Episode 341- Is "Nobody Dies For A Lie" A Good Rule of Evidence?

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Welcome to Episode 341 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and helps us understand Epicurus’ position on the same issues. This week will continue in Section 9 of Book Two.

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Summary

Cassius and Joshua continue in Section 9 of Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, where the Stoic Lucullus has been arguing that knowledge is essential to virtue, confidence, and successful living, and that consistency requires the skeptic to admit he cannot even claim to know that nothing can be known. Before turning to Section 10, Joshua raises a modern parallel: a viral clip of Mel Gibson telling Joe Rogan that “nobody dies for a lie,” offered as evidence that the Gospels must be historically true because the apostles were willing to die for their testimony. Cassius traces his own skepticism of that argument back to September 11, 2001, when it became clear that people are willing to die for beliefs that cannot all be true at once — the strength of a belief is no indication of its accuracy.

Joshua and Cassius work through why the argument fails on Epicurean terms: willingness to die reflects a judgment about what was witnessed, and judgment is exactly where error enters, since Epicurus locates truth and falsehood in the mind’s processing of sensation rather than in the senses themselves. Joshua brings in Epicurus’s own treatment of the “many” in Letter to Menoeceus 124 and Lucretius’s account of the square tower that appears round at a distance (Book Four, near line 353) as evidence that Epicurus took illusion and misjudgment seriously without ever concluding that the senses themselves lie. The discussion closes with Joshua’s reading from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, where Thomas More insists on giving “the devil himself” the benefit of law rather than trusting any one man’s certainty — an illustration, Joshua argues, of why epistemology has to rest on a standard (for Epicurus, the sensations, feelings, and anticipations) rather than on the sincerity or sacrifice of any individual believer.

Transcript

CASSIUS:

Welcome to Episode 341 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we’re continuing in Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective. We’re in Book 2 and we are up to Section 9, where the Stoic Lucullus has been setting up an argument with Cicero, taking the position that knowledge is essential to life, knowledge is essential to virtue, knowledge is essential to having the confidence to take any kind of action at all. A large part of his argument is that if you don’t have knowledge of something, then you have no idea what you’re doing, you have no idea why you’re doing it, and you’re ultimately going to lead a very unsuccessful and unpraiseworthy life, at least in terms of virtue, because if you don’t know what virtue is, if you don’t know anything, then you’re basically going to be stuck in life, totally indecisive and almost guaranteed to fail in any kind of definition of wanting to be happy in life.

Section 9 last week was focused on the question that had been raised about Socrates’ statement that he had taken the position that the gods had told him that he was a wise man because he knew nothing, and in the subsequent years after that, the philosophers of his school, Plato and the followers there, began to question whether you can even take the position that you know nothing or not, or whether that is a self-contradictory statement. Lucullus pointed out last week that Carneades had held absolutely that it was totally self-contradictory, and that no one who says that perception cannot be trusted, that knowledge is impossible, should even take the position that they know that nothing can be known, or that knowledge is impossible, because if you’re going to take the position knowledge is impossible, to the extent you can, you need to be consistent all the way across the board, and not claim to know anything. Lucullus introduced the position that Antiochus took on this issue, where Antiochus said that, well, Socrates was correct, and we can take a position on the fact that perception is unreliable, and we can’t really perceive anything at all. And so Antiochus ends up a little bit closer to Lucullus’ stoic position of saying that some knowledge is possible, but Lucullus is basically pressing forward with the point that consistency in this area is extremely important, and it makes no sense for a man who says that he approves of nothing, that he knows nothing, to say that he has any opinions at all on any subject.

Now, before we go into section 10, one of the main take-home points of all of this discussion is Lucullus’ argument, which I would contend Epicurus largely agrees with, that knowledge is important because you have to have confidence in your decision-making in order to know what to do when you get out of the bed in the morning. But there’s a lot of differences between the Epicurean view on that question as well, in that the Stoics want to insist that there are certain perceptions that are so clear in and of themselves that they cannot be otherwise than true. And going down that road is where Lucullus is insisting that wise and virtuous men should proceed. That having confidence in your knowledge is what’s going to allow you to make strong decisions, allow you to do the things that life requires to overcome obstacles, overcome hurdles, and in fact, succeed at living a virtuous life.

