Pauline Arguments for God's Existence

Pauline Arguments for God’s Existence

Daniel A. Bonevac Department of Philosophy University of Texas–Austin [email protected] When Paul went to Athens in 51 AD, he was bringing the gospel to the philosophical center of the ancient world. To be sure, this was no lon- ger classical Athens at its height, the Athens of Socrates and Plato, Solon and Democritus, Sophocles and Euripides. The Romans had sacked it more than a century before. But it remained a prominent university town. Affluent Romans still sent their sons—Cicero, Horace, Nero, and Hadrian, among many others—to Athens to be educated. Only Alexandria could claim to be an intellectual competitor. It did not take long for Paul to encounter philosophers in Athens. In what Hans Conzelmann and J. A. Fitzmyer describe as the “most important epi- sode” in Paul’s second missionary journey, and Martin Dibellius calls “the climax of the book” of Acts, Paul speaks to a group of philosophers on the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill.1 His address may be the first exercise in natural theology in Christian history. If Paul, “at the height of his powers,” was advancing a philosophical argument, he was doing so under some compulsion.2 Paul stood accused of having preached foreign gods without permission. He had arrived in Athens and had begun preaching at the synagogue and in the agora without a permit. Some who heard him brought him to the Areopagus—Luke’s account is un- clear about whether they were arresting Paul, detaining him for questioning, or issuing a strong request—and asked him to explain his new teaching. Ath- ens had an ordinance requiring people preaching new religions to

Abstract: In Acts 17, Paul offers general framework for demonstrating the existence of God— a supernatural being, a creator, designer, and ultimate purpose of the universe, who cannot be identified with anything natural but instead underlies and explains the natural world as a whole. What Paul says, combined with unstated theses about causation and explanation that his Stoic and Epicurean audience would have shared, adds up to a powerful argument for God’s existence. Cosmological and design arguments emerge as special cases. 1. Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Min- neapolis: Fortress, 1987); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 600; Martin Dibellius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (London: SCM, 1956), 26. 2. Dean Flemming, “Contextualizing the Gospel in Athens: Paul’s Areopagus Address as a Paradigm of Missionary Communication,” Missiology 30 (2002): 200. 158 Philosophia Christi • claim to represent a deity, • provide evidence that the deity wanted to reside in Athens, and • show that the deity’s residence in Athens would benefit Athenians.3 These preachers had to make their cases to an assembled group of philosophers. Paul’s audience, Luke tells us, was made up of Epicureans and Stoics (Acts 17:19). The Epicureans stressed the value of the goods of this world, especially friendship, pleasure, and freedom from anxiety. The Stoics may have been more receptive to Paul’s message; they stressed ethics and the rational intelligibility of the universe.4 Most Epicureans and Stoics accepted a form of theism; though their understandings of God differed considerably, they tended to identify god with the world, reconciling theism with natural- ism.5 Surrounded by temples to the Greek gods, few philosophers listening to Paul would have taken the polytheism of their ancestors seriously. But they were tolerant of traditional religious beliefs as well as of various religious cults imported from points east so long as they promised to benefit the people of Athens. And so they invited Paul to make his case. Paul proceeded to do just that. But there is little scholarly consensus about whether Paul is making a theological argument in Acts 17, and, if so, what sort of argument it was.6 I think that he was not only arguing for permission to preach but also offering a general framework for demonstrating the existence of God—a supernatural being who could not be identified with anything natural but instead underlies and explains the natural world as a whole. My argument is admittedly speculative. The central idea is that what Paul says, combined with unstated theses about causation and explanation

