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The Greek Pantheon Test

I’ve been very busy teaching, and so this blog has suffered. So I thought I’d do a short screed of an idea that I have had for some time.roman-gods-4.jpg I have discussed what a religion is for a while now. Instead I want to ask today, What is a god?

Philosophers have always treated the deity as a high concept entity, something that has the attributes of perfection: all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, omnibenevolent and so on. This is a view of God that is presumed in most discussions of atheism, the existence of God, the problem of evil and the like. But it is a very rare view of God in actual, you know, religions. The religions of the Folk have divine deities of all kinds, ranging from the all-too-human and fallible variety of Norse and Irish mythology, through to the distant and unknowable gods of Epicurus. So what sort of a test should we apply to divinities?

I propose a rough and ready kind of test I call the Greek Pantheon Test: If it would be a god in the Greek Pantheon, then it’s a god. Of course, a number of divinities not included by the Greeks, the Titans, would also be divinities in my book, but that is a matter of restricting divine beings to Olympus, which is a cultic matter. If Chronos were unknown to the Greeks, he’d definitely be included as a god when they were given a description.

This has some benefits, but also some rather counter-intuitive results. The benefits first: it means that we can deal with the sorts of deities that are almost universal, without artificially including or excluding deities as they match some prior philosophical canon, which is in any a case itself the end result of a long history of theological correctness in a particular tradition. Why aren’t the Lares and Penates of Roman domestic religion gods? Why aren’t the spirits of rivers and trees and other spirits of place gods? They act like gods in the ordinary senses, so, they are gods.

Now the counterintuitive outcomes of this test: angels are gods. St Michael is indiscernibly different from Thor or Mars or Huitzilopochtli as a god of war. Saints are gods. Mary and the Evangelists play a role as intermediaries between the High God and worshippers, just as the Vyantaras in Jainism, or the Demiurge in Platonism and the daimones in Greek mysticism. Jinn are gods. They have, as the Disney film put it, “super-phenomenal cosmic powers”. Prophets can also be gods. Ancestors, especially in the Confucian tradition, are gods. Devas in Tibetan Buddhism are gods. Any religion which has superhuman agents in it, has gods, no matter what the philosophically pure elite theology may say.

The Justin Barrett view of gods as “Minimal Counterintuitive Agents” – effectively humans with superhuman powers – ties in with this. A god is a superhero or supervillain. They are like us in all respects except their abilities or some other superstimulus feature. This is the folk view of gods, and it is something that philosophy of religion had better come to terms with sometime.

57 Comments

  1. DiscoveredJoys DiscoveredJoys

    Perhaps any person who can exercise free will (i.e. step outside the determinism of cause and effect) is a God by this definition?

    Of course your definition of free will may differ too.

  2. John Vreeland John Vreeland

    I’ve always been enchanted with the God implied by Anselm’s Ontological Proof of God. In this idea God is a thing of perfection that cannot be encompassed by human understanding, beyond even the question of mere existence. Such a thing exists by definition, and human notions of logic cannot apply to such a concept.

    People often speak of God redefining natural constants, but truly, a God cannot be seen as omnipotent if it is incapable of making 2+2=5, redefining TRUE and FALSE, or at least redefining pi.

    • In my experience, Christians use the word “great” as a technical term meaning “like omnipotent but with more loopholes”. 🙂

      As for Anselm, the book in which I first read about the ontological proof described its main problem as that “it treats existence as a property that an object may or may not have“. Years later, I attended a short adult education course about the history of philosophy across cultures, and during the discussion of Anselm I mentioned that quote. The lecturer seemed to like it a lot: I got the impression he thought it a better way to convey the point he was making than whatever he’d been saying.

  3. Where I differ from you is that I am more content to let the word “god” have different meanings in different traditions, rather than trying to find some blanket tradition to impose on everyone.

    One of the disadvantage of giving up religion all those (about eight) years ago is that it’s harder to justify arguing in favour of a theological position. But actually, I still quite enjoy a good theological argument as an intellectual and imaginative exercise, and it’s irrational to say that one shouldn’t just because one doesn’t believe the topic of the argument exists. That it can be fun ought to be enough, but one feels, I find, the need to justify it.