Now, before we get into section 10, Joshua has an illustration of this subject, and at least in a variation, how it’s discussed in the world today. So, Joshua, tell us what further thoughts you have on section 9.

JOSHUA:

Yeah, as we’ve gone through Lucullus’ argument here, his presentation of Stoic epistemology, and we’ve seen Cicero, through him, make some rather stark claims about truth, about falsity. We have in Epicureanism this question of, are the senses, do they always tell us the truth? Lucullus himself makes the point about the oar, the straight oar that looks bent when it’s in the water. He says, I’m not Epicurus, I’m not going to answer to every single case of sense perception, I’m just saying that some senses are so clear and so reliable that we can know that they’re true. I don’t need every single sense perception, I just need some of them.

But he does say about some things that, for example, he says no one can have any memory of what is false. If you remember it, it must be true. No one can discover what is false. If you really have discovered it, then it has to be true, otherwise you wouldn’t describe it as a discovery. Part of this is a language game. Part of this isn’t, it’s not really that he’s making claims that are this stark. It’s like with Epicureanism, this formulation of, well, all sensations are true, that you have to kind of unpack the meaning of that phrase before you can really apply it. And the same, I think, is probably true of Lucullus and of Stoic epistemology. I continue to say that we’re still hoping that more will become clear as the text goes further.

All of this did get me thinking, though, about a meme that I’ve been seeing recently, and it’s Mel Gibson. And it’s apparently a quote that comes from his interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. Mel Gibson says,

“I regard the Gospels as history. It’s a verifiable history. Some people say, well, it’s a fairy tale. He never existed. But he did exist. And there are verifiable historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up. That yes, he did exist. And the other aspect of this is that all the evangelists, the apostles, every single one of those guys went out there and died rather than deny their belief. And nobody dies for a lie. Nobody.”

And Joe Rogan’s response was, bearing in mind that Mel Gibson is not a theologian, maybe you might nitpick the way he says this or that. But frankly, in a conversational format with Joe Rogan, I think this was a great way of laying out a pretty thoughtful case pointing to actual evidence. The Gospels are historical accounts. You’ve got this extra biblical evidence. And he has that great line. Nobody dies for a lie. And this, I think, I’m still quoting Joe Rogan for the record. And this, I think, it struck a chord with people. And I saw numerous people quote it afterwards. And he’s certainly right about that because I have seen people quote this line extensively on places like Reddit and so on, where this expression from Joe Rogan in support of the film that he was or is working on as a sequel to The Passion of the Christ, that this kind of epistemology is useful for him for establishing what he thinks is the truth, that the Gospels are historical facts, that the claims, including the supernatural claims in the Gospels, are true, and that we know they’re true because we have this reliable standard by which to judge these claims, that the people who are making them are prepared to die for those beliefs, the belief that these claims are true.

So anyway, in light of our discussion of epistemology and of the kind of stark claims that people make about truth and falsehood, I thought this would be an interesting use case. So with all of that as kind of background, Cassius, I’m very curious to know how you would answer this question, because you’re here doing this podcast. Presumably, you don’t take the supernatural claims of the Gospels as historical fact. You don’t accept that those are true claims, as Mel Gibson does. And so the question is, how do we respond to what he is setting up as his kind of a standard of epistemology?

CASSIUS:

Great question, Joshua. And before I go further on it, I’ll say that this is a question I’ve thought a lot about over the years, because it had a great impact on me when I observed what happened on September 11th, 2001, and those people flew airplanes into the World Trade Center. It focused my mind on the inadequacies of this argument, because growing up, I’d always been taught as well, that the lives of the martyrs and the Roman Coliseum and so forth were all great examples of the truth of the Gospels, because they would not have died the way they did if they had not known what they were dying for was true.