3. Robert Garland, Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); B. Winter, “On Introducing Gods to Athens: An Alternative Reading of Acts 17:18–20,” Tyndale Bulletin 47 (1996): 71–90. 4. My remarks here are general, and perhaps superficial, but will become more precise as the argument proceeds. For an overview of Hellenistic philosophy, see A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Key literature on Hellenistic thought includes A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Phi- losophers, vol. 1, Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat, and Jonathan Barnes, eds., Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Julia Annas, Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and G. R. Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its De- velopment from the Stoics to Origen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For Hellenistic theology, see M. Dragona-Monachou, The Stoic Arguments for the Existence and Providence of the Gods (Athens: National and Capodistrian University of Athens, 1976). 5. See Anthony A. Long, “Scepticism about Gods in Hellenistic Philosophy,” in Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosen- meyer, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990), 279–91. 6. See, e.g., E. Haenschen, The Acts of the Apostles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971); C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994, 1998); and William H. Willimon, Acts (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), who says that Luke’s Paul “borders on natural theology” (143). Daniel A. Bonevac 159 that his Stoic and Epicurean audience would have shared, adds up to a general form of argument for God’s existence. The form of argument is powerful; the cosmological and design arguments, perhaps in addition to others, are special cases of it. Given his audience, the surprise is not that “some scoffed” at what he said, but that “others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’” (Acts 17:32).

1. Paul’s Speech

How did Paul proceed? The charge of preaching a foreign divinity without permission was false of Socrates, but true of Paul.7 Paul’s strategy, re- counted in Acts 17:22–31, was to point to “an unknown god” already wor- shipped by the Athenians, and to claim to be preaching that very god. Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. (Acts 17: 22–23, NRSV) The speech that follows does not appear to have the form of an argument. Luke, recounting the event, is no philosopher, and does not structure his account in argumentative form. But if we consider carefully the attributes of God that Paul cites, we can see a philosophical structure emerge from his words. Paul introduces what I see as his central philosophical move, speaking of the relation between God and the world as a whole, which begins with an image of God as creator: “The God who made the world (kosmos) and everything in it,”8 as Lord, director and sustainer: “he who is Lord of heaven and earth,” as self-sufficient:

7. See M. L. Soards, The Speeches in Acts: Their Content, Context, and Concerns (Lou- isville: Westminster John Knox, 1994); Hans-Josef Klauck, Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 76; Clare K. Rothschild, Paul in Athens: The Popular Religious Context of Acts 17 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 86. 8. Stoics “use ‘world’ [kosmos] in three ways: of god himself, the peculiarly qualified individual consisting of all substance, who is indestructible and ingenerable, since he is the manu- facturer of the world-order, at set periods of time consuming all substance into himself and reproducing it again from himself; they also describe the world-order as ‘world’; and thirdly, what is composed out of both” (Diogenes Laertius, 7.137 (SVF 2.526), quoted in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:270). Paul was thus immediately placing himself in a Stoic context. His use of kosmos here plainly refers to the world-order. For more on the Stoic conception of god, see Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:323–33. 160 Philosophia Christi “does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything,” as life-giver: “since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” as planner: “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,” as goal: “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—” as ground of our being: “—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’”;9 as Father: “as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.’”10 again, as independent of our own conceptions: “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.”

9. The quotation is from Epimenides’s Cretica, lost shortly after the time of Paul and sur- viving only in a ninth-century Syriac manuscript, in a passage that is also the source of the liar paradox: They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies. But you are not dead: you live and abide forever, For in you we live and move and have our being. (J. Rendel Harris, Expositor, October 1906, 305–17, April 1907, 332–7, and April 1912, 348–53) Attributing the phrase to Epimenides has become controversial. For an extended discussion of the history of the attribution to Epimenides, and a defense of it, however, see Rothschild, Paul in Athens, chap. 2. The issue makes a difference to the interpretation of Paul’s speech, as Roths- child argues: “For Luke, both Paul and Epimenides are strangers from afar summoned to Athens to fix a mistake; both announce that the tomb of their god is a lie; and, both transfer Eastern cult traditions to Greece through Athens” (24). References to legends about Epimenides appear in both Plato (Laws, 642d–643a) and Aristotle (Athenian Constitution, 1.1). 10. Paul is quoting the opening of the Stoic poet Aratus’s Phaenomena: “From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring. . . .” (Aratus, Phaenomena, in Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron, Alexandra, and Aratus, Phaenomena, Loeb Classical Library 129, trans. A. W. Mair and G. R. Mair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921)). Daniel A. Bonevac 161 and as purpose-giver, Judge, and Redeemer: “While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” Paul thus argues that he satisfies the Athenians’ requirements; he • represents an unknown god • who not only wants to reside in Athens but already does reside there, and • who offers Athenians the benefits of positive judgment and eternal life. He directs his appeal especially to the Stoics, many of whom already be- lieved in a kind of creator god and may well have seen the monument to the unknown god as a monument to the deity as they conceived it. So far, it may seem that there is little here of genuine philosophical interest. Paul’s logical move may seem chiefly an existential instantiation, from “an unknown god” to “this god,” providing a witness in the logical as well as the theological sense. But I think that misses the power of Paul’s appeal to the philosophers gathered at Mars Hill. He is giving a kind of incompleteness argument. Suppose you think you have a method—scientific method, for example, or any other naturalistic method—that lets you account for the world in its own terms. Paul’s aim is to show that your method generates something outside what your method encompasses and acknowledges. He thus shows you that your method is incomplete. The world, contra the Hellenistic philosophers, cannot be understood fully in naturalistic terms. That does not justify skepticism. It does not leave us in a condition of ignorance. The world points beyond itself to a supernatural cause or explanation of its existence.