    My view, as a Christian trying to define “god” in a specifically Christian context, was that a god is something that ought to be worshipped, and that basically, to be worthy of worship (implying total dedication and obedience), one must be always right, morally speaking: one must be, as it were, the personification of Morality itself. Definitely a long way from the Greek concept. 🙂 (Not to mention a fair chunk of the Bible but that’s another topic.)

    • ‘blanket tradition’ should be ‘blanket definition’, of course.

  4. John Harshman John Harshman

    Another fuzzy set, I see. Are leprechauns gods? Superman? Uri Geller (assuming he really could do what he claimed)? The Amazing Kreskin?

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Yes, it is a vague and fuzzy set. It seems to me that we often assume clear definitions where none exist, and hence it pays to use a good explanation as the basis for our definitions rather than vice versa. Here Barrettian MCI agents are, I think, a sufficient definition for deities, and we may think that a successful (at least, a not-debunkked) Uri Geller is a kind of deity. At first perhaps not – he’s more a Neo character out of the Matrix – but if he ended up being venerated then sure.

      Leprechauns play a particular role in the traditional pre-Christian Eire religions such as the Tuatha Dé Danann, and most certainly they were ordinary humans of the “giants in those days” kind (that is, powerful – traditional leprechauns were short). But what they can do is rather like what a shaman or wizard can do, and so are only partially divine or demonic; of the kind usually treated as sprites or spirits.

      Gods are basically “powers” (the Hebrew term “eloah” even means that etymologically).

  5. bob koepp bob koepp

    From an anthropological perspective, I can appreciate that the question “What is a god?” needs to allow for a wide range of responses, and it’s an interesting exercise to seek some common denominator to those responses. But it’s pretty hard to find intellectually interesting common ground between thick notions of diety that one encounters in the marketplace and thin notions like an ‘unmoved mover’ or a ‘necessary being.’ It’s rather like looking for commonalities in what a theoretical physicist has to say about the ‘uncertainty principle’ and what someone like Deepak Chopra says, or even what my “Chopra enchanted” neighbor opines.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      There are folk and elite notions in theologies of all kinds. I am predominantly interested in the folk, or as you call them, “thick” accounts. Thin conceptions are generally derivative of the thick.

      • bob koepp bob koepp

        I think a pretty good case can be made that various “omni-attributes” represent the projection of “thick” human hopes and fears taken to their conceivable limits. I don’t think a similarly plausible case could be made for concepts like ‘unmoved mover’ or ‘necessary being.’ The latter seem more likely to arise in the context of critical, philosophical reflection on the structure of reality, and then to be grafted onto (not derived from) thicker conceptions of deity. At least that’s how it looks to me.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          Me too. Unmoved movent depends crucially on Aristotle’s notion of causation as motion-imparting, and on a rejection of infinite sequences. That is hardly a thick conception of God, and only occurred in the theistic tradition when Islamic and later Christian high concept theology was undertaken.

          Necessary being is a mistake made by medieval philosophy of language, and one that I think Aristotle would not have made.

          If philosophy wishes to engage only these thin high concepts, fine, but it gets boring quickly, as pretty well everything that can be said has been, in increasingly elaborate technical apparatus.

  6. MartinDH MartinDH

    Aha! So Clapton really is “a” god.

    • Has it ever been doubted?

  7. Sam C Sam C

    The Revered John:

    They are like us in all respects except their abilities or some other superstimulus feature.

    And in one other very important respect: they don’t exist.

    Reification simply by writing about these ideas as though they are realised in some concrete fashion (either in the natural world or some hypothetical supernatural realm) does not enhance their validity.

    Isn’t godliness also sort of connected having some sort of effect on the world that the believer needs to take account of? Otherwise, isn’t Superman a god by this sort of definition? But people who read Superman stories don’t adjust their behavior in the light of how Superman might react to their activities.

    I feel that philosophy is on its weakest ground when arguing about definitions of non-existent entities and the implications of those. You can’t magic gods into existence by an ontological argument, first and last it’s a word game, nothing more.

  8. Sam C Sam C

    Sorry, forgot to say, I like the WWTGS “what would the Greeks say?” test for godliness. It’s too easy to be a Christian atheist while forgetting to be atheist about all the other major and minor deities!

