Demitheism

In honor of Easter and Passover, I'm going to revisit a topic I used to be very interested in, but haven't messed with much in years: demitheism. Demitheism is a word that I invented years ago to mean “middle positions between theism and atheism, between 'a God exists' and 'no God exists.'” (Between explicit hard theism and explicit hard atheism - for both terms there is considerable dispute on how best to define them, and we could be vastly more careful if we we're doing basically back of the napkin philosophical sketches.) Thus demitheism tends to be compromise positions that answer “does God exist?” with things like “well sorta, it's complicated.” You might think that there is little space for compomise here, and even less motive to try, after all people who believe in God tend to BELIEVE, and people who reject belief in God, tend to REJECT. But, in fact, you can build lots of interesting middle positions here, and historically philosophers have felt pushed towards demitheisms by a wide variety of concerns and pressures.

The most obvious and widely explored middle position here is agnosticism, the position that one does not personally know whether one or more Gods exist or not. OK, fair enough, I don't have much to say about agnosticism that hasn't been said before, but I think there are lots more possibilities. To quote myself 12 years ago:

“But agnosticism is only the beginning of the possible range of middle positions. Perhaps the claim “a God exists” is factually meaningless and therefore in neither true nor false, what A. J. Ayer called theological noncognativism. Perhaps the claim “a God exists” is meaningful, but still manages to be neither-true-nor-false, because Aristotle’s law of excluded middle is an error. Perhaps the claim “a God exists” is both-true-and-false. Perhaps existence is a fuzzy predicate over divinities, and the truth-value of the claim “at least one God exists” is .73. Perhaps God’s existence is underdetermined by the facts, but both God’s existence and non-existence are consistent extensions of the facts. Perhaps the existence of at least one God is a claim that rational agents should assert on some occasions, and retract on other occasions. Perhaps all rational agents should assert this claim at some point in their lives, but should also retract it eventually. Perhaps the appropriate reply to someone who asserts that “a God exists” is not the same on every occasion.”

And as we'll see we could go on. I came to demitheisms originally as a way of thinking about logical structure, what are the options for creating meaningful middle positions? What are the places in our practices of giving and critiquing accounts where there is space for middle positions like this? But, over time I've also become interested in the question of why someone might WANT to take a complicated middle position on a topic that has more usually been disputed between sharply divided camps.

Agnostic Demitheism

Most basically, one might simply be interested in humbly admitting the limits of one's own personal knowledge. If you say “I personally don't know whether a God exists or not,” you are staking a middle position between atheism and theism, but you aren't really asserting a middle position. You aren't saying that theism and atheism are both inadequate or incomplete; one of them might still turn out to be dead right, just that you aren't convinced of either yet. You aren't disagreeing with atheism or theism, you are merely unconvinced. There is lots of space for non-assertive forms of demitheism. “Weak” atheism or “implicit” is lack of belief in any God, without actually rejecting belief in any God. Perhaps one has simply never considered the issue, or perhaps one grew up with a conceptual scheme where gods and their lacks are not an obvious issue for reflection. Perhaps one is pre-verbal or brain damaged. Similarly, I've always thought there is space for “implicit” or “weak” theisms, people who have some belief in God, but haven't ever really understood atheism enough to consciously reject it. A child perhaps raised in a family which believes in God, but who hasn't ever reflected for themselves yet much on the topic.

We may simply not have reflected enough to reach a solid opinion, or perhaps we have reflected, but not found any grounds yet that seem particularly decisive to us. Some agnostics still hope that they will eventually come down on one side or the other, but are as it were, still undecided. Other agnostics feel like they have exhausted any strategy they might have for coming to know the answer (short of death or miracle), and no longer have much hope of deciding the issue. As a semi-joke we call a “militant agnostic” someone who takes the position “I don't know if God exists, and neither do you.” This starts looking more like an assertive position on the limits of human knowledge, than a mere admission of one's own lack of knowledge, but I've known folks that believed this way on basically epistemic grounds.  It is perfectly possible to be a demitheist on epistemic grounds. If a God existed that wanted to hide its existence (perhaps to avoid being blamed for past decisions), it's hard to imagine how humans would go about trying to “catch” a hiding God.