2. Aristotle’s Four Causes

What kind of naturalistic method would Paul’s audience have accepted? It was centered around at least some of Aristotle’s Four Causes. Aristotle’s philosophical influence waned soon after his death, but his work enjoyed a revival in the first century, and his logical and scientific works continued to shape philosophical methodology in those areas even before that. Hellenistic philosophers would have taken the world to be structured causally. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, defined a cause as “that because of which.”11 Aristotle elaborated four kinds of causes, the basic relations link-

11. Stobeaus 1.138, 14 (SVF 189), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:333. 162 Philosophia Christi ing things, people, and events that underlie four basic types of explanation. These are the kinds of answers we can give to ‘Why?’ questions. Efficient Cause:“the primary source of the change or coming to rest” (Phys- ics, 2.3 (194b29–30));12 “that from which the change or the resting from change first begins; e.g. the adviser is a cause of the action, and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made and the change-producing of the changing” (Metaphysics 5.2 (13a30–33)).13 For Aristotle, these are substances, not events. Final Cause: the “end or ‘that for the sake of which’ a thing is done” (Phys- ics, 2.3 (194b32–33)); “the end, i.e. that for the sake of which a thing is; e.g. health is the cause of walking” (Metaphysics, 5.2 (13a33)). Final causes do not require intentions; the purpose of a kidney is to filter blood, but neither a kidney nor an animal with one needs a corresponding intention. Formal Cause: “the form or the archetype, i.e. the statement of the essence, and its genera” (Physics, 2.3 (194b27)); “the form or pattern, i.e. the defini- tion of the essence” (Metaphysics, 5.2 (13a27)). Material Cause: “that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists” (Physics, 2.3 (194b24)); “that from which, as immanent material, a thing comes into being, e.g. the bronze is the cause of the statue and the silver of the saucer” (Metaphysics, 5.2 (13a24–25)). Paul’s audience would have seen scientific explanation of the world as consisting of supplying such explanations. All four types of explanation might be possible for natural phenomena. They might be distinct, as they are with a house; the final cause is to be a dwelling, the formal cause, the plan, the material cause, the wood, brick, stones, and so forth, and the efficient cause, the builder. But they might also be the same; the efficient, formal, and final causes, Aristotle says, often turn out to be identical (Physics, 2.7 (198a25– 26)). Now Aristotle himself says that his predecessors generally recognized only efficient and material causes; the Stoics would typically have reserved the title “cause” for the former, distinguishing cause from matter.14 Stoics generally distinguished various kinds of efficient cause. Things consist of active and passive elements. The active elements move; the passive ones are moved. The internal active elements of a thing, taken together, are its breath or spirit, and constitute its sustaining cause. The sustaining cause is in one