  9. jeff jeff

    What about the Atman and Brahman of the Upanishads and Vedanta? Also, some new-agey, new-thought folks might consider the subconscious to be God (it’s all around you in the waking state, as most would say it is in a dream).

    If I remember correctly (a long time ago), Jesus in his arguments with the Pharisees, to dispel charges of blasphemy, refers to some verse in Psalms that says “Ye are gods”, although I think gods in this context may have technically meant the elohim.

    And yes, Eric Clapton is a god.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Jesus is playing a bit of an exegetical game here. The “elohim” in Psalm 82:6 original did refer to other gods when Judah and Israel were henotheistic cultures, but after the Josiah reforms and the introduction of strict monotheism, it got a back-interpretation to refer to princes and kings, which the Pharisees would have known. But the author of the Gospel (John 10:34) intends this to mean that Jesus was, in fact, a divinity.

      The Mormons rightly read this passage and like passages to imply there are many gods in the OT documents.

      • jeff jeff

        Well, Jesus said many curious things, especially in the gospel of John, that his disciples seemed to have trouble grasping. Things like: “My Father is greater than me”, and “I am in my Father and my Father is in me”, and “If you see me you see the Father”. Some Swamis and Gurus who were raised in the Indian tradition and who have later read the bible, say they see a natural Brahman-Atman relationship, and they say “Ah ha! Jesus was a yogi”. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt there is much documented transfer between the two cultures.

  10. Adam Adam

    I am not an expert on these matters, but I think the Pantheon test would actually be more conservative than what is described here. As I understand the Greek gods, all of them existed independently of the world as we know it. Their cause was fundamentally different from the causes that we deal with everyday. I think that this consideration would exclude ancestors and place spirits from the realm of “gods”.

    Likewise, I think that they all have some measure of independence from each other. There was no supreme god who could create or destroy other gods at will (in fact, I can’t think of any that were consciously created by another god). This eliminates angels from the realm of gods. However, this criteria may be considered irrelevant since it doesn’t mean much outside of the Christian tradition, and us lowly humans would not be able to discern such a feature if it did exist.

  11. Edith Hamilton once wrote to the effect that the difference between the Greeks and us is that we imagine that God made the world while for the Greeks, the world made the gods. Aristotle may have thought that putting intellect (nous) at the origin of things was a good idea, but Hesiod was rather more Hellenic (or so it seems to me) in asserting that Chaos and Mother Night came first. (Of course Aristotle didn’t have a subscription to SCIENCE and therefore couldn’t guess that Hesiod would turn out to have been right.)

    I don’t think you can nail things down to a simple formula because the Greeks sometimes treated the Gods as the personifications of forces, emotions, or adjectives; sometimes as living beings that were part of the natural history of the cosmos; and sometimes as a metaphysical principle or dimension of everything. In the later connection, you often encounter the supposedly polytheistic Greeks writing about the God without specifying which God in a fashion reminiscent of Hindu polytheism. While we seem to operate with a rather impoverished ontology in which the universe is a large room with things in it, sort of a big warehouse, things were more fluid for the Greeks who entertained not only more kinds of entities but more ways of being. Horrible as the prospect may seem, I think you’ve got to go in for something like phenomenology to understand Greek religiosity.

  12. Off the top of my head, I want to retort that gods have a kind of given or necessary membership to bottom-level reality that other entities don’t share; it gives them not only super-powers, but special degrees of freedom, significance, and “worthiness of reverence”, if that phrase is not too obscure. They are not merely very powerful (superheroes), but are understood as having a character of existence that differs fundamentally from ours (they are divine or sublime).

    Looking now at previous comments, I’m not sure I have anything to add with this, but I’ll post this inspired blathering in case anyone missed anything.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      That might be true of some religions, but not all. It’s a later step in the conceptual theodicy.

  13. bad Jim bad Jim

    I’d argue that supernatural powers alone are not sufficient. A god has to have some sort of responsibility, whether it be for a particular place or a range of phenomena or endeavors. This would tend to exclude angels and demons, who are merely the agents of some greater being, as well as heroes. It would also exclude patron saints who, despite their assigned responsibilities, are merely conduits to God.