Well, of course, I would think that the people who flew those planes into the World Trade Center also thought that they were dying for something that they thought was true. And I don’t think both sets of beliefs can be true. So ever since that incident happened, it focused my mind that this was not a very persuasive argument, because people die all the time for things that I think an objective person could look at and say, hey, this is not true. Why are you taking this position? So that leads us to try to unwind what parts of the Stoic position Epicurus might agree with and which he might not agree with, because I think both Epicurus and the Stoics would take the position that you do want to have confidence in what you’re acting on, and you’re sometimes going to have so much confidence in what you’re acting on that you’re going to, for example, die for a friend.

You certainly would not want to die unless you had a strong degree of confidence in knowing that the reason you’re dying is worthwhile. But the very fact that you feel it so strongly that you’re willing to die certainly is not in itself proof that the thing that you’re talking about is true. And really, as we are investigating the philosophy behind all this and the big picture of all this, that’s what we’re most concerned about. Epicurus knew that it’s possible to be mistaken in your opinions. The great majority of Book 4 is devoted to illusions and how things can appear to us different than what they really are, from the bent oar all the way down the line of a long list of examples. So the strength of your belief is not an indication of the accuracy of your belief, is the first thing I would say.

JOSHUA:

Yeah, I think that’s so right. And it’s kind of a game of hide the ball here a little bit, because if you’re going to make an epistemological standard out of nobody dies for a lie, you have to understand that the willingness to die is not the part that you’re making the standard. It’s the judgment that has taken place in the mind of the person who’s willing to die. And I would say that assessing the judgment of these people as to whether what they believe is true or false, right? It’s not enough to say, well, they witnessed it and then they died for it, so it must be true.

I think there’s a whole lot of room in here for mistakes, for human error, right? They witnessed it. They were mistaken in their belief or in their interpretation of what they saw. And they were willing to die for that. They were willing to die for their mistaken belief. That doesn’t at all say that the thing that they think that they witnessed actually happened or that the claim, the central claim is true. What you’re ratifying by saying, well, if they died for it, so it must be true, is their belief about the thing they claim to have witnessed.

CASSIUS:

Yeah, and that’s why it’s so important for us to be precise about what it is we’re actually talking about. Now, Epicurus says that the things we feel, he considers pleasure and pain to be real and true. The senses, anticipations, and feelings are our standard for judging what is true and what is real. And in my own mind, I’m not questioning the devotion of people who die for their causes. From their own points of view, their calculations make sense to them. I think the urgent question is, before you make such a decision, you want to use the best reasoning process possible to reach that conclusion. Once you die for some cause, that’s one of those permanent solutions to a temporary problem. You don’t get another chance.

So you need to go into every situation, no matter how firmly you feel about it, with a clear head and with a standard of truth that makes sense. And for example, just looking at somebody and deciding that the feverishness which they believe something is a good indication that it’s true, that is not very sound reasoning for the reasons we’ve already discussed. People get exercised and excited and fervently believing in all sorts of things that are not true, in fact.

So before you get yourself worked up into that kind of situation, you need to make sure that from the very beginning, you’re analyzing problems in a way that is the best way possible to you. Now, Diogenes Laertius says that not every person has the constitution to be wise. And so not everyone is going to have the same methods of analyzing things, as we keep saying. Mistakes are possible. But at the same time, mistakes are possible from Epicurus’s point of view. It is possible to not make a mistake.

That’s basically what Cicero and the skeptics are saying, is that there’s no situation in which you could not possibly be wrong. There’s no situation in which you may be not making a mistake. And that’s the very fast road to total radical skepticism when you take the position that it is simply never possible to be sure that you’re not making a mistake. So there has to be a standard by which you do conclude that you’re not making a mistake. For purposes of the current conversation, looking at how fervently somebody believes in their opinion is not, in my view, one of the things that Epicurus would endorse as the best way to make a decision. It’s probably relevant. It certainly is relevant to look at the depth of someone’s devotion to their opinion and make the observation that, okay, well, something’s happened to cause this person to feel so strongly. But by no means is that determinative or settle the question. Just because they feel strongly about something does not mean that you will feel strongly about it or should feel strongly about it from your perspective under your circumstances.

