Creationism in antiquity

121 6 Creationism in Antiquity David Sedley Science and Theology Natural teleology, associated above all with Aristotle, and dealt with in a separate chapter of this volume,1 seeks to establish and elucidate the explanatory role of purposive structures and processes in the natural world, especially biological. Acorns exist for the sake of producing oak trees, eyelids for protecting the eyes. Natural teleology may or may not go on from there to seek the explanatory role of larger cosmic features, such as the shape and position of the earth. Much less does it need to ask – although it is not debarred from asking – the even bigger question, of how those structures and purposes came to be present in the first place. Thus it comes with no unavoidable theological implications. That bigger question is, by contrast, the main concern of creationism,2 the theological doctrine which, from the ubiquity of apparently purposive structures in the natural world, infers the existence of a divine creator, one whose own conscious, intelligent, and benevolent purposes have been embodied in those natural structures. Creationists need not differ from natural teleologists as to how the world and its occupants function. For example, they do not necessarily see in it the continuing presence of divine control. What they must add in order to deserve the title ‘creationists’ is a divine ‘creator’ – or, in Greek, more usually a ‘craftsman’ (dēmiourgos, anglicised as ‘demiurge’) – who consciously designed and built these cosmic and biological structures, typically extending from the sun’s annual and daily orbits, via climates and environments, all the way down to the structures and life-cycles of the simplest organisms. However, much as in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, most of the Greek creationists paid especial attention to the divine crafting of human beings, widely regarded as the main intended products and beneficiaries of their creative act. One might, on the basis of this contrast with natural teleology, expect creationism to be banished from any respectable book on the history of science. However, the fact is that a large part of the progress made in Greco-Roman science was achieved within a creationist framework. Take away the theology, and much of the science will go with it. 121 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 122 122 David Sedley A striking example of this is Galen. The foremost medical authority of the ancient world (second century CE; see Chapter 2), in his monumental treatise On the Usefulness of Parts, Galen used his formidable knowledge of anatomy to demonstrate in minute detail the peerless genius of the divine creator.3 One well-known example will suffice here: the precise number and formation of the bones in the human hand are, according to Galen’s investigations, functionally perfect, without the slightest redundancy or improvability. On the basis of innumerable similar observations, Galen is able to conclude that human anatomy as a whole is unmistakably the product of a superior intelligence. The Atomist Alternative Galen was perfectly familiar with the rival theory of the Epicurean atomists, originating with Epicurus at the end of the fourth century BCE, but traceable back to Democritus, in the late fifth to early fourth century. The Epicureans objected to creationism on a variety of theological grounds. These were largely concerned with questioning why an already entirely happy divinity would set about creating a world, and, moreover, a world posing such glaring disadvantages for the human race, despite that race’s being allegedly the prime beneficiary. But, alongside these negative arguments, the Epicureans set up their own alternative explanatory model of how seemingly purposive structures can arise by pure accident. This was based on the extraordinary power of infinity: an infinite stock of atoms randomly interacting over infinite space and time was bound at some point to form, quite accidentally, a world like ours. And in such a world, they argued, a fertile young earth was likely to generate numerous living beings, some of which could, again by pure accident, prove capable of surviving and reproducing their kind, while the remainder perished. This partial anticipation of Darwinian natural selection has won admiration for the Epicureans, as well as for the fifth-century BCE philosopher-poet Empedocles, who had first spun the idea that presentday species are the fortuitously viable survivors of past extinctions. The fact remains that without any idea of gradual adaptation, they came nowhere near to accounting for the kind of anatomical fine detail that Galen was able to cite as testimony to divine craftsmanship. Hence in later antiquity, unlike today, it was creationism that occupied the intellectual high ground and was best supported by state-of-the-art Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 123 Creationism in Antiquity 123 research, especially in biology and astronomy. The Epicureans’ materialistic alternative struggled to compete, while Aristotelianism, which had offered the compromise of natural teleology without a creator god,4 was increasingly finding itself absorbed into Platonism. Socrates Galen provides an ideal viewpoint from which to look back on the history of creationism in ancient thought. Soon after his time, with the advent of Neoplatonism, philosophers’ interest in divine craftsmanship was to be gradually eclipsed by a fundamentally metaphysical account of the world’s causal origin as lying in procession from and return to a highest explanatory principle. But Galen himself is very much in tune with creationism’s classical origins. Above all, he was an avid and admiring reader of Plato’s Timaeus, the pivotal text of the present chapter, on which he wrote a now largely lost commentary, and to which we will turn shortly. But before that, Galen has a surprise for us. The predecessor for whom he has the highest respect in such matters is not Plato but Socrates (On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 9.7.9–16). Socrates, he explains, as correctly represented by Xenophon’s portrayal of him (especially Memorabilia 1.1, 1.4, 4.3),5 did not waste time on speculative questions such as whether the world had a beginning, or how many worlds there are, but concentrated on attainable goods, a priority which Galen sees as the ultimate focus of his own medical work too. Socrates (469–399 BCE) is celebrated as the philosopher who turned philosophy from the study of the cosmos to questions about how to live