Did Plato believe in God? The answer depends on what we mean by God, and the Timaeus is where it can be seen most clearly. In this dialogue, Plato speaks of a good and intelligent cause that brings the world from disorder to order, and gives it the name of a trade: the Demiurge, the craftsman. What the Timaeus still lacks is the personal God that the Bible presents, and it is this difference, more than the word "God," that this article walks through.
A caveat before we begin
The answer below holds for the Timaeus, not for all of Plato. In other dialogues, such as the Laws, he deals with the divine on his own terms, and that is another subject. Here we stay with the book in which Plato tries to explain why there is a world, and not chaos, the subject of the summary of the Timaeus.
The question that leads to the cause
Timaeus's reasoning begins with a distinction that already appears in Plato's Theory of Forms: the measure no one gave you. There is what always is and never changes, and which is grasped by reason. And there is what always changes and never quite comes to be, and which is grasped by the senses. The river you see changes every day; what makes it a river does not.
This world, which we see and touch, belongs to what changes. And everything that comes to be needs a cause (Timaeus, 27d-28a). This is where the question about God enters, and Plato handles it with care. To discover the maker and father of this universe, Timaeus says, is a difficult task, and once discovered, it is impossible to communicate it to everyone (28c). That is why he warns that he offers a plausible account, the best a man can give on a subject of this size (29c-d). Anyone looking in the Timaeus for a profession of faith finds, first, humility.
Who the Demiurge is
The cause receives a name that comes from the workshops. Demiourgós is the craftsman, the one who works and shapes in the service of the people: the carpenter, the blacksmith, the potter. Think of a cabinetmaker making a table. He has the wood before him, and he has a model of a table in his mind. The table will be as good as the model.
This is how, Timaeus says, the world was made. The Demiurge fixes his eyes on what does not change, and so everything he makes in this way is beautiful (28a). Since the world is beautiful, the model he looked to can only be the eternal one (29a). Two details matter for the question about God. The first: the Demiurge has a model before him, that is, he looks at something, he does not create out of himself. The second: he works a matter, and this second point is what most separates the Timaeus from the Bible.
A good craftsman: why he made the world
Why did the craftsman make the world? He did not need to. Timaeus's answer is one of the most beautiful of Antiquity: the craftsman was good, and in one who is good no envy about anything arises. Free from it, he wanted all things to be as much like himself as possible (29e).
The world, then, does not exist out of necessity, nor by accident, nor to satisfy anyone. It exists because whoever is good does not keep the good for himself. There was a disorder, a movement without rule, and the craftsman brought it to order, because he judged order to be better. And he made the world a living being, with soul and intelligence, because what has intelligence is better than what does not (30a-b). This is the part of the Demiurge that comes closest to what many people call God: a good, intelligent cause that orders out of generosity. It is the reason the Timaeus was so loved by Christian readers.
So, is it God?
If by God we mean a good and intelligent cause of the order of the world, the Timaeus says so, with the caution of calling its account plausible. If by God we mean the personal God of the Bible, who creates out of nothing, the Timaeus has not yet got there. Plato did not speak there of a personal God, and the personal God comes much later. So the more exact question may be this: what, exactly, does Plato's craftsman do, and what does he not do?
He does three things: he looks to a perfect model, takes a disordered matter and gives it order, out of goodness. He does not do a fourth: he does not create the matter. It was already there.
How Christians read the Demiurge
Now imagine this book in the hands of a Christian reader. Augustine, the North African we mentioned in What Augustine didn't find in the books of the Platonists, knew the Timaeus and was struck by how much it sounds like the beginning of the Bible: a world that had an origin, an order coming from a good God and, at the end of creation, the same gaze before a beautiful world. In Genesis, God saw everything he had made, and it was very good (Genesis 1:31).
But the Christian reader writes with the pen in hand. Plato's craftsman works a matter that was already there, disordered. The Christian tradition reads Genesis another way: the God of the Bible finds nothing ready, he creates out of nothing, and even the matter is his work. This point is the center of Did God create the world out of nothing? The craftsman of Plato.
One question the Timaeus itself leaves open remains: the eternal model the craftsman looked to, if it was not inside him, where was it? Augustine answers that the ideas of all things are in the very intelligence of God. God does not copy anything; he knows what he makes. The full answer, and the story of how Christians received the Timaeus, is in Plato and Christianity: from the Timaeus to Genesis.
To keep
Did Plato believe in God? In the Timaeus, he believes in a good and intelligent cause, which looks to the eternal and brings disorder to order out of generosity. He does not yet speak of the personal God of the Bible, who creates out of nothing, and it was precisely in that difference that Christians accepted the goodness and corrected the craftsman, who became Creator. If the order you find in the world was already here before you, perhaps the question that remains is less "Did Plato believe in God?" and more: what does it mean to recognize an order that we did not put there ourselves?
The references 27d-28a, 28a, 28c, 29a, 29c-d, 29e and 30a-b follow the Stephanus pagination, which serves to locate each passage in any edition of the Timaeus.
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Did Plato believe in God?
In the Timaeus, Plato speaks of a good and intelligent cause of the world, the Demiurge, a craftsman who looks at an eternal model and brings disordered matter to order. But he does not yet speak of a personal God, like the God of the Bible, who creates out of nothing. This answer holds for the Timaeus: in other works, such as the Laws, Plato deals with the divine on its own terms.
What is the Demiurge of Plato?
It is the craftsman of the Timaeus. The Greek word, demiourgós, names the one who works for the people, such as the carpenter, the blacksmith and the potter. Plato uses it for the cause of the world: someone who has a perfect model in mind and makes the world looking at it, just as the cabinetmaker makes the table looking at the idea of a table.
Did Plato's Demiurge create the world out of nothing?
No. The craftsman of the Timaeus works with a matter that was already there, in disorder, and gives it form. The creation out of nothing is the correction that the Christian tradition makes when it reads Genesis: the God of the Bible finds nothing ready, and even the matter is his work.
Why did the Demiurge make the world?
Out of goodness. According to Timaeus, the craftsman was good, and in one who is good no envy about anything arises, so he wanted all things to be as much like himself as possible. The world exists because whoever is good does not keep the good for himself.
Continue: Plato and Christianity: from the Timaeus to Saint Augustine's Genesis · Did God create the world out of nothing? Plato's craftsman · Why was the world created according to Plato? · Who was Saint Anselm of Canterbury?
Source class: Timeu, de Platão