Buddhist and Ignostic Demitheisms -

Gautama Buddha famously supposedly takes a middle position on the existence of a creator deity. Story goes, that Buddha is asked if there was a single creator Deity ultimately responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. And Buddha is supposedly omniscient at this point (or rather has all-embracing-knowledge, sarvajnajnana – the difference between Western and Buddhist conceptions of omniscience is an interesting topic in it's own right). Buddha replies that if a man was shot by a poison arrow, he might be anxious on the question of who shot him, but the more pressing concern is getting the poison arrow out, and inquiry into who is responsible can wait until later. Similarly, Buddha argues, we need to escape the bonds of suffering first, and the question of whether a single creator God exists or not is not helpful until, at best, after this process has been completed. Buddha leaves open the possibility that the answer might turn out to be yes, or no, or it's complicated. Perhaps the process of becoming enlightened and escaping suffering will dissolve the question completely. (The story is told in the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, as one of the 14 unanswerable question, and some of the others are explicitly stated to be destined to dissolve, if I recall right). Buddha's worry seems not to be about the limits of knowledge, but about what kind of metaphysical disputes are helpful or non-helpful. He refuses to answer about whether the universe is infinite or finite, eternal or not, and whether the self (jiva) is identical to the body or not. He characterizes answers to these as being like a net of theories that can entangle one, and refuses to be “drawn into” the net. This is clearly a different kind of theological non-assertion, from the agnostic and with a different motivation.

Similarly, Rabbi Sherwin Wine coins the term “ignosticism” in the process of trying to articulate a view in the 1960s. He argues that before we can even productively dispute about whether a God or gods exist or not we have to clarify the meaning of the term “God” sufficiently for us to be able to dispute with each other rather than talk past each other. Before the question “does God exist?” can be responsibly explored we have to answer a “prerequisite” question, “What do we mean by 'God' in the question “Does God exist?'” The problem according to Wine, is that we never actually finish answering the prerequisite question sufficiently, to be able to ask the existence question appropriately. The question of whether God exists or not never manages to arise, we live and die, and spend our lives and loves working slowly towards the question. This is what he calls the ignostic position. It's traditional to interpret Wine and Ignosticism as a species of theological noncognativism ala Ayer's (we'll see more in a bit), but I've always found it more similar to the Buddha's worry. The problem that animates Wine, is not that the statement “God exists” might turn out meaningless rather than true or false, but that it is not-meaningful-yet, that we have more pressing issues to deal with, before we can give that problem the attention that it eventually deserves.

Pyrrhonist Demitheism

A traditional agnostic claims not to know whether God exists or not, but isn't necessarily actively cultivating this absence of knowledge. A Pyrrhonist skeptic takes a more programmatic approach, actively working to cultivate an absence of knowledge and even belief on weighty topics like whether or not God exists. Like Buddha, the Pyrrhonist is trying to avoid being tangled up in nets of theory. The Pyrrhonist skeptic seeks to balance arguments in favor of God's existence with arguments opposing God's existence and thereby come to an “epoche” – or suspension of belief, where balanced between competing considerations one finds one self in a lack of belief. If you find one side of the argument or the other to be overly tempting, you spend extra effort exploring the opposite side to restore balance. If you have insufficient arguments for one side, you employ one or more of the host of “modes” or generic arguments about the limits of human knowledge to help restore balance. The idea here is not at all like modern atheistic skepticism, but rather an active balancing of position in an attempt to “cancel out” both and remain at an extremely refined point of balance. The tradition has a lot of technical language about how to employ non-assertive “sounds” of skepticism “maybe” “perhaps it is so” “I suspend judgment” etc. The idea is that by attaining a very refined mental state of non-judgment, the skeptic will wind up in a fortunate mental state of having minimized their troubles as much as they can. For the Pyrrhonist skeptic taking a middle position between theism and atheism is part of a larger project of programmatically taking middle positions whenever one is able to, and this is though to be personally salutary.

Ontological Demitheisms

Even if you in some sense believe in God, God looks like a tricky limit case for the problem of existence. You can start from very traditional theism, and find yourself pushed slowly into saying careful complex, tricksy things about the extent to which God exists. In traditional Christian theology, for example, God is Creator, and all other things are Creations. God is radically unlike all created beings in a wide variety of ways, God has no parts, for example, and doesn't experience change, or indeed “undergo” or “experience” any thing of any kind.  God, as it were, happens to other things, things don't happen to God. Thomas Aquinas trying to do hard onto-theology in Book 1 of his Summa Theologica, has to say things like “God is not a substance” “God is not any sort of thing” and “God has no properties other than his own nature.” To the extent that God exists, God exists in a way radically dissimilar from the way all other things exist. Now there are lots of classic worries that things like words and intellectual categories break down when we are trying to apply them to God, and we'll see more of these in a bit, but words like “being” or “existence” are especially problematic cases. If God “exists,” then God “exists” in a way radically different from all other things that “exist” so why use the word “exist?” Indeed, sometimes basically theistic theologians will bite that bullet and say that God is “super-existent” rather than “existent” or is beyond-being, rather than being a being among beings.