one’s life, but his seminal contribution to creationism has gone largely unrecognised. Without endorsing any cosmological theory, Socrates is portrayed by Xenophon as arguing for the existence of benevolent creator gods by direct appeal to the systematic design visible in our bodies and our environment. These are far too regular, he maintains, to be the outcome of mere accident. That is not to say that there had been no teleological tendencies in earlier philosophers. The idea that organisms are the product of divine craft was already by Socrates’ day well documented in the poetry of Empedocles, somewhat paradoxically, given that he also saw a role for natural selection. This idea of divine craftsmanship in fact had its ultimate roots in the early and revered poet Hesiod (ca. 700 BCE), who in his Works and Days had referred to a series of races, culminating in Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 124 124 David Sedley the human race, as products of divine creation, and in particular had described in some detail how the first woman, Pandora, was cunningly fashioned by the craftsman god Hephaestus, aided by an entire support team of other gods and goddesses. Nevertheless, in Socrates’ hands divine craftsmanship came to be theorised to a considerably higher level than in those of any predecessor, in ways which would impact directly upon the teleology of Plato and, ultimately, of Aristotle too. What Socrates was, on Xenophon’s evidence, the first to introduce was not divine creation as such, but the key idea that creation is a special benefaction bestowed by god on humankind. For all its influence on later science, Socratic creationism is at root a religious rather than a scientific thesis. According to Socrates, the whole world, including lower animal species, has manifestly been created for human benefit. If the gods have done all this for us, we enjoy a unique relationship with them, one which we should express in religious devotion. This was in its day an importantly original intellectual stance. Indeed, it represents the dawn of religiously motivated creationism, a thesis that was thereafter to hold almost uncontested sway for well over two millennia, until Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. In Socrates’ eyes, the gods are not only our benefactors, but also the divine artisans who created our world and its contents, ourselves included. That the gods should do all this for us is not a matter of our mere good fortune. Gods are essentially good and beneficent, and we, as their primary beneficiaries, are linked to them by a unique bond. Study of the workings of nature is justified only to the extent that it confirms and deepens our understanding of the gods’ goodness to us. True piety lies, not in uncovering the hidden structures of nature, but in appreciating the intentions and outcomes of divine creation, and thus reinforcing the special relationship that links humans to god. This religious agenda undoubtedly helps explain why Socrates became the virtual inventor of the Argument from Design. ‘Argument from Design’ is a generic title for that family of arguments which seek to prove the existence of god, or more specifically of a provident god, by cataloguing the evidence for design in the world. Typically, these arguments seek to demonstrate the existence of divine craftsmanship by appealing to the most prestigious or intricate creative craft practised by man, and showing that gods’ creative powers must be such as to dwarf their human counterparts. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 125 Creationism in Antiquity 125 As reported by Xenophon, Socrates’ own version of the Argument from Design appealed to the expertise of representational artists, and especially sculptors. If you admire above all others an artist like Polyclitus, who can make such exquisite human figures of bronze, how much more must you revere whoever it was who made living, breathing human figures like us! And there must indeed be such a maker, Socrates adds, because the structures and attributes of human beings are far too consistently beneficial ones to have been the outcome of mere accident. Socrates’ argument here centres on a detailed compilation of evidence for the beneficial purposes served by the construction of animal bodies. He cites, among many examples, the five senses, the provision of eyelids and lashes to protect the eye from damage, and the user-friendly arrangement of the teeth, with the front ones suitable for cutting food, the rear ones for grinding it. These were to become classic examples of teleology in the subsequent tradition, closely echoed by Aristotle in his physical and biological writings. Moreover, Socrates continues, the many benefactions with which human beings alone have been privileged, such as language, upright posture, and non-seasonal sex, not to mention the provision of numerous other species for us to ride, eat, etc., show that humankind alone is the ultimate beneficiary of divine creation. Plato as Creationist Socrates, in Xenophon’s portrayal, conducted such an appeal to the evidence of design without himself getting the least bit engaged in physical speculation about the underlying components or mechanisms. This abstention from physical theory was endorsed only by a minority of his philosophical heirs. Plato in his Phaedo (96a–99c) sought to circumvent it by reinterpreting its real meaning. It represented, according to his interpretation, not any disapproval of physics as such, but Socrates’ recognition that he himself lacked the ability to pursue it in a properly teleological manner, a confession which he tempered with the express hope that he might learn this elusive teleological physics from others better equipped for it than himself. In his late dialogue, the Timaeus, Plato fulfilled this aspiration on Socrates’ behalf, portraying the latter as an appreciative auditor of Timaeus’ speech, in which just the right kind of teleological physics is finally worked out in detail. It should not escape notice that the gods of the Timaeus – a supreme deity, and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 126 126 David Sedley beneath him a committee of secondary gods creating organic life – bear the strong imprint of Socrates’ creationist theology as outlined in Xenophon’s Memorabilia 1.4, with its ultimate roots in Hesiod’s Pandora myth. The Timaeus was Plato’s most widely discussed and influential dialogue. Its readers were from the start divided between those who took Plato to be describing a literally datable act of divine world-creation, and