12. Aristotle, Physica, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930). 13. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 8, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928). 14. Seneca: “Our Stoic philosophers . . . say that there are two things in nature from which everything is produced—cause and matter” (Letters 65.2, in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:334). Daniel A. Bonevac 163 sense the cause of the thing’s existence as well as its continuation, for without its active elements it could not exist. But we should not simply identify sustaining causation with efficient causation, for the efficient cause of a thing is generally something external to it: the parent to the child, for example, or the builder to the house. Call such external causes auxiliary or proximate. Things in the natural world have both proximate and sustaining causes. A sustaining cause explains much of what happens to the thing, for many of its changes have internal sources. But sometimes they operate only given some external causal force. A cylinder, Chrysippus observes, rolls because of its shape when it is pushed. The push is the proximate cause; the shape is the sustaining cause, which not only allows it to roll but keeps it rolling.15 Aristotle and his peripatetic followers have to argue for the existence of formal and final causes. The very possibility of science depends on formal causes, the existence of patterns or structures that might be investigated and discovered. Stoic and Epicurean philosophers would surely have agreed. And final causes pervade purposive action, the life of the mind, and biological phenomena quite generally. They apply to everything in nature as well, Aristotle argues in Physics 2.8, though many Hellenistic philosophers would have rejected that claim, and Aristotle himself would have seen no important difference between biological phenomena and those involving human agency. By the first century, philosophers of a scientific spirit would have accepted what I shall call the Connection Hypothesis.16 Connection Hypothesis: Everything in nature has at least one of the four causes. In fact, Stoics and Epicureans would have accepted that everything purely physical has at least efficient (sustaining and proximate), material, and formal causes, and that everything purposive has a final cause as well, though they might have been reluctant to call them “causes.”17 So, they would grant

15. Cicero, On Fate 39–43 (SVF 2.974) and Gellius 7.2.6–13 (SVF 2.1000), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:386–389. 16. This often has the form of nihil ex nihilo. Epicurus: “nothing comes into being out of what is not” (Letter to Herodotus, 38, in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:25). The Stoics agree: “The substance of what exists, they [the Stoics] say . . . needs to be set in motion and shaped by some cause” (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 9.75–6 (SVF 2.311), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:269). The sequence of causes that constitute the world the Stoics call Fate (Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 336– 43), and it comprises everything; “everything that happens has something prior to it with which it causally coheres” (Alexander, On Fate, 191, 30–192, 28 (SVF 2.945), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:337). Similarly, Cicero: “things which will be do not spring up spontaneously” (On Divination 1.127 (SVF 2.944), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:338). See Calcidius: “it is a doctrine common to all philosophers that nothing either comes to be out of nothing or perishes into nothing” (293, in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:270). Indeed, the Stoics had already formulated a cosmological argument for the existence of a divine, everlasting, self-moving power. 17. Both the Stoics and Epicureans see the world as consisting of matter and events as resulting from causes. So, they would have been eager to assert that everything material has material 164 Philosophia Christi something stronger than the Connection Hypothesis, that everything in nature has at least three of the four causes. Strong Connection Hypothesis: Everything in nature has at least three of the four causes. (a) Explaining the purely physical requires efficient, material, and formal forms of explanation. (b) Explaining the purposive also requires final forms of explanation. These are hypotheses, not a priori, necessary first principles. Arguments based on them are inductive.

