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| Pantheon: temple for the worship of the gods. Emperor Hadrian built it in early second century in Rome. Romans adopted the Greek gods. In 609, Pope Boniface IV converted the Pantheon to a church. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
The Greeks invented their gods in the
universe and the universe in their gods. The two are inseparable.
Of
gods and men
Herakleitos, 540-480 BCE, said that all
things are in a state of flux, and the heart of the universe is pure fire. He
was a philosopher from Ephesos, a Greek polis in the west coast of Asia Minor.
He is right when he says that the “gods become men and men gods, the one living
the death of the other, the other dying the life of the one” (Fragment 66).
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| Herakleitos by Raphael Santi in "The School of Athens," 1510. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
This is particularly true for the early Greeks
and their gods. Most of the Argonauts were sons of gods. And even Kirke, her
brother Aietes, children of the god Sun (Helios Hyperionides, son of Hyperion)
and Medeia, daughter of Aietes, have a place in the Greeks’ cosmos and their
gods.
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| Raphael Santi (1483-1520), "The Council of the Gods." Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
The
Oracle
One of those gods, Themis (daughter of Gaia –Earth
– mother of the Seasons and Fates, wife of Zeus, mirror of Justice) also showed
the Greeks to worship the gods. She convinced them that the oracle at Delphi
was the prophet of the gods. She taught god Phoibos (the bright) Apollo the art
of law giving (Orphic Hymn to Themis 79).
Herodotos, the great historian of Hellas’ golden age, puts Delphi at the very
heart of Greek piety, politics, and culture.
Delphi was so well known all over the
Mediterranean that non-Greeks also sought policy advice from Pythia, the
priestess of Apollo at Delphi. The Lydian kings Gyges, c.680-645, and Croesus,
560-546 BCE, had enormous respect for the integrity and truthfulness of the
Greek oracles and gods. They brought so much gold and other precious gifts to
god Apollo at Delphi that the polis of Delphi gave citizenship to any Lydian
who requested it. No Greek polis would start a colony outside of mainland
Greece or undertake anything significant like war without consulting Pythia.
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| "Priestess of Delphi" by John Collier, 1891. Art Gallery of South Australia. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
In fact, even when Greek armies were facing
their enemy, which could be other Greeks or barbarians, they first asked their
diviners to look at the entrails of the sacrificial animal for good omens from
the gods before they went into battle.
Herodotus is certain that Apollo defended
Delphi against the invading Persians just before the battle of Salamis in 490
BCE. He also says Demeter doomed the massive Persian fleet at Salamis.
Herodotos has no doubt that the oracles of the gods are true, particularly the
Boiotian oracle of Bakis that foresaw the Greek victory at Salamis. The gods,
Herodotos says, sided with the Greeks during the massive Persian invasion of
Greece so that they would restore a balance in what was a hugely unequal
struggle. Herodotos had no doubt the gods played an important part in human
affairs, and Greek affairs in particular (The
Histories 1.13-14, 46-55, 91-92; 7.8; 8.13; 9.100-101).
The
gods inspired the Greeks’ cosmic vision
In addition, laws and reason govern the
Greek gods and the cosmos. The English classical scholar Hugh Lloyd-Jones says
that the Greeks set “the foundations of most of the chief arts of civilization”
primarily because of their gods who gave them “the notion of a cosmos, an
universe regulated by causal laws (The
Justice of Zeus, 1983, p. 179). The American writer Henry Miller also sees
the gods right in the Greeks’ vision. “The gods,” he says, quite perceptively,
“humanized the Greeks (The Colossus of Maroussi,
1941, p. 236).
The Greeks’ cosmos is open to investigation.
That is why the Greeks began asking questions, explaining natural phenomena
with data and reasonable theories they formulated from their careful
observation of the workings of the natural world. That was the beginning of
science.
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| Ptolemaic celestial spheres in Cosmographia by Peter Apian, Antwerp 1539. Ptolemaios (Ptolemy) was a great Greek astronomer who flourished in the second century in Alexandria, Egypt. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
Pindaros, 518-after 446 BCE, the great poet
of Thebes known for his exquisite Epinician (victory) Odes in praise of the
victors in the Panhellenic athletic and religious games, wrote that men and
gods had the same mother, though they were vastly different in power.
