Philosophical Detritus VII: Arguments About Gods.

Over the years I've met many a fundamentalist Christian online looking to troll atheists. I am technically an atheist, since I don't believe in gods, though I don't usually identify as one. I identify as a pragmatic naturalist. I see naturalism as an epistemic philosophical stance which argues that the natural world is all that we can know, since the only channel for gathering information we have is sensory experience. I have concluded, after decades of consideration and hanging out with mystics, that there are no supernatural realms, forces, or beings. And I broadly accept accounts from evolutionary psychology about what makes the supernatural seem plausible (see especially Barrett 2004).

I assert that gods, along with unicorns and time travel, are part of the human imaginarium rather than a part of nature. We cannot study gods as we might study a natural phenomenon, because there are no natural phenomena unequivocally associated with gods. The closest we ever get to gods is the anthropological study of how belief in gods affects the behaviour of believers. 

However, belief in powerful supernatural beings is more or less ubiquitous across human cultures. Despite the protestations of Buddhist modernists, this includes all Buddhist cultures. While Buddhists do not worship a creator, most Buddhists do worship Buddha or some other figure as a powerful supernatural being. Intercessory prayer to Guanyin is a major feature of the history of the Heart Sutra, which I spent 12 years researching in forensic detail. And gods of various kinds feature on almost every page of the Pāli suttas: from major Vedic gods like Brahmā and Indra (Sakka), to autochthonous gods like yakkha and kinnara.

When asked about his first act in reforming the Chinese state if he were made Emperor, Confucius opted for clarification of terminology. I like this. As a naturalist, I don't capitalise the word "god" because I don't accept the privileging of this idea or any one version of it. Since gods all seem to have conventional names, I prefer to use these. Thus, I write about "Jehovah" rather than "God". By refusing to frame this essay in terms of "God", I consciously reject the Christian framing of the discussion. This is also consistent with not identifying as an atheist. Despite writing about some Christian ideas that are part of my cultural heritage, I'm not a Christian, and I don't accept the validity of any Christian interpretation of mythology or doctrine.

This essay is about some of the ways that Christians, or more precisely Christian theologians have defended their ideas about Jehovah. Not that an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being, with a notable penchant for smiting his enemies, needs defending from puny humans. Nonetheless, many such apologetics have been offered over the last 2000 years. Clearly, Christians felt the need to defend Jehovah long before science began to erode the foundations of all religions.

Jehovah or Yahweh is the creator god of Christians and Jews, sometimes also known as El "god" or El Shaddai "god of the mountains, god almighty". In the Semitic languages, al or el is used the way we use "god" in English; it's a generic title. In Hebrew scripture, Yahweh's name is printed as a sequence of consonants: YHWH. Yahweh is a scholarly reconstruction of the vowels. The actual pronunciation was deliberately suppressed. It was replaced with euphemisms like Adonai "Lord" when scriptures were read aloud, and the real pronunciation was eventually lost. In Hebrew, Yahweh is also referred to as Elohim (a plural used to suggest greatness), El Elyon “God Most High”, El Roi “God Who Sees”, El Olam “Everlasting God”.

By contrast, the name Jehovah was invented by Christians. It is a mongrel that combines the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of Adonai. A quirk of linguistic history resulted in the first (short) a becoming e. The name Jehovah is consciously avoided in the New Testament, where it is typically replaced by Greek Kyrios "Lord" or Theos "God". Thus, it is convenient to distinguish Yahweh, the Judaic god, from Jehovah, the Christian god.

Of course, Jehovah is not the only creator god in world mythology. There is also Allah, which is not a name but a title. Allah also means "god" and is linguistically related to the Hebrew El. Culturally, Arabs and Jews trace their ancestry to the mythical figure of Abraham; hence, we refer to "the Abrahamic religions", but the similarities end there. Yahweh and Allah are two different gods, from related cultures with related languages, whose followers both call them "God". Other creator gods include: Ahura Mazda, Brahmā, Marduk, and many more. Not all cultures have a creator god, but there are many that do. And as we will see, this simple fact is consequential for theological arguments.

Moreover, there are something like 10,000 different sects of Christianity, and many of the schisms were the result of arguing about Jehovah or the nature of Jehovah. So we need to be a bit wary of seeing Christianity as monolithic. 

Argumentation in the Absence of Evidence

The fact is that Jehovah is not a natural phenomenon even in theory. Christian beliefs place him before, outside, and above nature (the super in supernatural means "above"). Christians have never really defended Jehovah based on direct empirical evidence. There are a number of standard theological defences of Jehovah. In what follows, I look at a dozen different approaches, giving a brief overview followed by some comments on where each approach fails (which they all do). 

Cosmological arguments infer Jehovah from motion, causation, or contingency as a first cause or necessary being. These arguments originate in Greek philosophy (Aristotle, ca. 4th BCE) and are adapted to Jehovah by Philo (ca. 20 BCE – ca.  50 CE) and medieval figures such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

First cause arguments are powerful, but they don't point to Jehovah in particular. Rather, by adopting oversimplified, linear models of causation, they arrive at a dilemma: either there is a first cause, or the universe is infinitely old. And since they believe, a priori, that the world was created at a point in time (by Jehovah), and is thus not eternal, they assume that Jehovah was the first cause. But there is nothing in this argument that says that the first cause was Jehovah rather than, say, Allah, Ahura Mazda, or even some non-supernatural force. That said, causation is neither simple nor linear: everything is interacting with everything else, all at once. So this argument fails establish the existence of Jehovah.