3. A Pauline Argument

Paul’s central philosophical move, as I see it, is to apply the Strong Con- nection Hypothesis to the natural world as a whole. The natural world itself, taken as a whole, must have at least three of the four causes. But the whole can’t be caused in any of those senses by a mere part of it. Nor can the whole be caused by itself. So, something outside the world is a cause of the world. The argument below may seem strikingly foreign to anything made ex- plicit in Acts 17. But the first three premises of the argument are analytic and would hardly have needed articulation. Premises 4 and 5 are plausible claims about explanation that would be part of the common ground the naturalistic philosophers constituting Paul’s audience would have shared. So, the first five premises could reasonably be taken as commonplaces that Paul could assume his audience could easily supply. Premise 6 is simply the Connection Hypothesis. Paul’s innovation is to make reference, at the very beginning of his speech, to the cosmos and then to show his audience what follows from applying their own naturalistic method to the natural world as a whole. (1) Something is natural if and only if the natural world includes it. (2) Something is supernatural if and only if it is not natural. (3) Everything includes itself. (4) Nothing natural explains itself. (5) If something natural includes something else natural, something can explain the former only if it explains the latter. (Explaining the whole, that is, requires explaining the parts.) and efficient causes. The Stoics explicitly invoke formal causes, distinguishing the matter out of which something is composed from “its shape or structure” (Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:270). Stoics saw the active principle as structuring the world and also supplying efficient causes; the Stoic conception of god is thus the concept of an ultimate efficient and formal cause. But they also see god as comprising the world, and so in effect conceive of god as a material cause as well. Alexander: Stoics “say that god is mixed with matter, pervading all of it and so shaping it, structuring it, and making it into the world” (On Mixture, 225.1–2 (SVF 2.310), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1:273.) For more on the Stoic treatment of what Aristotle would call final causes, see Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Phi- losophers, 1:340. Daniel A. Bonevac 165 (6) Everything natural has an explanation. (7) So, the natural world has a supernatural explanation. Throughout, we should understand “includes” as “completely includes.” An angel, an incarnate God, or the God of a panentheist might be partially in- cluded in the natural world without being natural in the sense required for the argument. The argument above is valid. Everything includes itself, so the natural world, in particular, includes itself. Anything the natural world includes is natural; so, the natural world, viewed as a whole, is natural. It thus does not explain itself. But it does have an explanation. If that explanation were natural, the natural world would include it. And, since both would be natural, and the natural world would include the explanation, then something could explain the natural world only it if also explained that explanation—which, since it would explain the natural world, would have to explain itself. But that is impossible; nothing natural explains itself. Any explanation of the natural world must therefore be supernatural. There is such an explanation. So, the natural world has a supernatural explanation. My interpretation of Paul’s speech may strike the reader as fanciful. The argument, as I have reconstructed it, might seem to have little to do with what Paul actually said in Athens. But we can run the argument with efficient, formal, or final causes. Each of the three versions can be assessed independently; the soundness of any one does not depend on the soundness of the others. The result is that we get arguments for a God having just the attributes that Paul mentions. Consider the above list of attributes that Paul cites. We can sort them into Aristotle’s four causes as follows: Efficient Cause:creator, life-giver, sustainer, Father Formal Cause: Lord, director, planner Final Cause: goal, judge, redeemer Material Cause: ground of being?

4. Taking a Finer Slice of the Argument

I have spoken about three versions of Paul’s argument, applied to efficient, formal, and final causes and kinds of explanation. Much of the rest of this paper develops the implications of those arguments. (Proximate) Efficient Causes The argument would show that the natural world has a supernatural efficient cause. The existence of the natural world has an explanation, and, the argument would conclude, a supernatural explanation. This gives us a con- 166 Philosophia Christi ception of God as creator: “The God who made the world and everything in it” (Acts 17:24). This is a kind of cosmological argument, in a simple form, making no assumptions about infinite regresses of causes. Formal Causes The argument would show that the natural world has a supernatural formal cause. It can be given a formal explanation, an explanation in terms of a structure that itself goes beyond the natural world. On one interpretation, then, the argument gives us a conception of God as planner or designer: “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live” (Acts 17:26). This is a simple form of the design argument. On another construal of the formal cause reading, the argument gives a conception of God as the Form of the world, as the Logos, or as Truth, and yields an Augustinian argument from Truth. The Pauline argument, read in this way, is a simple and very general intelligibility argument, an argument that God is a necessary condition for the intelligibility of the world. Final Causes The argument would show that the natural world has a supernatural final cause. This reading of the argument would show that there is a purposive explanation of the natural world. This gives us a conception of God as the ultimate Good, the ultimate goal or purpose of human activity: “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:26). This is a kind of Platonic argument for God as the Good. It is the form of the argument most likely to meet with a skeptical response from Paul’s audience, for many philosophers in the first century would have insisted, contra Aristotle, that the natural world, like many of the things and events within it, lacks a goal or purpose. I have not suggested applying Paul’s argument to the fourth of Aristo- tle’s causes. The argument, applied to material causation, would show that the natural world has a supernatural material cause. That sounds like a con- tradiction in terms: how could the material of the world—what it is made of—be supernatural? Surely the material cause of the world is matter, which seems to be both natural and to have no further material cause, contradicting (6) above. Something like material causation may explain what Paul had in mind in citing Epimenides: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Making sense of this scripture in these terms, however, would seem to require a conception of material cause foreign to Hellenistic philosophy. The Stoics, as we have seen, did not consider matter a kind of cause. And the most obvious interpretation of a supernatural material cause would be pantheistic or at least panentheistic, something alien to Paul’s thought. So, I will set material causation aside for the remainder of this paper. Daniel A. Bonevac 167