Paul Tillich famously pushes this a little further, if God is Being (das Seiende) even the highest Being, then God cannot properly be said to be the source of all being, or the ground of all being, and thus, it is preferable to think of God as the ground of being-itself, and therefore not an example of being. You can see similar moves in Origen and Middle Platonism. Or to bring up more recent cases, recent Continental thinkers like to point out that a discourse requires some kind of ineffable background which grounds the discourse and can never properly become a foregrounded topic of that style of discourse.  In a similar way, beings require a framework-for-being to be, especially to be as-what-they-are, to be-in-the-foreground, and the framework-for-being cannot properly be. But when we start inquiring as much as we are able, into how to characterize or talk about the framework-for-being, it starts looking a lot like some of the ways theologians have talked about God.

Or we can phrase the problem in Heideggerese. We thought we knew what we meant by the term “being,” but now we are perplexed. If Wine's Ignosticism worries that we spend our whole lives exploring the question of the meaning of the term “God” and never progress to truly examining whether “God” exists - a later day Heideggerian can imagine us spending our whole lives exploring the question of the meaning of being, and never getting far enough in ontology to really understand being or existence well enough to truly progress to examining whether God “exists.” The theist finds that God's ontological situation is so different from the ontological situation of most beings that they start getting pushed to demitheism. The atheist ontologist finds that the nature and ground of being is so problematic, that even if they reject God, they wind up describing something vaguely similar playing similar roles.

Ineffabilist Demitheisms

Or perhaps the problem is not so much God's odd relationship with being, but God's odd relationship with words or conceptions. If we think that God is “ineffable” or “beyond all conceptualizations” then in particular “God exists” is going to fail to be true. Perhaps one thinks that all words fail to live up to the transcendent God, but some words nonetheless wind up being aimed at glorifying God.

One way that my favorite old theologian (Pseudo-Dionysius) puts it, is that each conception we have or try to frame to describe God, winds up describing something less than God, which we argue if they exist or not “We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it.” (The Mystical Theology, 1048B). When we say that God is Goodness, or Being-itself, or the Creator or All, or the big bearded Patriarch in the Sky, an omniscient-omnipotent-omnibenevolent person or whatever, these are conceptions which we can attempt to dispute as to whether they are existent or non-existent, but none of these are God. (At one point he calls them underhanging logoi.) We are really debating about the existence or non-existence of our own imperfect and limited conceptions of God. In a sense, we are back to Ignosticism, but rather than arguing, we should live our lives as a slow exploration of or journey towards (or wrestling match with) God, we are worrying that the mechanism of reference is failing us. For Pseudo-Dionysius, talking about God, much less disputing about God always winds up making a strawman argument. Indeed, in this picture, even if I try to assert that God exists, I fail and wind up only asserting something like this-conception-of-God-that-I-like-to-use exists.

Apophatic Demitheisms

We can get far more sophisticated in our accounts of the ineffability of God, and the many theological strategies that have been used over the ages to partially cope with this problem. Pseudo-Dionysius in particular has several other strategies, besides the one I just mentioned, but we are drifting towards my dissertation here, and I can talk too much about it. Short version, Pseudo-Dionysius has a methodology for trying to talking about God to the extent we can, while admitting it is impossible. This method involves making affirmations and denial in particular orders for particular reasons. This means that Pseudo-Dionysius asserts that God exists at one point, and denies that God exists at another point and says that God is beyond all assertions and denials at a third. We call it “apophasis” - “speaking-away” when someone says something, but also tries to “unsay” it, denying the things they themselves have asserted. In particular, Pseudo-Dionysius thinks that both the affirmation and denial that God exist, are useful things to teach people at different particular stages of their spiritual development. We encourage people to journey towards God by affirming conceptions a little bit more noble than what they already understand, and denying conceptions that they are already ready to outgrow. In a sense, the issue here is spiritual pedagogy, rather than epistemology, ontology, or philosophy of language. We assert “'Conception x of God' exists” and we deny “'Conception x-1 of God' exists.” But later on we will assert “'conception x+1 of God' exists” and deny “conception x of God' exists” for basically the same reasons. Eventually we will even deny of all conceptions of God that they exist, without affirming of any replacement conception, but only once we are confident that the student has understood the basic pattern leading to an apophatic demitheism.  Another funny thing about this picture, in a sense theism and atheism are imagined as working together here in a joint project of improving our understanding of God.

Demitheism as a Translation problem

Another fun form and motive for Demitheism is when we try to make sense of disparate traditions using common vocabulary, or use one style of philosophy to try to understand another. So for example, Samkhya-darsana and Yoga-darsana are two of the six orthodox (we might say “astika”) schools of traditional Hindu philosophy – we might say the Rationalist school and the Yoga school. Both are probably developing in the late BCE centuries and reach their traditional form in the early CE centuries, and both are remarkably similar.