    Under this view, in the Christian scheme God and the devil are the only gods, though the devil is a slippery character: in Job, Satan’s the quality control inspector; elsewhere he’s arguably God’s police force, with a deplorable tendency to run entrapment operations.

    Gods ought also to be at least potentially immortal, which would tend to exclude heroes and saints were it not for the afterlife (or recordings in the case of Clapton and Hendrix).

    Defining a god as one who may be petitioned or propitiated, implying some sort of observable effectiveness, would include a Superman but exclude a distant Creator or any ineffable mystery, although the offer of an afterlife once again muddies the distinction, as something which some or all will experience but for now cannot be observed.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      That’s special pleading for the view arrived at in the Christian and Islamic theological traditions. It is simply not true of most religions.

      Gods can be general, although they are often special in their activities. [That’s an effect of cultic specialisation IMO.]

      Gods can die.

      Gods can exist in mythoi that lack afterlives.

      Gods can be intermediaries.

      Gods can be merely avoided, or ignored because one propitiates another god in the pantheon. So long as you do not offend another god, you don’t need to do much ritually speaking.

      But even without all that, note that the Devil is a deity in traditional theism. Grant that, and the rest is negotiation.

      • bad Jim bad Jim

        Without question Satan is treated as a god in many if not most Christian traditions. I’m not sure if the devil is singular or plural in Islam (there’s an ambiguous stoning ceremony in the Mecca pilgrimage) but I’ll concede that point as well. Nevertheless, there is considerable ambiguity in scripture.

        A god who died in antiquity is not a god now (neglecting postmortem immortality) which is perhaps a distinction worth making. Are Hercules and Hendrix still gods? It’s clear that we don’t live part way up a gigantic oak tree, that the summit of Olympus is untenanted, and that Jupiter is a giant gas ball. Surely gods whose attributes have been falsified are thereby diminished.

        Household gods, spirits of places and ancient trees are all worthy of worship; more than once I’ve prayed to balky appliances “Please, just this once!” If gods are merely powerful but dimly understood entities then we may now have more of them than ever.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          On that last, Google “resistentialism”…

      • bad Jim bad Jim

        I even apologize to shirts I haven’t worn, so a philosopher’s aria to his coat from La Boheme comes immediately to mind, but respect and affection are not enough. A god worthy of a place in the pantheon ought to be at least minimally effective and independent enough to be a problem to the all-father (if there be such). Nymphs and Rhine Maidens pass but saints and heroes fall short.

    • The Greeks had shrines to prominent heroes, and the distinction between ‘god’ and ‘hero’ seems to have never been particularly clear. We have mortals who supposedly became gods, and in many traditions (I’m not sure if the Greek was one, but definitely in Teutonic and Chinese traditions) the gods were not inherently immortal but rendered so by some external agent (such as ambrosia or the peaches of immortality). I think that your restrictions would cut out a lot of figures that their worshippers would have not hesitated to call ‘gods’.

      • bad Jim bad Jim

        Since some of these gods are at least a thousand years old, it would be nice to have some assurance that they’re still around. What should we do with a dead god?

  14. bob koepp bob koepp

    just to clear up some matters alluded to above…
    Clapton is not a god. He is a very good, tasteful guitarist. As I recently described him elsewhere, he is particularly good when he’s backing up the likes of Duane Allman, or playing fills for the likes of Jack Bruce.
    Hendrix is not a god. He is a bodhisattva hailing from an asteroid off the coast of Mars.

    • As Steve Luthaker said, “God plays guitar with Jeff Beck’s hands”.

  15. Wouldn’t it be politically correct to ask, What is a god or goddess?

  16. But do they pass the “Star Trek” test? Remember the episode of Star Trek where the Enterprise Crew find that the Greek Gods were just stranded aliens*? The Greek Pantheon test means that any sufficiently advanced aliens (with respect to bronze-early iron age humans) are gods. Not a good outcome.

    *As opposed to the movie, with the immortal line “why does god need a starship”, but the same prinicple applies.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Of course the counterintuitivity depends rather crucially on one’s anthropology and level of technological sophistication (you can cure cancer? You must be a god!). See my response to Chris Schoen here.

