Creation Stories

Reflections: Timaeus' account of creation is almost as unbelievable as the Bible's.

Might Plato have accepted that the universe could not be explained and understood? He tried heartily to do just that in his Timaeus. My initial reaction to this dialogue was one of wonder: The question put to Timaeus (by Socrates) regarding a perfectly-run city in a time of war is hardly addressed. Rather, Timaeus goes on (and on) about the makeup of the cosmos with no real physical evidence to back it up. Living in Athens at a time when society was crumbling around him, Plato seems to have a compulsive need of controlling the knowledge of how the world works in its entirety. Was this one of Plato's intentions for writing this dialogue? What was he really trying to say and when can we take his writing at face-value?; When is he writing in metaphor?

There are stark differences between Plato's picture of the world's creation and other creation myths such as Genesis. The most striking is that Plato's approach is mechanical and scientific (despite his wildly unscientific claims) as opposed to allegorical. That aside, the prescriptions of how one should live and behave amount to be the same in both.

Many Creation stories (Genesis and The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example) come from a time when cities were beginning to form, around the time when agriculture was starting to take hold (circa 5000 BC). Eventually, walled cities with fortifications were needed to protect crops, land, food surplus/cache, from jealous rivals or raiders... The transition from groups of nomadic and mobile hunter-gatherers to one of relatively sedentary city-dwellers had certain requirements. Most requirements amount to how one should behave. Two examples: Do not commit murder; do not steal. How can a city survive if these two basic concepts are not observed?Both Genesis and the Timaeus contain a moral code that a population must follow in order for the population to remain in order, or civilized. Interestingly, these stories take very different paths in getting to similar moral points. Genesis conveys its lessons through symbols and allegory while the Timaeus explains its message through dialogue.

Timaeus' "dialogue" takes place a day or two after Socrates' on "Justice" (in The Republic). Are Timaeus' descriptions of the world an extension of the ideal republic, projected to the cosmos and the human soul? (Expanding to the cosmos and contracting to the individual)? Socrates' and Timaeus' visions are ones that should be used as models for our own lives, i.e. if we understand and recognize the perfection of Socrates' Republic as well as Timaeus' account of everything else, we will more likely recognize when we, as individuals, go astray and move out of harmony with the natural and good orderliness of the universe. For example, 89e - 90c: There are 3 types of soul that reside within us - balance between them must be kept. The trappings of earthly ambitions lead to mortal thoughts and render one "merely mortal". However, if one seeks knowledge and goodness and truth, immortality, "...Keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him". If we have fallen out of harmony with what is "good", we must come to relearn the revolutions of the universe and follow their rhythm. Compared with Creation Myths, Plato's focus on the Physical leaves no need for the Anthropomorphic Supernatural, as Judaism did at the time and some later religions (Catholicism, Islam) would.

Plato's entire opus is said to equal the length of the modern bible but how unfortunate that his lab books did not survive to this day... As someone with a background in Biology I was a little stunned to read the many statements Plato makes about the human body, for example, "Inflammations of the body are caused by bile..." and about the physical world "...when water is broken up into parts by fire or even air, it could happen that the parts recombine to form one corpuscule of fire and two of air". Like Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, might Timaeus's image of the world be an allegory to something much deeper and more mysterious or did philosophers of his time feel such a need to categorize all that exists - to sum up the "Whole Picture"? Was it acceptable to extrapolate certain basic truths to all aspects of existence without anything but the most crude conjecture and evidence (if any evidence at all)? Is the Timaeus a primitive prefigurement to Einstein's idea of a "Unified Field Theory" to explain everything? Loosely speaking, I think it is, if one is to take this dialogue literally.

A line that sums up much of the Timaeus, 68b: "It is impossible, even approximately, to provide proof or likely account on these matters". It wouldn't have been out of place for this line to be the introductory sentence of the work with the explanation that within these "matters" are tiny seeds of truth that have been extrapolated from. Let me explain with an example: In 67d-68 Timaeus makes connections between the natures of sight, touch and taste in the same way that he tries to connect everything from the revolutions and movements of the cosmos to those of human souls. He is conflating unrelated ideas. (I think) he used these simple but wrong statements as metaphors of the world as a whole and as examples of its perfection on scales both large and small.

Granted, Plato's deductive reasoning is a hallmark of the scientific method as we know it, but he falls short (in the eyes of today's scientists) in his lack of empiricism. To us, Plato's shortcoming in this regard seems amazingly obvious but one must keep in mind that his philosophy is centered on the knowledge of abstract forms as opposed to empirical knowledge. "Why waste time in observation?", he might have asked. "The universe is based on Reason and the 5 solids, and perfection can only be visualized in one's mind in the form of Forms". Plato contends that the world as our senses sense it is an imperfect copy. Aristotle would come to be the first to place much importance on collecting evidence and observing the physical world (never mind that he claimed men have more teeth than women) and he, unlike Plato, left behind volumes of writings on his observations of the biological world.

68d: "It is god who possesses Knowledge ... to mix a plurality into unity ... while no human being could possess either of these whether at the present time or at any time in the future." Here, Plato concedes that there comes a point where human reason ends and "Faith" begins - some knowledge is in the hands of the ineffable god and cannot be understood or explained by humans. Compared to the other Creation myths, Plato's approach is decidedly more overtly explanatory, philosophical and relies less on blind faith. However, his treatise depends on a priori logic. Unlike Genesis, Plato does not assume that the demiurge has petty human emotions and he relies more on his own observations of the physical, natural world to explain existence. Rather than imposing what he feels are an anthropomorphic deity's reasons for creating the cosmos, he explains the creation of the world on a much more cerebral and physical level. There is no mention of a personal god because that is the last thing Plato wants to rely on in his explanation of the nature of the world. 29b-c, "Don't be surprised then, Socrates, if it turns out repeatedly that we won't be able to produce accounts on a great many subjects - on gods or the coming to be of the universe - that are completely consistent and accurate. ...Keeping in mind that both I...and you...are only human." Indeed. Now if only we could find those lab books...