Polytheism: myth and meaning

If gas prices hadn't spiked to $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, I wouldn't be reading Greer's opinions about polytheism today in 2011. But such strange connections make up the stuff of life. I discovered Greer through his peak-oil blog in my search for explanations about what was happening to the oil markets three years ago. What initially attracted me to his site among the many others was the historical sensibility of his stance that civil collapse is a long and messy process—not at all the abrupt end of the world so many people imagine. But what kept me reading his blog week after week was his strange way of explaining his stance through his talk of myth and meaning.

Though I find myself eager to finish A World Full of Gods and to move on to the next topic of classical monotheism, I want to include a post about Greer's ideas about myth and meaning. He raises the topic in the eleventh chapter out of thirteen, which from my point of view as a polytheist skeptic may be mistakenly too deep into the book. It's the chapter of most value to non-polytheists, as the skill of thinking-about-thinking benefits oneself in so many endeavors, both inside and outside religion. On the other hand, most people read for the confirmation of their existing beliefs, and I doubt many non-polytheists will ever crack open this book, so what does it matter how far into the book this chapter is? As it is, I'll relate some of Greer's ideas about myth and meaning here at JEC because I've intertwined his ideas into my own jargon for talking about philosophy and science, and I want to share the story.

According to Greer, a myth is a story that gives meaning to the world. This sharply contrasts from the term's common use, where myth means a falsehood. Indeed, as Greer points out, a myth that's unequivocally false would do a poor job providing meaning to anything and would thus be a poor myth. Rather, the validity and meaning of a myth lies in the ears of its listener. No one doubts Easy Rider is fiction, but how many of the Baby Boomers we see riding their motorcycles out on the open roads on any given weekend haven't found at least some meaning in Peter Fonda's and Dennis Hopper's portrayal of nomadic independence? Myths work on many levels, unlike facts.

As with trying to make sense of a Coen Brothers' movie, problems emerge when people ask what a myth is about. Myths aren't about anything; they're mere stories, building blocks for people to ascribe meaning to the universe they experience. A listener can give any story a wide range of meanings, from the literal to the abstract symbolisms we drudged through in high school English classes. Those differences in meaning stem from differences in interpretive schemes, and no scheme is right or wrong except as measured by other myths and their schemes.

Myths are not veiled presentations of some other discourse; all other discourse are veiled presentations of myth…

Thus, there's no way to escape the use of myth. The human brain hardwires us to use them as a way to understand things. Indeed, the modern man's belief that he doesn't believe in myths—that mythical thinking went extinct along with many other superstitions from long ago—follows from his very belief in a specific myth, a myth that has captured our collective imagination for the last couple hundred years, the Myth of Progress. The Myth of Progress holds that humanity, darling of the universe, moves ever onwards and upwards to bigger and better futures, that our lives are better than our parents' and our children's lives will be better than ours. There's no room in the ascent of man, as the myth goes, for the irrationality of myths.

Greer's point in all this, far from the impossible task of ending our beliefs in myths, is that we ought to know more myths. No myth makes sense of all phenomena, and our ability to make sense of our experiences is largely tied to how many myths we know.

Our problem is not that we have no myths, but rather that too many of our myths tell the same story and make sense of the world in the same way. Most of our stories end and they all lived happily ever after. We are left floundering and baffled when things do not turn out that way, and our hopes of perpetual improvement burst like bubbles—financial or otherwise.

This is where polytheism comes in. Paganism has a wealth of myths covering many possibilities and circumstances: triumph and defeat, pride and humiliation, fidelity and adultery, and so on. There's no one moral or one set of morals one can derive from Paganism. Such diversity empowers.

I take Greer's ultimate battle here to be with secularism and its linear view of history. However, Greer also criticizes monotheisms for their myths' otherness, their detachment from nature. Greer is a druid and likes his stories, on the whole, to draw from and reflect nature and its balance, limitation, and reciprocity. Greer advocates his view well, though in the end it's all just another story.

