But is it a reasonable belief?

In his essay "Faith in the Twenty-first Century", philosopher Stephen Law explores the value of different understandings, different definitions, of the word faith (2003). In the course of his discussion, he also discusses the notion of reasonableness, which immediately came to my mind when I read his essay, "Did Zeus Exist?" in The New York Times by academic Gary Gutting.

By presenting and answering a range of popular opposing arguments, Gutting argues in "Did Zeus Exist?" that we do not, in fact, have any strong reason to assert with confidence that the ancient Greek god Zeus did not exist then, nor, indeed, that he does not now exist (2013).

Apart from the fact that it fits so neatly with our reading both of Law (2003) and of the subject matter of the chapter on cultural anthropology in Quest (Hartmann & Blass, 2007, pp. 3 - 43), I thought that Gutting's short essay is both fun and also raises some very important issues not only for cultural anthropology and the argument over whether or not any gods, demons, souls, ghosts, pixies, tooth fairies or similar things exist now, have ever existed or could ever exist, but also for academic work and critical thinking generally.

When Gutting presents a series of five opposing arguments to his thesis, that we have no sound grounds for asserting with certainty that Zeus did not once or does not now exist, he gives a great example of the importance of seriously addressing by first stating and then answering the strongest arguments against the main idea for which we are arguing. This is always something we need to be alert to: the support for our own idea is greatly strengthened if we present and show the weaknesses in the counter arguments against what we think. Correspondingly, if we cannot answer, or simply ignore, opposing arguments, our own thesis is greatly weakened since readers will reasonably assume we did not include and answer the opposing reasons for the very good reason that we could not answer them. And if we cannot answer objections, perhaps we should also be reassessing our own idea.

But I also think that Gutting, a very capable academic, knows exactly what he is doing and that he has been a bit naughty, as a  few of his commentators on the article, which is actually a post in a blog that The New York Times hosts as a regular column, note: the same arguments apply to every god, ghost, demon, devil and other such supernatural entity that human beings have made up over the course of our history, and there are a lot of these: from the monotheistic religions of the despotic Middle-East, to the spirits, demons, ghosts, heavens, hells, souls and other strange entities of other types of religions. If it is true, as Gutting asserts, that the non-existence of Zeus cannot be absolutely asserted, any more than his actual existence, then so to is it equally impossible to assert that there is in fact any good reason to believe in Zeus, or any of the other wonderful beings and entities that populate the worlds religions past and present. It might well be true, but, as Gutting also points out, that is not evidence that can support a belief.

In fact, I think that Gutting's naughtiness goes a bit deeper: he must know that there is another strong argument in favour of asserting the non-existence of Zeus, past and present. But perhaps he left this as something to tantalise his readers as they first thought of it, and then realised that if true, it must also apply to every other such claim by the theistically or supernaturally minded. Can you think of it? A hint: it's something that Law discusses in the pages we have been reading over this pleasantly long weekend, and will hopefully get around to discussing in class tomorrow morning. But please feel free to share your ideas in advance in a comment, or two, or even three.

Should we really be open to the existence of Zeus? And Yahweh? And Jesus as god as well as man, and of Allah, and of souls, of devils, of demons, of vampires, of ghosts, or fortune telling, of spirit channelling, of reincarnation and the like?

And in case you can't access The New York Times article, I've also posted the text online here as a Google document, complete with the image.

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References

Gutting, G. (2013, July 31). Did Zeus exist? The New York Times. Retrieved from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/did-zeus-exist/

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Law, S. (2003). Faith in the twenty-first century. In The Xmas Files: The philosophy of Christmas, (pp. 113 - 123). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.