Delphic Maxim 1: Follow God (for atheists)
The challenge I’ve set myself — in order to get in the habit of writing regularly — is to respond to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes every morning, and the paste it unedited into Medium. The Delphic Maxims were carved on stones around the Oracle at Delphi in Ancient Greece. They’re a kind of guidelines for living your life. Now, just because an ancient culture made these prescriptions for life doesn’t mean that they’re still relevant today. A lot of young men (Jordan Peterson fans) worship Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And there’s a lot that’s admirable about Stoic philosophy — but there’s also a lot that’s missing or dated. And even more importantly: any ethical guide to life is of its time. There might be some principles you can carry forward — and definitely with each translation some of that work gets done — but in the main, life has changed dramatically over time.
So let me attempt to unpack the Delphic Maxims and translate them, in my own terms, for a contemporary world.
1. Follow God
I grew up Catholic. Which is to say that I was baptised, I went to church most Sundays, I was an altar boy for a while, I went to Catholic schools, my grandmother would bless me with holy water when we were little, and I believed in God. The stories and allegories in the bible were fascinating to me as a young child, but I wonder, looking back, the degree to which I accepted these stories as fact or whether they functioned for me like good fantasy. I also loved, loved Star Wars (and unlike religion, I am still deeply invested in the lore of that galaxy far, far away).
Over time, I became less religious. I was going to write less ‘faithful’, but I think that word is loaded with a whole lot of connotations that I don’t find helpful. ‘Faithfulness’ is in many respects a virtue — in the sense that it means fidelity, and perhaps in the sense that a person trusts in another, whether that be a person or an institution. Our faith in institutions these days is quite degraded, with reason, in part because they have become so vast and self-protective that they elide the human domain in which they operate.
Did this happen to me with the church? I wouldn’t say I ‘lost faith’, so much as gradually came to see that human instinct to read meaning into the world as something learned, and so I unlearned it. So I don’t see faith or religion as necessarily ‘false’ (metaphysics aside), but more as a social construct: a learned, cultural behaviour. It’s certainly not something I begrudge people — as long as they don’t impose their faith and the beliefs that attend that faith on others.
Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying ‘God does not play dice with the universe’, and a lot of people take this as evidence of Einstein’s belief in God. Likewise Stephen Hawking ends A Brief History of Time by arguing science might ‘know the mind of God’. I can’t speak for the personal faith of these men of science, but I can speak to the notion of ‘Spinoza’s God’ — the idea that the universe itself, in its totality, as a vast cosmic web of life and matter and energy and wonder, the universe functions as a kind of ‘God’. Does it not? It is all-knowing, since all that can be known is known by the creatures that comprise the universe. It is all-powerful, since any power that exists, exists as a part of the universe. It is omniscient and omnipotent, since it is all that there is. I think there’s something in Spinoza’s God to which the Einsteins and the Hawkings of the world would subscribe.
So how do you ‘follow God’ if you are an atheist, or agnostic about the existence of a higher power, like I am? Well you might appropriate the idea of ‘faithfulness as fidelity’, since faithfulness is clearly a fairly virtuous position to take (I’m sure I’ll end up talking more about virtue later on). And if you are keeping your fidelity to the universe, you might think of it as your duty to help define the quality of that universe — whether it is a nice place to be, or whether it isn’t. So to follow God might be to learn, to be happy, to treat others kindly, to experience wonder and awe, to remember that you are a part of that cosmos as much as anything else.
That sounds wishy washy and trite. It is. I have 15 minutes and it’s the best I could do, but at the end of the day…you are responsible for what you bring to the cosmos. So bring something good.