Polytheism and salvation

For a while now, with the goal to continue these Monday religion posts, I've aimed to read next a book by a Catholic scholar about Thomas Aquinas. My reason is I've observed a trend of classical monotheists who imply or outright claim that non-monotheists don't really understand monotheism and it's their ignorance that causes them not to be monotheists. So it shouldn't surprise you to know that I'm a little fearful of the next assignment; I'm expecting it to be an endeavor of antagonism, one full of clearly's, in fact's, and obviously's I don't find clear, factual, or obvious.

In the meantime, A World Full of Gods continues to inspire me with new writing topics each week, enough so that I'm having to pace myself with the reading part to avoid backlogging the writing part. My enjoyment of the book comes despite my disagreement with the author, which I've come to realize is high praise of a writer's skills. Most people can write appealingly to readers in agreement; it's the ability to write appealingly to those who disagree that takes the most skill and is something worth aspiring to.

* * *

Early in A World Full of Gods, Greer claimed the core difference between polytheism and monotheism (and between polytheism and atheism) is that polytheism alone ranks experience above theology (and philosophy). In short: polytheism gives the benefit of the doubt to nearly all claims about the gods—even claims that on the surface conflict with each other. I've come to think of this as that P's believe it when they see it, whereas M's (and A's) see it when they believe it.

Greer takes this another step further and says most seemingly conflicting claims about the afterlife are true, too. Can souls live on after the body's death? Yes. Can souls reincarnate? Yes. Can souls become spirits that interact with the living? Yes. Can souls be brought back to life after death? Yes. Indeed, it's exactly the diversity of near-death experiences, as well as experiences of apparitions and of children with previous-life knowledge, that make a diversity of afterlives plausible.

Greer has written many books about the occult, so I'm not surprised he takes deathbed phenomena seriously. I don't. But though I usually find such talk about souls and the afterlife nonsensical according to my own Story of Materialism, what's interesting here is a greater point implied by polytheism's afterlife-diversity: polytheism is not a religion in search of a problem to solve.

Much of what a religion has to say about life is implied by what it says about death. These days most religions in the world, from Western monotheisms to Buddhism, claim there's an improvement to be had by dying and therefore that there's a fundamental problem with living. Polytheism—or at least classical polytheism, with its broad beliefs in the afterlife—does not make this claim. According to polytheism, some individual humans may find themselves in trouble from time to time, maybe even most of their lives, but other individuals may be in no trouble. To the polytheist, religion may help people with their problems, but its purpose isn't salvation because people, as a whole, don't need saving.

To some extent, this resonates with me. In the last few years—long after I graduated college, I might add—has it been pointed out to me how unthinkingly teleological most modern thought is, from the most devout of monotheists to the most devout of atheists. The case of salvation is no different. There can be an essential problem with humanity only if humanity ought to be doing or being something different than it currently is. This presupposes an objective viewpoint. But if our planet's ongoing evolution is purposeless then humanity is what it is, so to speak, and it has no essential problem—only our individual, misguided expectations placed upon a finite existence.

To you, I offer this post

A former coworker of mine, Steve, said a lot of nutty things, but one thing he said is some of the best general advice I've ever heard: to receive more of something, first give it away.

Steve was talking about reciprocity with other people, such as how if you want other people to listen to you and take your opinions seriously, you should first listen to them and take their opinions seriously. After listening to them for a while, they're likely to listen to you—probably without realizing it. Ditto for respect, trust, love, money, and nearly anything else you give and take with others.

Steve's advice helps me make sense of Chapter 8 of A World Full of Gods, which is about polytheist worship. According to Greer, The essence of Pagan worship is reciprocity between divinity and humanity. The polytheist universe is populated only by finite beings and entities, and this universal finiteness means all things exist through giving and mutual interaction.

Religion in the Pagan sense is a matter of exchange. While the gods are greater than human beings, they are not infinitely so, and humanity thus has the potential to bring something of its own to a relationship with divinity. Each participates in the relationship in a manner proportioned to their relative place in the cosmos, but the relationship is never merely one-sided.