Incidentally, Brahmins already anticipated this kind of infinite regress argument in the Bṛhadāranyka Upaniṣad, probably composed around the 8th century BCE, where Yajñavalkya cuts it off by saying "Don't ask too many questions, Gārgī, or your head will shatter apart" (BU 3.6). In my view, we have to risk head-shattering and keep asking questions.

Teleological arguments infer Jehovah as an intelligent designer from order or purposiveness in nature. Early versions of such arguments already appear in Plato (d. ca. 348/347 BCE) and the Stoics (4th–3rd ca. BCE). They became standard in medieval and early modern "natural theology". Intelligent design arguments have become popular amongst educated Christians in the 21st century.

These kinds of arguments proceed from the twin assumptions that the world was created and that a creation requires a designer. Nothing about the universe, per se, suggests that it was created. Creationism is a belief. And as my readers know, belief is a feeling about an idea.

Notably, the fact of evolution shows that no designer is needed. Organisms evolve over time through random mutation and natural selection: no design is involved, and thus no designer is required. Moreover, having a designer would have resulted in more efficient and effective designs, whereas our bodies are all too obviously kludged together over millennia.

Historical arguments proceed from alleged "historical" acts such as miracles, covenants, or fulfilled prophecy. They arise in early Jewish and Christian apologetics (1st – 3rd c. CE), associated with figures like Josephus and Justin Martyr. Such arguments presuppose that scripture is historical rather than mythological. This is not a tenable stance to take. Religious storytelling may well incorporate historical elements, real geography, and so on, but this doesn't make it a witness to history.

This style of argumentation is also common amongst Buddhists and philologically-oriented Buddhist Studies scholars who wish to assert the historicity of the Buddha despite the lack of anything a historian would call "evidence" (See Attwood 2023). As David Drewes (2023: 404) pointed out recently:

Everything that makes the Buddha a Buddha is supernatural: his discovery of the Dharma by his own power; his understanding of karma, the geography of the world, the structure of the cosmos, the path to liberation, and the makeup of living beings and the material world; his freedom from desire; his omniscience; his thirty-two marks; his special characteristics and powers.

Scripture is always mythological. It is seldom, if ever, a reliable historical source, except as reflecting the view of the people who wrote the scripture down.

Apophatic arguments propose that Jehovah must exist while exceeding all finite description, making him accessible only through negation. They originate in late antique Neoplatonism (3rd – 6th century CE) and enter Jewish and Christian theology via figures like Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. 500 CE).

This is not really an argument for Jehovah, per se, since it explicitly assumes his existence. Apophatic arguments are only a workaround for his being supernatural and thus indescribable. Again, this approach doesn't single out Jehovah from the plethora of creator gods, for whom all the same claims to supernatural puissance are made.

Ontological arguments claim that conceiving Jehovah as a maximally great or necessary being entails that he must exist, because existence is a perfection that such a being cannot lack. This style of argumentation originated with Anselm in the 11th century and was later reformulated by Descartes (1596–1650) and Leibniz (1646–1716).

This is all too obviously circular. It relies on the a priori belief that Jehovah is a being, rather than, say, a fictional character. And it assumes the characteristics that Christians attribute to Jehovah are real characteristics.

Ontological arguments have the same problem as the cosmological argument. Nothing about the "greatest being" points to Jehovah unless we assume that Jehovah is the greatest being. The argument cannot distinguish Jehovah from other "supreme beings".

Moral arguments claim that objective moral facts or duties require Jehovah as their ground or lawgiver. While antecedents exist, the recognisably philosophical form emerges in the 17th –18th centuries with Hugo Grotius (1583 – 1645) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).

The idea that morality has to be imposed from an external source is an assumption. And this idea finds political expression in Thomas Hobbes, one of the most influential English philosophers. Hobbes was born as the Spanish Armada sailed to England, and lived through the 30 Years' War and the English Civil War, leaving him with a very jaded view of humans. He came to believe that being at war is our natural state and that humans require a tyrant to force them to stop being violent. This is ironic because the wars Hobbes lived through were very much the result of the ruling classes fighting over who got to be the tyrant.

In fact, as Frans de Waal (2013) and his colleagues have shown, morality emerges from evolving to be a social species. We can unpack morality from just two capacities that are shared by all social mammals and many social birds: empathy and reciprocity. (see also The Evolution of Morality, 18 November 2016). We don't need gods or tyrants.

Moreover, once again, even if we were to stipulate that morality was an externality, this would not point to Jehovah in particular, only to a supernatural "law giver". Which could just as easily be Ahura Mazda or Marduk.

Arguments from religious experience treat experiences interpreted as encounters with Jehovah as prima facie evidence. They are articulated explicitly in early modern philosophy (17th – 18th c.), notably by John Locke (1632 – 1704) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834).

