox roared back to life in the late 20th

century as vague goodness linked with the late Professor Lotfy Zodiacs fuzzy

logic professor seems very in conversation. Several years ago told me that

the heap paradox would be at least a 9 on his difficulty scale will

encounter three applications of it at the end of this paper. The last person to be treated in this survey

of Hellenic unbelievers is Epicurus, who compiled the materialist Adam ism of

Low Keep US in Democritus the reality aspect with a profound question about the morality

of divine beings. For all the provocative nature of his argument, there is no surviving

source in Hellenic, not even a summary. The only full source is the Christian Latin

father lacked tenuous in his tract on the anger of God written around 300 C-T.

Some 550 years later, I’ve quoted David Hume’s compact

paraphrased to J. Of the argument itself, not like tension’s text. Epicurus

is old questions are as yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil

but not able then? Is he omnipotent? Is he able but not willing then?

Is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

The ancient holiness were also astonishingly productive in many areas of science, but their most remarkable

achievements came after the great Athenian period was over in what’s called the Hellenistic era.

Following the death of Alexander and 3:23 BCE, Luchino Russos

wide ranging and learned volume, The Forgotten Revolution to Quaye gathers

sources for their work in a dazzling variety of fields. I’m merely citing from

headings in his table of contents mathematics, geometry. Optics, sonography. Catoctin,

geodesy mechanics. Hydrostatic. Pneumatics, mechanical engineering. Instrumentation, military technology.

Navigation. Medicine and outby physiology. Botany. Zoology. Chemistry. Note

also the two section titles on your page, there were ancient astronomers like aristarchus

who came to a huge centric view of the solar system long before Copernicus and even

speculated on an infinite universe. Having mentioned Roussos book, I should say

that one area in which he’s a little outdated is the wholly astonishing device called the Antique Ketterer

Mechanism, on which there is a recent authoritative book by Alexander Jones to L

and even a PBS documentary. I’ve reproduced his diagram of circa 30

interlocking gears, a degree of engineering complexity no one had thought possible

in the ancient world. Simon Winchester’s brand new book, The Perfectionist, is also at 2.

L discusses the mechanism at the beginning of Chapter 1, something I recommended

when he was here several years ago and said he’d never heard of it before. The Romans, on the

other hand, were not renowned for philosophical, scientific or abstract intellectual interests. Two

quick examples. One, the charismatic philosopher Can’t Deities created a sensation

in 155 BCE. When he visited Rome, he gave a speech praising the justice

of Rome’s growing empire, which was enthusiastically received until he gave another

speech the next day, disproving everything he had said. The arch conservative

Cato, the elder in the Roman Senate, proceeded to expel philosophers from Italy,

not wanting the youth to become attached to words and theory rather than pragmatic

military virtues. Number two, I can’t resist citing one delightful crystallization

of the non-IT election of intellectual jism of the Romans from Karl Boyer’s 700

page history of mathematics to M in the midst of a 152

page summary of Hellenic achievements. He notes that in seventy five BCE, when Marcus Taleo

Cicero was serving as quiet star in Sicily, he found the neglected and overgrown tomb

of Archimedes, which had a diagram of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder,

alluding to one of his most famous discoveries. Boyer says dryly He restored

the tomb. M. Desh Almost the only contribution of a Roman to the history of mathematics.

After 150 pages. I’m very sorry to report. The Boyer’s witticism was

removed from the third edition of the book, revised after his death by one

automatic spok of Georgetown, Texas. By contrast,

there are a few Latin writers who do have a place in the survey. Chief among them, Titus, Lucretius,

Caras, contemporary of Cicero, who wrote the most extensive and focused attack on the traditional

gods that survives from the ancient world. A sixth book, hexameters poem called David Rabe ROOM

in our Turok on the Nature of the World. In particular, his praise of Epicure us

early in the first book to end is one of the most spectacular passages in Latin literature.

My non verse translation doesn’t come close to conveying its force.

The depiction of Epicurus as cosmically heroic, daring to fight against the traditional

gods, break through the gates of nature and in a pure act of intellectual imagination,

wander through. The immensity is unlike anything readers of Latin literature had

ever seen. It may annoy some people, especially those with expertise in Renaissance, Latin

and Italian scholarship, even to mention the next book on your handout. Stephen Greenblatt’s

Pulitzer winning swerve with its memorable, if overstated subtitle. But it was

responsible for putting translations of Lucretius at the top of their Amazon category for a while.

