A third direction was that taken by Plato, the tendency to conceive of a
transcendent God on a metaphysical level above the empirical world, not
immanent within it, with human-like qualities of intelligence and provident
foresight. Plato is only vacillatingly monotheist; as in Aristotle’s sharply delim-
ited proof from motion for the Unmoved Mover, Plato endows God with only
limited powers, at best shaper or controller of the world, creator of neither the
world substance nor the eternal Forms. The Middle Platonists moved closer to
constructing a monotheism of reason, and tried various models by which forms
emanate from the primal One; but these are generally ontological descriptions
rather than proofs, and slip off into pantheism.
The inner arguments of the Greek philosophical network are one of the
sources of the concept of monotheism. In general, the trend of the abstraction-
reflexivity sequence produces some components of monotheism, including the
concepts of metaphysical unification and transcendence of the empirical, and
of epistemological and moral perfection. Greek philosophy developed a strand
capable of blending with the full-blooded anthropomorphic monotheism of
Christianity, and may even have promoted its spread. But there is no single
religious tendency of philosophical networks; left to itself, Greek philosophy
was just as likely to emphasize sheer naturalism (for a while), omni-skepticism,
or pantheism.^20
The Greek networks are notable in world comparison for the popularity
of counter-proofs against the existence of the gods or God. In fact, the negative
proofs were first on the ground, and their continued instigation prodded much
of the successive development of positive proofs. There were famous atheists,
especially in the Megarian and Cyrenaic schools. The Academy, during its
skeptical phase (down through Carneades), made a staple out of arguments
against the religious proofs of the Stoics; this in turn stimulated still further
counter-proofs from the Middle Stoics. The Skeptic school took ammunition
from the balance of inconclusive arguments on both sides. These arguments
contributed modestly to sharpening the level of conceptual abstraction, for
instance, as the Megarians forced the Stoics to distinguish a dimension of
relative and absolute perfections.
On the whole, these arguments did not drive philosophical development
with anything like the centrality that proofs of God had for Islamic, Jewish,
and Christian philosophy. As late as Sextus Empiricus (200 c.e.), arguments
over the polytheist gods were mixed indiscriminately with those concerning
monotheism. Even concerning the latter, arguments were often at a low level
of abstraction, as in the anti-Stoic arguments that the proof from motion makes
the Divine into a material body sharing the imperfect qualities of the material
world. This concreteness was due to the continuing political presence of
polytheism. The main external pressures against philosophical arguments came
from affronts to the polytheist cults, both early (the charges for which Socrates
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^835