This is a style of argument for the supernatural that I have frequently encountered amongst Buddhists. We know that religious practices often lead to hallucinations. I have particularly drawn attention to the common phenomenology of sensory deprivation and meditation (See Attwood 2022). Beyond this, common religious practices—such as fasting and sleep deprivation—heighten susceptibility to hallucinations.

When religieux experience hallucinations, or even just altered states, they interpret these through the lens of their religion. So, again, the arguments for Jehovah from experience are circular because they take Jehovah to be axiomatic.

I already noted in my exposition on time that experiencing timelessness, or being in a seemingly timeless state, is not the same as actually being outside of time. Experience does not easily translate into metaphysics.

Thomas Metzinger's treatment of out-of-body experiences is a paradigmatic example of refuting arguments from experience. He not only shows that his mind never did leave his body, but his alternative rational explanation is so powerful that he can now reliably induce out-of-body experiences in naive subjects under laboratory conditions.

Argument from revelation: Appeal to the authority, coherence, or fulfilment claims of texts taken to be revelations of Jehovah. They developed in late antiquity (1st – 4th c. CE) alongside canon formation and apologetics.

This is a wholly circular argument based on belief in Jehovah. Many Buddhists fundamentalists make the same kind of argument about the Buddha and Buddhist scripture. Scripture is only considered authoritative by believers. This is not an argument that can carry any weight outside of fundamentalist cults and sections of religiously inspired academic Buddhist Studies (see Attwood 2023).

Pragmatic arguments seek to justify belief in Jehovah by its practical or existential benefits rather than demonstrative proof. These arguments originate with Pascal (1623 – 1662) in the 17th century and gain prominence in modern sceptical contexts.

This is largely a reference to Pascal's wager. Pascal's argument was that one cannot know for sure if Jehovah exists or not. But if he exists and if Christian descriptions of his behaviour are accurate, then one can make a calculation of risks and rewards involved. And Pascal concluded that the inconvenience of being a Christian is massively outweighed by the risk of eternal damnation and the promise of infinite rewards.

Note how much work "if" is doing in these sentences. Pascal's wager makes sense if the only choices are Christianity and atheism. The calculus breaks down when we acknowledge that other supreme beings are claimed to exist. And after all, other religions with other gods are no more or less plausible than Christianity is. What if we bet on Jehovah, but "God" is actually Marduk or Zeus? There is no clear wager here.

Arguments from reason or intelligibility claim that logic, rationality, or the intelligibility of the world presupposes Jehovah as a rational source. They are largely modern (19th–20th c.), reacting to naturalism and materialism.

Again, this is simply a circular argument that treats Jehovah as axiomatic. Moreover, it also suffers from being Jehovah-centric. The criterion of intelligibility does not distinguish between supreme beings. What if Ahura Mazda is the supernatural being required to make the world intelligible? In that case, Jehovah contributes nothing.

Argument from consciousness: Hold that subjective experience or intentionality cannot be adequately explained without reference to Jehovah. This line of argument is mainly late modern (19th–20th c.), tied to debates over physicalism.

I have expounded at length on how consciousness is a useless legacy concept that no one can define. It cannot be used as the basis of an argument without a consensus on what it means. And no such consensus exists. Worse, consciousness is an abstract concept. An ontological argument based on abstractions is an oxymoron.

Again, the failure of science to adequately explain being conscious of experience does not point to Jehovah per se. If some supernatural input is required, then why not invoke Baal or Marduk? There's nothing special about Jehovah.

Argument from beauty or value seeks to infer Jehovah from irreducible aesthetic or axiological features of reality. It becomes explicit in the 18th–19th centuries, especially in Romantic and post-Kantian thought.

Here, Jehovah is presupposed to be a viable explanation of beauty or value. This, in turn, presupposes that Christian descriptions of Jehovah are accurate. Proponents also presuppose that Jehovah has no competition from other religions. They also presuppose that aesthetics, like morality, must be imposed on us from the outside rather than emerging from within us.

This is both a classic god-of-the-gaps argument and something more. There is a gap in our explanations of axiological matters into which Christians shoehorn Jehovah. But the failure of science, history, and philosophy to explain beauty in a satisfactory way is not an argument for Jehovah. It's just a gap in our understanding of the world.

In fact, simply invoking Jehovah doesn't explain anything. If you presuppose that Christians accurately describe Jehovah, then this, effortlessly, explains everything. And the rest is just details we needn't bother with. No one ever says how Jehovah explains beauty. No mechanisms are presented. And thus, in the end, nothing is explained by invoking Jehovah.

Conclusion

In my experience, science is not the preferred tool for critiquing religion (and most religieux don't understand scientific arguments anyway). Rather, my preferred tool is historical perspective.

For example, the majority of arguments for Jehovah are vitiated simply by acknowledging that other supreme beings are proposed by other religions, and on exactly the same basis. All of these arguments about Jehovah seem to presuppose that Jehovah is the only choice of god that we have. If we step outside Christian parochialism and acknowledge that other religions exist, then arguments for Jehovah are trivially invalidated in almost every case. None of the traditional Christian arguments that they claim point to Jehovah's existence is capable of singling out Jehovah from the plethora of available gods.