5. God and Humanity

The argument stated in the previous section already manages to account for much of what Paul said to the philosophers in Athens. It accounts for still more if we consider that argument’s implications, not only in relation to the natural world as a whole, but in relation to us, together, or to each individual human being. The relations that interest Paul are not only between God and the world but between God and humanity, collectively as well as individu- ally. God stands in the relations delineated in the causes not just to the natural world as a whole but also to everything it includes and thus, in particular, to us. We too have a supernatural explanation. So construed, Paul’s argument yields additional features of God: Efficient Cause The argument yields the existence of God as Parent—“‘For we too are his offspring’” (Acts 17:28)—and as creator and sustainer of life: “he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:25). Formal Cause The argument concludes with the existence of God as Lord, as the one who not only designs the cosmos but designs us and our lives—“he who is Lord of heaven and earth” (Acts 17:24) and, again, who “allotted the times of [our] existence and the boundaries of the places where [we] would live” (Acts 17:26). Final Cause The argument argues for the existence of God as our final end, our purpose, our Judge and Redeemer—“he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness” (Acts 17:30).

6. The Polytheist’s Objection

Suppose these arguments regarding God and humanity from sections 3–5 work. We would have an argument for a supernatural creator god (efficient cause), a supernatural designer or planner (formal cause), a supernatural life-giver, a judge (final cause), and so forth. But Paul, speaking with a commanding view of temples to a wide variety of gods and goddesses, and appalled at the idol worship he witnessed—as his contemporary Petronius expressed it, in Athens “you might more easily find a god than a man” (Sa- tyricon, xvii)—would have realized that there was an obvious objection to what he was saying. Why think these are all one being? The god “in whom we live and move and have our being,” the god whose offspring we are, 168 Philosophia Christi is Zeus in the original poems Paul is quoting. But Greek myths mention many other gods and goddesses who play different roles and provide different kinds of explanations. Why not think that the creator, the designer, and the purpose-giver are distinct divinities? Immanuel Kant would argue much later that we seem to need something like the ontological argument to tie the various properties of God together and thus obtain the conclusion that the creator, the designer, the judge, and so forth, are all one God.18 There is an even more basic problem. The Connection Hypothesis as- serts that anything natural has at least one of the four causes, and so can be explained in at least one of the four ways Aristotle outlines. But that means that we are guaranteed only one of the readings of the argument. We do not get a creator, a designer, and a purpose-giver; we get a creator, a designer, or a purpose-giver. If we instead start from the Strong Connection Hypothesis, we can get, at least, that there is a creator and there is a designer. Perhaps we can also infer the existence of a purpose-giver. But even if Aristotle is correct that efficient, formal, and final causes are often identical, there is no guarantee of that in this case. We have at best weak reason to think that the creator, the designer, and the purpose-giver are the same being. Suppose that the natural world and humanity stood in these relations— creator, designer, purpose-giver—to different gods. These gods would be dependent on one another for the natural world to exist. Think how often the Greek gods thwart one another’s plans in Greek mythology. God as Lord, designer, and planner, the formal cause of the universe, would depend on the creator, the life-giver, and so forth, for the design to be implemented and the plan to be carried out. Athena would depend on Zeus. Zeus would depend on Athena. And so on. Paul has an argument, however, at the heart of his speech, intended to solve these problems. God “does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:24–25). So, “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals” (Acts 17:29). God does not depend on us or anything we think, say, or do. Nor does God depend on anything other than himself. It follows that the natural world’s creator, designer, and purpose-giver cannot be different beings. If they were, each would depend on the others and risk being thwarted by the others. Remember that Paul’s argument, together with the Strong Connection Hypothesis, yields the conclusion that the natural world has supernatural efficient and formal causes. To that conclusion he adds three additional premises, (8), (9), and (10), to obtain the argument: (8) There are supernatural efficient and formal causes of the natural world.