But if we ask if the Samkhya-darsana of ancient Indian “Rationalists” were atheists things get complicated. For one thing, they are traditionally categorized as an “astika” (literally “there exists”) school rather than a “nastika” (“there doesn't exist”) school. In modern Hindi, astika does mean "theist," and nastika "atheist," and the classical-medieval six astika schools and four nastika schools do roughly fit this typology. But is that what “astika” really meant in classical and medieval times? There is dispute among medieval and modern scholars about what makes one school astika while another is nastika … is it taking the Vedas as authoritative (Manusmirti's 5^th cent? position) or perhaps belief in another world for transmigration (Haribhadra's 9^th cent position) or perhaps belief in an atman (Ghurye's 21^st cent position) that makes a school astika. Heck, Nagarjuna in the 2^nd (ish) century, lists Samkhya as a nastika school, even though most authorities list it as astika, so there may have been dispute there.

But, the question of whether the Samkhya-darsana were “atheists” or not gets even thornier. The Samkhya believed in “prakriti” but not “ishvara.” Indeed, the Yoga school has different aims and focus, but mostly borrow the Samkhya metaphysics whole cloth, except to add “ishvara” as one additional element of the metaphysical picture.  Roughly, prakriti is unified material being. It is a single thing which differentiates into smaller things. It is an uncaused cause. A prime mover and first cause, and the source of all material being. It is the ground of material being. You'll see it translated as “nature” sometimes, but it is “Nature” in the sense of an ontological prerequisite, not “nature” as the opposite of “culture” or “artificiality.” “Ishvara” in contrast, is a word for a personal God, or perhaps for a Supreme Being, it literally means the ruler of beauty, or maybe beloved lord.  Ishvara often means God conceived as transcendent over other gods, or the God to which one is most personally devoted, or God conceived as an object of desire. Most Hindu philosophies have thought of brahman/atman, as combining both prakriti and ishvara, as being both the first cause of all things, and the final cause of all things, as being both the source of being and the most supreme of beings. And that's how Abrahamic conceptions of God, usually work too, God is both being and lord, both first and last, both ground and ultimate goal. But the Samkhya school of philosophy asserts and explores the existence of prakriti, while denying and arguing against ishvara. And it's not entirely clear how to talk about this in other languages. Is the Samkhya saying that God exists, but not as a personal God? Perhaps, it is trying to be what we might call “Deist” but not “Theist.” Although that way of talking is problematic since they accept both holy scriptures and religious rituals. Or maybe the point of this is to accept efficient causation while denying final causation (although again their causal theories are complicated and use pretty different terminology than Hellenistic ideas of causation). Or maybe the point is to deny any kind of moral force or rightness to the way the universe is unfolding. Or maybe it's frankly “atheist.” Certainly the Samkhya school gets accused of atheism a lot in modern India. Nor are there really living Samkhyaist to address the question to, and the most obvious descendants of the samkhya-darshana, the yoga-darsana and shaiva siddanta, both gave up the rejection of ishvara. Samkhya has no problem with Aristotle's God, a first cause of all things, but it rejects Plato's form of the good. So uhm, are they theists or atheists? Er … it's not just a problem with theology, or pedagogy, or philosophy of language, but rather the contexts and histories are just so different … They never interacted with the word “theos” one way of the other, but neither did they ignore it. Rather they talked in their own way, in their own tradition, and we trying to categorize them, need some middle position between theism and atheism to do justice to their belief in prakriti as well as their rejection of ishvara.

Dialethist Demitheism

Dialethism is the position that there are true contradictions, that sometimes a statement and it's negation are both true. This directly violated Aristotle's understanding of the law of non-contradiction, but so be it, such philosophers disagree with Aristotle, it's not like that's never happened before. It is possible to motivate Dialetheism from several different cases, such as the liar's paradox or Russell's paradox. Graham Priest, the granddaddy of modern Dialethism, argues that dialethia arise at the boundaries of the expressable in a variety of contexts in formal semantics. Modern western Dialethists are usually motivated by issues in logic, rather than say ontology or theology – the sorites problem or the problem of reasoning from inconsistent case law. But there usually is an acknowledgement of the role of dialethic reasoning in Eastern philosophical contexts, the Buddhist logical system catuskoti, the Jain insistence on anekantavada, the role of nonduals in zen Buddhism, etc. If we are going to believe in true contradictions anyway, the question of God's existence seems like a classic case of a place we might want to assert a dialethia, for any or several of the reasons already mentioned. If God is importantly beyond existence, then perhaps we should say of “God exists” that it is both-true-and-false, or that “God exists” and “God does not exist” are both true, or however we like to phrase our asserted dialethia.