those who took his creation narrative to be merely illustrative, comparable to a geometry lesson based on line-by-line construction of figures which never in fact came into existence in that way. On the more ‘literal’, as well as more creationist, of the two readings, Timaeus asks whether the world had a beginning in time or has always existed, chooses the former option, and then reconstructs the likely motivation of its creator and the process by which he planned and built it. On the alternative reading, the creation story is a fiction devised to convey the world’s dependence from infinite time past on a divine cause. One reason why in antiquity many of Plato’s followers (though no one else, it seems) adopted this latter, ‘sempiternalist’ reading, was that Timaeus indisputably goes on to assert that the world will never end. The temporal asymmetry of a world with a beginning but with no end was widely felt, among Plato’s critics and followers alike, to be conceptually intolerable. Another was that, according to Plato’s creation narrative, time came into being only with the creation of the great celestial clock, and this would – self-contradictorily, it is alleged – place part of the creation process in a time before time!6 In reply, it has been pointed out, Timaeus warns that his creation narrative will unavoidably contain inconsistencies and inaccuracies, but that these simply reflect the limitations of human cognitive powers, and are therefore not a ground for dissatisfaction with it (29c–d; cf. 34b–35a). Timaeus also conveys strong philosophical reasons for the temporal asymmetry, based partly on another of Plato’s inheritances from Socrates, a very close consideration of the concept of craftsmanship. In positing that the world had a beginning, rather than having existed for infinite time past, he does not treat this as if it were part of a merely mythical narrative, but argues for it on metaphysical grounds (27d– 28c): the world belongs to the realm of becoming, not that of being, and therefore must itself have ‘become’ in the sense of coming to exist. It is only after establishing this that he permits himself to ask about the craftsman who must now be assumed to have brought it into existence. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 127 Creationism in Antiquity 127 For example, like any good craftsman he must have focused his thought on the ideal Form of what he was trying to achieve, then embodied this as best he could in the available matter. This recalls a famous passage in Republic Book 10 describing a carpenter making a table as looking to the Form of Table, and applies the same principle even to the great divine craftsman. Thus the familiar craft model is from the start intimately bound up with the idea that the world, as a supreme product of craftsmanship, had a temporal beginning. But don’t artefacts also have a finite duration, and in time inevitably disintegrate? Here Plato can be seen relying on an old Socratic paradox, that any craft is a capacity for opposites. The doctor, best at saving life, is also the best at taking it; the builder, best at constructing a house, is also best at demolishing it; and so on. The same applies to the world-builder: durability being a desirable property of any artefact, this supreme craftsman must have made the world maximally durable, in fact so durable that to dismantle it again would require a craftsman as good as he is. (Think of tying a knot so tight that no one weaker than you can untie it.) But he is himself the only candidate for that role. And, being perfectly good, he has no possible motive to destroy his creation. Hence, although the world is inherently just as subject to destruction as it originally was to generation, it will de facto never be destroyed. The temporal asymmetry which caused Plato’s readers such concern thus turns out to follow from principles of craftsmanship by which even a divine craftsman is bound. Cosmogonic Reasoning If, as it seems, the creation of the world was a real dated event, what does Plato offer as the motivation? Here too the creator’s goodness is invoked: being supremely good, he will have wanted everything to be as good as it could be, and above all as orderly as possible. From this single premise, that the world had to be made maximally orderly, all the creator’s major decisions about its structure are then worked out by Timaeus on a priori principles, with almost no appeal to empirical evidence. A few of these structural findings were empirically untestable in any case. For instance, how many worlds did the creator make out of the available matter? ‘One’ is Timaeus’ answer, arrived at, and unavoidably so, by entirely abstract reasoning. The further conclusion that the world is intelligent, and therefore a living being with a soul, may be put in the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 128 128 David Sedley same category: for example, without being intelligent it would not be the best possible creation. But other cosmological findings might easily have been supported by familiar empirical evidence. For example, what shape did he make the world? Timaeus’ answer, ‘spherical’, could have been backed by astronomical data, which seemed to show the rotation of its outer layer, where the fixed stars are, to be that of a perfect sphere. Instead Timaeus relies on a mixture of theoretical and pragmatic criteria for reconstructing the creator’s decision: the sphere is the most beautiful of all shapes; the world has no need for asymmetry because the lack of an external environment makes unnecessary such asymmetric appendages as arms, legs and sense-organs; and so on. Similarly the question of what the world’s main components are yields the answer that there are four, indeed none other than the traditional quartet of earth, water, air, and fire;7 but the grounds given for this answer make no mention of the evident fact that the world is stratified into these four layers, and instead rely on an a priori and largely mathematical argument (30b–32c). A final example is the Demiurge’s structuring of the heaven with two criss-crossing circles, those of the ‘Same’ and the ‘Different’ (roughly, the celestial equator and the ecliptic), divided according to harmonic ratios. Although Timaeus’ account of this does take the celestial phenomena into consideration, it is primarily guided by the need to analyse the heavenly sphere as the world’s intelligent soul, patterned after the structure of thought itself as a certain amalgam of sameness, difference, and being. The underlying epistemology here seems to