Sextus Empiricus Turns Suspension of Judgment on the Gods

Sextus Empiricus, the second century physician and philosopher whose surviving works are the fullest record of developed Pyrrhonism, applied the school's method of suspended judgment to theology with unusual persistence, devoting a substantial portion of Against the Physicists to the question of the gods specifically. His approach was not to argue that gods do not exist, a dogmatic claim the Pyrrhonist treats with exactly the same suspicion as any other positive assertion, but to lay competing arguments about the gods side by side, that the concept of god is self contradictory, that different peoples hold wildly conflicting and equally unproven conceptions of what a god is and does, that no agreed method exists for settling which account is correct, until the arguments balance and neither side can be affirmed over the other without an arbitrary leap the evidence does not support. He extended the same treatment to arguments for providence, for divination and for the very possibility of proving a god's existence from the created world, cataloguing objections rather than resolving them, since resolution was never the Pyrrhonist's goal. The result reads less like ancient atheism, which does make the positive claim that no gods exist, and more like a catalogue of everything a confident theology or a confident atheism would have to answer before either could claim to know rather than merely believe. Later skeptics revived his arguments against both Catholic and Protestant certainty during the Reformation's own disputes.