Aristodemus, whether a disposition of parts like this should be a work of chance, or of wisdom and contrivance?" He also argues in like manner from the existence of intelligence in man, the soul, and the general adaptability of man's powers and conditions to the furthering of his life. This argument to design has appropriately been called "peculiarly the Socratic proof,"[7] and to his treatment of it, so in keeping with the practical, sturdy common-sense of the man, nothing essential or important, except in multiplication of applications and details, has been added since his time. In the opinion of the writer, however, Socrates, so far as one can judge from his recorded utterances, developed merely the form of the Argument to Design, but it cannot be positively asserted that he used it as a theistic argument. In the Memorabilia it is always "the gods" to which the argument leads, and the worship of them that he urges. He may have had a more theistic conception, but the context warrants no further meaning of θεός than the generic one of an object of worship—in this case the national gods. In the Apology "ὁ θεός" is used almost invariably of the local divinity of the oracle at Delphi, and of the "daemon" which, at the instigation of the Delphian divinity, as he was convinced, guided his actions. The present writer is strongly of the opinion that much violence has been done the words of Socrates by translators and interpreters, and that this fact will account for much of the alleged theistic teaching which is, without warrant, ascribed to the Athenian sage.
The contribution of Plato to the theistic argument was, characteristically, the form of the "Ontological proof" which has been called "Idealogical." This process is a very natural development for Plato's Dialectic.[8] Once divide the universe, as he did, into the two classes of permanent existence and transient phenomena, and identify the former with the ideas (which are nothing else than universals, each of which expresses the essence of many phenomena), and it is a very easy process to conceive of these ideas themselves being united in another more inclusive idea, and so, by a process of generalization, to reach at length the "Idea of Ideas"—the absolute Idea, in which lies the essence of all in the universe. Thus from any one fact of beauty, harmony, etc., the human mind may rise to the notion of a common quality in all objects of beauty, etc.: "from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others; from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until, from thought to thought, we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the perfect, absolute, Divine Beauty."[9] The "ideas," too, and especially the "Good" or "absolute Idea," have in them a teleological element, "since the Idea not only states as what, but also for what a thing exists."[10] The absolute Idea is not only the first principle of the universe, but also its final purpose, and thus we have indicated in various places a teleological argument. Traces of other forms of the theistic argument have been detected in Plato's writings, but none of them are at all explicitly developed, and one cannot but feel that some writers on the subject have claimed altogether too much for Plato's theology.[11] The poetical and allegorical form into which he so constantly throws his discussion makes it extremely difficult to determine his exact position, especially on such a subject as his theology, in which he is constantly adapting his metaphysical doctrines to the prevailing polytheistic religious ideas; and at the same time this method of expression gives a good opportunity for the collection of isolated quotations which may support almost any theory.
The religious character of Plato's philosophy is, as Zeller says, to be found much more on the moral than on the scientific side, and hence he was content to leave the more exact formulation of such arguments as these to his successors. As to the results to which this method led him, the statement of Zeller, in view of the many conflicting opinions, seems satisfactory: "In everything that he states concerning the Divinity the leading point of view is the idea of the Good, the highest metaphysical and ethical perfection. As this highest Idea stands over all ideas as the cause of all being and knowing, so over all gods, alike hard to find and to describe, stands the one, eternal, invisible god, the Framer and Father of all things."[12] Of the personality of God Plato had no conception,[13] and it would be a very difficult undertaking to prove from his extant works that he was, in any real sense of the word, a theist.
Of the three divisions of the speculative sciences—physical, mathematical and theological—Aristotle makes the last the "most excellent,"[14] "for it is conversant about that one amongst entities which is more entitled to respect than the rest."[15] It is to the discussion of this subject in Book XI. that the greater part of the Metaphysics leads up. He has established in the previous portions of the work the two substances which he calls "natural or physical"—namely, matter and form—and now he proceeds to justify the hints he has given of a third substance which is "immovable."[16] It has been customary to divide this discussion of Aristotle into several formal theistic arguments,[17] but in the opinion of the writer the text of the Metaphysics does not lend itself readily to any such cut and dried arrangement of its argument. Aristotle does, indeed, to avoid the absurdity of an endless regress, argue from the κινούμενα and the κινοῦντα of the physical World to a πρῶτον κινοῦν which is a pure ἐνέργεια, ἀκίνητον, ἄνευ ὕλης, and hence foreign to all the passivity and contingency of matter;[18] concludes from motion in the world that there must be a First Mover;[19] and asserts the actuality of the eternal as opposed to potentiality; but these arguments are so blended together, and take each one so much from the others, that I cannot be convinced that Aristotle had ever clearly differentiated them.
But it is clear enough that the crown of Aristotle's whole system is this "prime mover," "unmoved" and "apart from matter," and that this conception, up to which his thought leads from every side, as the necessary implication from the motion everywhere seen in the world, is his chief contribution to the argument for the existence of the Divine. Aristotle's chief interest lay in the cosmological problem, and his form of proof and the result which he reached by it were moulded by this fact. His argument did not lead him to a Creator of the world, for the universe, no less than the prime mover, was eternal, and the latter is nothing more than a principle of reason immanent in the world—pervading it, not distinguished from it—and the author of motion only in a passive way, after all, as a sort of magnetic object of desire.[20] In other places Aristotle makes passing references to different forms of the argument to prove the existence of the gods,[21] but it is evident that his own interest centered around this unmoved final cause, and it is in his proof of its existence from cosmological considerations that his significance for us lies.