Summarizationist Demitheism

So my own position on philosophy of language and truth is an “error theory” in which all claims come out as being false if we are careful enough. Often I call my position summarizationism. Statements, properly understood, are trying to summarize complex situations for some particular purpose. Statements about the world always wind up being, in fact, false, but are often, helpful, appropriate summaries, or “close enough” for their intended purpose. This isn't really even a failing of language, statements are trying to draw our attention to some aspects of our complicated world, while eliding and drawing attention away from others. Rather truth is an overly strong goal, that misunderstands what we want out of semantics. Our world always transcends us. The situation is always more complicated than we can say. Words always fall short of worldly realities. Even these words. Obviously, like many of the other positions mentioned, I need to get cozy with self-refutation, but I'm OK with that.

One of the side effects of my general understanding of language and truth, is that I have to be a demitheist when it comes to God. “God exists” and “God doesn't exist” are both false. Both oversimplifications of a case which transcends us. And for me, God is not unique in this respect. “I exist” and “I don't exist” or even “The USA exists” and “The USA doesn't exist” are going to have roughly the same problem. The situation is too complicated. The USA is a political fiction, but a political fiction with real bite and a real history. I myself am more and less than my conceptions of myself. The world includes beings which need a ground of being, and also which stand-out from the background on their own (ex-ist, from ex-stare, “stand away from”). I'm like a Jain asserting anekantavada – the non-one-sideness of all things. The world just doesn't really fit into words, and neither do things like God which might be importantly beyond-the-world in some sense.

Theological Non-Cognativism

Logical Positivists used to argue that for an empirical claim to have factual meaningfulness it ought to have testable truth-conditions. Otherwise, we might waste time and mental energy trying to falsify claims (or better pseudo-claims) that are not even falsifiable in principle. Because of human limits, we must establish limits to the claims we are allowed to treat as factually meaningful, so that science can conduct its business effectively. Thus, a scientific materialist atheist, may find that their understanding of the philosophy of science forces them to back away from strong atheism, and assert instead that the claim “a God exists” is not factually meaningful, rather than being factually false. This view came to be known as theological non-cognativism, the idea that the claim “God exists” is meaningless because it lacks good testability conditions, rather than it being actually false, and it had quite a life in Anglo Philosophy from say the 1930s to 1980s. The theological non-cognativism of AJ Ayers looks like it's just atheism “phrased differently,” but the theological non-cognativism of someone like Dewi Phillips looks far more like someone searching for ways to talk about the weird grounds between theism and atheism.

Eventually, though many parts of the logical picture of the Logical Positivists have been beaten up badly over the course of the twentieth century. Quine argued that the empirical vs analytic distinction won’t hold up to close scrutiny, and that there is no strict distinction between observations and theoretical claims. Popper argued that falsifiability is a requirement for distinctively scientific claims, but not for all factual claims. Kuhn argued that claims which are factually meaningful in one paradigm are often factually incommensurate with claims from another paradigm. The Logical Positivist rules about meaningfulness seem to cut against themselves. Heck, Alston and Hick even used to argue that “eschatological verificationism” could supply adequate testability conditions to the hypothesis of God's existence dealing with the problem head on. Nonetheless, even if we can’t form rigorous criteria for when a claim is or is not factually meaningful, it might look like the claim “A God exists” is a particularly tempting candidate for being a non-factually meaningful claim.

Similarly Wittgenstein has a slightly different take on how roughly Positivist worries effect religion. According to him, the sense of the world must lie outside of the world, and thus outside of the possibility of expressing it via pictures of the world, and thus outside of the possibility of expressing it via language (6.4-7). Ethics, aesthetics, God, and the problems of life, all lie outside of the realm of possible speech, according to the Tractatus. Thus a Wittgensteinian might be suspicious of metaphysics of any kind, asserting OR denying the existence of God. Indeed, Wittgenstein goes one step further, he says “6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.” And while this is more extreme than traditional theism, religious perspectives have often wanted to imagine God as transcending the world in some sense, so as to distinguish theism from pantheism. Indeed, if God pre-existed the world and created the world, it would be odd to think of God as one of the beings IN the world.

But we habitually use the word “exists” to refer to beings which are in the world, such as chairs, or people, or lizards. Indeed, sometimes we even think that when we assert something’s existence we are asserting that it is in-the-world. But if so, then the transcendentalist theist’s claim that “God exists, but not as a being in the world” could be rendered as “God has some form of being other than existence” or “No God exists, although some God has a form of being other than being-in-the-world.” The more we take existence to be a matter of falling under the scope of an existential quantifier, the more extra-worldly being starts looking like non-existence.