Nevertheless, Pindaros was certain, that men, in some way or another, resembled
the immortals “in greatness of mind or nature” (Nemean 6.1-7).
Some seven centuries later, Galen, Greek
scholar, philosopher, and great physician of the second century, said that
mortals have something in common with the gods – and that is reason (An Exhortation to Study the Arts 21).
The gods, and the universe those gods
represented, demanded that the Greeks understand divine power, which meant an
understanding of nature and the causes and effects of phenomena in the natural
world and the universe. They knew, for example, that:
(1) The god of southern wind, Notos, was the
father of rain, Zeus having given him the prerogative of sending rain-giving
clouds from the sky to earth (Orphic Hymn
to Notos 82).
(2) Hephaistos, son of Hera, is fire – the
all-devouring, all-taming, and all-haunting part of the universe. Hephaistos –
the god whose craftsmanship sparked metallurgy in the Aegean island of Lemnos
and Caucasus -- is the eternal artisan who brings light to mortals who see the
ether, the Sun, the stars, the moon
and pure light through him. Hephaistos in fact lives in mortals and, because of
that, nature itself burns in their bodies. In other words, Hephaistos, the god
of fire, is reason in the cosmos and in the world of men (Orphic Hymn to Hephaistos 66).
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| Hephaistos hands Thetis the shied he crafted for Achilles. Paintin by Antony van Dyck, 1630-1632. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
(3) Nomos – a cosmic principle – is all
about reason and order in the cosmos. It sets limits for life on Earth as much
as it arranges the stars in the universe (Orphic
Hymn to Nomos 64); and
(4) Okeanos, the mighty river around the Earth,
was where all life, including the gods, came from. He was also the father of
all seas, rivers, and streams of the Earth from his marriage to his sister
Tethys.
Aristotle confirms that the ancient Greeks
considered Okeanos and Tethys the parents of creation. The gods themselves took
their oath by the water of the Styx (Metaphysics
983b29-33), a river in northeastern Arkadia. Hesiodos says that the gods
would pay a terrible price if they swore a false oath by the primeval and
immortal water of Styx (Theogony
793-806).
Natural
philosophy
Water was at the heart of the Greeks’
cosmos. It became the key with which Thales opened the origins of the cosmos.
Thales was a sixth century BCE Greek cosmologist from Miletos, a flourishing
Ionian polis on the coast of Asia Minor near the mouth of the river Maiander.
Herodotos says Miletos was the pride of Ionia (The Histories 5.28).
Aristotle considered Thales the founder of
natural philosophy (Metaphysics 983b20).
Thales made water the foundation of the universe. He said the Earth rests on
water (Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b21).
Thales also believed that “all things are full of gods” (Aristotle, On the Soul 411a7-8).
Aristotle, too, believed the Greeks’
forefathers thought that the first substances or principles governing the
cosmos were gods. It was like the divine enclosed the whole of nature. And
reason was also present throughout nature and the universe. In fact for
Aristotle reason was the explanation for the world and for that world’s order (Metaphysics 984b15-20; 1074b1-14).
Divine
benefactors
In addition, Aristotle considered the gods
the greatest benefactors of humankind. Just like children are drawn to their
parents with affection and love, Aristotle said, so men and women have an
affection and love for the gods who are responsible for their existence,
nourishment, and education (Nicomachean
Ethics 8.12.1162a4-7).
Thus the gods and reason – both essential
for the origins, order and very being of the universe – were complementary.
That explains why the Greeks did so much with science, which they invented.
Their gods were the beginning of their cosmology. They were always curious and
eager to understand the cause and effect relationships in nature without the
aid of superstition. They were perpetually perplexed and delighted by the
beauty, reason, and order of the natural world and the cosmos. Their gods had
to be reason, and they were.
Archilochos, a seven-century BCE poet second
only to Homer in greatness, put the Greeks’ attitude towards their gods this
way. “Attribute,” he says, “all to the gods” (Fragment 23).
Erebos
(darkness) in Western cosmology
Some 3,000 years after the Greeks thought
out carefully their rational and beautiful picture of the cosmos, the cosmology
of the Western people is a black hole for gods and, to some degree, science as
well. By science I mean theory and applied reason, an intelligent way of making
sense of the massive and exquisitely beautiful cosmos.
