The last days of Dēmiourgós

The Saturday column is for archive material with tenuous links to something contemporary. This week, I visited the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum.

As the first tamers of horses (and other labouring animals) rode west from the Eurasian steppes, rumours spread of their advance. Creatures half men, half horse -- centaurs -- became the subject of myth and legend throughout the ancient world. The ancient Greeks, particularly, had a thing about chimeras. Take the pre-Socratic philosopher-scientist Empedocles, and his ideas on the origin of life. We did not really begin to explain the origin of contemporary species until Darwin, in the mid-19th century. Empedocles idea perhaps comes closest to modern scientific thought, even if it is far from the mark:

On the earth there burst forth many faces without necks, arms wandered bare bereft of shoulders, and eyes wandered needing foreheads.

Many sprang up two faced and two breasted, man faced ox progeny, and conversely ox headed man progeny.^[1]

These experimental chance formations eventually stumbled upon individuals who could reproduce, and fully formed humans then took over. It is not the specific trial-and-error mechanism, in some respects reminiscent of evolution, that makes this the most modern of the ideas, but the fact that this hypothesis invokes neither a creator God, nor an innate teleological drive powering the change (which in turn might imply a creator God). Despite its naturalistic account, the idea is obviously far fetched, as Plato pointed out. Plato preferred the version with the creator God -- who he called dēmiourgós -- who had constructed humans to the best possible plan. Aristotle was not entirely satisfied with invoking God, and took the view that the cosmos was eternal, and species were eternally fixed to the best possible set of designs. Yet this left open the question: how did nature know what the best possible set of designs was? Aristotle invoked a teleological principle, but this line of thinking leads back to an intelligent creator.

Dēmiourgós was a classic God-of-the-gaps, invoked when no plausible alternative was available; a respectable and scholarly version of being that had always been invoked to explain the unexplained. The Greek philosopher-scientists began the trend of filling these gaps with knowledge of how the world really works, but with their decline, God once again became the explanatory mechanism for every known mystery. Little progress was then made until the enlightenment, when technological and societal advance enabled scientific advance. Theories are not made in a day, however, and though we still associate gravity with Newton, and evolution with Darwin, theories like these are now the work of thousands, who have contributed many details. The big gap may be plugged by a huge boulder, but through small gaps around it, some believe (or want to believe) that they still see God. Creationists hope that by plying away at these gaps, the boulder will fall; while scientists are continually contributing the pebbles that fill them. Today, the major gaps in which God can be seen have been pushed back to two fields: consciousness, and cosmogony. Free will and the strong anthropic principle are the remaining active battlefields (oh dear, I apologise, I seem to be in the middle of an attack of the bad-analogies). Even as we make colourful molecular maps of an evolved brain,^[2] and take snap-shots of the universe in its youth^[3] -- as the boulders are being rolled to their destinations -- these gaps, like every major gap before them, are presented as problems that science can never even approach. Those that try are chided by God's spokesmen for participating in unscientific activity on ground that belongs to the philosophers and theologians. From where we sit, we can laugh at the ancients, invoking a God of the sun, to account for its daily and seasonal cycles. Twenty-first century gods-of-the-gaps will look all the more amusing.

 

References

1. ^  Quoted in Andrew Gregory. 2001. The Birth of Science. London: Icon.
2. ^  Jean Livet, Tamily A. Weissman, Hyuno Kang, Ryan W. Draft, Ju Lu, Robyn A. Bennis, Joshua R. Sanes & Jeff W. Lichtman. 2007. Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system. Nature 450:56-62 doi
3. ^  e.g. Hubble Ultra Deep Field (Space Telescope Science Institute Newsletter Vol 20 Issue 4)