      • the counterintuitivity depends rather crucially on one’s anthropology and level of technological sophistication

        I find this claim interesting, because insofar as the counterintuitivity here does depend on these things, this account diverges from MCA theories, since the whole point of counterintuition theories in this context is that they are concerned events inconsistent with the kinds of inferential schemas that are stable regardless of the precise details of what a person knows: that is, the particular sort of counterintuitivity studied in studies of minimal counterintuitivity is not a sort that would be very sensitive to one’s anthropology and level of technological sophistication. (This is usually made by distinguishing MCI concepts, which do not vary much between cultures or between individuals, from ‘bizarre’ concepts, which easily can.)

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          I am not trying to exegete Barrett. These are my own mistakes. You do not like them? I have other mistakes.

          Yes, intuitive normality seems to be relatively cross cultural (so far as we know; how much actual research has been done? Cf. Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan’s WEIRD paper), but if you are seeking a demarcation criterion in a given culture it will depend on what is broadly considered “ordinary”. It is my view that “common sense” is both biological (the Umwelt of primates) and/or cultural (the set of prejudices acquired in general at puberty). So “counterintuitive” is not fixed.

          Barrett and Malley (2007) define it thus:

          “By counterintuitive events, we refer to events that violate observer’s naïve (i.e., untutored) intuitions about causal relations (Boyer, 1994, 2001; Hirschfeld and Gelman, 1994; Sperber et al., 1995). As developmental psychologists have demonstrated, children rapidly acquire (or even manifest from birth) inference systems that generate causal expectations for objects and actors. These conceptual systems include specialized inference systems that concern physical interactions (“naïve physics”), the activities of living things (“naïve biology”) and intentionality (“Theory of Mind”).” [p202]

          This is all a little massively modular for me, but the point is that one has “untutored” intuitions as a developmental step, in typical cognitive development. However, one problem is that what counts as “untutored” is vague. When we ascribe agency to trees, we are already massively enculturated, and language users, so I think that we are also set up for intuition that is not culturally naive.

          Barrett, Justin L., and Brian Malley. 2007. A Cognitive Typology of Religious Actions. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7:201-211.

          Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):61-83.

    • jeff jeff

      He’s more likely to need a holodeck, if this is some kind of simulation. I have tried looking up at the sky and saying “end holodeck”, but no dice. I assume someone’s working on it. Also, I’ve noticed that the holodeck safeties are off.

      • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

        The Simulation Argument (that we live in a simulation like a universal holodeck, because intelligent beings would eventually have simulated everything to make us all immortal) is one of the less impressive philosophical arguments out there, one which ignores at least two of the more obvious problems:

        1. Information is lost so a simulation cannot retrieve all past intelligent beings.

        2. Simulations are not the same as the things they simulate: physical differences in substrate inevitably make a difference in dynamics. Another way to state this is “you can’t run a simulation of a universe on anything less complex than an actual universe, so what’s the point?”

        So work on assumption that there is a spoon, but no Matrix. Humean skepticism reigns here.

      • jeff jeff

        I tend to agree with you, and I don’t buy Nick Bostrom’s arguments (for consciousness reasons, among others). But you’re assuming that the universe or context in which the simulation resides has the same properties as the simulated universe, and/or that the simulated universe isn’t much simpler than the containing universe.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          True. But parsimony suggests that we ought not posit that more complex universe without some reason, and so far, none (see point 1).

    • Ian H Spedding FCD Ian H Spedding FCD

      Forgive an ageing Trekkie but the the episode cited is #31 from Star Trek: The Original Series called “Who Mourns For Adonais?”

      As Ian Musgrave says, the Adonais of the title is the last survivor of a group of highly-advanced aliens, stranded on Earth in the time of ancient Greece, who become the gods worshiped by the people of that period. One interesting point made in the story is that these gods appeared to crave the adoration of their worshipers much in the way some of us crave the affection of companion animals like cats or dogs. When that adoration is denied Adonais, it appears that, for him, life is no longer worth living and he commits suicide.

      In the TV show Stargate: SG-1 aliens who masquerade as gods in order to dominate and exploit less-advanced species is a recurrent theme. The final storyline concerns a race called the Ori who propagate a faith called Origin and can be viewed as a thinly-disguised attack on evangelical religion.