JOSHUA:

You know, since what we’re really dealing with here is the question of the reliability of the eyewitness, it’s interesting to note that when we look for eyewitnesses in Epicurus’ surviving works, not only does he not rely upon them, except insofar as he is a witness to his own sense perception, he doesn’t really talk about them that much. In the letter to Menoeceus, we have a reference to the many, right? The populace, the hoi polloi, and their views and why he comes to the conclusion that their views are wrong. This is that classic paragraph 124 from the letter to Menoeceus when Epicurus says,

“For the statements of the many about the gods are not true prolepsies derived from sensation, but rather false suppositions, according to which the greatest misfortunes befall the wicked and the greatest blessings befall the good. For men, being accustomed always to their own virtues, welcome those like themselves, but regard all that is not of their nature as alien.”

And I think another good example of a discussion in Epicureanism of the reliability of witnesses comes from the fourth book of Lucretius, around line 353, when he says,

“Further, when we see the square towers of a city at a distance, they commonly appear round to us, because all angles seen far off show obtuse, or rather they do not show at all. Their strokes die away, and the blows never reach our eyes. For as the images are carried through a long tract of air, the air beats upon them continually in their passage, and so wears off their corners. Hence it is that since no manner of angle strikes the eye, the stony fabric appears of a circular figure. Yet the roundness is not so distinct as if the object itself were really round and seen at a small distance, but it bears a kind of resemblance to such a figure, yet it is not completely so.”

Lucretius’s poem is full of examples of instances where these edge cases of the kind that Lucullus is talking about come to the fore, that when a straight oar is submerged in water, the refraction of the light coming from the oar through the water, the oar looks like it’s bent rather than straight, but you know it’s straight because you just put it into the water.

And Lucretius’s poem is full of examples, just like this one, of times when our trust in sense perception as part of the standard of epistemology looks to be under threat. But when it comes time for us to ask where the mistake is, Epicurus points not to sense perception itself, he points to the judging faculty of the mind. It’s the mind that makes judgments on the information, the raw data that’s coming in through the senses. And the senses, like witnesses in court, Cassius as you often say, are just furnishing testimony without claiming omnipotence, right? They’re just giving you data.

And the data comes to the mind where it is then processed by this judging faculty of the intellect. And this, Epicurus thinks, is where the mistakes are made. This is where error is introduced. This is where the falsity of the claim comes from, if there is any falsity in it. And so when I say that in response to Mel Gibson’s quote about nobody dies for a lie, you’re not really dealing with the fact that they were prepared to die for it. What you have to examine and assess is their judgment of what they claim to have seen, because it’s the judgment that is wrong.

CASSIUS:

Joshua, I think that’s exactly the right point. And it’s exactly what you’re illustrating from Lucretius. For the sake of argument, we might admit that people died in the Colosseum for their faith 2,000 years ago. Most of us also believe that there are people who died for their beliefs when they flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center. We can readily admit that people die all the time for things that they believe to be true. But what lesson do we learn from that?

As you’re saying, when you look at the tower at a distance and it appears to be round, Epicurus is saying you have to keep in mind that you need additional evidence when you’re looking at it from a long distance away. Before you can really be sure whether it is square or round, you need to process the data from your senses properly so as to come to a sound conclusion.

When we process the observation that people are willing to die for their beliefs all the time, the proper conclusion is not that that is proof that what they believed was true, but that in fact people simply do die for beliefs all the time. And to conclude from the fact of their having sacrificed themselves that they were right is a total non-sequitur, totally does not follow from the observation that they died. There’s certainly no logical reason why we should conclude that they were right. We can conclude that they held their opinions very deeply, but that doesn’t mean that they were right. That would be a false processing of the data that we received, leading to a conclusion that we should not have reached. We should have either waited longer and gotten additional information or simply stepped back and realized the lack of logical necessity that the one must be caused by the other. That the decision to sacrifice yourself must have been caused by the truth of the opinion behind it.

