Creation and More Personal Thoughts on the Pre-Socratics

This post is similar to what I wrote regarding unanswered questions in Aristotle's work here. The study of philosophy must understand that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are inverse from each other in the human situation. We begin our search for being from a singular sensing individual, and only by much work make our way to the intelligible realm, thus often leaving the intelligible realm incomplete in our philosophy ... and yet the intelligible realm is more perfect and complete in itself, but again, only lastly known to us, and through much work. 

An Everlasting Nature or Creation?
And so the Pre-Socratics begin their journey of discovery from their perspective of ignorance as the first rational thinkers and their experience of the world around them. As a young philosophy student I often struggled to understand how many philosophers throughout the history of philosophy came logically to their conclusions. How did you get to point B from point A? For example, when looking at the notion that the Pre Socratics and later Greeks held that the cosmos was somehow everlasting in time, this can be a head scratcher. They didn't have a notion of creation ex-nihilo? Not really... but not because the notion of creation is wrong, but simply because their line of reasoning began in such a way that their starting place in their own experience did not bring them far enough to such an idea. Let me explain. 

The core paradox that the Pre-Socratic thinkers were trying to explain was that of the one and the many, change and stability. How is it that in nature everything is always undergoing a process of change and yet things are not utterly annihilated? Indeed, they even retain their identity over time through these changes. It was clear to them that there had to be some principle in being itself that gave permanence to all things. If there was no permanence, then all things would fold into nothingness, and from nothingness nothing ever comes, and so there would be nothing at all. Rather, there is something. Therefore something has to be everlastingly permanent. Parmenides captured this line of thinking and influenced later thinkers on this point especially. And so what is a thinker to draw from this? Well, nothingness is a place we cannot go, or even think about, and so it makes sense to consider nature itself as permanent in some way. Nature must have always been. 

And so approaching the question from the order of being, as a Christian, and thinking that they must have had some sophisticated reason for not really recognizing a creator or creation actually misses the point. Rather, it should be approached from the order of knowing, in that their experience led them to this conclusion because that was a far as they could think. It was a conclusion which expressed something true, and yet was in the end incomplete. 

Aristotle points out that the Pre-Socratics explained some things, but in terms of first and ultimate causes and principles they became lazy and did not explain them. The Pre-Socratics were able to identify two realms of theoretical study, that of the study of nature, physics (phusis - the growing thing), or mobile being (being in motion) and also that of mathematics (quantity abstracted from physical motion and being). But they missed the need for first causes and principles and ultimate realities which explain both the natural and mathematical. This is the metaphysical (the study of first and ultimate realities which Aristotle introduced.)

And so to conclude, if things don't add up when considering a particular thinker it is probably because we don't understand the launching point for their philosophy. We don't understand the axioms they are beginning with, and are rather considering the end point of their search and comparing it to our end point. We have to walk the walk in their shoes to be able to truly understand where the differences are and why.