The principle of reciprocity provides the proper context to the much-misinterpreted Roman religious maxim do ut des, usually translated I give that you may give. Too often, even by those alert to the complexities of Roman religion, this has been read as a commercial transaction in which Roman worshippers paid their gods in advance for some benefit.

This is unjust. What the maxim actually implies is the exchange of gifts as an expression of ancient rules of friendship and hospitality. Behind this conception lies a concept of an exchange of gifts between different orders of being as the bond that unites the universe.

While I don't doubt there were at least a few self-interested Romans who gave to the gods with the hope they were partaking in a commercial transaction, the idea of reciprocity makes sense of a puzzling question I've long had about polytheism—as well as other religions—Doesn't anyone care about track record? Just as with the recent, well publicized rain prayer in Texas and how it didn't immediately conjure an end to the state's drought, it must be ages since people first realized the gods don't respond predictably to offerings and beseechings.

Modern theorists of religion have wrestled with the habit of making gifts to gods, ancestors, and spirits, on the assumption that there are no obvious returns on the investment. To ancient and modern Pagans alike, however, the assumption is transparently false. If such beings exist and govern the natural world, their gifts are as obvious as food and drink on the table, rain on the fields, fertility in the soil, and the fact of life itself. The gods are primarily and superlatively givers of good things, and the world in which life takes place is their gift to us.

In other words, the polytheist doesn't make an offering to the rain god simply to ask for rain. Instead, he makes the offering to fulfill his end in his coexistence with the rain god, who has already provided the polytheist with a lifetime of rain.

For the core of Pagan sacrifice is participation and celebration, not appeasement or renunciation. Making offerings to the gods is central to Pagan religious practice because it allows human beings to respond to the generosity of the gods with gifts of their own. Prayers are accompanied with offerings, or with promises of offerings to come, to reaffirm that gods and humans both participate in the web of reciprocity, celebrating their friendship with an exchange of gifts. Thus the old Pagan rituals of animal sacrifice were festive events for the entire community, more like a barbecue than like most modern religious rites. The gods received their share of the offering, and the rest was cooked and served out among the worshippers.

The polytheist gives to the gods not only because giving is good for the gods but also because giving is good for the giver. This reminds me of Christianity and how it advises us to forgive others for their transgressions again us, not only because forgiveness benefits the transgressor but because forgiveness benefits the forgiver.

This perspective leads me to wonder to what degree the modern world's slew of philosophies and ideologies centered on markets and rational self-interest are by-products of our world's increasing detachment from the natural world and related ideas such as the web of reciprocity. When most of what we consume is bought from strangers, prepackaged and paid for using money, each transaction ends with the deal squared, freeing both participants from further responsibility. But if detachment from nature is a fiction, as many ecologists are apt to point out, perhaps such arrangements are not so rationally self-interested after all.

An interlude about a limitless entity

A few weeks ago I asserted that it's impossible to conceptualize an entity that's both all-powerful and all-beneficent without diluting the meaning of the terms. An old friend of mine, Josh, commented how he thinks it's indeed possible to reconcile such ideas. I replied—as it's my policy to respond to all readers' comments—that my full answer would entail a post of its own. This is that post.

The context of the conflict is that people encounter what seem to be moral conflicts. For example, there are situations when you can be kind or honest but not both. Furthermore, these situations are not rare but instead happen most if not all days. Driving a car seems to force the issue every minute. How can an all-powerful entity, who thus has the ability to make the universe anything it wishes, also be the morally best possible entity if it rigged the universe to impose such conflicts? Why force people to choose between the better of two imperfect choices?