And this is an example of where Epicurus is strongly in favor, obviously, of reasoning. He’s against dialectical logic, but the entire Epicurean philosophy is built on deductive reasoning, thinking things through clearly based on the evidence of the senses, anticipations, and feelings. You start with what is true and real to us through the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. But those faculties do not deliver opinions to you. They do not tell you the truth just simply by observing them. You have to process the information in your mind. The big flaw, the big divergence is that Epicurus never allows you to reach conclusions without evidence or against the evidence that is available through the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. The Stoics and many of these other philosophers are taking the position that no, the sensations, anticipations, and feelings are lying to you. They’re always deceptive. You can never be sure. You must rely only on logic. You must rely only on putting aside your sensations and looking for some higher method of geometry or other mathematical esoteric type of analysis that transcends the senses.

I think that’s ultimately where we’re going in a situation like this is people die all the time. Whether they are dying for the truth or for a lie or for a mistake is an entirely different question that has to be evaluated separately. Now, again, as we go forward, I do think we want to keep in mind, since we’re talking about the topic of voluntarily giving your life away, Epicurus emphatically says that a wise man will on occasion die for a friend.

There are going to be occasions where you choose to voluntarily die. And our task in deciding how to process knowledge correctly is to understand how best to reach those kind of conclusions with the greatest confidence that you possibly can have. The skeptics will tell you there’s no situation in which you might not be mistaken. Epicurus is telling you that there are situations in which you can be confident that you’re making the right conclusion. And what we’re doing and talking about all of these issues with canonics and epistemology is discussing how to get to that goal of having processed the data in a way that you can have confidence in the opinions that you derive from that data.

JOSHUA:

It’s going to be very important to get all of this clear in our heads because so much of what we’ve been talking about, even though it doesn’t directly bear on the text, does lead us right into paragraph 10, which is where we’re going next. This is where Lucullus is going to introduce Prolepsis, as well as where he’s going to quote, as I’ve already mentioned in a previous episode, Democritus, because he makes the point, and I’ll reiterate it, that the skeptics who are encountering the same kind of problems that we’re encountering. Lucullus says,

“When we address them with the argument that if the doctrines which we are upholding are not true, then everything must be uncertain, the skeptics reply, well, what is that to us? Is that our fault? Blame nature, who, as Democritus says, has buried truth deep in the bottom of the sea.”

So the question of how we answer Mel Gibson’s objection without throwing everything away and just saying the truth is in the bottom of the sea or the truth lies in the bottom of a well, that is going to be a very important question. And it’s a question that we’re going to continue to have to face as we go into section 10. And no doubt, as we go into sections 11 and 12 and 13 and everything else as we go on here, on this central question of, is it really possible to verify whether a given claim is true and whether a given

CASSIUS:

claim is false? Yes, Joshua, rather than go further and read section 10, which is a relatively long section, why don’t we use the remaining time we have today to make any final comments on what you’ve just raised? Because that clearly is the question that causes so much trouble to so many people. They end up concluding, like the skeptics do, that nothing can be determined with confidence, that it’s always so possible to make a mistake that there’s very little we can actually choose to consider to be firm and established in life.

And I think we can return to where Epicurus ultimately is taking a dramatically different position in his evaluation of what truth really means. The old Pontius Pilate question about what is truth. And in the end, at the very broadest of levels, Epicurus is telling us that the standard of truth, the way by which we judge what is true and what is not, that standard is found in the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. What we perceive is reported to us honestly, leading to that phrase we hear so often in Epicurean discussion, all sensations are true.

The truth that we’re talking about in Epicurean philosophy is not and cannot be a truth that is knowable only to a supernatural God or knowable because you’re standing in the center of the universe somehow and you’ve somehow accounted for and had access to every bit of data that exists everywhere in the universe so that you can say, well, I’ve seen everything. I’ve done everything. I’ve been everywhere. And I know from my own past experience that certain things are possible and certain things are impossible. That is a standard that cannot be met. It is a standard that is false even to suggest that that is possible.

