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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Ancient and Modern

Peter Jones on the debate between creationists and anti-creationists

The debate between creationists and anti-creationists is nothing new. As David Sedley shows in his extraordinarily interesting Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Cambridge), it raged as strongly in the ancient world as it does in the modern. The ancients were, for the most part, creationists. The big debate for them was what happened next, i.e. how the physical world came to be. The natural science, therefore, was just as important as the ‘theology’. On this issue the spanner in the ointment [sic] was Socrates. He tells us that, as a young man, he was thrilled by speculation about the natural world: ‘whether it was blood that makes us conscious beings, or air, or fire; or is it the brain that supplies us with our sense of sight and hearing or smell? Is it from here that memory and opinion, and then knowledge, come?’ But eventually he became disillusioned because it did not seem to him to deal with ‘the only thing that it is in man’s interest to consider with regard to himself and anything else — the best and highest good’. And that, he argued, was what the god had in mind for the human race.

To support his belief about the deity’s beneficence, Socrates produced our first example of the ‘argument from design’, taking the body as an example: look how eyelids and lashes protect the eyes, how far from the eyes and nose the excretory channels, and so on. But Socrates’ great disciple Plato could not swallow Socrates’ rejection of scientific explanation, and in his dialogue Timaeus set about showing how Socrates’ views could be squared with the workings of the physical world. In doing so, he came up with a theory the polar opposite of Darwin’s: not evolution, but devolution!

For Plato, man did not evolve from earlier forms. Man was the archetype, the god’s most perfect creation. Other life forms therefore devolved from him. This happened, Plato argues, because man became degenerate and, via reincarnation, was demoted to lower biological specimens. Toenails prove it. For man, they are a pointless appendage. So why do we have them? Because the all-provident deity knew that man would become degenerate, and lower biological creatures would need them as claws. Obviously. QED.

Next time, we shall examine the ancient case against creationism.

Peter Jones

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