I admit this is a delicate topic, with many centuries of thought on the matter yielding their own entire branch of philosophy, called theodicy—and I further admit I'm going to ignore the reams of complexity that those centuries have heaped upon the question and give what seems to me is the straightforward, sensible answer. After all, it's part of my trade as a software developer to determine when leaky complexity has been heaped upon a faulty design and to figure out what needs to be removed to make the thing work. And yes, sometimes that means throwing away some cherished code you wrote awhile back.

The simple answer to the all-powerful, all-beneficent question is that such a limitless entity poses a paradox. Josh proposed a moral hierarchy as a solution, where some traits rank higher than others, but this solves a different problem. It solves the problem of choosing between the better of two imperfect solutions. The perfect solution, though only conceptual and impossible to realize, is that you get to have your cake and eat it too. In the example of kindness or honesty but not both, supposing that one of the virtues ranks higher than the other—say, honesty over kindness—means only that by choosing to be honest and unkind you have selected the better of two, flawed choices. A hierarchy of moral values allows for an entity that is all-powerful and as-beneficent-as-possible or instead as-powerful-as-possible and all-beneficent, but not both. Either way, the meaning of the terms has been diluted.

Another proposed solution thought up a long time ago is that the universe is indeed the best possible universe and that these conflict situations aren't conflicts at all. Rather, the conflicts play out—or can play out—according to what's in our best interests. So, for example, choosing to be honest and unkind is even better than if we could somehow be both honest and kind. Perhaps it's through the act of committing evil—or lesser good—that we gain some maximal good, such as spiritual fulfillment.

Yet another proposed solution to the problem is that the entity chose to give humans freewill—somehow, the best of possible choices it could have made—and because we're neither all-powerful nor all-beneficent, our choices require the universe to impose moral conflicts upon us. Yet another proposal asserts that these matters are entirely beyond our comprehension, that such a limitless entity is possible but we'll never know how.

These three solutions all reduce to: It cannot be known. Why is it good for us to make imperfect choices? It cannot be known. What is freewill? Why is the universe better off having it than not? It cannot be known. Why can't we know? It cannot be known.

What does all-powerful mean? It cannot be known.

What does all-beneficent mean? It cannot be known.

What does it mean to dilute the meaning of a term? To say: It cannot be known.

The easy way out of this mess is to drop the claim that one can both conceptualize a limitless entity and not dilute the terms all-powerful and all-beneficent. After all, diluting the terms' meanings says nothing about the entity's existence—only our ability to make falsifiable claims about it.

For what it's worth, this analysis makes me more appreciative of religions that embrace mysticism.

Polytheism and the cosmic unity

I suspect many of you readers have found at least one problem with polytheism, but I further suspect most if not all of the problems you've found with it are on your own terms, using your own assumptions and values. But some of you who've paid attention these last few posts and stirred some neurons may have spotted a problem with polytheism on its own terms—a way in which it's rendered self-defeating. That problem is: Because polytheism ranks religious experience as more important than theology, what does it mean for billions of monotheists to have experienced a one, true God or some other cosmic unity?

There's no fully satisfying way around this. You can't claim both that religious experience is #1 and also that some people's religious experiences are wrong. Just as with having and eating cake, one of two must budge.

Greer budges a little and provides an answer in the pay dirt chapter I wrote about last Monday. He points out how most of us—myself included, upon first reading the chapter—are confused about the term ineffability. Ineffability is not (as many of us believe) an absolute quality but instead is a relationship. Specifically, it's a relationship between an idea and some given language whereby the language can't fully describe the idea. For example, quantum physics is ineffable in the English language. (And if you think it isn't, then you don't understand quantum physics!) We can approximately talk about atomic and subatomic particles using such terms as wave-particle duality, but our grasp of such small scales is incomplete and hazy. Just as planetary orbit was ineffable in the ancients' languages because they lacked laws of motion, quantum-scale motion is ineffable to us today. But someday quantum physics may not be ineffable. (Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.)