Consistent Extension Demitheism

Another motivation for demitheism that I always use to explore, is what I called “consistent extension” demitheism, although I'm not familiar with anyone who has actually advanced this one. The idea is to look by analogy at cases like the axiom of choice, or the parallel postulate, or the relations between normal modal logics. The Axiom of Choice is formally independent of Zermelo-Fraekel set theory, ZF, which means that ZFC and ZF~C are both consistent and non-equivalent extension of ZF. ZF is “neutral” with respect to the axiom of choice. The axiom of choice is not already contained within ZF set theory, but both it and it's denial can be added to ZF set theory yielding coherent accounts of sets. Similarly the “neutral” geometry can be consistently extended to Euclidean, hyperbolic, or elliptical geometries.  Or the “smallest” Normal Modal Logic, K, can be consistently extended in a variety of importantly different and inter-related ways (T, D, S4, S5, etc.).

OK now imagine world W, where a complete enumeration of the truths of that world, such as they are, (or better yet the deductive closure of W, W*) contained nothing that implied or amounted to either the claim “God exists” or “God doesn't exist” but that W + “God exists” and W + “God doesn't exist” were each, non-equivalent consistent extensions of world W. Such a world would be “neutral” or “ambiguous” with respect to God's existence. God's existence would be unprovable in such a world (because it is independent), but so would the denial of God's existence. The facts of the world would be capable of being given multiple interpretations, including an interpretation in which God exists (or more likely several distinct such interpretations), and at least one interpretation in which God does not exist. God's existence would be underdetermined by the facts of the world. No worldly test in world W would disambiguate God's existence. In a sense, God “hides” from world W. Any intervention God makes in world W, requires a layer of plausible deniability, so that it is possible to interpret the facts of the event as something other than God's intervention, even if it also possible to interpret the event as God's intervention. W is, in a sense, a “fideist” world, a world where the facts are insufficient to falsify disparate faiths as to the interpretation of the facts.

I don't really want to assert that our world is a world like W. (In fact I think that truths and facts don't really work like that, so when you try to enumerate the truths of our world you get none, so the formalization just doesn't work). But I still think this is a sort of helpful analogy for imagining what a world where Fideism worked would be like. The facts always underdetermine the interpretation of the facts. A world that you can interpret with or without a God, doesn't really seem that alien to me.

OK – so obviously each of those could be a little paperlet or blog post on its own. And I haven't even tried to tackle say, Hegel, or Heraclitus, or Zhuangzi's understanding of the “maker of all,” or say Kant's understanding of the fourth antinomy of reason with respect to the existence of an absolutely necessary being, and also not. We could find more philosophical motivations to be pushed to complex middle positions between theism and atheism if we wanted. My goal here is really just to give a sketch of a bunch of them to show that many people, for many reasons, find the terrain between atheism and theism to be compelling.

Chasing Eunouchos and Saris

I have a writing on Jesus' interaction with gender-odd people, that I have started and given up/bogged down on three times now. Trying to talk about early Jewish ideas about gender-odd people, or Greek ideas about gender-odd people have similar issues. It's all very complicated, and there is a lot of evidence that is suggestive, but very little that is particularly decisive. And there are so many methodological problems. And so many assumptions that might be challengeable, or might not … I keep hoping for a bright grad student to spend months and months sorting it all out for me … Or maybe a scholar already has somewhere, and I just haven't found it. … So rather than giving answers I'm going to try to share some of my frustrations …

One of the first basic issue is this. At Matthew 19, Jesus talks about three kinds of “eunuchs.” The Greek here is “eunouchos” which the Septuagint regularly uses for the Aramaic term “saris.” So did Jesus actually say the Greek word “eunouchos” or the Aramaic/Hebrew word “saris” (or something else?), and the author of Matthew just chose the Greek work “eunouchos” to render whatever Jesus said into Greek? Well, it probably depends on just how bilingual you think Jesus was, which is controversial, and has lots of suggestive evidence. Moreover what did “eunouchos” mean in Greek at the time? Was it a term specifically for males who had been castrated and typically served as royal servants? Or was is a broader category for a variety of gender-odd people in Greek thought, including but not limited to castrated male royal servants? I can find suggestive evidence for each side and people advancing that interpretation. Certainly the broader notion comes into use by the next century. What about “saris”? Again it looks like castrated male royal servants are the main meaning in the Hebrew and Aramaic of a century or two earlier. But the Hebrew of a century of two later, seems to treat “saris” as a much broader category. So what did it mean in Jesus' day? In Jesus' mouth? In this specific context? It completely shifts the meaning of passage as a whole, how you take these terms … There is lots of reason to think that several different traditions and cultures worth of understanding of the castrated and gender-odd were colliding in the Roman Empire around this time, the Greek, the Phyrigian, the Roman, the Jewish, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Mesopotamian Semitic, etc. The idea the “eunuch” in English specifically means castrated male seems pretty entrenched, but it's not that hard to find people who use the term otherwise, so there are lots and lots of problems with interpretation.