be as follows. On the one hand, reasoning about the nature of the universe has as its subject matter contingent truths, and to that extent can never aspire to the certainty characteristic of pure mathematics: its goal is not unshakeable certainty but maximum ‘likelihood’ (eikos, 29b–d). On the other hand, well-conducted cosmological thought is a very decent approximation to pure intellectual reasoning: it is not a fundamentally empirical exercise, but is, to a greater extent, the rediscovery of chains of teleological reasoning which must once, during the world’s creation, have been actually conducted by the ideally good intellect that created it. Explaining Imperfections One factor that Plato recognises as complicating his creationist enterprise is that the creation process must frequently have involved compromises. A well-known example is the fragility of the human head Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 129 Creationism in Antiquity 129 (75a–d). A choice facing the gods whom the creator charged with making human beings (more on them below) was between giving us greater durability and greater intelligence. Living matter could never fully combine these desiderata, and the gods’ decision to favour the latter over the former was undoubtedly the wiser choice. A widespread interpretation of such compromises as this takes Plato to identify matter as the cause of the world’s imperfections. Importantly, creation is not ex nihilo, which virtually all Greek thinkers considered impossible. Hence the creator relied on a pre-existing supply of matter, on which he set out to impose the best possible order. And this matter, the interpretation goes, to some extent resisted his attempts, thus making the world less than perfect. Is this a plausible reading of the Timaeus? Material stuffs are characterised by mechanical rather than end-related movements – for instance, water left to its own devices flows, fire rises, in both cases without regard to any good end served. These stuffs Timaeus tellingly calls by the names ‘necessity’ and ‘the wandering cause’ (46c). Their very presence in the world may seem sufficient to guarantee that good ends will sometimes be thwarted. But that does not straightforwardly follow. The mechanical and often chaotic behaviour of material stuffs captures what they were like before the order was imposed (53b). In our ordered world, they have, according to Timaeus’ metaphor, come under the ‘persuasion’ of the world’s governing nous: ‘intelligence’ or ‘mind’. If that persuasion has been fully successful, matter has been organised into exactly the disposition and behaviour that the creator wanted. Would Plato really want to suggest that something as lowly and devoid of intelligence as brute matter has succeeded in resisting the will of the best being in the universe, god? Nothing in the text compels us to suppose so. How then does matter’s persuasion by intelligence work? The post-Platonic term ‘matter’ – what Aristotle calls hulē – is no better than an approximation to what Timaeus calls the ‘receptacle’ (hupodochē) of becoming. In itself this is conceived as a featureless and entirely pliable entity that underlies, and thereby provides the location of, qualitative change. As far as we can tell, this receptacle never lacks some quality or other. More specifically, prior to the world’s creation, it unstably bore the ‘traces’ of the four primary bodies. This quartet of earth, water, air, and fire is represented at the intelligible level by four corresponding Forms, and the ‘traces’ were, correspondingly, chance resemblances to these four paradigms that appeared and disappeared in the receptacle. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 130 130 David Sedley To impose order on the chaos, the creator’s task was to replace these chaotic element-traces with mathematically ideal particles designed to correspond as closely as possible to those four eternal paradigms. Each of the four was assigned as the shape of its particles one of the five geometrically perfect solids. To see how this was done, consider the case of fire. We may take it that the Form of fire is, or embodies, the essential function of fire, which is, in brief, to cut or divide: as flame, it does this by the dissolution of whatever it burns; as light, by dividing the visual ray. This capacity to cut was maximised by the creator by constructing fire’s particles as tetrahedra, that is, regular four-faced pyramids. By contrast, earth, with its comparative stability, was composed of cubic particles. The key point here for present purposes is that the decision to construct the world out of these four primary stuffs, and to shape their particles as illustrated above, was the creator’s own supremely intelligent way of imposing order on the previously disordered receptacle. Being entirely pliable, in no way could the receptacle have resisted his will. And if in today’s world any imperfections arise from the necessitating properties of fire, earth, etc., that does not mean that matter is successfully defying god’s will, because those properties were the very ones that he himself chose and imposed, as being, all things considered, the best ones. Fire does continue to manifest mechanical ‘necessity’ in its own intrinsic behaviour, but that necessity has been harnessed (‘persuaded’) to serve the good ends determined by intelligence. For example, much of the world’s fire constitutes the bodies of the stars, every one of them a god; and as light it provides vision, one of the greatest of divine benefactions, enabling humans to observe the regular celestial periodicities and thus advance in mathematics, and ultimately in philosophy (46a–47c). So far as one can tell from Plato’s text, divine intelligence has, to precisely the extent that it wanted, succeeded in persuading fire to cooperate in achieving its ends. If for its own reasons it does not choose to persuade all of the fire to cooperate (as indicated at 48a), there is no suggestion that this is contrary to the divine will, as if intelligence had been successfully resisted by necessity. If ordinary caustic fire, despite being potentially uncooperative and destructive, remains too, there is no reason to doubt that the creator judged it on balance to be better thus. In short, the fact that the world was generated from pre-existing matter, rather than from nothing, need not have constrained the creator’s success. The only constraint, even implicitly, was that he could not Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 131 Creationism in Antiquity 131 choose the amount