Saying that something is ineffable—that is, ascribing ineffability as an absolute property of that thing—is equivalent to claiming that that thing can't be described in any language. That includes all possible languages—forgotten languages from the past, languages we'll know only in the future, and languages we'll never realize. Can we know something is indescribable in all of these languages? Computation theory deals with this very problem from a purely logical perspective, what with Turing completeness and so on. In short, limitations indeed seem to exist in the most powerful languages, which would make some things ineffable in all languages, but we can't be sure that any proof of such limitations isn't an artifact of the language we're using to make such a proof. So it's inconclusive.

Within this wiggle room Greer has his answer. Religious experiences may be fully describable in a language, just one we don't possess. (A theory of mind is a candidate for such a language.) Religious experiences, including those of an exclusive God or other cosmic unity, may be imprecise ways of talking about phenomena that are in actuality precise, just as planetary motion turns out to be precise though it was once ineffable to all known languages. Thus, while religious experiences may rank higher than theology to the polytheist, religious experiences may not signify literal meanings—they may be interpreted in many ways. As for experiences of cosmic unity, here are Greer's own words.

As we have seen, people experience and revere many different sacred entities, some personal, some not. The fundamental unity of the cosmos is one of these, but not the only one. Many people worship it, and many have experienced in it one way or another, but the same is true of other sacred presences and powers. Nor is it automatically true that a cosmic unity is necessarily a better god to worship than some entity closer to human existence.

What are the gods?

In Chapter Seven of A World Full of Gods, I struck pay dirt—I gleaned insight into what polytheism is about, what its gods are. But before I expound upon that insight, I wish to state my intentions with these Monday posts.

Two things for certain I believe: firstly, continuing education is a fine pursuit, and secondly, we oughtn't be modest about it. We should share what we learn. We should show it off, flaunt it. People who aren't interested needn't listen.

My purpose then with these Monday posts is to share what I learn, my goal then to stir the neurons in others' heads—if only a little. Any post receiving a comment stemming from a stirred head is a post that succeeded. It's not my goal to change anyone's mind, with the exception of people who believe they shouldn't question their own beliefs. But such exceptions are few, and they needn't listen.

The reason I claim no goal to persuade isn't to get your guard down. Rather, it's to apologize for the brevity of this post. I've had the benefit of reading a hundred pages of Greer's prose, in which he presents his case with many supporting details, presumably all with the intent to explain and persuade. I'm merely writing to explain, and I'm using far fewer words to do it. This creates gaps, and those gaps appear even wider if you presume the explanation is an argument meant to persuade. It's not. It's meant to stir.

Now, down to business.

As I said, Chapter Seven is pay dirt. From it I understand what classical polytheism claims the gods are—or I think I understand. They're not bearded men and stately women hanging out on a tall mountain in northern Greece—why else didn't Greeks climb Olympus, meet the gods, and resolve the issue once and for all?—but instead are more like the incorporeal nous of classical monotheism. Only, in the case of polytheism, the gods are numerous and finite. Here's a passage from the book.

Consider the ancient Greek idea that mountains and rivers are gods. Modern readers of classical literature often think that the ancient Greeks were talking about supernatural beings who were related to a given river or mountain, but who were distinct from what we perceive as a geographical feature. But this is not what the ancient Greeks were saying. To them, a mountain or a river was not simply a geographical feature. What we call the mountain or the river was the body, the physical expression or dimension of a more complex entity. That entity also had a self-aware personality; it could perceive, choose, desire and take action.

In other words, the gods are the consciousnesses underlying natural phenomena. This isn't a stretch. Right now I'm apt to personify Phoenix's summer, such as how it's going through a mid-life crisis and showing off to excess its still plentiful virility. Or maybe Summer is defensive about Autumn nearing too close to Summer's throne, and Summer is shouting his might. You needn't believe Summer is an actual, personable entity to understand my point that Phoenix is especially hot right now in late August, and my personification is simpler, though less precise, than describing the details of high and low temperatures, dew points, and seasonal averages.

But polytheists don't merely personify nature; they believe the gods exist. I'm personifying when describing the icy hands of the Methow River, which I fell into a few years ago, but that doesn't mean the river is alive. Personifying summer doesn't mean there exists a living Summer. Or does it?

