died, as well as the scandals of the Sophists and Cyrenaics) and late (the
polytheist defense against Christianity in the later Roman Empire). Not until
Christianity became politically dominant did high-order metaphysical proofs
of God begin to drive the epistemology-metaphysics sequence.
India provides another useful comparison. Proofs of the existence of God
were not prominent until the 700s c.e., notably with Shankara. This was the
period when Buddhism was declining and its place in the abstract regions of
the philosophical attention space was being taken by the Hindu schools. The
occasion has some analogy to the takeover of philosophy by Christianity in
the 400s from the Neoplatonists; both of the previously dominant philosophi-
cal schools were non-anthropomorphic transcendental mysticism, which in the
case of Buddhism was explicitly atheist. Shankara, who took the lead within
Hinduism, is a network offshoot of the Mimamsakas. This school of scriptural
literalists, in their struggle against the non-traditional cults of Hindu theism,
had denied the reality of the gods as more than mere names in the Vedic texts.
It is the Vedas which are eternal, and thus play a part like the eternity of
matter in the classic Greek cosmologies. Kumarila, in the generation before
Shankara, sharpened the argument to deny that a transcendent God would
have a motive for creating the world (a point also argued by Greek Skeptics
cited by Augustine). Shankara turned Mimamsa epistemology to a different
purpose, in effect splitting the difference between Buddhist atheism and popu-
lar Hindu realist polytheism. Since doubt presupposes a standard by which to
judge, the existence of the highest standpoint is proven; this is Brahman, the
inexpressible non-dual reality, in contrast to which the world is illusory.
Once Advaita had taken control of the attention space from Buddhism, all
the remaining Hindu schools were forced to readjust. Nyaya-Vaisheshika, the
only one to remain active outside the Advaita ranks, abandoned its early
atheism and expanded its pluralist realism to include God as another meta-
physical entity in its list. Udayana (1000s c.e.) produced a compendium of
proofs; one variant of these (that right knowledge requires an external source,
which can only be God) is reminiscent of Shankara’s epistemological proof,
although without the acuteness of Shankara’s argument from doubt and beg-
ging the question as to whether right knowledge does in fact exist. Udayana’s
other arguments include versions of the cosmological argument from causal
dependence (Radhakrishnan and Moore, 1957: 379–385). The compendium
form implies that these arguments were current in previous generations of the
Nyaya-Vaisheshika school. Udayana ostensibly argues against Buddhism; but
Buddhist atheism was no longer a living school, and the only Buddhist survi-
vors at that date were magical-theistic tantrists. What we see instead is a par-
allel to medieval Christianity, where proofs of God become a game in its own
right for the display of intellectual skills.
Between 1000 and 1400, as theist schools (Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka)
836 •^ Meta-reflections