And so in human life, we have to have another standard. We have to look at the reality of the universe as we know it to be, which is that there are not supernatural gods. There is no center to the universe. There is no ability to receive and process all the data in the universe. We have to make decisions based on what is available to us. And what’s available to us comes through the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. So Epicurus is not going to waste time debating a standard that is false or requiring a standard that is false before he takes action.

There’s a sense in which you could analogize Epicurus’s position to what Cicero is going to end up talking about in terms of what is probable and what is not. But Epicurus doesn’t see things in terms of what is probable. Epicurus doesn’t say that probability is as far as we can go. He tells us to focus on our circumstances that we receive through the sensations, anticipations, and feelings, and to not get caught up in the type of nihilism that comes from thinking that, well, there’s nothing but atoms and void in the universe. Nothing else is real. Everything else is an illusion. That is the direction that ultimately you have to take a position on. And Democritus failed that test from Epicurus’s point of view, if indeed he took the position that nothing is real except the atoms and the void.

Epicurus is telling us that as human beings, certainly we believe atoms and void are real because we validate them through our reasoning process. But what’s really real to us is what the sensations, anticipations, and feelings tell us every moment of our lives. And that’s ultimately the standard by which we make decisions. And we don’t apologize for it. We don’t constantly wring our hands and say, oh my gosh, I’ve never been everywhere. I haven’t lived throughout eternity. I don’t know everything under the sun. Therefore, I can’t make any decision at all. That is a prescription for disaster, a prescription that would have never produced humanity as it exists today. It would never have allowed us to accomplish anything in our lives, much less hope or think that we have an idea of what it means to live happily and take steps to achieve it.

So as much as this phrase about all sensations are true is a stumbling block to so many people, just as it is a stumbling block to so many people to think that Epicurus thought that the size of the sun was a basketball instead of what he really said, which is that the size of the sun is as it appears to be, which is telling us to look back at the sensations, anticipations, and feelings for the right answer.

It’s at this level that these decisions have to be made about what kind of a philosophy that you’re going to adopt and why Epicurus’ view of all these things was so important and so different from the great majority of the rest of Greek and Western thought. Everyone else is telling you, ultimately, to be just like Socrates and say, you don’t really know anything, but God can tell you that you know nothing and therefore you’re the wisest of men. Epicurus is saying that’s not a valid way to proceed. There is no supernatural God who’s going to judge what’s right and wrong. And as a creation of nature, you deal with what nature has given you. You don’t look to otherworldly standards that do not exist. So Joshua, as we begin to close, how would you wrap up what we’ve been discussing today?

JOSHUA:

You know, as we come to an end, it occurs to me to say this on the subject of people who die for their beliefs, that I don’t consider myself to be immune to the allure of the martyr, right? Of the person who has a moral core and who is not going to cross that for any reason, who’s willing to die rather than to lie.

And in fact, we have discussed many such people in the history of this podcast, everyone from Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake. We’ve talked about John Brown, the strident abolitionist in the days leading up to the American Civil War. It’s not that I’m entirely dismissive of what this represents, but we do have to be clear about where we draw the line in terms of what we think is true and what we think is false.

And for that reason, I think that this is an important question. And because it’s an important question, I’m not willing to just accept the easiest answer, which is, well, they died for it. They believed it. They wouldn’t have died for it if it wasn’t true. Therefore, it must be true.

Certainly, as much as I admire some aspects of Giordano Bruno, I don’t think that his philosophical positions, that the things for which he died were invariably true. Some of them probably were true. I think that his willingness to die was admirable. His refusal to kiss the crucifix that was offered to him in his last moments, that’s certainly something that resonates very strongly with me. But I don’t hold this up as a standard of epistemology.