It thus makes sense to ask whether at least some gods are embodied in nature or specific natural phenomena, or even to speculate that these gods may be the inner dimension, the dimension of awareness and mind, of the natural world. From this point of view, a god of weather could be conceptualized as the indwelling consciousness of the lower atmosphere itself, related to the complex physical structure of winds, clouds, topography and energy flows in exactly the same way that the human mind and personality relate to the physical brain and body.

Here Greer hints at that troubling question: how do we know any of the people around us are real, are conscious? How do I know? It's possible everyone around me is an automaton giving the illusion of having a mind. That they're made of the same organic compounds as I and give birth to other automatons only shows how complex and well functioning they are. So too do their well reasoned pleas that I think of them as living beings.

The answer—my working answer—is I don't know for sure. I can't even be sure whether I'm alive. But as with neutrinos' existence, the universe appears to work as though our consciousnesses exist. That is, my best guess is other people are alive. As far as mental frameworks go, ascribing minds to other people is a good one; so far it's explained human behavior my whole life—political discussions excepted, of course.

So why not accept a mental framework that ascribes minds to natural phenomena? Why give the benefit of the doubt—and, consequently, souls—to humans but not to rivers and mountains? This question hits upon our core assumptions in metaphysics and epistemology, and perhaps I'll give my own answer, for what it's worth, in a future post.

…as though they do

The cosmological argument, which I wrote about last Monday, is but one argument for the existence of God. It's also an argument for the existence of multiple gods. As Greer writes in A World Full of Gods: most arguments for the existence of one god also work in favor of multiple gods because nothing in the argument requires exactly one god. Indeed, the only monotheist argument that fails for polytheism without objection is the ontological argument, which rests upon the idea of one greatest conceived being. But the ontological argument is a strange flight of logic. I doubt many people use it to convince themselves of anything they don't already believe. It's so abstract—so philosophical—it doesn't seem to apply to real life. Suffice it to say I'm not going to write about it here.

But Greer's point goes further. Other theist arguments don't work equally well for monotheism and polytheism; some work better for polytheism. For example, take the moral argument. Claims that there exist objective moral values are incongruent with our experiences of the real world. Consider the case of someone having to decide between two virtues, say, honesty and kindness. Sometimes you can be honest or kind but not both. Sometimes we are conflicted. Such moral conflicts are hard to reconcile with the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent entity without diluting the meaning of omnipotence or omnibenevolence. But if the universe is as traditional polytheists say and the gods are limited and in contention with one another, then moral trade-offs probably result as a routine matter. That is, the world we see matches the world we expect.

A multiplicity of gods explains a lot about the real world. The atheist argument from evil, which argues against the existence of God based on the presence of evil, fails against polytheism because the gods' limitations allow for the existence of evil. Indeed, some gods may willingly be a source of our problems!

Can it be that simple? I acknowledge the polytheist makes defensible claims, but is he saying anything meaningful? What does it tell me that the heavens roil with a chaos that matches our own world's? How am I wiser by knowing this? Take the following passage in A World Full of Gods.

Thus it's perfectly valid to say of gods and neutrinos alike that while we don't know if they actually exist, the universe appears to work as though they do.

This sounds nothing like the religions I was taught growing up. The passage has a scientific flavor—I doubt the reference to neutrinos is an accident. Just as science doesn't prove anything but instead offers best guesses to explain what we see, is polytheism too offering mere best guesses? Again, polytheism shows itself to be founded on experience, not theology. As for what's gained by theorizing gods into existence, I hope that's covered somewhere in the second half of the book.

The cosmological argument

What philosophers call the cosmological argument is what countless people have figured out for themselves through casual reflection on the nature of the universe. As the argument goes, the universe can't always have existed; it must have been created by something.

More formally, the argument may go as follows.