When the existence of Jehovah is axiomatic in your thinking, then your reasoning will always arrive at the conclusion that Jehovah exists. Because axioms are what we take to be true a priori and they become the criteria by which we validate conclusions. When we presuppose Jehovah, then any conclusion which seems to affirm the existence of Jehovah is judged to be true. And this circular, and thus invalid, logic is present in all of the traditional arguments for Jehovah.

Finally, when Jehovah is treated as an ultimate explanation of life, the universe, and everything, then invoking Jehovah becomes a way of shutting down awkward discussions or obfuscating ignorance. Simply saying "God" explains everything does not actually explain anything. An explanation generally involves pointing to causal sequences of events. Which Christians have never been able to do.

Such arguments begin very early on in the history Christianity . And they have been persistently employed and updated down to the present. Christians appear to know that there is an ongoing question and keep trying to come up with ways to shut down the discussion. Nevertheless, the discussion is ongoing.

~~Φ~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava (2022). "Sensory Deprivation and the Threefold Way." Unpublished essay. https://www.academia.edu/83896358/Sensory_Deprivation_and_the_Threefold_Way

Attwood, Jayarava (2023). "On Historical Methods in Buddhist Studies and the Disputed Historicity of the Buddha." Unpublished essay. https://www.academia.edu/121900443/On_Historical_Methods_in_Buddhist_Studies_and_the_Disputed_Historicity_of_the_Buddha

Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

Accountability and Ethics

THE SUBJECT OF ACCOUNTABILITY has come up quite a lot lately. I've come to see gods that oversee our behaviour and karma as part of the same complex of ideas stemming from changes that civilisation brought to human culture. I outlined this view earlier when discussing the plausibility and salience of rebirth, and here I'll expand on it.

My thought is that we evolved to live in small bands of several families all working closely together to ensure our survival. These bands were probably part of larger groupings, but on the whole most of the time was spent in relatively small groups of say 30-50. In contemporary hunter gatherer societies there is typically a division of labour with women gathering food and men hunting. Women stay together as a group while working which takes up a good part of their day. Men tend to hunt alone or in small groups, but spend a lot of time together as well. In a group of 30-50 which is highly dependent on each of its members, there is not much in the way of privacy. We would all know what everyone is doing, and especially we would know if they were following group etiquette and rules. Going against the norm, and keeping it secret, often causes an internal tension that would have observable consequences. If you know someone well and over a long period of time, you know when something is wrong. Infractions are dealt with socially - with shame being an important factor in maintaining cohesion. And cohesion is not just arbitrary it is what helps the group survive in what is probably quite a hostile environment.

We share these patterns with our social primate cousins - especially the apes. Chimpanzee society has many of the same features for instance, and I think provides us some insights into our own distant past. They work together foraging as a group, and rely on each member to contribute and not to deceive. And individuals do on occasions deceive the group over food and sex. We don't just share a common genetic ancestry, I think we probably share a common social ancestry. In any case I think one can learn a lot about basic human drives and behaviours from Jane Goodall's observations on the Chimps of Gombe stream in her book In the Shadow of Man.

Civilisation changed this pattern, and made us different from any of our ancestors or cousins. Civilisation gave us the means to live together in much greater numbers. We were no longer dependent on passing game, or the random distribution of food crops. We domesticated our food - both animal and plant. This allowed for an expansion of group sizes beyond the magic Dunbar number of 150 - the number of relationships we can keep close track of. In a large village we do not know what everyone is up to because we do not observe it for ourselves. We do still keep track using informal information sharing (aka gossip, but this word has far too many negative connotations). It is not less important that everyone consents to live in the same way and follows the same rules, but it is much harder to know. And within any group there are always those who can profit by deception. Civilisation brings with the it a new problem of how to limit the dishonesty of susceptible individuals when personal observation is not sufficient to detect breaches.

Many societies developed a kind of cosmic police force and judiciary. In Indo-Iranian myth for instance it was the function of Mitra/Mithra. The people who propagated the myths of Mitra and preserved it through many centuries believed that the universe itself was ordered and that this macro-cosmic order was reflected in the microcosm of human society and human relationships. By sacrificing to Mitra the Indo-Iranians and their descendants were trying to ensure that Mitra had enough sustenance to do his job. And one of his jobs was to oversee the contracts and bonds that held society together. In fact his name probably originally meant 'contract' (from PIE *√mei 'to tie' + the instrumental suffix -tra: 'the one who ties', or 'that which ties'). I suspect that if you search the myths of all people's you will find this judicial function being carried out. It is possible that the role of enforcing the laws will be separate, but I think they are often combined.