And even if very few ever made their way through all six books, Greenblatt deserves some credit

for just getting people exposed to this unique work. And it’s thoroughly unblushingly secular

materialism. I mentioned only in passing the Augustan poet of ID, whose metamorphosis

had a merry time recounting traditional tales about the gods without a trace of reverence.

One line from his earlier hours on a toria, too. Oh, Express’s pretty unabashed

cynicism expended yesterday all said it would expect it. Aspartame was

it’s convenient that gods exist. And since it’s convenient, let’s pretend they exist.

Nadjib. One has to recall that revival of old time religiosity was

a key part of a gustus program, and the supremely Urbain offered for reasons

unclear, was exiled to a Semien barbarian port city on the Black Sea.

For the last years of his life, his irreverence was probably not the primary cause,

but it’s a hint of things to come in the more ideologically driven Christian world. So the Hellenic world

in particular produced abundant critiques of traditional theology, both from the standpoints

of reality out of Muslim and Europe, epicurean materialism and morality. The philosophical arguments.

But other forces prevailed for more than a millennium. Number three dark middle

ages. I put. Dark in quotes because there are specialists who find the term demeaning. Dark

Ages, but this section will show the post classical retreat from reason. The transformation

of the Christian religion. Or maybe religions from obscurity to dominance over the Roman

Empire is one of the oddest stories in history. The subtitle of Keith hopkins’ book, 3-Day

says it very well The Strange Triumph of Christianity. I’m not going to deal

with that process, but its effect upon the intellectual world was extremely harmful. We’ve seen

how much latitude ancient Hellenic thinkers claimed for free expression of ideas not

absolute, but more than most places and times. Now there could be only one truth.

And it wasn’t arrived at by observation of nature or experimentation, or logical thought, or even introspection,

just alleged revelation, not subject to any kind of Socratic cross-examining.

And yet there was serious conflict within the new religion from the first generation, because James,

Peter and the inner circle in Jerusalem, who had known the living yet shocked the real name of Jesus,

regarded Paul, who would never set eyes on him as an outsider, purveyor of false claims

and even crazy acts. Nine and in twenty six, Paul’s own letters

showed there were splinter groups and divergent opinions even in the early first century C.E.

Since there could be only one true belief, all the others came to be labeled heresy,

an innocent word perverted by theological obsession. Since in classical Hellenic hydrous

this simply meant chase with no implication that any one choice was inherently

wrong. Those splinter groups proliferated positively. Astounding rate

by the end of the fourth century. We have two catalogs of heresies 3-B,

one by Epifanio S. Bishop Bishop of Selam US called Panaro on Medicine Chest,

which covers 80 heresies. The other by Phil last Rhea’s called the book of Diverse

Heresies containing a hundred fifty six and elaborate translation

of Epifanio has been issued by Brill. But for last, REOs has apparently never been published

in English. I imagine most of you are aware that there were more than a few versions of early

Christianity, but one hundred fifty six? Who was it? Who said Let 100 flowers

bloom? The Hellenic world didn’t pay much attention to Christian claims, as we

see from Paul’s experience in Athens Act 17. But a philosophically trained

skeptic might have noted that the lack of agreement stemmed ultimately from a lack of evidence

for their outlandish assertions. If you’re curious about this bizarre period, two books

by former Bible literalist Bart Ehrman 3C provide an excellent entry point.

It was also in the late 4th century that Christians, six decades after their strange triumph,

began killing other Christians, calling them heretics. The first was precisely on us,

put to death in three eighty five by secular Roman authorities in the Gallic town of Traeger

primary reference that 3D. The ostensible charges were sorcery and immortality,

but he had long been accused of heresy and standard histories of Christianity, called him

the first fatality of Christian intolerance. Moving forward, the stereotype

phrase for the dark medieval period of European history is the age of faith.

But at the same time, there were skeptics and heretics galore, and even a few hardcore atheists. In

places where Christianity had not imposed a stranglehold, it was quite possible to reject

their claims. Sometimes in memorable ways, there is a pleasant story 3 about

read God, the King of the friesians in the early 8th century, preserved in a Latin

biography of St. Vote from the King was about to be baptized into the Christian faith.