1. Everything in the universe is contingent—i.e., everything that exists has been brought into being, or has been caused, by something else.

2. The causes are also contingent.

3. Together, statements 1 and 2 conclude there exists an infinite regression of causes.

4. But an infinite regression of causes is impossible.

5. Therefore there exists a cause that isn't contingent—i.e., a First Cause or a Necessary Being.

Polytheist perspective

The CA is most often used to justify monotheism, but the argument doesn't rule out the possibility that there exist multiple gods. Statement 5 may be written in the plural: “Therefore there exist causes that aren't contingent—i.e., First Causes or Necessary Beings.” Nothing in the preceding four statements implies only one cause can be without cause.

Furthermore, the CA doesn't require of its First Cause that it be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, or possessing other limitless attributes. It need only be powerful enough, knowledgeable enough, and loving enough to create the universe. For all we know, the creation the universe may be a mindless task. The CA doesn't show the First Cause to be a deity or worthy of worship.

Counter-counterargument

An interesting twist in the CA occurs in subsequent counter-argumentation, whereby the CA is itself encapsulated within an infinite regression, shown as follows.

1. The CA is invalid because it's possible for an infinite regression of causes to exist.

2. But the infinite regression of causes itself must have a cause.

3. Therefore, there exists a cause that isn't contingent—i.e., a First Cause or Necessary Being.

The idea here is there exists a First Cause even within a universe that permits the existence of an infinite regression of causes. But this is only one possible conclusion. Another is that the cause of the infinite regression of causes is itself part of an infinite regression of infinite regressions of causes. We may continue proposing further infinite regressions, too, until we have taken things to their logical conclusion and have proposed an infinitely dimensional infinite regression. This hints of Cantor showing infinite sets having different cardinalities.

My opinion

I reject the CA because it isn't falsifiable. Does the universe permit infinite regressions? Who knows. Maybe the universe is like the implication of Berry's Paradox—i.e., infinite in one direction but lacking a well defined beginning in the other. Or maybe the CA is valid insofar there once existed a First Cause, but the First Cause no longer exists. Or maybe the First Cause is evil. And so on. In no way does the CA help make predictive statements about the universe and is thus of little use to me. But your mileage may vary.

Two or more gods

Grand Archdruid John Michael Greer is a self-professed history geek. Falling somewhere between carrying out impeccable research and possessing an encyclopedia knowledge of world history, Greer includes countless historical examples to infer parallels with the present in his blog, The Archdruid Report. But if Greer is so smart and knows so much history, why is he a polytheist?

Growing up, what I learned about polytheism is what I think most of us Westerners learn about it: A long time ago most people were polytheists, but eventually they grew up and became monotheists or atheists. How then can someone both intelligent and knowledgeable choose to believe in multiple gods? Where have they been since Plato and Epicurus?

As part of my ongoing effort to learn about topics I know little or nothing about, I've begun reading Greer's book, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism. As I expected, it's no wishy-washy, touchy-feely account of polytheism; it's a hard, logical case for the existence of multiple gods. To correct a lesson I learned long ago: Polytheism is grown up, or at least as grown up as any of the religions I know—including my own.

Though I'm not yet halfway through the book, it has inspired me with today's post. But firstly, I apologize to those who think it's distasteful to discuss religion in mixed company. And secondly, I'll state my bias: I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist most of my life, from the moment I was born, with only some teenage experimentation as the exception. And now, with my disclosure over (along with any chance of me ever being elected to public office), here's something I've learned about polytheism.

In general, the core difference between a polytheist and a monotheist is that the polytheist draws his theology from religious experience while the monotheist judges religious experience using his theology. Which you rank as more fundamental—theology or religious experience—dictates how many gods you believe in. As Greer writes, “religious experience is inherently polytheistic” because different people experience different gods. If you take everyone's religious experiences at face value then you must be polytheist. Therefore, those of us who are either monotheist or atheist do not take all religious experiences at face value. We rank something else more fundamental than religious experience alone.