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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 900035" data-attributes="member: 7240">Many of the points I wanted to make already have been but I'll wade in and make a few of them slightly differently, risking possible repetition.Clearly, it is impossible for a character to deny the existence of very powerful magical entities but this is not the same as atheism. In refuting Roman polytheism, Saint Augustine argued that the so-called gods were not so much non-existent as misunderstood -- they were not, in fact, gods with the power to create but rather created beings -- fallen angels (demons and incubi). Thus, the divinity of these gods was denied without their existence being denied.But one could go even farther and deny the existence of these gods, arguing that, in fact, religious rituals -- spells and liturgy are, in fact, remnants of a powerful kind of magic, the knowledge of which has been lost. Both arcane and divine magic could be viewed as vestiges of a great science that understood how to manipulate the basic energies of the universe through specific rituals and procedures. One could look at the relationship between divine magic and real magical science in much that between medieval alchemy and modern chemistry. Thus, the various somatic motions, material components and spoken words that comprise spells might be a combination of the vestiges a scientific procedure intermixed, over time, with random mumbo-jumbo that has nothing to do with them.Thus, I don't see a reason to state, even with the existence of the cleric class, to argue that gods must exist in D&D on a mechanical level.All that stated, however, there are no atheists in my campaign world. This is because religion has various other vital functions that a pre-modern culture cannot do without. Religions define the social contract; they provide the structural backbone for cultures; they are portable mutual aid networks; they offer necessary parallel hierarchies to the purely secular; they provide not only cosmological explanations for the world but also explicate social realities, etc, etc. Thus, I would argue that while D&D campaigns might be able to survive without gods, they really cannot survive without religion. Thus, returning to the subject of philosophy in the Classical world raised by others, Platonism had to give way to Neoplatonism.</blockquote>

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