When he stopped the proceedings and asked for from whether the great majority of kings and princes

of the Phrygian nation would be in heaven or in hell on being told that the unbaptized

could not be in heaven. Redbud stepped back from the font and said he would not accept

being deprived of the company of the deceased leaders of the friesians, and that he couldn’t suddenly

abandon the beliefs and traditions of his own culture. One of the most entertaining,

complicated and obscure episodes in this period is something called the Book of the Three Impostors,

described by French historian George Mean Oua in his French title 3 F

as a blasphemous book that did not exist in translating the

University of Chicago press punched up that title, adding for sensationalizing

elements atheists bible most dangerous. Never. This is, of course,

teaser number two. The story, meanwhile, tells us an incredible tangle of myth

and history already in the 13th century. There were rumors of a supremely heretical tome

that claimed Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were impostors, and all three Abrahamic religions were

nothing but folly. Pope Gregory the 9th issued a ferocious denunciation

of the. Look, which no one had ever seen. And it’s supposed author of Holy Roman Emperor

Frederick the Second. Who is excommunicated? Not once, but twice in his lifetime.

The first was rescinded when he was behaving better. At almost the same time, St. Thomas

Aquinas called for unrepentant heretics to be executed. 3-G, quoting

the church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others by excommunicating

him and separating him from the church and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be

exterminated, thereby from the world by death. This fully institutionalised

suppression of thought. Maybe the low point in relations between religion and freedom.

George Colton’s multi-volume history of the monastic era in Europe, covering the years one thousand

to fifteen hundred is written with an openly anti-Catholic bias, which means

he gleefully includes episodes that do not redound to the credit of the church and his

dogmas. His discussion of what might be called the Proteau crusade against the Albert Jensens in

the 13th century draws on a large collection of trial documents assembled by

the Inquisition in the south of France in the same timeframe as the two previous examples.

I quote v.r Colten, one of the most memorable passages recorded in Latin 3H.

The same Petrus Pẽr Ghazi has said that if he got hold of that God, who would

save just one of a thousand humans that he himself had made and would condemn all the others.

He would tear them apart and ripped to shreds with fingernails and teeth as a treacherous person,

and would regard him as false and perfidious, and would spit in his face. Spirit in

Feachem a U.S. teaser. Number three saying Mahe died from the drop.

Apparently a French curse. He demurred. His vivid defiance

may remind you of the notorious Van de fushi and Dante’s Inferno. Also 3H, who made

an obscene hand gesture called Figs Fiqh and threw them in God’s face,

where upon serpents come to magnify his torture. Colten notes that

final salvation of all mankind was a characteristically Albert Jørgensen belief.

The documents go on with another 15 pages of testimony against Petrus. Apparently,

his own brother turned on him without stating what happened. But there were no good outcomes

for Albert Jenson’s, so he was probably executed for heresy. Yet he surely would have said

he was the true Christian. So the dark and Middle Ages, a bit like the Romans,

did not contribute much to the development of our main themes arguments against divinity based

on reality and morality. But the attempts to impose a smothering dogmatism

were bound to incite resistance when better information and a revival of old ideas came

along to challenge orthodoxy. Section 4 Renaissance Enlightenment

With the coming of the Renaissance and Reformation, we enter into periods of even more intense conflict and divergent

ideas, often promoted with a positively alarming level of fanaticism, especially

to anyone who thinks that all the defenders of these religions were equal and being wrong.

The broad outlines are familiar. I’m not going to redraw them. In fact, we’ll be absurdly selective in coverage.

The first of the three so-called revolutions, Copernican, seems to have begun around

idea of KUVO centricity. Although he did not publish his book until 15 43,

reportedly seeing its final pages on May 24th, literally moments

before his death. Popularising account at 4 a. The retreat of geo

centricity continued with the work of Kepler and Galileo, and religious leaders lost one of the foundations

of their system the belief that Earth was the center of everything and the sole focus of divine

attention on the religious side. The unity of Western Christendom, already

undermined by the Great Schism with the Eastern Orthodox and 10:54 was shattered just

seven years after Copernicus. The discovery by Martin Luther’s rebellion against the corruptions

of the Roman Church, his insistence on using and interpreting only the Bible

itself. So last creep Torah rejecting Catholic emphasis on church tradition,

opened a path for the later emergence of historical critical scholarship, which ironically, has

yielded devastating results for the adherents of literalism. Whether Catholic or Protestant,

the disintegration of European Christianity led to an efflorescence of splinter groups generically

called Protestant. That continues to this day. The second edition of Oxfords World

Christian Encyclopedia for BEA claims thirty three thousand ninety. Christian

denominations around the planet, although they apparently count the Catholic Church through 236

times once for each country in which it appears this expands almost exponentially

from those hundred fifty six heresies in the fourth century. Things could get pretty. Wild.