In the post-Aristotelian schools we have an entire change of the point of view, and instead of a philosophy of nature, such as occupied the attention of the pre-Socratic thinkers, or a philosophy of mind, such as Socrates, Plato, and to a large extent, Aristotle attempted to construct, we find the interest of men in speculative questions centered in a philosophy of life, of morals. Corresponding to this change in the point of view, we may easily detect an alteration in the manner of dealing with the arguments for the existence of the gods.
There was, in the first place, an increased emphasis laid upon this line of thought, in common with religious subjects in general, and the reasons for the belief in the existence of the gods (for the Greek schools never transcended polytheism—when they speak of θεός they mean simply the abstract divinity of the many separate divinities) seems, so far as we may judge from the comparatively scanty remains that have come down to us, to have been discussed at great length; critically and negatively by the Sceptics, positively and apparently with full conviction by the Stoics, and with a curious mixture of both of these attitudes by the Epicureans. These latter, if the reported doctrine of Epicurus himself be trustworthy, denied the popular gods, and, in order to insure freedom, rejected the Stoic doctrine of providence; but, on the other hand, asserted a belief in gods whose essential characteristics are immortality and perfect happiness (to insure which they must care nothing for the world or for men), and whose existence was held to be proven on the basis of the common consent of all men ("Argumentum e Consensu Gentium"). This argument is the result of a "natural idea" or "pre-notion," which Epicurus called πρόληψις;—"that is, an antecedent conception of the fact in the mind, without which nothing can be understood, inquired after, or discoursed on."[22]
The Stoics, on the other hand, with their strong conviction of providence working in the world, were rather inclined to deny the validity of this argument from common consent, and rested their belief in the gods, as Cicero makes his Stoic do in De Natura Deorum,[23] on the evidence of design and purpose in the universe, but by this process succeeded only in proving to their own satisfaction that the world is divine—a fatalistic pantheism which roused the ire of the Epicurean and Sceptic alike, and which even Cicero seemed hardly to be able to accept.
From this necessarily brief review of the development of the argument for the existence of a Divinity in Greek and Roman thought, it will be seen that, at one time or another, in a more or less fully developed form, each one of the principal types of the theistic argument received the chief emphasis and had its method enunciated. The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, on the basis of the maxim as old as philosophy itself—Ἀδύνατον γίνεσθαι τι ἐκ μηδενὸς προυπάρχοντος— pointed to an Ἀρχή—a real behind phenomena, a permanent behind the change—and thus pointed to the so-called Aetiological argument founded on the principle of causality. Socrates, with his pre-eminently practical disposition and ethical point of view, saw above all things intention in nature, and so from the consideration of this choice and adaptation of means to their end, and the resultant Final Cause he constructs a very complete Teleological argument for the existence of some intelligence behind the visible world. Plato's Ideas, as we have seen, determine the method by which he arrives at his abstract divinity, namely, by the "Idealogical" form of argument based upon a process of generalization. Aristotle, struck by the phenomena of motion in the universe, lays most stress on the course of reasoning which would lead back to the Prime Mover. The Epicureans, subordinating their theology to their ethical theory, and unwilling to allow their deity to interfere with the world or with men's affairs, developed and placed their dependence on the argument from common consent. The Stoics, laying great stress upon the order, proportion and harmony in the world, argued to mind as the reason for this condition of things. But none of these philosophers, in the opinion of the writer, attained to a conception of God which could in any real or accepted sense of the word be called theistic, or which would satisfy a mind accustomed to the idea of the Christian doctrine of God.
For the Greek writers never make any accurate distinction between ὁ θεός, οἱ θεόι, τὸ θεῖον and τὰ θεῖα. They never conceive of their θεός as anything more than a rather larger and more majestic member of the innumerable family of the divinities of which the poets had sung—more spiritual only in so far as it was more vague and indefinite, a sort of mysterious, mythical being to which is sometimes attributed the same kind of personality possessed by the inferior gods, and sometimes regarded as simply the abstract divinity which characterized all of the gods. But that to which the arguments that we have been discussing generally lead is not even so near to the theistic conception as this modified polytheism, for they usually conduct us, as we have already indicated, to nothing more than a (sometimes) personified force of nature, principle of order, or abstract conception—not a God. Take away the inaccurate and misleading terms by which the original Greek is rendered in most of the English versions, in which the enthusiasm of the student of comparative religions has taken the place of the careful and accurate translator, and, aside from frequent apostrophes, such as are continually addressed by the poets to the many gods of the popular religion, the end of the arguments we have been considering will be found to be as depicted above. In a word: Greek philosophy, independent of Semitic influences, developed the form of the chief types of the theistic argument, but it failed utterly to deduce from them a theism, being throughout in its theology either polytheistic or pantheistic.