      The question of worship is what I baulked at when I was still a (partially) practicing member of the Church of England and contributed to my final loss of faith. For me, it was a kind of blind, unquestioning adoration and groveling obeisance which I could not believe a god of the nature proposed by Christianity could possibly require of his followers, not without being the most outrageously narcissistic megalomaniac. Obviously, that does not preclude the possibility of such a being existing but he could not be a messiah, just a very naughty boy.

      The question I would ask is why not instead classify these beings as Star Trek/Gate/Wars aliens, with or without knobbly foreheads and bad teeth (which probably means the Americans would classify the Brits as aliens).

    • The Greek Pantheon test means that any sufficiently advanced aliens (with respect to bronze-early iron age humans) are gods. Not a good outcome.

      I don’t necessarily see this as a problem, personally. Many (if not most) early cultures regarded their rulers as gods of a sort, and in some ways it’s hard to refute that view. Does the ruler have abilities beyond those of us mere mortals? Yes, in that they have access to resources beyond those available to the average person. Does the ruler have the power of life and death over his/her subjects? Yes; one word from the king and the peasant could be turned into bone meal. Does the ruler determine the fate of my immortal soul? I’m told they do, and how would I know any differently? So from the perspective of the commoner in an absolute monarchy, the positions of king and god are, to all practical purposes, indistinguishable.

  17. jeff jeff

    Well, the reason is a natural human one. Parsimony would also suggest that when you are in a dream, it is quite real. But the experience of waking up suggests otherwise.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Bostrom’s argument rests on the a priori likelihood that eventually some intelligence will put us in a simulation; lose that, and the rest fails immediately. There are an infinite number of possible scenarios; we do not adopt them as true because they are conceivable.

      • jeff jeff

        No, but we can and do entertain them. If not, then why are we talking about a pantheon of gods? It seems to me that philosophy as a subject is not limited to certainty or concrete, observable facts.

  18. Nakarti Nakarti

    This goes in with my own counter-argument of:
    If you insist that you have a God that created the Universe and all the people, then you have to admit that I am, the same as anyone else sufficiently creative, a god. Because I have created in my mind, a universe, with intelligent beings, and some worship me and others don’t, they don’t know me but expect I created them in my image, which I didn’t; they’ve rather chitinous exoskeletons and more digits than us, along with having mostly reversable forms except their head being on one end; and it really doesn’t matter to me if they do worship me. It’s just for entertainment anyway.
    And if you accept that, you need to realize that not only does your God likely not care what you believe, but most everything else you believe about it is almost certainly wrong. If you are right that God exists.

  19. Matt S Matt S

    I don’t like this for two reasons. First, I am not sure what “being a god” meant to the Greeks. We have a long varied tradition scrunched down into a small mass of stories and debris. Teasing out the culture from that is problematic. Particularly since keeping gods a mystery was often the point.

    My second objection is that I don’t think this helps much. I think your definition is “would some pre-science group have worshiped these entities”. The existence of some of those entities is not at all a problem for our world view, the existence of others quiet a game changer.

    Instead I propose the “will test”. That is, a god is an entity that can cause action simply by the exercise of will. My ability to life a rock, start a fire, create life, etc. by use of natural force is unremarkable. That I could do any of those things simply by willing it so, that is the game changer.

  20. I am not trying to exegete Barrett. These are my own mistakes. You do not like them? I have other mistakes.

    Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to reject the MCA theory in its standard form, or to hold to another theory for different purposes. I just find the difference notable, since it will mean, among other things, that the Pantheon test will be both more promiscuous than an MCA test about what counts as gods and will allow things to change from being a god to not being a god in ways that aren’t based on any actual change in properties. For instance, if we’re Theodish worshipping Thor, and it turned out centuries later that Thor really did exist and did have all the powers we attributed to him, but he had them because he’s an alien with extraordinarily advanced technology at his disposal, without any reassessment of what Thor can actually do he ceases to be a god. (On nonreligious matters, we would see the same thing: an animal-eating plant, or breathable liquid, or a living machine, are all almost certainly MCI regardless of our state of science or technology, but would move from counterintuitive to intuitive as our science and technology advanced, if we use a sense closer to that used here.) I think this probably does track something; but I think it’s tracking something that is necessarily massively more difficult to investigate than MCA theory is, and won’t always be able to make a direct use of the sort of evidence underlying MCA theory. Of course, since philosophers have a Manifest Destiny to rush in where angels fear to tread, that might just mean that it’s exactly the sort of thing for a philosopher to discuss.