Constitutional law expert Leonard Leaving’s massive book on blasphemy has several

spectacular chapters on 17th century sects in England, including

the Quakers. Nowadays, quiet and demure who vehemently refuse to submit

to authority, religious or secular, and marched into other churches, sometimes stark

naked, denouncing the congregations as doomed to hell. This multiplication

of beliefs came became a recognizably English trait. 150 years later,

poet Robert Southey provided a humorous list of heretical sects in England for

D. I won’t read all the names, but they’re real. Even the Mughal Etonians and

the head of Baptists are in the Oxford English Dictionary and you can see there’s a problem if

only one can be true. How do you decide which the Jeffersonian wall of separation

dating from the same decade as Saudi’s list was in part intended to keep those

sects from killing each other, which both Jefferson and John Adams thought would happen

if any one gained control over the state offering. Even a bare summary

of major Enlightenment figures would be the most superficial part of this superficial talk.

So I will simply point to Spinoza, who led the way in abandoning the God of the Bible. HUME

rejected miracles and said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he must be a scoundrel.

Voltaire, who after the Lisbon catastrophe ridiculed lionesses, claim that this is the best of all possible

worlds. DETROW In the article Buddhist who presented secular interpretations

of reality, American hero Tom Paine, who pilloried Bible stories and demand Worldcon,

who showed the inadequacy of scholastic arguments for God. I jumped now

to number 5, 1920. The 21st century’s the 19th century produced a sustained attack

on the Judeo-Christian system from within. That is by scholars who knew their texts

intimately and applied rational and critical standards, undermining their historicity

and exposing the complex background to the heterogeneous texts of the Bible. The foremost

name is David Friedrich Schwartz, who published at twenty eight a fourteen

hundred page study in 1835 5A, which was soon translated by novelist

Maryann Evans, better known as George Eliot. Its impact can be gaged from Albert

Schweitzer’s Quest of the historical Jesus also 5A, which surveys one hundred years

of work on the historical Jesus, but devotes 50 of its 400 pages just

to Strauss and his opponents. Half a century later, the skepticism of predominantly

German scholars had reached general recognition among the educated in England. Matthew Arnold,

Oxford’s first professor of poetry, showed the new attitude in a single phrase

strategically placed as the final sentence of a popular edition of his book, Literature and Dogma

That line turns up at the climax of the 19th centuries. Most one of the most controversial

novels today almost completely forgotten. Robert Ellesmere by Mrs.

Humphry Ward. Born Mary Agusta Arnold, niece of Matthew Arnold.

The title character is a minister who loses his faith and at the moment of transformation. Also

five B quotes Arnold’s statement put in nested quotation marks with

italics and an exclamation point. Gladstone himself knew Mrs Ward well

and complained of the book’s harmful potential. He even reviewed it, helping make it

the scandal of 1888. By that time, Victorian England had

many unbelievers, one of the most outspoken being the lifelong maverick and social activist Charles Bradlow,

who was elected to parliament in 1880 but denied his seat when he refused to swear by

God, colorful as his life was. There’s a postmortem, a sidebar story that’s so unusual.

I had to include it for your enjoyment. Showing the hostility to free fingers can extend right beyond the grave.

When he died in 1891, the impressive sum of two hundred twenty five pounds was raised

almost overnight to erect a monument in Brookwood, London’s Necropolis Five see

and hand out. Page five it had a fine bronze bust, which you can see in the old

photograph it left. But in September 1938, one day before

a world union of free thinkers Congress was scheduled to visit, it was stolen

and it remains missing to this day. The Internet provides the photo at right

showing the stump on which the bust was mounted. This is teaser number for the decapitated

gravestone. There was an extraordinary sidebar to the sidebar because

Brad Lore was an ardent supporter for independence for India. Clark

says most of London’s resident India Indian population came to his funeral.