18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 3, 5, 6. Daniel A. Bonevac 169 (9) Supernatural causes are gods. (10) Gods do not need anything. (11) If the natural world had distinct supernatural causes in different senses of “cause,” at least one of those causes would need something (for example, the action of another supernatural cause) for the natural world to exist. (12) So, the natural world has exactly one supernatural cause. The Stoics and Epicureans in Paul’s audience, as we have seen, would have been happy to grant that everything has efficient, formal, and material causes. So, from the Strong Connection Hypothesis, setting aside the question of material causation, at this point in the argument we could derive the existence of a supernatural being who is creator (efficient cause) and designer (formal cause). We appear to have no way, however, to get the conclusion that such a being would also be a purpose-giver, a standard of excellence, or a fount of normativity, much less a judge and redeemer (final cause). Paul’s argument easily extends, however, to solve that problem. We need an additional premise, making section 3 (5) a bit more specific. As stated, section 3 (5) says that, if something natural includes something else natural, something can explain the former only if it explains the latter. Ex- plaining the whole requires explaining the parts. Suppose that explaining a part requires a form of explanation, in terms of efficient causes, for example. It would make sense that explaining the whole then also requires that form of explanation. According to the Strong Connection Hypothesis, (section 2 (2)), explaining anything physical requires using formal, efficient, and material causes; explaining anything purposive requires using formal, efficient, and final causes. If the natural world includes both physical and purposive phenomena, then all four forms of explanation are required to explain the natural world. (13) Physical phenomena have formal, efficient, and material causes. (14) Purposive phenomena have formal, efficient, and final causes. (15) Some natural phenomena are physical. (16) Some natural phenomena are purposive. (17) If something natural includes something else natural that has a formal, efficient, or final cause, it also has that kind of cause. (18) So, the natural world has supernatural formal, efficient, and final cause(s). Now, the argument that the natural world has exactly one supernatural cause can conclude that cause is formal, efficient, and final—that the supernatural designer and creator of the world is also its purpose-giver and source of value. One caveat: premise (17) above, applied to final causes, may be ques- tionable. If we think of a purpose as defined in terms of a function within a larger whole, then does the existence of purposes within that whole entail 170 Philosophia Christi a purpose for the whole? The heart, for example, has a function within the body. It’s not obvious that this requires the body itself to have a function. A defender of the premise, however, has a reply: The heart pumps blood in order to keep the body alive. The body, then, must at least have staying alive as a purpose. Generally, a part has a purpose within a whole in relation to some purpose of the whole. I have argued that Paul, in Acts 17, sketches a general framework for demonstrating the existence of a supernatural being who is creator, designer, and ultimate purpose of the universe. My reconstruction depends on the as- sumption that Paul understood and largely shared the view of explanation that his Stoic and Epicurean audience would have assumed. Paul, I believe, was generalizing from Stoic arguments for a creator to a general pattern of argument for a more ambitious conclusion, for a creator, designer, and purpose-giver for the universe who cannot be identified with anything natural but instead underlies and explains the natural world as a whole—a being who transcends the naturalistic frameworks of Aristotelian and Hellenistic philosophy. Even if I am wrong in my reading of Acts 17, the resulting pattern of argument remains powerful, worthy of contemporary discussion and debate.