Jonathan Barnes writes:

The Stoics occupy the last section of David Sedley’s enthralling book. For Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity is not about the book of Genesis, nor about early Christian debates over God’s creative activities, nor yet about the dispute between the pagan Platonist Proclus and the Christian Platonist Philoponus on the eternity of the world. The ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’ is mentioned only twice, en passant. Creationism, here, is the ‘thesis that the world’s structure and contents can be adequately explained only by postulating at least one intelligent designer, a creator god’; and the thesis implies neither that the creator created ex nihilo, nor that the world was created at some time in the past. The book proceeds more or less chronologically: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the Atomists, Aristotle, the Stoics. (An epilogue spends a page or two on Galen.) The final score is Creationists 5, Critics 2.

(LRB 5 June 2008)

California | hardback 269 pp. |ISBN: 9780520253643