I am not making fun of the technical achievements
of Western scientists. Their satellites and telescopes are expanding our
knowledge of the universe. I am simply suggesting that, when it comes to a theory
of cosmology explaining the origins and creation of the universe, the Western
view is, most probably, that of science fiction.
Western astronomers and physicists on the
dawn of the twenty-first century speak of the “inflation” theory of how the
universe came into being. They say they believe the “universe began in an
extraordinary explosion known as the Big Bang” (National Research Council, Nuclear Physics, 1999, p. 112). In
addition, they say that the universe arose from a very small matter during the
violent burst and a moment after it.
Brian Greene, a physicist making a career
out of the Big Bang theory, is quite certain that at the moment of the huge
blast “the whole of the universe erupted from a microscopic nugget whose size
makes a grain of sand look colossal” (The
Elegant Universe, 2000, p. 4).
Greene is a proponent of what he calls a
“superstring” or “string” theory, according to which, the particles of nature
behave not like point-particles but rather like loops of vibrating string.
These vibrating-string particles of nature, the electrons and quarks making up
the atoms, for instance, eliminate the incompatibility between quantum
mechanics (of the microscopic world) and general relativity (of the universe).
Is the
universe flat?
No wonder Greene is optimistic that this
string idea could, one day, put everything in the universe under the marching
orders of a single grand principle, a master equation. The string theory could
become a theory of everything. But that’s highly unlikely. So much power in the
hands of even a god would be dangerous. The Greeks knew that so they made their
gods and cosmogony, and cosmology democratic.
Western scientists, however, believe in a
neat separation between their science and society. They claim the universe is flat
because of the afterglow of the Big Bang. They dub the afterglow cosmic
microwave background radiation.
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| NASA's vision of the afterglow of the cosmic microwave background radiation. |
They sent a balloon-telescope 5,000 miles above
the earth. The telescope took pictures of background radiation and, from that
analysis of light, they say they captured photons (particles of light) dating
from the very moment of the Big Bang explosion, some 10 to15 billion years ago.
This claim boggles the mind in its overwhelming
demand for perfection and faith in perfect super-telescopes, satellites, and
high-tech science. We know, of course, that scientists and humans in general
are by no means perfect beings. To think that the truly gigantic cosmos sprang
from an atom, and was brought into existence by no less than an explosion, is
blind faith in miracles.
In addition, something like 95 percent of
the universe is invisible
to astronomers since it is dark matter or high-energy radiation. Yet Big Bang
cosmologists insist they are right from the questionable measurements they took
of the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation.
The Christian
metaphysics of the Big Bang Theory
The Big Bang explanation of the birth of the
universe is a child of Christian thinking dressed, first of all, in the
impressive Opticks and Principia works of Isaac Newton,
the eighteenth century British natural philosopher who believed in an infinite
universe made by the god of the Christians.
Newton’s universe lasted 200 years until the
Jewish physicist Albert Einstein in early twentieth century argued the universe
was of uniform density, curved space, and finite nature. Alexander Friedman, a
Russian mathematician writing in the 1920s when Einstein was proposing his
theories, said that the density of matter making up the universe was related to
time, suggesting that perhaps the universe was expanding.
Friedman’s hunch was made slightly more
plausible by the British astronomer Edwin Hubble who discovered that nebulae or
distant galaxies could possibly be moving away at great speeds – at least that
is what astronomers said about his measurements of the possible fast movement
of those extragalactic stellar systems. Hubble, however, saw no relation
between his observations of far away galaxies and the origins of the universe.
He was also doubtful the universe was expanding.
From these tenuous hints of Friedman and
Hubble – that the universe could, in theory, be expanding – the Big Bang
scientists constructed their preposterous claim that the cosmos came into being
15 billion years ago with the shuttering explosion of an infinitely small grain
of matter.
How convenient that these experts, whose
hubris has even dubbed their untenable speculation “the standard cosmological
model,” turned science upside down by reaching the same conclusion as the
Biblical legend of creation – that the Judeo-Christian god built the cosmos
from nothing.
This is a disturbing proposition that leaves
some scientists concerned about the nature of their enterprise. In 2015, some
physicists rejected the big Bang theory, arguing that the cosmos may have
existed forever.
The Big Bang theory brings into conflict fundamental ideas in science.
Gravitation, explaining huge forces of the
universe, and the quantum, making sense of the microscopic world, become
opposite to each other. Saying that the universe came out of a huge explosion
fails to explain the start of the cosmos, and, just as fundamentally, what about
before the Big Bang? “Nothing” is not legitimate for an answer.
