Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity

Preface

Preface The dining hall of my college—Christ’s College Cambridge—displays portraits of its most illustrious alumni.One pairing is of unique symbolic value. On the left is William Paley (1743–1805), author of the classic version of the Argument from Design. In his Natural Theology (1802), Paley developed his celebrated comparison of the world and its natural contents to a watch, on finding which one could not but infer that “there must have existed , at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” To Paley’s right stands Charles Darwin. In his days as a student at Christ’s (1827–31) Darwin was immensely proud to occupy what he believed to be the same set of rooms as Paley had before him. Yet within months of leaving Cambridge Darwin had embarked on the research which would, when it reached maturity, radically and irreversibly destabilize Paley’s confident arguments for intelligent creation. In today’s Cambridge it would rarely if ever occur to me to check with my colleagues whether any of them believe Paley’s arguments to trump Darwin ’s. Locally at least, whatever residual skirmishes may still divide Darwin ’s successors, the war is generally perceived as having been won by the evolutionists.But the lectures that form the content of the present book were delivered in a country where the legacy of the 1925 Scopes trial inTennessee still resonates in battles fought on school boards and elsewhere over the teaching of evolution, and where polls suggest that nearly half the population believes that the human race has been created by God in the last ten thousand years, while at the opposite pole fewer than one tenth believe that evolution occurred without God’s intervention. In the United States of all places it would have been a mistake to consign the debate to history. xv Indeed, my aim is the very reverse of that: it is to use history in order to shed new light on the debate. However, at no point will I address the issue of biblical authority, which has explicitly or implicitly bulked so large in the modern era but has virtually no counterpart in the ancient pagan debate.1 My interest is in the arguments for and against divine creation and the appeals that were made to its explanatory power. In classical antiquity, these were formulated and deployed by a series of leading philosophers, nearly all of whom agreed, at least tacitly, that settling the issue is fundamental to establishing a proper relationship with the divine, and hence to the quest for human happiness. What is the value of conducting such a historical exercise? For my money, it lies precisely in treating both sides of the ancient debate with equal sympathy .The object is not to determine who was right, but to understand each position’s rationale from the inside.The potential rewards include new historical perspectives on the pantheon of thinkers who laid the foundations of western philosophy and science, perspectives which are likely to enhance our understanding of their ethics,their physics,and even in some cases their logic. But an equally rich recompense lies in the sheer intellectual exercise of thinking one’s way into lines of reasoning with which one may well at the outset have no intuitive sympathy, while establishing a matching critical distance from those one is inclined to favor. In the first two chapters I explore the creationist tendency of the “Presocratic ” thinkers Anaxagoras and Empedocles. My third chapter reconstructs Socrates’ radical contribution to creationist thought,both in the pages of Xenophon and Plato and in its historical context. Chapter IV is devoted to Plato,with special reference to his Timaeus. And the following three chapters trace reactions to this uniquely seminal text among Plato’s successors— first (chapterV) the atomists,2 who tried to show how creationist arguments can be successfully resisted; then (chapter VI) Plato’s pupil Aristotle, whose project was to retain all the explanatory benefits of creationism without the xvi / Preface 1. In later antiquity Platonist interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus, although it came to manifest some of the same reverential methodology as biblical exegesis, nevertheless differed in never regarding Plato’s say-so as sufficient by itself to establish truth.This Platonist tradition constitutes a fascinating story (on which see especially...