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Pauline Arguments for God's Existence

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Pauline Arguments for God's Existence PHILOSOPHIA CHRISTI VOL. 20, NO. 1 © 2018 Pauline Arguments for God’s Existence DANIEL A. BONEVAC Department of Philosophy University of Texas–Austin [email protected] When Paul went to Athens in 51 AD, he was bringing the gospel to the philosophical center of the ancient world. To be sure, this was no lon- ger classical Athens at its height, the Athens of Socrates and Plato, Solon and Democritus, Sophocles and Euripides. The Romans had sacked it more than a century before. But it remained a prominent university town. Affluent Romans still sent their sons—Cicero, Horace, Nero, and Hadrian, among many others—to Athens to be educated. Only Alexandria could claim to be an intellectual competitor. It did not take long for Paul to encounter philosophers in Athens. In what Hans Conzelmann and J. A. Fitzmyer describe as the “most important epi- sode” in Paul’s second missionary journey, and Martin Dibellius calls “the climax of the book” of Acts, Paul speaks to a group of philosophers on the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill.1 His address may be the first exercise in natural theology in Christian history. If Paul, “at the height of his powers,” was advancing a philosophical argument, he was doing so under some compulsion.2 Paul stood accused of having preached foreign gods without permission. He had arrived in Athens and had begun preaching at the synagogue and in the agora without a permit. Some who heard him brought him to the Areopagus—Luke’s account is un- clear about whether they were arresting Paul, detaining him for questioning, or issuing a strong request—and asked him to explain his new teaching. Ath- ens had an ordinance requiring people preaching new religions to ABSTRACT: In Acts 17, Paul offers general framework for demonstrating the existence of God— a supernatural being, a creator, designer, and ultimate purpose of the universe, who cannot be identified with anything natural but instead underlies and explains the natural world as a whole. What Paul says, combined with unstated theses about causation and explanation that his Stoic and Epicurean audience would have shared, adds up to a powerful argument for God’s exis- tence. Cosmological and design arguments emerge as special cases. 1. Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Min- neapolis: Fortress, 1987); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 600; Martin Dibellius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (London: SCM, 1956), 26. 2. Dean Flemming, “Contextualizing the Gospel in Athens: Paul’s Areopagus Address as a Paradigm of Missionary Communication,” Missiology 30 (2002): 200. 158 PHILOSOPHIA CHRISTI • claim to represent a deity, • provide evidence that the deity wanted to reside in Athens, and • show that the deity’s residence in Athens would benefit Athenians.3 These preachers had to make their cases to an assembled group of philoso- phers. Paul’s audience, Luke tells us, was made up of Epicureans and Stoics (Acts 17:19). The Epicureans stressed the value of the goods of this world, especially friendship, pleasure, and freedom from anxiety. The Stoics may have been more receptive to Paul’s message; they stressed ethics and the rational intelligibility of the universe.4 Most Epicureans and Stoics accepted a form of theism; though their understandings of God differed considerably, they tended to identify god with the world, reconciling theism with natural- ism.5 Surrounded by temples to the Greek gods, few philosophers listening to Paul would have taken the polytheism of their ancestors seriously. But they were tolerant of traditional religious beliefs as well as of various religious cults imported from points east so long as they promised to benefit the people of Athens. And so they invited Paul to make his case. Paul proceeded to do just that. But there is little scholarly consensus about whether Paul is making a theological argument in Acts 17, and, if so, what sort of argument it was.6 I think that he was not only arguing for per- mission to preach but also offering a general framework for demonstrating the existence of God—a supernatural being who could not be identified with anything natural but instead underlies and explains the natural world as a whole. My argument is admittedly speculative. The central idea is that what Paul says, combined with unstated theses about causation and explanation 3. Robert Garland, Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); B. Winter, “On Introducing Gods to Athens: An Alternative Reading of Acts 17:18–20,” Tyndale Bulletin 47 (1996): 71–90. 4. My remarks here are general, and perhaps superficial, but will become more precise as the argument proceeds. For an overview of Hellenistic philosophy, see A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Key literature on Hellenistic thought includes A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Phi- losophers, vol. 1, Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat, and Jonathan Barnes, eds., Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Julia Annas, Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and G. R. Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its De- velopment from the Stoics to Origen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For Hellenistic theology, see M. Dragona-Monachou, The Stoic Arguments for the Existence and Providence of the Gods (Athens: National and Capodistrian University of Athens, 1976). 5. See Anthony A. Long, “Scepticism about Gods in Hellenistic Philosophy,” in Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosen- meyer, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990), 279–91. 6. See, e.g., E. Haenschen, The Acts of the Apostles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971); C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994, 1998); and William H. Willimon, Acts (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), who says that Luke’s Paul “borders on natural theology” (143). DANIEL A. BONEVAC 159 that his Stoic and Epicurean audience would have shared, adds up to a gen- eral form of argument for God’s existence. The form of argument is power- ful; the cosmological and design arguments, perhaps in addition to others, are special cases of it. Given his audience, the surprise is not that “some scoffed” at what he said, but that “others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’” (Acts 17:32). 1. Paul’s Speech How did Paul proceed? The charge of preaching a foreign divinity with- out permission was false of Socrates, but true of Paul.7 Paul’s strategy, re- counted in Acts 17:22–31, was to point to “an unknown god” already wor- shipped by the Athenians, and to claim to be preaching that very god. Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an un- known god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. (Acts 17: 22–23, NRSV) The speech that follows does not appear to have the form of an argument. Luke, recounting the event, is no philosopher, and does not structure his ac- count in argumentative form. But if we consider carefully the attributes of God that Paul cites, we can see a philosophical structure emerge from his words. Paul introduces what I see as his central philosophical move, speaking of the relation between God and the world as a whole, which begins with an image of God as creator: “The God who made the world (kosmos) and everything in it,”8 as Lord, director and sustainer: “he who is Lord of heaven and earth,” as self-sufficient: 7. See M. L. Soards, The Speeches in Acts: Their Content, Context, and Concerns (Lou- isville: Westminster John Knox, 1994); Hans-Josef Klauck, Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 76; Clare K. Rothschild, Paul in Athens: The Popular Religious Context of Acts 17 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 86. 8. Stoics “use ‘world’ [kosmos] in three ways: of god himself, the peculiarly qualified indi- vidual consisting of all substance, who is indestructible and ingenerable, since he is the manu- facturer of the world-order, at set periods of time consuming all substance into himself and reproducing it again from himself; they also describe the world-order as ‘world’; and thirdly, what is composed out of both” (Diogenes Laertius, 7.137 (SVF 2.526), quoted in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:270). Paul was thus immediately placing himself in a Stoic context. His use of kosmos here plainly refers to the world-order. For more on the Stoic conception of god, see Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:323–33. 160 PHILOSOPHIA CHRISTI “does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything,” as life-giver: “since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” as planner: “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,” as goal: “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—” as ground of our being: “—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.
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