The next step in the development of this idea was its further abstraction. In societies which followed the lead of Zoroaster and adopted monotheistic gods (such as the Abrahamic religions) the functions of overseer and enforcer were combined with other roles into a single "swiss-army-knife" or über god. In the Old testament god these two functions are much more prominent than in the new. In India a curious abstraction took place. Rather than combine all the functions of regulating society into a swiss-army-knife god that could do everything, they went another route altogether. In India the role of overseer became entirely abstract; it simply was part of the fabric of the universe that your actions would have inescapable consequences which were suitable to the action: we usually refer to this role as karma (though of course karma just means 'work or action'). Note that though the mechanism is different the function is identical. This suggests that the problem it was intended to solve was the same.

The development of this idea then stagnated for many centuries amongst our ancestors - and indeed has not changed at all in some sections of the Western world. One minor development was the contracting out of the overseer role to priests. The priest stands between the people and their god. There is no doubt that some people are more apt than others to have the kinds of experiences that can be interpreted as 'divine'. Most of us are rather untalented in the business of visions and mystical attainments, even with the boost of psychedelics. Perhaps it was inevitable that some people who had easier access to such states would act as intermediaries, and be valued as such by their fellows in this role. Somewhere along the way the job ceased to be awarded on the basis of merit and typically became the preserve of a clan - the vast majority of whom had to fake their contact with god which they did by aping their more inspired elders. In Judaism it was the Cohen clan, in North-West India the Brāhmaṇas. With the advent of a celibate clergy other arrangements were made to keep control of this social function in the form of large institutions such as The Church or The Saṅgha. Religion so captured by hereditary groups or hegemonic institutions quickly descends into formalism and empty rituals, and this is more or less the situation with most religions most of the time.

So for most of the Christian era in Europe the church has been a sham. However it did continue to provide oversight of the people. It did this through confession particularly. This is an observation made by Michel Foucault (e.g. in Madness and Civilization). Although God was invoked, it was in fact the clergy who had taken over his role as overseer. Since the role needed doing this was not necessarily a bad thing, but the fact is that it was mostly done under false pretences. Much the same kind of thing happened in India. In both places genuine visionaries would crop up from time to time, though in Europe we would generally torture them and then burn them alive; and in Indian they would set them up as local deities. Now at the same time kings were also still seen as divinely appointed rulers (several kings had wars with popes over this issue). Kings began to make and enforce laws too.

It was not until the Enlightenment that things began to really change however. The European Enlightenment shifted the focus from religion and superstition to the possibilities of reason. The idea of being ruled by reason was pretty attractive after several centuries of dark age - hence the term Enlightenment, and hence also Mr and Mrs Rhys Davids's deliberate identification of the Buddha with the European Enlightenment via the translation of bodhi as Enlightenment (complete with upper-case E). Michel Foucault notes that one consequence was that the oversight of those who simply could not follow any rules (the mad) moved from the church, to the burgeoning medical profession. But in the meantime the mad were locked away in asylums, which were originally lazar houses, because in a society which was beginning to see reason as defining humanity, losing your reason became a crime.

As Europe developed and spread outwards in an orgy of imperialism and colonisation it exported these values around the world. Only Asia proved able to resist, but only temporarily. The power to make laws, to oversee them, and to punish wrong doers moved decisively away from religious and towards secular administrations. This was one of the principles of the French and American Revolutions, though it was no so clear cut in England, so that the United Kingdom does not separate church and state - my Sovereign is also the head of the Church of England. The power to keep tabs on people was abrogated to the government on the one hand, and to the medical profession on the other. But in many places the medical profession became a subsidiary of the government, or at least was governed by government rules and regulations. Confessions continued to be a crucial part of the way the secular judiciary operated. And in some places the name of the judicial god was sometimes still invoked (the power vested in me by almighty God...). Medical priests used our confessions to regulate our bodies and sexuality, and assumed vast authority over us. Government took on a much greater role in attempting to regulate the morals of society. The UK's present Prime Minister for instance understands without question that part of his role is to set and enforce moral guidelines for the people of Britain (See this assessment in the China Post 22 Aug 2011). The medical profession meanwhile has totally taken over the regulating the lives of the mad, and madness is now a disease of the mind, a chemical imbalance, or a genetic defect.

Presently we seem to be in another transition. Surveillance of individuals by government agencies has never been more comprehensive. Our every movement is monitored by video cameras (the UK has more per population than any country in the world!). In fascist states surveillance intruded more deeply and with more devastating effect than peacetime democracies. We cannot cross a national border (most of which are entirely arbitrary) without our finger prints being taken and our movements entered into computers. Yes, some of this is for our own protection because people from countries which our governments (extending their godlike powers to the nations around us) have routinely oppressed and exploited for the last two centuries are now attacking us in very personal ways, exploding bombs on trains and buses for example. But still, we are being watched, have no fear. Elsewhere in the world Muslims, given the chance to vote, are voting for religious governments of the type that have a track record of imposing restrictive laws on their people.

All of this began as a way to ensure the cohesion and therefore survival of small bands of people eking a living out of the environment as best they could. In Buddhist ethics we are enjoined to surveil ourselves, to vigilantly watch our own minds, and not to act on any unskilful impulse. We're not asked to keep track of others, though we might help a friend out of compassion. This is quite an unusual idea in a society with 2000 years of being taught that someone else does the watching for us. We're not really used to taking responsibility for this role. We become our own judiciary. We pre-emptively confess our transgressions not in a context of fear and punishment, but to friends and mentors who wish us well, and help us to make amends (if necessary) and get back on track. This way we attain to the state of avippaṭisāro 'not feeling remorseful' (i.e. having a clear conscience) which feeds into the natural progress of the Spiral Path (e.g. AN 10.1-5).