Among them was a 22 year old named. Underst gundy’s,

who says in his autobiography, Also Five See that while waiting for the train, he overheard

the heckling of a clergyman. That’s his word. Heckled by an outspoken atheist,

which only strengthened his distaste for atheists in the last hundred fifty years,

it brought with the reality based critique of theism, but about as far as it can go. Reducing geo centricity

to a tiny shadow of its former self, and within my lifetime, consigning anthropocentric

city to the dustbin as well. The first stage in the latter process was, of course, the work of Charles

Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, recognising the principles of descent with modification

and natural selection as unifying all life, implicitly rejecting the special

creation of humankind and denying God any role in guiding evolution

by within my lifetime. I refer, of course, to the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson

of the double helix of DNA first reported in 1953. In the most important

two page article ever published five D, your page quotes one of the driest

understatements in the history of science. Surely from Krick, it has not escaped our

notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests the possible

copying mechanism for the genetic material. The concept of divine

beings is operating in our world had been under sustained attack since the Great Till Nudnik Thinkers

and Attack revived with new scientific evidence in the days of Copernicus and Galileo. But

the Copernican revolution was only the beginning. As telescopes grew more powerful, the

mere act of looking out into space became more mesmerizing and disorienting.

Back in the 17th century, French philosopher Boulez Pascal said Five E! The eternal

silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Scholars still dispute

whether the me in this isolated sentence represents Pascal himself, a speaker

or a hypothetical free thinker whose views he disagreed with. In any case, telescopes were still

in their infancy in the mid 17th century, but it was already clear not only that the

earth was no longer the center of everything, but that there was no vault in the sky. Rather that,

as Pascal observed, space just goes on seemingly infinite. And the more powerful

the telescope, the farther you see. There is a remarkably evocative footnote

in the treatment of the 18th century astronomer William Herschel and Richard Holmes as excellent

age of Wonder 5F and hand out six. He cites a passage from an 1882

Thomas Hardy novel I’d never heard of two on a tower.

I’ve cut and pasted Holmes’s footnote in its entirety because it links the arrows of Herschel

Hardy, Edwin Hubble and Holmes himself through the feeling he calls cosmological

vertigo teaser number five, which might occur in Pascal’s day intellectually at

the mere thought of spatial infinity. But for modern astronomers comes from real

optical and psychological experience. I quote from Gail Christensen’s Hubble biography

also 5F, because Holmes seems to be misremembering a bit when he says Hubble

used to describe the invocation of Buddha is not, at least in the passage quoted

attributed to Hubbard himself. Note the absence of a page reference, but the general impression is surely

justified even if you think, as people did until Hubble’s day, that there is only one galaxy,

its depth and emptiness radically undermined the comforting illusion of geo centricity.

The phrase only one galaxy leads to a very special photo presented in original

color 5f and hand out six. Kristiansen calls it pl. h 3:35

H destined to be the most famous ever taken. I’ve copied from a beautiful

coffee table book on the Hubble Space Telescope dated October 6, 1923.

It has the letter N for Nova in three places, but one has been crossed out and

v._a are exclamation point added and read. Comparison with previous images

showed that the star was a seated variable, which meant that the Andromeda Nebula

thought to be part of our galaxy was in fact another galaxy at almost incomprehensible

distance from earth. Nowadays the estimate is at least hundred billion

galaxies. That seems like a final dethroning of geo centricity. The process already

begun with the heliocentric ideas of Hellenistic astronomers. The challenge to conventional

religiosity represented by this intergalactic scale is clear. If we see something

like this and you can’t read it from here. But this is a Hallmark children’s book with a title God

is Everywhere. Five G. From 1968, four years

after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, radiation confirmed the Big Bang.

The naive title seems utter nonsense. If we contemplate the cubic volume of the observable

universe universe. Must be at least ten to the sixty third cubic miles

one, followed by sixty three zeros from right to left.

And his acceleration is expanding, its expansion is accelerating. I’d like

to say the universe is too big for God, whereas most people still think God is shrink

wrapped around our planet and concentrated over the land masses. Modern theologians

and evident desperation sometimes say God is outside the space time continuum.

But where’s that as a bridge to the final section? I quote mathematician William Clifford’s famous

line 5 H. It is wrong always everywhere. And for anyone to believe anything upon

isn’t sufficient evidence. Which neatly links evidence. The reality aspect

to morality issues of right and wrong. It’s now time to return to philosophical and morality

based arguments against theism. Picking up where the ancient holiness left off, you might expect

to hear about the much publicized new atheists. But I’m going to focus on people better qualified

as philosophers, especially three items five I written or co-edited by the late

Michael Martin. Harvard trained and perhaps the most relentlessly rigorous opponent

of pro theistic arguments in the 20th century. The pages noted on your handout

show that three of the traditional attributes of God missions freedom, omnipotence contain

inherent self-contradiction and thus cannot be true. Plato’s

Youth of Frode Dilemma and the writings paradox of your abilities have been recognized as problematic for centuries.

