Is God the unmoved mover of Aristotle's philosophy?
Aristotle argued his way to a first mover — a being that causes all motion while remaining untouched by it. The question is whether that conclusion, reached by reasoning alone, is the God of Scripture, or only the furthest point human thought can reach before it stalls.
Where Reason Stops
Commentators grant that the mind can press back to a cause behind everything. What it cannot do is turn that necessity into knowledge of a Person. One writer names the Greek thinkers directly and marks the exact line their logic could not cross:
William KellyEven Plato and Aristotle, rivals too, had no real light. They, more or less openly, all held eternal matter at bottom; and though the philosophers boasted, as they still do, of their knowledge and logic, they failed to see that they could not prove it, or even that it is to mere mind unthinkable... For it is impossible to admit an effect without a cause; but reasoning can never rise at best beyond. There must be a First Cause; it can never say, There is. This God alone can and does affirm.
The Argument Defeats Itself
There is a sharper problem. The very step that forces the mind to admit a first cause is the step that disqualifies the mind from knowing Him. Whatever needs a cause is not God — and God, by definition, has none:
J. N. DarbyThere is a God, because a thing cannot exist without a cause, but that is not God — it is, after all, only saying that we are finite. I must believe that He is... The impossibility of conceiving existence without a cause (which proves there is a God) is the impossibility of conceiving Him who is that cause, and who exists without one.
So an unmoved mover, arrived at this way, is a conclusion about the world rather than an acquaintance with God.
An Infinite That Is Only an Abstraction
Aristotle's own account of the infinite comes in for direct criticism. Stretch a finite thing out forever and you have not described God at all:
J. N. DarbyThere is every confusion by making infinitude of good in God an extension; and this runs through ancients and moderns, Aristotle, Hegel, etc... Thus, when Aristotle says, The infinite is the whole potentially but not actually, we have parts, extension, and — nonsense; but not an approach to infinitude as it refers to God. "The whole" — of what? If applied to God, this is necessarily materialism or pantheism... But it is only an abstraction; and, applied to being, it is a contradiction; for a being is actual, and has ceased to be simply potential.
No Creator Behind the Greek Gods
When Paul spoke at Athens, the philosophers there had no room for a God who made everything from nothing. Matter was assumed to be eternal, and their god was left wrestling with material He never made:
Numerical Bible NotesThe Platonist also believed matter to be eternal, although he attributed to God the soul which animated it and produced the actually existent world. But as a consequence God is in a continual struggle with that matter which He did not create, and by which He is limited. He can neither conquer it, nor withdraw Himself from it; He is not the absolute Creator and Lord of all whom the apostle announces — the Almighty, in whose control of all the soul of man can find its rest.
A God Too High to Notice Us
A mover who cannot be moved sounds impressive. The writers ask what such a being leaves for a human being to hold on to:
J. N. DarbyThe Greeks were spinning thoughts out of their own heads, which, like spiders' webs, could catch flies and nothing else. Some said: God was too high to notice man. It sounded very grand, but then what was to become of man?... The world by wisdom knew not God. Why did the Athenians set up an altar to the "unknown God"? It was the only bit of truth Paul could pick up to use among them.
Known by Moving Toward Us
Scripture's answer to an unknowable first cause is not a better argument but a Person who steps into view. God does not send a definition; He comes Himself:
J. G. BellettWhat a proof that God reveals Himself in action and in personality, and not by theological descriptions or commentary, is the Incarnation with all that it led to in the life of Jesus... What a witness does all this leave to the great truth, that God will be known by manifestations of Himself, and not by descriptions — that He has not committed the revelation of what He is, and who He is, to the pen of even inspired descriptions, but that He has chosen to be His own Revealer, in living personal action.
Summary
- Must be. Reason can reach a first cause, but never an introduction; it says there must be, never there is.
- Not Him. The same rule that proves a cause exists shows the causeless One is beyond conceiving — the argument ends where God begins.
- Not Creator. Aristotle and his fellow Greeks kept eternal matter at the bottom, leaving a god limited by what he never made.
- Not near. "Too high to notice man" sounds grand and leaves man with an altar marked unknown.
- Not still. God chose to be His own Revealer in living personal action — He moved toward us in the Son.