~~oOo~~

Note 13-5-12

 Does Thinking About God Improve Our Self-Control? Wired Science.

Yes. It does. 

"The scientists think that faith-based thoughts may increase “self-monitoring” by evoking the idea of an all-knowing, omnipresent God. Previous research, which showed that priming people to think of a vengeful, angry God reduces the likelihood of dishonesty, supports this view. If God is always watching, we better not misbehave—he knows..."

Brahmā the Cheat

The Brahmanimantanika Sutta (MN 49) has a number of interesting features. The sutta opens with the news that Baka the Brahmā has taken on a wrong view. Baka means 'crane' or 'heron', but it has figurative meaning which is according to Monier-Williams: "hypocrite, cheat, rogue, the crane being regarded as a bird of great cunning and deceit as well as circumspection)". We should immediately be alert therefore that this is a polemic. The animal with the same characteristics in Anglo-European culture is the weasel - so the character's name might be rendered God the Weasel.

The view that Baka has taken up is this:

Idañhi, mārisa, niccaṃ, idaṃ dhuvaṃ, idaṃ sassataṃ, idaṃ kevalaṃ, idaṃ acavanadhammaṃ, idañhi na jāyati na jīyati na mīyati na cavati na upapajjatī’ti; santañca panaññaṃ uttari nissaraṇaṃ ‘natthaññaṃ uttari nissaraṇa’nti vakkhatīti.

This, sir, is permanent, this is enduring, this is eternal, this is everything, this is unending. This is not being born, is not aging, is not dying, is not falling, is not being reborn; and beyond this, there is no escaping.

Our first question is what does Baka mean by 'this', what is he referring to? And because the text moves swiftly on to another tack it is difficult to tell. However there is a clue in the passage I've cited, in the sequence: birth, aging, death, falling, rebirth. This is not a random sequence, nor are death (mīyati) and falling (cavati) simply synonyms as one might easily assume them to be, nor perhaps are birth (jāyati) and rebirth (upapajati).

I need to backtrack for a bit. In 2002 Gananath Obeyesekere published Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth, which took a broad view of the idea of rebirth. It seems that many cultures develop a theory of rebirth and in its most basic form it involves circulating between this world and another world - usually some form of heaven, often inhabited by one's own ancestors. It has been asserted for a long time that in the early Vedic period there is no evidence of a belief in rebirth, but more recently Joanna Jurewicz showed that the Ṛgvedic mantra 10.16.5 can be interpreted as a request for Agni to send the dead person back again to his descendants (this is discussed in Richard Gombrich's 2010 book What the Buddha Thought). This suggests that early Vedic people had a standard rebirth theory in which the person (actually the man) cycled between this world and the other world.

The 'other world' for the Vedic Brahmin was the world of the fathers (pitaraḥ). This idea is expressed in greater detail in the Bṛhadāranyaka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads which both tell the story of how one precesses through the cycles. However the simple binary persisted for some time and it is referred to in the Pāli texts (in the phrase 'this world and the next world'). The simplest expression of this cycle does not allow for escape.

Let us now reconsider the Brahmanimantanika Sutta. The sequence, again, is: birth, aging, death, falling, rebirth. The cycle involves being born (jāyati) and living in this world (jīyati); dying (mīyati) and arising (upapajti) in the heavenly realms. Having lived a long time in the heavenly realms, one falls (cavati) back down to earth to be once again born (jāyati). And so the cycle goes round.

This cycle is called saṃsāra which is a noun from the the verb sam+√sṛ 'flow' - and means to move about continuously, to come again and again. It is this that Baka is saying is "permanent, enduring, eternal, everything, unending". This is his deceit: the view he adopts is that saṃsāra is forever, and inescapable, that we are doomed to go around and around endlessly. The ethicization of the universe that occurred amongst the samaṇa movements meant that the model had to become more sophisticated, but I will leave that thread for now. But the idea that one could escape from the rounds of rebirth (or redeath as it is sometimes called) must have seemed extremely radical. Indeed the Upaniṣads the idea is introduced to Brahmins by a King or Kṣatriya, and although there is much speculation about what this might mean, at the very least it shows that the idea was new and from outside fold.

Māra steps into the sutta at this point and his contribution at first sight is puzzling. However Māra is sometimes called Namuci, which is a contraction of na muñcati 'does not release'. His role often relates to keeping beings in saṃsāra. Māra as an archetypal figure is often associated with our own doubts, he is the inner voice of doubt. So whereas Baka seems to represent the social pressure exerted on us to doubt the possibility of liberation; Māra represents our own doubts.

One of his warnings to Buddha is:

so... mā tvaṃ brahmano vacanaṃ upātivattittho... evaṃ sampadamidam bhikkhu, tuyham bhavissati

He... do not overstep what Brahmā says... [or various evils] will befall you.