Life it’s Restates Plato’s argument 5 J paraphrased by Grayling Back

to I. But not everyone has heard of Plato. Seems odd, but true. Forty

years ago, Yale Law Professor Arthur Leff produced an Article 5 K about

the collapse of morality. If there is no God imposing it from above. Each of the

phrases I’ve quoted is its own paragraph in the original, so it’s laid out vertically

with content. I would say highly unusual for a lodger in all eight years ago

to conservative Protestant theologians starting from Lefse, remarks attempted to solve the dilemma

in Gods favor five K again. To date, their book published by the American

Office of Oxford. It seems much more receptive to these things, has had no philosophy

journal reviews and only to an overtly Christian periodicals. One quote

may show why he God is essentially good, morally perfect without defect

or darkness. It’s an odd word choice. This means not only that he would

never issue a command that would would break any inviolable or necessary moral truth, but that

he could not. This is slippery territory. The limits of divine omnipotence

were discussed in the notorious but little red Regensburg address of Pope

Emeritus Benedict Five L. Joseph Ratzinger was a professor before becoming

cardinal and pope, and his talk is impressively learned. You should look it up amazingly.

He spends several paragraphs arguing against the claim, which he attributed to Duns, SCOTUS

and the Muslim even husband, that God must be able. Given omnipotence and

absolute freedom to invert all moral values, both Bagon and Walls

and the Pope respond by taking God’s perfect goodness for granted. A procedure

known as begging the question. In 2012, Galen Straus, and now here at U.T.

and Thomas Nagel at NYU had an exchange in the New York Review of Books 5 AM. Quoting

Nagel, Galen Strassman offers what I believe to be the most powerful argument against the existence

of God. The argument from evil is a theistic responses to that argument of which I am aware

seem unpersuasive, and I find it hard to understand how belief in an all good

and all powerful D.O.T. can survive in the face of it. So Epicurus is old.

Questions are alive, well and still unanswered. I had to add a brief reference

also 5m to one of the most formative books of my undergraduate days. Being a relic, this

takes me along back a long way back. Walter Coffman’s faith of a heretic, superbly

informed and intensely serious. And he, too, treats, treats the problem of evil

as decisive against God. The other argument you’re bulletin’s so righties paradox.

Back at 2, I is also flourishing. Three recent articles 5 n. Apply it informs.

I call the embryo logical. So righties Kerckhove and Waller the ethical so righties CIDR

and the paleontological. So righties mine the only non philosopher in the bunch. Kerckhove

and Waller undermined the idea of fetal personhood long before personhood amendments.

I asked the question between us and Olduvai Gorge, who had the first soul,

whose parents didn’t? And TED CIDR, in the most important of the three, argues that since

humans must completely fill a spectrum from really good to really bad, even

a very wise God can not make an ethically justifiable all or nothing division

anywhere on that continuum. So your abilities to is alive and well. After twenty four hundred

years, I close with a relatively little known defense of the societal

value of dissenting from conventional opinion, from another on none other than

John F. Kennedy 5. Oh, hand out seven. Less than a month before

his assassination, he was at immersed for the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library.

So one of his focal points is the poets or artists freedom to Dissent. But

it takes only a slight shift to extend his words to the freedom of thought that we have seen courageously

exemplified from the ancients until today his splendid remarks. Regardless

of whether Kennedy himself, for someone like Ted Sorensen actually wrote them, seemed both significant

and achingly poignant. In today’s atmosphere of illiterate tribalism, they

touch on other topics of high relevance. Now the Legistorm in Colleges, The Future of America.

I’ve reproduced the speech in its entirety. You can read it on your own time. It’ll make you painfully

aware of how far we have fallen from Kennedy’s eloquence and breadth of vision.

But to end on a positive note, we have, as Steven Pinker insists in the earnest final pages

of his book, numerous historical models for the deep values of reason, science

and humanism and both the freedom and the obligation. To exercise them in the quest for continuing

human progress without fearing imaginary divinities. Thank you.