God and Greek Philosophy: Studies in the Early History of Natural Theology

"God and Greek Philosophy" is a study of the main arguments for the existence of a god or first causal principle in the ancient Greek philosophers. Gerson's study of ancient Greek philosophers includes the pre-Socratics - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and sceptics, and Plotinus. In the Greek philosophers, arguments for the existence of God are a part of natural theology, which is distinguished from and held to be superior to mythic and civic theology. Unlike a Jewish, Christian or Islamic context, where natural theology is subordinated to scriptural principles, Greek natural theology is actually a type of scientific realism. God is a hypothetical entity postulated as an ultimate explanation of various data. A central aim of this book is to show the continuity of the Greek idea of wisdom and its identity with what can be loosely called "natural theological reasoning". From the beginning of philosophy in Greece until its substantial absorption in Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, there is an ongoing dialogue with the notion of the divine as its focus. The book explores the relationship between arguments in natural theology and metaphysics, and examines different theories of causality underlying theological argument. It argues that the culmination of Greek natural theology is the distinctive creation metaphysics of Plotinus.