Some people talk about Giordano Bruno as if he’s a martyr for science, because he held the very Lucretian view that Earth was one of probably infinite number of other worlds, and that any number of these other worlds, or indeed an infinite number of these other worlds, probably also harbor life. And so he was very far ahead of his time with that position. But I don’t think that his death is sufficient evidence that that claim is true. If that claim is true, we have to find other ways to verify it.

That’s really been the whole point of this discussion. I’m not prepared to accept that a person in extreme circumstances has made the right judgment call about the facts and has arrived at an opinion that is the truth. And I’m certainly not willing to accept that just because they died for that belief, that that in any way enhances the nature of the truth claim. Their judgment about specific claims can be true or false. And we have to examine those claims on their merits in order to determine whether we think they are true or false. It’s not sufficient that someone else was willing to die for their belief that the claim was true or false.

And my last word on the subject would be to point to another man, and indeed another Christian, who was willing to die rather than lie. And I’m talking here about Thomas More, and I’m specifically talking about the character Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. There is a moment in this play where Thomas More is confronted by this witch-hunting prosecutor and a man named Richard who has just left the room.

The prosecutor says, “You’re letting him go?”

And Thomas More said, “Go he should, if he were the devil himself, unless he broke the law.”

And the prosecutor said, “So you would give the devil benefit of law?”

And Thomas More replies, “Yes, I would. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to go after the devil?”

And the prosecutor says, “I would cut down every law in England if I could go after him. If I could get the devil, I would cut down every law in England.”

And Thomas More says, “Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? And when you’d cornered the devil and the devil turns around to meet you, where will you go then for protection? All the laws of England being cut down and flattened. This country is planted thick with laws, man’s laws, not God’s. And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? I give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

It’s certainly true that he was willing to die for what he believed, but he never stopped believing that there had to be a standard separate from his own person, that it was not the arbitrary decision of one man to decide the life of another, that there was a system of law in place to deal with this question, and that in that particular field, that’s the standard.

And we should, rather than promulgate from the chair, we should defer to the standard. And that in all cases, even very, very difficult cases, even if the devil himself were to appeal on this ground, we should defer to the standard. And I think it’s the same with epistemology. You have to have recourse not to any one man’s opinion, whether they were willing to die for it or not. You have to have recourse to the standard. And for Epicurus, the standard is the canon of epistemology, sensation, the feelings, the pathé of pleasure and pain, and prolepsis. That is the standard.

And so under any circumstance, right, and no matter who’s asking, and no matter what lengths they’re willing to go to, we have to apply the standard. That’s where I’ve kind of ended up on this question. It’s been somewhat difficult to navigate this issue, but I hope that it’s set us up for a more interesting and more fruitful discussion of Section 10, which deals with many similar themes when we finally do get there next week. What are you thinking as we wind down here, Cassius?

CASSIUS:

Those are great points, Joshua. I know we were concerned when we first started talking about this, that this might be a tangent. But I think more than a tangent, this has been an illustration of the importance of why the subject we’re talking about has to be thought about, has to be analyzed so you can understand what the proper standard really is.

People die for their causes on opposite sides of questions all the time. In every war that’s ever happened, there have been people who died on one side or the other. Both of them cannot have been right about all of their assessments of what was going on. We have the same thing going on today. Being willing to die for your cause is a data point, but it is not a determinative data point. It doesn’t settle the question by any means.

And as you’ve just been saying, it’s important for us to think through, before we have to make important decisions, what the standard really is and how to apply the standard, how to get there, how to process the information so that we can be confident that we’re making the best decision possible for us under the circumstances. That’s what the entire book of Academic Questions is really all about. How do you come to conclusions? How do you make decisions that you can be confident of as you try to live your life the best way you possibly can?

Why don’t we go ahead and stop there for today? We’ll come back next week and go further into section 10, and we’ll continue discussing the questions involved in determining how to get knowledge, how to apply knowledge. So in the meantime, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean Friends Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our discussions of Epicurus. We’ll come back next week and start with section 10. Thanks for your time today. We’ll see you soon. Bye.