I just finished a paper for my “Philosophy of Being” class on why Aristotle thought that there were 55 gods. It’s an expository paper that attempts to explain Aristotle’s reasoning in the Metaphysics that leads to the conclusion that there are 55 gods, which he calls “Unmoved Movers”. Being an expository paper, it does not contain any response or critique of Aristotle, although as a Christian, it should be obvious that I must disagree with the conclusion. Although I don’t find the conclusion of 55 gods to be terribly useful to us today, I do find other aspects that arise through his reasoning process to be of interest, especially Aristotle’s insistence that all of the change that we see in the world must ultimately be caused by something that is eternal and unchanging. If you would like to read the paper, you can download it here.

One thing I will comment on at this time is Aristotle’s insistance that time is eternal. His argument for the eternity of time is pretty reasonable, but Christianity has claimed that time does have a beginning, even though that has always been difficult for our minds to comprehend. I find it interesting that in the book A Brief History of Time, the author Stephen Hawking claims that mathematically there is some support to the idea of time beginning at the Big Bang. I will have to trust his great intellect for that one, but I’m happy to hear that this highly respected scientist, who is not a Christian, nevertheless provides some support for this particular aspect of the Christian view of the universe. Anyway, Aristotle, like most others in his day, believed that the universe has always existed and that history was circular. (Evidently this view of the ancient Greeks is present in the TV series, Battlestar Galactica, which draws a lot from ancient Greek culture.) Christianity teaches that history has a beginning and is moving towards a consumation when Christ returns.