Joshua Billings: “Natural (a)theology: atheism, providence, and the evidence of the senses. ”

The paper argues that a significant philosophical development of the late fifth century is the idea that the existence and workings of divinity are deducible from natural phenomena, and the development of modes of reasoning from visible to invisible. While Greek culture had broadly believed that the gods were present and active in nature and human life, it is in the late fifth century that thinkers broadly begin to extrapolate from nature to divinity. This takes two opposed forms, which I argue are dialectically related: a negative theology, which concludes the non-existence or non-involvement of the gods from features of human life (particularly the lack of punishment for injustice); and a positive theology, which reasons the involvement and benevolence of the gods on the basis of features of the human constitution and environment. The former is demonstrated by the Aristophanic Socrates, the Euripidean Bellerophon, multiple medical texts, and fragments of Thrasymachus and possibly Antiphon; the latter, which often presents itself as a response, is found most explicitly in Euripides’ Suppliants and Xenophon’s Memorabilia (where it has been connected to the historical Socrates). These discussions demonstrate important continuities in long-standing questions of divine justice while also reflecting, I argue, a new attitude toward the evidence of the senses.