1) Cultural Imperialism vs Overly Uniquifying the Modern

So the smart scholar I've been corresponding with puts the first worry this way.

“I'm not saying that there weren't always people who felt different or who felt that they did not fit into the binary gender system. I just wonder whether they thought about themselves in the same terms we do today... whether they could actually conceive of a third or intermediate or indeterminate gender as being a suitable label to embrace, because the idea simply hadn't been floated yet. It makes me think a little of the situation with gay/lesbian sexual identity. You have to wait until the 19th century to find the intellectual underpinnings of what we now think of as sexual identity. There were always gay people, but the idea of a non-heterosexual identity just wasn't there until the modern period. So I think we have to be careful not to get into "cultural imperialism," imposing our modern way of thinking onto the past.”

2nd Century Gallus Priest

Well, first, Rome officially adopted Cybele as a State Goddess in 204BCE, and her priesthood coming out the Phyrigian tradition, were “galli.” They wore women's costumes, mostly yellow in color, and a sort of turban, together with pendants and ear-rings, wore heavy make-up, and wore their hair long a bleached. They typically castrated themselves. They were a familiar sight in Rome, and other parts of the Greco-Roman world. And Romans used phrases like “medium genus” and “tertium sexus” to describe them (“middle kind of people” or “third sex.”) So yeah, the ancients definitely at least had the idea or concept of a third or intermediate gender or sex, as an available possibility, whatever they thought of that possibility.  And whether that was their usual way of thinking about gender-odd folks or not. And yes the Galli were routinely called “eunouchos” in Greek. And don't get me started on India, and how much cultural interaction there was between India and the Greco-Roman world.

But, the bigger point about “cultural imperialism” is a real worry, but a complex one. The terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are from the 19^th century, it's true. Earlier people carved up the complex domain of gender, sexuality, attraction, identity and so on, in different ways with different terms and idioms, and often different ideologies as well. There were lots of ways of talking and thinking about sexual identities other than heterosexual ones long before the 19^th century though, and this was something that interested many people in many time periods. Plato in the symposium, for instance has Aristophanes talking about male-male lovers as “people of the sun,” female-female lovers as “people of the earth” and male-female lovers as “people of the moon.” Clearly, Aristophanes speech is intended to explore the rhetorical possibilities of humor and satire, but it is also advancing a picture of preferences and identity. The topic of homosexuality in the Ancient world is a complex and fairly well explored one, and it is very much a mistake to project modern categories like “homosexual” onto them, but the ancients certainly used plenty of intellectual categories of their own, and made lots of distinctions in attraction and identity. They just carved the space differently. The distinction between penetrating and being penetrated, and what kind of motive one had for being penetrated was crucial, whereas whether one preferred penetrating males or females was often considered minor. And if we look at other pre-modern contexts, say medieval China, or Shakespearean England, we are going to find different terms, idioms, and concepts, and none are going to be exactly like the 19^th and 20^th century idea of “homosexuality” but neither are they going to lack the intellectual underpinnings to think and talk about sexual identity in their own idioms and categories.

There is definitely a danger of “cultural imperialism” of overly using our own intellectual categories to think about other times and cultures. But there is an opposite danger too. We can over-emphasize the uniqueness of the modern, by refusing to look at similarities to other times or cultures. Maybe we want to flatter ourselves that our culture is “advanced” or “special” or “distinctive” and it really is in some ways, but it is easy to want to exaggerate this. Or maybe we want to portray our society as “fallen” in some important ways, and want to dismiss or under-emphasize ways in which other societies struggled with similar issues.

There is LOTS of evidence that various cultures of the ancient world struggled with the gender binary in various ways. Sometimes scholars just assumed that gender wasn't binary. Sometimes people assumed binaryness, but there were rebels. Sometimes gender binaries were really about trying to suppress the power of women culturally or politically, other times that motive seems less central. A good history of the gender binary in the West, and resistance to it, would be a long hard, (valuable) project, and if someone has done it and I haven't seen it, I'd love to know.

Certainly there were people in the Mediterranean in Jesus' time who were thought of as non-binary by their contemporaries. But how many? Of what kinds? How did people think or talk about them? What were concepts employed? Did Jesus know or say anything about them?

