For some reason I assumed that most cosmological arguments imply ex-nihilo. I was not leaving any room between an Uncaused Creator and Caused Creation. It’s still hard to wrap my mind around an uncaused eternal “chaos”.
Funny that you should say…let me introduce you to Tom!
I think you’d be right that most Christian cosmological arguments take ex nihilo creation for granted, but I’m not actually sure. We’ll know better by the end of this unit!
And let’s pay attention to this issue when we read the bit of Laws and Aristotle developing the Prime Mover argument (which is much more detailed than Plato’s arguments).
“A good craftsman, making a beautiful universe, must have had an eternal model.”
Is that because the “created model” would’ve not been able to create a beautiful universe? I think by now the superiority of Being over Becoming is become clearer; however, I wanted to understand if that’s why in this context, the universe had to have an eternal model.
And I guess, that also explains why there are only 2 models; there are only 2 possible types of models eternal or created. Plato seems to dismiss the Becoming model very fast “but if otherwise (which is an impious supposition), his gaze was on that which has come into existence. But it is clear to everyone that his gaze was on the Eternal”
I agree that he seems to give short shrift to the hypothesis that the model for the universe was itself something created. But I suspect that, if he’s helping himself to the notion that all order requires a craftsman and hence a model, there would be a “regress of models” ending only in an eternal one; that’s speculative, but reasonable.
Do you think Plato believed the eternal model upon which the creator patterned our universe existed within the creator’s mind or was it something external to the creator? Perhaps he assumed this changeless, uncreated being must have dwelt in some changeless, uncreated world after which he modeled our created one. I believe he shared Xenophanes’ disdain for anthropomorphic concepts of deity, so I doubt he was imagining anything so crude as God living in some eternal house of eternal wood and stone, but it’s still hard to conceive of a thing existing that isn’t existing in a place external to it. Certainly, the idea of God presented in Nehemiah 9:6 as The LORD alone, who created the heavens, the heaven of heavens, and the earth, is not one I would have ever thought up on my own.
Ugh, I just wrote a long answer and it was inadvertently erased…I’ll try to reconstruct concisely but accurately.
I don’t think Plato believed the god, aka the Demiurge (δημιουργός = craftsman), was the source of the ideas or forms after which the universe was patterned. In Plato’s system, the forms exist independently of the mind of the god. Similarly, a pre-existing chaos exists independently of the god, or so it appears to me from this dialogue, anyway. On Plato’s view, he is apparently a sort of divine orchestrator. He did not create everything ex nihilo as later theologians said. It seems that it did not occur to Plato that there was any problem about a pre-existing chaos or pre-existing forms—or about a pre-existing Demiurge, for that matter. Those were the fundamental entities, I suppose we might say.
I think you’re right with regard to disdain for anthropomorphism; Augustine in City of God makes it clear that the more sophisticated religious thinkers of Greece and Rome were embarrassed by the myths, even if they paid lip service to them. And if the craftsman is a Being (as Plato seems to say) then he couldn’t have had a body at a place—that would be perceptible and, hence, corruptible.
But as to whether you would or would not have thought of the idea of a single all-powerful creator God, quite a few philosophers and theologians would say that you would have. Paul, too, said, famously: “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom 1:19–20).
Thank you, that makes Plato’s reasoning much clearer to me. To clarify my own last point though, apart from the revelation of Scripture, I think I would have agreed with Plato regarding pre-existing Chaos, etc. I could have reasoned out the existence of a Most High God, and I might possibly have even concluded there is only One True God who made everything that has been made, but I don’t think that, on my own, I would have reached the idea that this God created absolutely everything that isn’t Him. Maybe someone could have, but not me.
It may seem obvious to us after thousands of years of Judeo-Christian teachings on ex-nihilo, but there’s still something kind of alien in the idea that the entire concept of anything existing apart from God is itself a creation of God. It would be as if the Flatlanders found out that actually the King of Pointland was right all along. He really was the omnipresent all-in-all he claimed to be, and they were just inventions of his own infinite imagination. (That could be a fun book to write if there weren’t already a mountain of bad Flatland fanfic.)
I absolutely agree with Paul, of course. Natural revelation won’t give us a complete theology, but it is sufficient to point us to God’s existence. That leaves me with no excuse if I don’t do everything in my power to seek Him out and try to find out what he expects of me. And given my own natural inclination toward sheer laziness, I know it’s only by His grace that I was drawn to Him.
It’s an interesting question—whether the idea of creation ex nihilo is or was simply unobvious. But, as we will see later on, the idea comes fairly naturally from the principle of sufficient reason. We look for explanations of everything; why not, then, some undifferentiated chaos (whatever that actually means)?
The scientific impulse in the West ultimately came from Socrates and other philosophers, who sought ultimate explanations of everything. As soon as you keep pushing in that way, eventually the question, “This ‘chaos’—where did it come from?” is bound to emerge.
Also, Tom, let me introduce you to Ben!
haha … My reply was actually meant to Tom’s comment, but somehow it landed “orphaned”
Does Plato’s chaos resemble Genesis 1:2′ tohu va vohu (formless and void)? And if it does, does it simply mean that God created the “raw” materials first and then made order out of it? Why? After all, God could’ve created order straight out of nothing.
I also wonder in light of modern discoveries and evidence of the “big bang” theory, if the ex-nihilo argument if stronger nowadays than it has ever been.
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