Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity

VI / Aristotle

VI Aristotle 1. god as paradigm Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) was Plato’s student for two decades before founding his own school. Is it more fruitful to think of his mature work as antiPlatonist ,or as that of an independent Platonist? Although this age-old question does not admit of final resolution, I am convinced with regard to my present topic,the explanation of purposive structures in the world,that most can be learnt by emphasizing, rather than minimizing, Aristotle’s Platonic background and training.1 Aristotle is the greatest teleological thinker of antiquity, probably of all time, and his teleology takes us to the very heart of his physics, his biology, his metaphysics, and his ethics.2 It is no part of my purpose, in the single chapter I shall devote to him, to cover all these aspects of his work. Instead I want to defend a portrayal of Aristotle’s teleological worldview as a reasoned modification of Plato’s creationism. Of course, in this field he was doing much more than modifying Plato. For one thing, he happened to be the ancient world’s greatest zoologist, and his zoological research enabled him to develop his teleological thinking to a level Plato could not easily have envisaged .But my focus will not be on Aristotle’s biological writings.The chapter will be largely directed at a single book, book II of his Physics, which is his systematic defense of the teleological worldview against its competitors. 167 1. Gerson 2005, provocatively entitled Aristotle and Other Platonists, appeared only after I had drafted this chapter. It should be consulted for a much more ambitious , and more Neoplatonic, assimilation of the two than I have contemplated, including chapter 4 on issues relating to causation. 2. I must here leave untouched many of the major issues in Aristotle’s teleology, on which see esp. Gotthelf 1997. Plato, like nearly every other thinker in and well after antiquity, associated teleology with conscious purpose.To make the world a purposive structure just is to posit an intelligent mind as its cause.True,the intelligent mind could have created the world and then left it to run itself mechanically, but no ancient thinker—after at any rate Anaxagoras, whose position on the point is open to dispute—was ready to contemplate a split-level theory of that kind.Either the world was intelligently created and is intelligently run, or it originated from non-intelligent causes and is still, with the possible exception of human action, governed by causes of that same kind. We have seen at length how, while the atomists defended the latter view, Plato developed the former: his Demiurge, who created the world, has left it under the overall control of the intelligent and divine world soul.3 In conformity to this background, Aristotle too treats the twin issues of creation and administration in strict parallel to each other.The world, along with its resident species, is not the product of an intelligent act of creation, for the simple reason that it had no beginning at all but has always existed— a thesis he defends by appeal to the essential eternity of the heaven’s circular motion. And likewise when it comes to the world’s continued functioning , there is no divine oversight, planning, or enforcement.4 So far he may seem to tend closer to the atomist camp, since no divine interest in our world is invoked at any stage. But like Plato, and unlike the atomists, he nevertheless holds that throughout the natural world there are irreducibly purposive structures. Pretty well everything in nature has a purpose, despite the fact that no intelligence either conceived that purpose or administers it. This restrained teleology has won Aristotle innumerable admirers. For, it is rightly said, purposive structures are indeed basic to nature, quite regardless of the question of divine control or its absence.Never mind whether you are a creationist or the most hardened of Darwinians: you cannot avoid saying that the heart is for pumping blood,the eyelid for protecting the eye, the teeth for cutting and grinding food. Nor, for the Darwinian, are these 168 / VI. Aristotle 3. It is admittedly hard to establish how much more the Platonic world soul governs than the celestial rotations.But Ti. 37a4–c5 (on which cf.Reydams-Schils 1997) makes it clear that it has true “opinions” (dovxai) about the sensible world of becoming , and hence does not concentrate its thought exclusively on...