2) Fine details in terms and concepts and the limits of evidence

Galen uses the term “eunouchos” to include people who are born with ambiguous genitalia, and for people who have male genitalia but are impotent or heavily feminized, as well as for people who have had male genitalia removed. Lucian in the 2^nd century, says that someone who has intact genitals but is unable to penetrate a woman is also a eunuch.  Is that usage more common, or limited to the 2^nd century only, or what?  Aristotle and Hippocrates both mention that men unable to procreate from birth even with a full set of genitals are "eunouchos."  The Septuagint uses “eunouchos” to translate a discussion of a merely infertile male at Wisdom 3:14, and that's like 3^rd century BCE, so the word was used for more than just castrated-folks even before Jesus. Latin uses the terms castratus, eunuchus, and spado, (as well as eviratio vs. castratio). Are there important distinctions between them? Probably. (OK I learned more, the Pandicts, 6th cent Roman laws clarify this quite a bit, the wikipedia on eunuch is more helpful than my Latin dictionaries here.  Spadones are folks who lack generative power, whether their genitals are intact or not, castrati have damaged or missing genitals.  Spadones are allowed to marry, adopt, and institute posthumous heirs, unless they are also castrati.  The Pandicts are clear that someone can be "eunuchus" and still even able to procreate.  Now how many of those distinctions are in place centuries earlier?).  The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon lists 9 different terms as meaning eunuch or chief eunuch (and from a bunch of different roots, including an Aramaic transliteration of the Greek term eunouchos, and the Hebrew tumtum isn't one of them). Were there important distinctions among these many terms? Probably.  NINE terms.  Are there other terms in Greek besides eunouchos that were near in meaning to it, but had important differences? Probably. There is a lot of dispute about the etymology of the Greek eunouchos, some tracing it to eune / bed in various ways, or to eunoein / good minded, or to eunis + okheuein / deprived of mating. And that plays into controversies on the words meaning. Is a gay man a eunuch? An impotent but intact heterosexual? A person with a micropenis? A trans-woman who has undergone genital surgery? A Catholic priest? A celibate woman? A non-binary person who is no longer fertile, but has kids and a marriage already (like ME)? If that seems like projecting OUR concerns into the past, notice that ancient Greek speakers seemed to disagree about the case of the impotent, or the infertile, or the uninterested in marriage, or the purposefully choosing not to engage in marriage despite it's attractions, or the potent but not with women. Who the hell counts as a eunuch?

Maybe we could sort some of this out with a lot of footwork, but probably there is enough subtlety to the terms and their shifts over time, and uses in different polemic contexts, that many of the maddening questions are going to be unanswerable.

3) Axes to grind

Even apart from worries about cultural imperialism, I clearly have an axe to grind here. I'm non-binary and trans and looking for places that ancient thought dealt with non-binary people or trans people, or whatever the closest equivalents they could frame in their own idioms were. And there is a sense in which I'm working on this largely to try to make sense of Matt 19. (Other ideas like androgynos, or hermaphoditus, or galli, or the myth of Tiresias, or Hercules' crossdressing, become important if we are trying to understand more Pagan understandings of ancient non-binary and trans -like people)

But there are plenty of gay scholars, who think, plausibly of eunouchos as a term for men so gay that they were unwilling or unable to procreate with women, despite social pressure to do so.  They see in Matt 19, Jesus discussing something like homosexuality, but in pre-modern terms. And there are plenty of conservative scholars who think of eunouchos as a term for people who choose celibacy, like the priesthood that is eventually started in Jesus' name, and see Matt 19 very much in terms of the celibacy of the priesthood.

That means that this isn't just a term from another culture, or a term we have suggestive but sketchy evidence on, but a term that is itself a thing to be fought over in the modern world. Sigh. Each scholar and each translation has to be viewed with a certain kind of suspicion, even ourselves, because it is so easy for agenda to take the lead over evidence …

4) Lack of Personal Resources

My Aramaic scholar friend-of-a-friend gave me over a dozen great leads to find things that smart people might already have written on this quagmire.  If I were still a grad student in Bloomington, I'd go round them up from the excellent University library there, read them at my carroll, look for more, and start composing. But I don't have access to a university library anymore, and none of this is going to be in our little public library, and only bits and pieces are on the web. And I don't really have the time. And I don't really have sufficient expertise in the relevant languages, just a sorta broad base in ancient cultures, gender theory, and such.   This topic deserves a long and serious scholarly treatment by a real scholar, but I am just scholar enough to yearn for one, and not scholar enough anymore to deliver one.

* * *

I WANT to say, hey Christian or ex-Christian gender-odd folk, this is what Jesus actually says about gender-odd folks, regardless of what the conservative Christians in your life want to say about people who don't fit perfectly into the right boxes …

What I actually have to say, is here's my take with a huge dose of perhaps, and waffle, and complexity. The bigots speak a simple message, ignore problematic details that call their narrative into question, and trust people like me to be full of doubts and caveats, and easy to shout down. And so I am, and don't know how to fix it …

Maybe I'll write that commentary on Jesus and the Gender-Odd folks one day, but for now, all I can do is complain about how hard it is … sigh.