Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity

III / Socrates

III Socrates 1. diogenes of apollonia To clear the way for this chapter’s protagonist, Socrates, I must start by explaining briefly why I do not believe that his approximate contemporary Diogenes of Apollonia is of major significance for our story, as has sometimes been thought. For Diogenes has been often credited with the earliest version of (roughly speaking) the Argument from Design, that family of arguments which infer the existence of a providential god from the evidence of intelligent creation in the world.1 And some of the most important arguments stemming from Socrates have been wrongly,in my view,reassigned to Diogenes. Diogenes, datable to the late fifth century b.c., was by no means in the first rank of Presocratic superstars. He has nevertheless acquired the reputation of being the first teleological thinker. In the only monograph ever devoted to the history of teleological thought in antiquity, published in 1924 byWillyTheiler,Diogenes is given more space than Plato and Aristotle combined , while Anaxagoras gets a mere five pages and Empedocles none at all. I hope I have by now made it clear why I consider such cursory treatment of these latter two Presocratics an injustice. I must now add my reasons for the converse view, that Diogenes of Apollonia is not the important figure in this story that he is widely assumed to be. Diogenes’ reputation as a pioneer of teleology has been cemented by a single fragment (64 B 3), which reads as follows: For it would not be possible without intelligence (no;sis) for it so to be divided up that it has measures of all things—of winter and summer and 75 1. Even the very judicious Pease 1941 gives Diogenes undue credit in this regard. night and day and rains and winds and fair weather. The other things too, if one wishes to consider them, one would find disposed in this way, the finest possible.2 This announcement that everything is disposed in the finest way possible sounds like an anticipation of the teleology developed later by the Stoics and Leibniz, and satirized in the person of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, under the rubric “the best of all possible worlds.” But in my view Simplicius, our source for the quotation, tells us enough about its context to rule out any such understanding. Diogenes was a material monist, who nominated air as the universal underlying stuff. Fortunately we have from Simplicius not just some extensive quotations from the opening part of his treatise, but also an indication of the order in which they occurred there. To establish the primacy of air, Diogenes started his argument by maintaining (64 B 2 DK) that a single material substrate, rather than a plurality of coordinate elements, must be postulated, because of its greater explanatory power. He then turned to identifying this single underlying matter, arguing for his distinctive thesis that it is in fact air. As evidence for its identification with air he cited the exceptional powers of air, not of course in air’s guise as concealed substrate of everything, which would have been circular, but as manifested in its most directly observable forms, as the stuff of wind, breath, etc. In particular (B 4), he pointed out, breathing air is the very basis of animals’ life and intelligence: Furthermore, the following too are major signs. Humans and the other animals are kept alive by the air they breathe. And this is both soul and intelligence for them, as will be clearly shown in the present treatise. And if this departs, they die and their intelligence lapses.3 It was only after this (at the beginning of B 5) that he proceeded to firm up his conclusion that air is indeed the divine universal principle of everything: 76 / III. Socrates 2. ouj ga;r a[n, fhsivn, oi|ovn te h\n ou{tw dedavsqai a[neu nohvsioˇ, w{ste pavntwn mevtra e[cein, ceimw¸novˇ te kai; qevrouˇ kai; nukto;ˇ kai; hJmevraˇ kai; uJetw¸n kai; ajnevmwn kai; eujdiw¸n: kai; ta; a[lla, ei[ tiˇ bouvletai ejnnoei¸sqai, euJrivskoi a]n ou{tw diakeivmena, wJˇ ajnusto;n kavllista. In thus punctuating and translating the last five words, I follow Laks 1983, ad loc., who points out that the usually favored translation , “disposed in the best possible way,” has to treat wJˇ simultaneously as the correlative of ou{twˇand as the wJˇthat combined with a superlative means “the [ . . . ]est possible...