of matter, since there was a finite supply of it and he deemed it prudent to use this all up rather than leave anything outside the world that might later pose a threat to it (32c–33b). And there is no indication in Plato’s text that this led to any otherwise avoidable deficiencies. It is more in accordance with Platonic thought to say that the world’s imperfections, of which the skull’s fragility is emblematic, amount to the kinds of compromise that inevitably occur whenever a paradigmatic Form is embodied in matter. Just as no material table can match the perfection of the Form of Table, so too no material world could share the perfection of the Form it is modelled on. Anaxagoras’ Anthropogony The creation of human beings is the culminating phase of Plato’s cosmogony, following in this respect a well-established Presocratic tradition. Thereafter, it was generally accepted, human agency would take over as the main guiding cause, so that cosmogony would be succeeded by cultural history. Why then, according to Platonic creationism, were human beings created? Answering this requires a preamble about Plato’s predecessors. For Socrates, we have seen, humans were created as the ultimate beneficiaries of the entire cosmogony. A generation before him, the great natural philosopher Anaxagoras had already offered his own account of the world and its inhabitants as the product of a governing nous – ‘mind’ or ‘intelligence’. Socrates, according to Plato (Phd. 97b–99c), was disappointed by what he read about this in Anaxagoras, but we should pause to see, on the basis of his surviving fragments,8 what stage in the prehistory of creationist thought Anaxagoras may have represented, and whether it bears in any way on the creation of humankind in particular. Originally, according to Anaxagoras, matter was entirely mixed, and hence a bland, inert, and undifferentiated stuff. The reason why it is not still that way is that there was a second entity, nous, which chose to act upon this stuff, stirring it into a vortex, the rotation of which then mechanically separated it out into the layers characteristic of a world. That is to say, the heavy, dark stuff travelled to the bottom or centre, forming the earth, while the light, bright, and fiery stuff travelled to the periphery, forming the stars. In between, the other two cosmic masses, water and air, similarly formed distinct strata. The separation of the mixture is still not complete and never will be, but that the separative process still continues is illustrated by the fact that some heavy items Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 132 132 David Sedley have become caught up in the fiery stuff rotating in the heaven, as the fall of meteorites attests. Given this, Anaxagoras inferred that the same phenomenon on a larger scale accounted for the sun, which he identified as a huge red-hot stone or ingot, as large as the Peloponnese, marooned up in the ether, far from the zone it might be expected to occupy. The basis of this rotatory movement and its consequences is a dualism of mind and matter. What I here loosely call matter is in his own diction a mixture of the world’s physical ingredients, which, thanks to the cosmogonic rotation, is no longer a bland, undifferentiated blend, but whose components on the other hand can never become fully separated out. And that is how matter differs from mind. Matter is always mixed, there being, as Anaxagoras puts it, ‘a portion of everything in everything’. The sole exception to this principle of universal mixture is mind, which he says is, on the contrary, unmixed, and which in fact owes its extraordinary power over matter precisely to this fact of being unmixed. What then is the Anaxagorean mind? Is it the familiar kind of mind that is possessed by any and every thinking being, ourselves included? Or is it a superhuman mind, capable of creating a world – in other words, what most thinkers would in this context call a divine creator? It is both. Mind is something we are all familiar with because we each have a portion of it in us, making it directly open to inspection – or perhaps, more accurately, to introspection. It is thus from familiarity with our own minds that we appreciate two things in particular about mind as such. One is that mind has a unique capacity to initiate and steer the motion of matter, the matter in question in our own case being our bodies. The other is that when mind moves matter, it can foresee the consequences of those changes, and can therefore plan for them. Given, then, that our world is maintained by motion, that of the heavens in particular, and that something must have initiated this motion and foreseen all along what its result would be, namely an ordered world, what could that thing be but mind? The latter point, that the cosmogonic mind must have foreseen the outcome of the rotation it brought about, can be inferred from Anaxagoras’ fragment B4a: These things being so, one must believe that there are many things of all kinds in all the things that are being aggregated, and seeds of all things, which have all kinds of forms and colours and savours. And that human beings were compounded, and all the other animals that have soul. And that the human beings, for their part, have cities that they have populated and farms that they have constructed, just as where we are. And that they have both sun and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 133 Creationism in Antiquity 133 moon and so on, just as where we are. And that their earth bears many things of all kinds, of which they harvest the best and bring them to their dwelling to use. So much then for my statement about the separation – that it would not happen only where we are, but elsewhere too. Although mind is not explicitly mentioned in these lines, there is little doubt that what are being described are the beneficial outcomes of mind’s ‘separations’ of matter, not only in our world, but in other parts of the universe too. As indicated in the last sentence, there is no reason why our own region of the universe should have been uniquely privileged, so we should expect that what mind has planned and executed in order to create our world, it has repeated elsewhere to create other worlds. In our world there are, as Anaxagoras points out here, innumerable kinds of seeds from which plants and animals have grown, and which continue to provide crops for farmers to cultivate and harvest, aided by the sun and the moon. (The moon was believed to provide signs for the benefit of farmers.) Anaxagoras infers that the other worlds have