This is reminiscent of the debate scene in BU 3.6 where Gārgī is questioning Yajñavalkya on what the various aspects of the universe are made; and finally asks on what brahman is woven. Yajñavalkya replies

sa hovāca gargī mātiprākṣīḥ
mā te mūrdhā vyapaptat

Don't ask too many questions, Gārgī
your head will split apart.

Gārgī desists, but later in the text another questioner's head does split apart.

Of course Māra also plays the role of Lord of saṃsāra - he thinks of the kāmaloka as his realm, where we dwell at his mercy, which is to say we dwell suffering. Māra is afraid that if the Buddha teaches that beings will go beyond his realm (te me visayaṃ upātivattissanti).

Then the Buddha and Baka have a discussion about the elements. Baka says

Sace kho tvaṃ, bhikkhu, pathaviṃ ajjhosissasi, opasāyiko me bhavissasi vatthusāyiko, yathākāmakaraṇīyo bāhiteyyo

If indeed you, bhikkhu, will be attached to earth, you will be in my domain, in my reach, at my mercy.

This is repeated for a list of elements. Of course the Buddha is aware of this and says that he not attached to the elements. The list of elements is unusual: earth, water, fire, air, beings (bhūta), devas, Prajāpati and Brahmā. Once again I refer the reader to BU 3.6 and the discussion with Gārgī. It goes like this (I'll use Valerie Roebuck's translation, slightly modified)

"Yajñāvalkya, she said, since all this earth (idaṃ sarvaṃ pārthivaṃ) is woven on the waters, as warp and weft, on what are the waters woven?
On air.
On what is air woven?"

And so on. The list begins the same: earth, water, air. Then we get 'the middle realm' (antarikṣaloka) which may well correspond to bhūta in the Pāli list. Then in BU a list of various devalokas - gandharvaloka, adityaloka, candraloka, nakṣatraloka, devaloka, indraloka - then prajāpatiloka and finally brahmaloka. If we collapse the list from gandharva to indraloka into 'devaloka' (which they are all varieties of) then the list from Brahmanimantanika Sutta and BU are very similar indeed. What's more the list makes more sense in the context of BU than it does in a Pāli sutta, because the Buddha was hardly likely to be attached to Prajāpati or Brahmā.

There is one snafu here. And it is that one of the distinctive teachings of the BU, which we meet at the end of book 3 (3.9.28), is the idea of escape from rebirth:

jāta eva na jāyate ko nv enaṃ janayet punaḥ |
vijñānam ānandaṃ brahma rātir dātuḥ parāyaṇaṃ ||

Born, only, not born again; who could beget him?
Consciousness, bliss, Brahman, grace; the gift to the giver.

It seems that in all of these kinds of references to Vedic ideas in Pāli texts, there is always an element of over-simplification, of parody. One gets the sense that the last thing a Buddhist wanted to do was debate a Brahmin on their own terms - and yet again so many of the converts seem to have been, at least nominally Brahmin.

In Brahmanimantanika Sutta we seem to have some quite clear references to Upaniṣadic ideas. However as I noted in Early Buddhists and Ātman/Brahman the references are to cosmology rather than to the more central details of the Upaniṣadic thought. It seems as though the cosmologically notions had been popularised, or perhaps more likely that the cosmology recorded in the Upaniṣads represents a popular tradition rather than a specifically Upaniṣadic tradition - I would make the contrast with the identification of ātman and brahman, which is not found in the Pāli texts. 

 ~~oOo~~

Buddhism and God(s)

It is axiomatic for Buddhists that (so-called) Buddhism is an atheistic religion, though many academics will point out that the actions and attitudes of some Buddhists are practically indistinguishable from theism. Buddhism is an English term coined in the 19th century for people who follow the Buddha. The original followers called themselves savaka (the hearers) sakkaputta (Children of the Śakyan - the Buddha being a Śakyan by birth). The modern Indian term would be Bauddha, a collective noun along the lines of Śaiva (a follower of Śiva) and Jaina (a follower of the Jina).

The Buddhist relationship with gods is in fact quite complex. Throughout the Pāli canon gods of various sorts appear and at times are major players. Where would Buddhists be for instance is the Vedic creator god Brahmā (in the form of Brahmāsahampati) had not begged the Buddha to pass on what he learned under the Bodhi Tree? Indra is another Vedic god who plays important roles in many suttas and jātaka stories - though usually under his alias Sakka (Sanskrit Śakra).[1]

Early Buddhism was also cognisant of local deities. Hardly a page of the canon goes by without mention of yakkhas (Sankrit yakṣa) or nāgas for instance. Yakṣas are local chthonic deities who were worshipped in the villages by the ordinary people - such people were sometimes referred to by the Buddha as superstitious (maṅgalika). Then there are the Four Great Kings (Cattāro Mahārājāno) who also appear regularly. Some of them share names with the legendary figures, there is a king Dhṛtarāṣṭra in the Mahābhārata for instance.

