Plato's
God
According to Plato,
there is the world of perfect Forms, which exist beyond time and space and were
not created; they're eternal. There is also raw, chaotic matter. It is
unordered and constantly changing obeying no set of rules. Plato's God was
called the 'Demiurge', literally meaning public worker but also the word used
to describe a craftsmen.
The role of the Demiurge
is to bring order out of such chaos. He uses the pre-existing matter to do so,
using the Forms as the model. The creator faces the problem of matter resisting
its will. The universe can never be perfect due to the matter it is created
from and can never be a perfect universe, and is also always changing because
it is in space and time.
An important point need
to be made here. The God of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is said to create
the universe 'ex nihilo' i.e. creating something out of nothing. He is all loving,
all powerful and a personal God. The Demiurge is not all powerful, and does not
create something from nothing. He is morally good as judged against the Form of
good.
Influence
Although I will discuss
this in later posts, I need to raise the point that such ideas influenced
thought on how God was defined by early Christians and western Philosophers.
The idea of something having 'perfection' was defined as something that was
beyond space and time, and something which was not contingent on
anything but is seen as necessary and eternal.
The idea that God
brought the universe into existence and is spaceless and timeless, and is a
necessary being, not a contingent one, was most certainly influenced by such
thought. In particular, the Christian Theologian St Thomas Aquinas was to offer
such an argument to prove God's existence in his famous 'Five Ways' (But that is another post for another day!)
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