been so structured as to provide the same benefits. What is most striking is that the other worlds are inferred each to have their own sun and moon. Recall that for Anaxagoras the sun is a red-hot stone, anomalously trapped in the ether; it can be added that the moon is, similarly, a massive fragment of earth, again isolated in the ether, and drawing light from the sun’s glow. When Anaxagoras makes clear his expectation that each of the other worlds should also have precisely one sun and one moon, as ours does, it is a natural implication that in our own world too the displacement of these two huge bodies is not taken by him to be merely accidental. Rather, he is assuming that mind plans and creates worlds, our own included, specifically with a view to the needs of human societies, and that providing the necessary conditions for agriculture, among which a sun and a moon are prominent, is one part of that task. Hence in Anaxagoras’ cosmogonic theory there is good reason to conclude that our world was planned, designed, and created by mind to provide the right conditions for the emergence of life, and more specifically, for the benefit of its human inhabitants, enabled to farm and thus survive. Whether this was done by mind as a beneficent act is less clear, because human beings themselves are the world’s principal vehicles of mind, and if they are created by mind that might just as well be for its own benefit as for theirs. Nevertheless, in at least a limited sense, Anaxagoras’ account of creation can surely be called anthropocentric. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 134 134 David Sedley Anaxagorean Mind Both Plato and Aristotle were later to complain that Anaxagoras, despite trumpeting the powers of mind, in practice made no use of its intelligent powers in accounting for good features of the world. But they did not read carefully enough. When we scrutinise his dense and difficult text with sufficient care, as I have just tried to do for fragment 4a, it becomes increasingly clear that the cosmogonic mind that he postulates is a providential creator of worlds, systematically aiming for and achieving overall beneficial outcomes. Now consider Anaxagoras’ fragment B12, a kind of eulogy of mind: (a) The other things share a portion of each, but mind is something infinite and autonomous, and is mixed with no thing, but it alone is by itself. For if it were not by itself, but were mixed with something else, it would share in all things, if it were mixed with any of them – for in each a portion of each is present, as I have said earlier – and the things in the mixture would prevent it from controlling any thing in such a way as it does in being alone by itself. (b) For it is both the finest and purest of all things, and it possesses all understanding about each, and has the greatest strength. And the things that have soul, both the larger and the smaller, are all of them controlled by mind. (c) And the entire rotation was controlled by mind, so as to make it rotate in the first place. And at first it began to rotate in a small way; now it is rotating more; and it will rotate still more. And the things which are being mixed, separated and segregated, mind understood all of them. And both what they were going to be like and what they used to be like, both the things that are not now and the things that are now, and what they will be like, mind arranged them all, and also this rotation which is now being undergone by the stars, sun, moon, air and aether that are being separated off. And it was the rotation itself that made them be separated off. And the dense is being separated from the rare, the hot from the cold, the bright from the dark, and the dry from the wet. (d) There are many portions of many things. But nothing is totally separated or segregated, one from another, except mind. All mind is alike, both the larger and the smaller, while no other thing is like anything else. But the things that it has got most of in it, those are what each single thing most evidently is and was. Notice that in this text the subject, ‘mind’, refers equally and without explicit distinction to animal minds, as in the second half of (b), and to Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 135 Creationism in Antiquity 135 the mind that created the world, as in (c). In (d) Anaxagoras says, ‘All mind is alike, both the larger and the smaller.’ There is no reason not to take ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ here literally. My mind or yours could never create a world, and it is reasonable to assume that the mind that made our world had to be a much larger one than either of them. But in every respect other than size, we are here assured by Anaxagoras, all minds – our individual minds, the cosmogonic mind, and presumably also the minds of dogs, bats, and bees – are homogeneous. The world-creating mind may think bigger and more complex thoughts than our minds do, and move bigger masses of matter, but it nevertheless thinks, and acts, in what is fundamentally the same way. Then is the world-creating mind a creator god? Possible grounds for saying so are that it functions as a superhuman intelligent agent, which in an ancient Greek context is the main qualification for being a god, even if for completeness its immortality would have to be mentioned as well; and also that Anaxagoras’ fragment B12, whose fulsome praise of mind’s wonderful powers we have just read, reads much like a hymn. But there are more and stronger grounds for doubting that it is a god. For instance, Anaxagoras appears very careful to avoid applying the actual language of divinity to it. This silence about its divinity, even in the focal passage about mind, is unlikely to be a mere accident of textual survival and loss. We can usefully compare a parallel case of terminological abstinence on his part. In fragment B17 he insists that the Greek verbs meaning ‘come to be’ and ‘perish’ are strictly incorrect, a metaphysically misleading way of talking about what are in reality combinations and separations of stuffs which themselves endure. True to his word, he systematically respects this principle throughout his preserved fragments, never once using the offending verbs, but replacing them with talk of ongoing combination and separation. His scrupulous avoidance of the language of divinity gives the impression of being similarly motivated. Whether or not he dared to say it explicitly, he did not believe that talk of ‘god’ or ‘the divine’ captures the truth about the cosmos and its origins, and he censored his own language