All of these gods are shown as paying obeisance to the Buddha, and even his disciples. One of my favourite episodes from the Pāli canon is when Sāriputta goes home to see his orthodox Brahmin mother Sārī (Sāriputta means son of Sārī). She is scathing of him, his lifestyle and his friends and heaps abuse on them. (Nyanaponiika and Hecker, p.34) Later when he is very ill he visits her again and during the night he is visited by the Four Kings, Sakka and Mahābrahmā in turn, all of them wishing to wait on Sāriputta. Sāri is stunned to think that her son is being waited on by the gods she worships. Now she is receptive, Sāriputta gives her a Dhamma lesson and she attains to stream-entry (a state almost always reached by through hearing a dhamma lesson in the Canon [2]).

Sakka goes on to play a prominent role in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (the 8000 Line Perfection of Wisdom Discourse) where he is also portrayed as a disciple of the Buddha. The Four Kings similarly retain their role and even become important figures in their own right - especially Vaiśravaṇa, king of the north. The Golden Light Sutra (Suvarṇabhāṣottama Sūtra) features a number of other deities who offer dhāraṇī for the protection of the Buddha's followers. Sarasvati an important Vedic goddess appears, as does Lakṣmi who may be related to the goddess of luck Sirī that appears in some Jātaka stories, and who is not mentioned in the Vedas. [3]

The Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra introduces a new theme - the conversion of deities. Previously the gods just naturally seemed to pay obeisance to the Buddha, but in this text (from ca. 4th century CE) the god Śiva is converted to Buddhism by Avalokiteśvara. As far as I know there is no definite mention of Śiva in the Pāli texts. Studholme's tentative dating is supported by the appearance of Śiva on the scene since it coincides with the earlier dates suggested for the dominance of the Indian pantheon by Śiva. It is perhaps no coincidence that around this time Avalokiteśvara begins to assimilate Śiva's iconography and his name changes to be more like Śiva as well: from Avalokitasvara to Avalokiteśvara: ie from Avalokita + svara (Regarder of cries); to Avalokita + īśvara (Lord who looks down). Īśvara is an important epithet of Śiva. I have noted before how the former name (Kwan Yin in Chinese) tends to be retained in China because it was quite firmly established in Kumarajīva's translation of the White Lotus Sūtra (Sadharmapuṇḍarikasūtra) in the 4th cent.

However this conversion seems not to have stuck because in the late 7th century the Tantric text Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṅgraha features a violent confrontation between Vajrapāṇi and Śiva - who here is called Maheśvara (mahā + īśvara; Great Lord). Śiva in this case refuses to submit, and in the end Vajrapāṇi slays him with a mantra, then revives him only to place his foot on Śiva's throat until he converts to Buddhism. Tantric art often shows Vajrapāṇi trampling on Śiva. Tantric Buddhism absorbed many Vedic and Hindu deities into it's pantheon and in particular they reinvigorated the worship of Agni through the various fire rituals (Homa).

So it seems clear that at all stages of it's development Buddhism acknowledged the existence of gods, or at least appears to have acknowledged the belief in gods. Ancient Indian Buddhists did not try to disprove the existence of gods as do today's atheists. However at every turn they are shown as inferior to the Buddha, and to Buddhists. Buddhists also mock the gods as inferior - the Kevaddha Sutta - DN 11 where Brahma is pretending to be an omnipotent god but cannot answer the Buddha's question and begs the Buddha not to show him up in front of the other gods.

If we followed the pattern we would simply acknowledge that Jehovah/Allah is a god, but point out the inconsistencies in the stories about him, and show why he is inferior to the Buddha - which should not be hard: the creator of samsara is clearly a terrible bungler. Design? Perhaps. Intelligent design? Pull the other one! The politics of the time might make this a little more dangerous for us than it was in the past with so many people willing to kill people for the crime of mockery. But mockery is developed to a high art in the UK and no one - not the Queen, the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury nor even your best friend, and especially not one's self - is exempt. No one here can afford to take themselves too seriously! Indeed strident atheists are seen as just as reprehensible as strident religious fundamentalists.

Notes

1. The Dictionary of Pāli Names is a very useful source for references to gods. See for instance: Sakka.
2. Note that Peter Masefield, in his book Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism, argues that this attainment could only take place in the presence of a Buddha. This is yet another example that the assertion is erroneous. See also my review. It is something to reflect on however, that stream-entry is almost always reached through listening to and reflecting on the dhamma, not through meditation.
3. On Sirī see Rhys Davids, T.W. 1903. Buddhist India. p.216ff.

Bibliography

• Nyanaponika and Hecker, Hellmuth. 1997. Great Disciples of the Buddha. Wisdom Publications.
• Studholme, Alexander. 2002. The Origins of oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ: A Study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. State University of New York Press.

Update 31 Jan 2014

A new study of religion in the USA by Pew Research reports (p.2):

• 65% of American Buddhists believe in a god of some kind, another 10% are agnostic. 
• 20% believe in a personal god.

This suggests that we need to revisit the idea that Buddhists do not believe in god. Clearly many Buddhists do believe in god. The problem for Modernist Buddhism is how to square that with our Scientific Rationalism. That Buddhism is a-theist is not a trivial proposition for most Modernist Buddhists in the developed world.