Bernard Lovell, a British professor of radio
astronomy, asks the “ultimate” question. “If the universe evolved from the big
bang,” he says, “what existed in the beginning? To argue that the universe came
from nothing, as … contemporary theoretical cosmologists maintain, is a
brilliant mathematical evasion of a problem that may lie beyond human
understanding” (“Out of the Quagmire,” The
Times Literary Supplement, July 13, 2001, p. 4).
Greek
cosmology
The Greeks did not argue the universe came
out of nothing. Their commitment to philosophy and reason would not tolerate
such an absurdity. Greek cosmology assumes no one created the universe. Aristotle
said the universe is eternal (On the
Heavens 277b28-29). The cosmos is forever. It has no beginning or end.
Furthermore, Greek cosmology includes no mathematical or other kind of evasion.
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| Aion (Αιων) or immortality represented by the young man surrounded by the imaginary circle of the zodiac, thought to be the path of the Sun in the constellations. The sitting woman is the Earth and the children represent the seasons. Mosaic, Roman Villa, Sentinium, 1st half of the 3rd century BCE. Munich Glyptothek. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
Greek cosmologists included Eros in their
vision of the cosmos. Eros was the cosmos. Eros was the Earth and the gods.
There had to be intense love for all the magnificence of the universe. And the
Greeks tied everything with water without which no life is possible. But what
is attractive or philosophical about an explosion? Nothing.
Big
Bang: a mirror of the nuclear bomb
The Big Bang mirrors more than Christian
creation myths. It is even a stronger mirror of the Western scientists’
immersion in nuclear bombs. Now that “physicists” live with their nuclear bomb
creation, a monstrosity infinitely worse than the Greek monster Typhoios or
Typhon, they cook up the birth of the universe out of the only thing they know
and trust – atomic weapons. These terrestrial big-bang bombs blast any efforts
at a rational cosmology, which can make sense of all the data scientists have
about the universe. They are also pure evil.
Says Tyler Stevenson, a specialist in
nuclear disarmament: “We the people continue our mute permission of nuclear
weapons, death camps in our own backyards, with thousands of hydrogen furnaces
at the ready” (“The Moral Flaws in Our Peace,” Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2000).
With such political and cultural and
scientific reality molding the minds of scientists, how is it possible to think
of the beautiful cosmos as anything but the product of a massive nuclear
explosion, the Big Bang?
We
need the Greek cosmic vision
This is another way of saying that we need
the Greeks desperately now more than ever. Their cosmos may still inspire clear
thinking about the purposes of human life, terrestrial life, and the life of
the universe.
Western industrial societies are
monotheistic. Their economic models of extracting “resources” from the Earth
have been threatening civilization. They heat up the Earth and pollute the
global environment. They give disease and death to people and wildlife. In
addition, the vision of these industrialized societies includes nuclear bombs,
perpetual wars, and development-like wars against the natural world.
We must face this ominous situation with
Hellenic courage. Master science and technologies, but pass them through the
filters of Hellenic thought and ethics. If this knowledge is inimical to life,
discard it. If it sponsors the hegemony of the oligarchs, resist it. Build a
new world with the insights of Greek natural philosophers. Take it for granted,
the natural world and the cosmos are divine. Love and study the natural world and
the cosmos for knowledge, truth and wisdom.
This means, no matter what we do, our
environmental and social policies must reflect our love for nature.
Other priorities for a sustainable, Hellenic-like
society should include: Scaling down the sizes of farms so that a working family
can do all the work. Grow a variety of food without the use of pesticides or
genetic engineering of crops. Become self-reliant and involved in your
community, town and country. Clean up pollution and ban toxic chemicals. Convince
the politicians to work for environmental protection and the universal
abolition of nuclear weapons.
The Greeks in Greece must wake up from their
slumber and fight for their freedom. Say enough with the insults and orders and
borrowing money from the European Union. Elect patriots and get out of the
European Union. Be self-reliant in food – and everything else. There’s no
reason Greeks can’t build electric cars, solar panels or busses and railroads. There’s
no reason Greeks need so much foreign influence. Revitalize the villages. Each
village can add to the country’s prosperity and strength. Turn to the Sun for
energy for the entire country.
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