  21. Jeb Jeb

    John

    Tomas O Cathasaigh, The Heroic Biography of Cormac Mac Airt

    Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1977

    Very nice introduction that touches on some of the issues surrounding this approach if you have not already read it.

    What you are suggesting poses problems for clasification and morphology. But thats not a subject you are unfamiliar with.

    Interesting to see how this plays out.

  22. Jeb Jeb

    It also contains a very nice cite from one of Kai Lung’s tales which suggests to me why the study of belief must be based on evolutionary understanding and hard and detailed research rather than fiery ideologicaly driven rhetoric.

    “It is in reality, very easy to kill a dragon, but it is impossible to keep him dead.”

  23. There were also godlings, demigods, children of gods, and others with powers but who were not gods. I think your scheme might need demigods.

    When I think of god-formation I sometimes consider that in an earlier age, Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill would become gods through oral tradition. And there are people in South America who pray to Che Guevara as a saint and (of course) think he answers them. Yet somehow the current pope hasn’t gotten around to beatifying him.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      I don’t expect the Greeks to be consistent here. Many of their heroes and Titans and what have you aren’t included. But if you changed the names and sold them back to the Greeks, they’d end up in the pantheon.

  24. sbej sbej

    “When I think of god-formation I sometimes consider that in an earlier age, Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill would become gods through oral tradition. ”

    Oral culture certainly from when society become ranked is the subject of close surveillance by all competing social groups using such material. So their are a range of checks and balances dictating outcome.

    “We do not by any means think this was unnecessary to be introduced here, because the foolish and unwise people living in the diocese of Saint Kentigern still do not fear to say that he himself was conceived and born of a virgin. But why do we linger over these things? Truly we think the matter absurd to inquire further as to who the sower was and in what manner he ploughed or even planted the earth…………”

    Jocylen of Furness on the importance of fear and uniformity.

  25. Theoricus Theoricus

    I think the greatest problem here is that there needs to be at least two particular aspects to a ‘god’ for it to even be considered a deity in the first place. They would be Omnipotence and Omniscience, albeit I would probably settle for omnipotence. If your deity does not include those two aspects I could easily call humanity a god, our abilities at transforming individual lives and our planet are unparalleled by other recognizable consciences.

    The problem I have though, is that allowing a ‘god’ to actually be omnipotent, to change the fabric of reality by whim, would automatically put such a being at odds with Science. Science is based around the discovery of certain fundamental processes in our universe through the observation of patterns. Introducing an omnipotent being to the universe would destroy any value to the process outright, it would be like someone asking you to guess a number between one and ten and they change the number when you guess it. A god that could change the processes of our universe would make the point of discovering those processes useless.

    Unless of course it is a god which doesn’t interact with our universe in any way, in which case we can know nothing of him. The whole idea of religious scientists is paradoxical to me.

  26. sbej sbej

    Tendancy to class narrative wholesale as supernatural in origin has been the actual working problem with this form of analysis.

    i.e. all tales that form the standard pattern of the villian are assumed to be related to the otherworld god and therefore religious in origin and motivated by such concerns.

    A taxonomy issue.

    Of course if you are not defining religion as an exchange or relationship with supernatural powers it makes things a bit more interesting.

  27. Firionel Firionel

    I guess at this point the debate has been over for a while, but I still wanted to publicly muse about this: Would God Father himself pass the pantheon test?

    Personally I feel he would have been excluded for lack of existence. Now that really is a counterintuitive outcome, and I’m nowhere near enough of an expert to give any real defense of that feeling, but still it makes me wonder whether the goal of the undertaking is not slightly overambitious.

    I like the idea of the pantheon test a lot, but ultimately I believe it is predicated on the assumption that words must mean something similar just because we use them as translations for each other. They don’t. And that’s doubly true for highly abstract words such as ‘god’.

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