accordingly. He could, instead, have permitted himself some conventional use of religious language, if only in order to protect himself from the charge of impiety, an offence for which he was in the end exiled from Athens. Seen in this light, the resemblance of the cosmogonic mind’s powers to those of a traditional god, and the quasi-hymn composed to emphasise this resemblance, need not be hinting that the cosmogonic mind is actually divine. They may be intended to achieve the opposite result, namely to replace traditional divinities with a purely natural Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 136 136 David Sedley power. Recall his thesis of the homogeneity of mind. It favours the idea that the cosmic mind is not superhuman, since qualitatively it is the very same power as is present, albeit in smaller portions, in each of us. Anaxagoras can legitimately be understood as reducing ‘god’ to a familiar power, mind, just as he reduced coming to be and perishing to mixture and separation. Such a reduction of god to mind was echoed by his near-contemporary the tragedian Euripides, in his characteristically daring line ‘Zeus, be he natural necessity or the mind (nous) of mortals’ (Troades 886). It is no surprise that Euripides too is reported to have faced trial for impiety. But perhaps the most important consideration is the following. When Anaxagoras picked out mind as being at once the bearer of knowledge and the initiator of motion, far from being in any way a theological stance this was one half of an original and historically significant metaphysical thesis, the dualism of mind and matter. Previous philosophers had typically tended towards a kind of monism, treating matter as if it were itself inherently endowed with vital properties. This made the existence of animate beings like us unproblematic, but at the price of threatening to make everything else animate as well, even rocks and corpses. Thales (early sixth century BCE), conventionally considered the first philosopher, was remembered for saying ‘All things are full of gods,’ and that at least one kind of stone, the magnet, must have a soul, since it has the power to move iron. Anaxagoras evidently sought, in response, a metaphysics capable of separating the animate from the inanimate, and found it in a second principle, mind, which he saw as irreducibly different from matter, and present in some bodies while absent from others. Such a dualism, considered in its own right, had no need for the concept of god, and by his scrupulous avoidance of theological language, Anaxagoras was surely recognising as much. Even the portion of mind which was large and powerful enough to plan and shape the matter of a whole world was nevertheless just that, mind. This brings us to a historical paradox. On the one hand, Anaxagoras turns out to have been the first creationist, that is, the first to postulate a purposive agent which created the world as a craftsman creates an artefact. Moreover, there is some sense in which the ultimate intended beneficiary of the creation was humankind. On the other hand, Anaxagoras’ creative agent was no god, but a familiar ontological component of the physical world, the power which we call mind and witness constantly acting on our own bodies. Creationism, it turns out, in this way first entered the Western canon as a scientific and non-theological, possibly Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 137 Creationism in Antiquity 137 even anti-theological, theory of origins. Theological creationism, as we have encountered it in Socrates and Plato, was a later development. Anthropogony in the TIMAEUS We may now return to Plato’s Timaeus, and specifically to the question of why his divine creator should have included humankind in his world-plan. Contrary to the anthropocentric tendency of Anaxagoras and Socrates, according to Plato the world was created not for the sake of humankind, but with a quite different end in view: to maximise the orderliness of matter. Why then need it even include human beings? Plato’s answer is clear, but is arrived at by the following circuitous chain of inferences. In order to be the best possible product, the world had to be intelligent. To be intelligent, it had to be a living being. Therefore the Form on which its craftsman modelled it had to be the Form of Living Being, or Animal. Since this generic Form contains all the species of animal, the world’s likeness to its model would be maximised only if it too contained members of all these species, whereas so far it contained only one species, the fiery star gods who were an integral part of the newly created fiery upper zone. Analogously to the divine residents of the fiery zone, all the animals who were natural residents of the other three zones – air, land, and water – had now to be added, including men (meaning male human beings). The world itself already had a soul, but now all the newly created animals needed their own souls too, which the creator made, giving them the same structure as he had to the world-soul, albeit of inferior quality. These souls were immortal and recyclable, and would in each incarnation need to occupy and animate an animal whose degree of elevation or debasement matched their own. To the lesser gods that he had created the demiurge delegated the task of creating mortal bodies suitable to house these souls. The initial archetype that the lesser gods created was man. Later, when souls originally suitable for animating men had degenerated morally, they would be demoted to the role of animating lower beings, albeit with the chance of later redemption. Thus the reason for the creation of man was to initiate a process that, when complete, would populate the world with all animal kinds, in the interests of an admittedly somewhat abstruse ideal of cosmic completeness. It would be misleading, however, to infer that men were no more essential to the process of world-creation than worms Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 138 138 David Sedley or pigs were. Plato inherited Socrates’ conviction that man is a divinely privileged species, but adapted it to his additional Pythagoreanderived belief that the soul survives death and transmigrates between species. Degraded souls move down the natural scale, first from men to women, and then on down into quadrupeds, and, lower still in a quite literal sense of ‘lower’, into legless creatures like snakes, and, below even them, into fish. But promotion is possible too, and the very highest reward for virtue may even take a soul above human incarnation, into a state of blissful disembodiment. It is against this background that we must understand Plato’s theory of the origin of species. What the gods initially devised and created, according to him, was just a single species, man: the male human being was their archetype. It was in order to provide bodies suitable to house souls that had lost their moral fibre that the gods went on to create women, and as souls accumulated further vices, ever lower and lower species would be added, until the animal kingdom was complete. But none of these involved a genuinely new programme of species design. Rather, the original male human body was progressively adapted. For example, following the introduction of women, with the progressive further degeneration of souls the originally upright body had to be bent downwards towards the ground, the arms converted into legs, and the approximately spherical head elongated in such a way as to squash flat and thus render inert the naturally circular motions of reason. In constructing this system of punishment and redemption, Plato became the very first thinker to conceive the idea that one species has transmuted into others by adaptation, and that in consequence all animal species, humans included, are biologically interrelated. However, the transmutation he had in mind was the very antithesis of Darwinism. Not evolution but, we might rather say, devolution. Not the descent of man, but a descent from man to lower species. These metamorphoses are made by Plato to sound more like fable or myth than science, but it is striking how, in the course of his semi-mythical exposition, he can on occasion deliver an unexpectedly reasonable scientific application of his devolutionary theory. Consider toenails. In a Darwinian age, toenails are evidently vestigial claws, no longer serving their original defensive or locomotive function, and therefore excellent evidence that humans were not directly created but evolved from other species. If you were designing humankind ab initio, you would never bother with the toenails. To Plato, with his theory of devolution, toenails are, on the contrary, a manifestation of divine providence. The gods who originally created man, he maintains, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 139 Creationism in Antiquity 139 intended him all along as an archetype, ready to undergo conversion into lower species. And that was why, according to Plato, their archetype included toenails, waiting to be developed into full-scale claws or hooves when needed at a later stage in biological history. Those who find this mode of explanation hard to treat seriously might be more impressed by its power to explain the male nipple. By following Plato’s devolutionary principles, we can work out that the nipple, although without the least functionality in the original male human beings, was deliberately included in the archetype in order to be developed into a vital nutritional tool, as soon as the next stage, the formation of women, arrived. I earlier considered, and answered negatively, the question of whether matter is the source of bad in the world as conceived by Plato. We now have a more plausible candidate. The existence of moral badness, and a great many of the harms people suffer as a result of it, can be accounted for by the moral degeneration of souls. Yet that degeneration serves what is ultimately a greater good, the world’s completeness; for without it there would be no souls suitable for animating the numerous lower life-forms, and the world would remain an incomplete copy of its eternal model. Plato’s version of divine creation thus becomes arguably the first to maintain that individual moral badness, although undesirable in itself, is a necessary part of a greater cosmic good. Divine Engineering Let us return, finally, to the Argument from Design, which infers the existence of one or more benevolent divine creators from the evidence of their benefactions. Plato knew this argument (Laws 10.886a2–4), but avoided using it, considering it potentially impious even to call into question the existence of a good deity (Timaeus 29a). Xenophon’s Socrates was its first champion, and from him it passed to the Stoics, self-declared ‘Socratics’ who from around 300 BCE took over as the leading flagbearers of creationism. Socrates had chosen statues as his point of comparison: god’s achievement in creating living, self-moving beings outclasses the genius of the best human sculptor, who can make no more than static dummies. The Hellenistic age, in which Stoicism rose to become the dominant philosophy, was also an age of astonishing engineering advances. A mechanical sphere that reproduced all the major astronomical cycles9 was built by Archimedes, whose archetype was followed by other models, including one that survives today as the ‘Antikythera Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007 140 140 David Sedley mechanism’ and another said to have been constructed by the Stoic philosopher-mathematician Posidonius. These advances enabled the Stoics to update Socrates’ Argument from Design, replacing sculptures with astronomical spheres (Cic. On the Nature of the Gods 2.88). Anyone, they argued, even the most uncivilised of barbarians, would instantly recognise one of these spheres as the product of intelligence. Yet the world itself is the great original mechanism of which these spheres are mere replicas. Who then can doubt that the world too is the product of a designer, indeed of a designer whose brilliance outclasses that of the great Archimedes himself? Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Chapter 5 by Thomas Kjeller Johansen. The history of creationist thought in antiquity has not traditionally been a recognised topic of study. However, the ground covered in this chapter is more fully explored in Sedley 2007. The only other monograph on (approximately) the same theme is Theiler 1924. Hankinson 1989. See also Chapter 3 by Corcilius and Chapter 5 by Johansen in this volume. On these chapters of Xenophon, see esp. Powers 2009. This remains to the present day a widely asserted ground for preferring the sempiternalist interpretation. See, e.g. Baltes 1996. See Chapter 4 by Ebrey in this volume. The remains of Anaxagoras’ writings are edited by Curd 2007, albeit with a somewhat different interpretation from the one that follows. See Chapter 10 by Taub in this volume, and Jones 2017 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Cambridge Centre of International Studies, on 11 Jan 2022 at 14:46:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136096.007