Justified True Belief

(●) The first man in the West to argue that whatever truly is can never change, and to keep the conclusion when his own eyes denied it. + Go outside before dawn and there is a bright star low in the east. Go out again after supper, months later, and there is a bright star low in the west. For a long time the Greeks called them by two names, Phosphorus the morning star and Hesperus the evening star, and Diogenes Laertius reports, on the authority of Favorinus, that Parmenides was the first to work out that the two are one body, adding that others gave the credit to Pythagoras. Whoever it was, it is the kind of thing he did: notice that what you see and what is actually there are not always the same, and trust the reasoning. He took that habit further than anyone before him. Somewhere in the first half of the fifth century BC, in a small Greek town on the Italian coast, Parmenides wrote a poem arguing that whatever truly is was never born, will never die, and never changes in any respect, so that the world of coming and going that everybody wakes up to every morning cannot be what it seems. Then, and this is the part that matters, he did not back down. He is where deductive argument enters Western philosophy: not a wise saying, not a guess about what everything is made of, but a chain of reasoning that dares you to find the broken link. Plato called him venerable, Aristotle spent the opening of his Physics answering him, and for two and a half thousand years anybody who wants to say that things really do change has had to say why he was wrong. He wrote one work and one only, a poem of perhaps eight hundred lines. Roughly a hundred and sixty survive, and the largest continuous piece of it, fifty-two lines carrying the heart of the argument, is with us because a commentator on Aristotle in the sixth century after Christ noticed that copies of the poem were becoming hard to find and decided to copy that stretch of it out in full while he still had one.

(●) c. 515 BC: Born at Elea, in a town founded a generation earlier by families running from Persia. + Elea sat on the coast of southern Italy, in the country the Greeks called Oenotria, and it was new. Herodotus tells the story of how it got there. When the Persian general Harpagus came down on the Greek cities of the Ionian coast in the 540s BC, the people of Phocaea put their families and their household goods on ships and left rather than live under a governor. They tried Corsica, lost most of their fleet in a sea battle against the Carthaginians and the Etruscans, and sailed on down to Rhegium; from there, on the advice of a man from Poseidonia who understood an oracle better than they did, they founded the city Herodotus calls Hyele (Histories I.164 to 167, Macaulay translation). Latin speakers would call it Velia. The Greeks called it Elea, and the philosophy that came out of it is called Eleatic to this day. Parmenides was born there, son of a man named Pyres, into what Diogenes Laertius calls illustrious birth and great wealth (Lives IX.21, Hicks translation). His birth year is a reconstruction rather than a record, and, as it happens, there are two reconstructions to choose between. The first comes from Plato, who says that Parmenides came to Athens at about sixty-five, when Socrates was very young. Count backwards from a young Socrates and the birth lands around 515 BC. The second comes from Apollodorus, a chronicler who dated men by Olympiads, the four-year intervals between the Olympic games that the Greeks used the way we use decades. He put Parmenides’ prime in the 69th of them, 504 to 501 BC, and since the chroniclers reckoned a man’s prime at his fortieth year, that figure pushes the birth back to about 540. The first is the date most often printed. Neither is more than an inference drawn from somebody else’s arithmetic. As for the end of the life, nothing records the year he died at all, and the conventional c. 450 BC is only the first reckoning carried forward.

(●) c. 495 BC: A poor Pythagorean named Ameinias turned him from the life his money had planned for him to the quiet life of a student. + A rich young man in a Greek city had a career waiting for him: property to manage, offices to hold, a seat at the table where things were decided. Diogenes Laertius, drawing on an earlier writer named Sotion, says that what interrupted all of that was a friendship. Nothing in the sources dates the friendship, so a year in his twenties is the birth reckoning carried forward and nothing better than that. Parmenides had heard Xenophanes, the wandering poet who told the Greeks that if horses could paint they would paint horse gods, and Diogenes is careful to draw a line here: Xenophanes taught him, but he did not follow Xenophanes. The man he did follow was Ameinias, son of Diochaetas, a Pythagorean, and, in Diogenes’ phrase, a worthy gentleman though poor. Pythagoreans were the followers of Pythagoras, who lived in these same southern Italian towns under a common rule, rather in the manner of a religious order, and who cared about the soul, about silence, and about number. It was Ameinias and not Xenophanes, Diogenes says, who led Parmenides to adopt the peaceful life of a student, and when Ameinias died Parmenides built a shrine to him (Lives IX.21, Hicks translation). It is a small detail and easy to walk past, so it is worth stopping on. The rich young man of the town built a hero’s shrine for a poor teacher. Whatever else the philosophy that came out of Elea was, it began in gratitude to somebody who had nothing to offer but his company and his convictions.

(●) c. 490–470 BC: He put the whole argument into the meter of Homer and gave every word of it to a goddess. + Nothing dates the writing of the poem, so anywhere in his middle years is the honest answer. What survives of it opens with a ride. Mares draw a chariot along a road, the daughters of the Sun throw back their veils and lead the way, the axle in the socket shrieks like a pipe, and they come to the gates of the ways of Night and Day, where Justice keeps the keys. The maidens talk her into opening them. The doors swing back on their sockets and the traveller drives straight through, and a goddess takes him by the right hand and welcomes him: it is no ill chance, but right and justice, that has sent him this way, far from the beaten track of men. Everything after that is her speech. Parmenides never argues in his own voice at all. He writes in dactylic hexameter, the six-beat line that carried the Iliad and Hesiod’s poems about the gods, which is to say the sound a Greek associated with heroes and with revelations rather than with reasoning. Then he takes the oldest machinery Greek poetry had, the journey and the message from a god, and uses it to deliver something nobody had ever put in verse before: a piece of step by step argument that asks to be checked. Diogenes Laertius, listing the philosophers who wrote in verse, puts him beside Hesiod, Xenophanes and Empedocles (Lives IX.22). Why a goddess? He does not say, and guessing is all anyone can do. What can be said is what the choice does. A conclusion this hard to swallow is easier to hear from a voice with authority behind it, and the poem is arranged so that the reader is not being lectured by a clever neighbour but taught by someone who knows. The goddess herself, though, never asks to be believed on her own say-so. She tells him to judge the case by argument.

(●) c. 480–450 BC: His own city bound its officers by oath, every year, to the laws he had written for it. + Two independent notices survive, and no source dates either of them, so any date for the lawgiving has to be a wide range across his working life. Speusippus, who was Plato’s nephew and succeeded him as head of the Academy, wrote in his book On Philosophers that Parmenides served his native city as a legislator (Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.23, Hicks translation). Plutarch, writing five centuries later against an Epicurean who had accused the old philosophers of being useless to public life, gives the detail that makes it vivid: Parmenides "beautified and adorned his native country with most excellent laws which he there established, so that even to this day the officers every year, when they enter first on the exercise of their charges, are obliged to swear that they will observe the laws and ordinances of Parmenides" (Against Colotes 1126a, Goodwin translation). Take Plutarch at his word and the picture is worth holding on to. Once a year, in a small town on the Italian coast, the incoming magistrates stood up and swore to keep the code written by the man who had argued in public that motion and change are names mortals have made up. He did not think the two activities were in competition, and neither should a reader. The same person can hold that the visible world is not the deepest truth about reality and still care very much what the visible world’s magistrates do on a Tuesday. Strabo, the geographer writing under the first Roman emperors, thought the town had done well out of its philosophers. Elea was the home of Parmenides and Zeno, he says, and in his own judgment the city was well governed, partly through those two men and partly from a time before either of them (Geography VI.1.1).

(●) c. 450 BC: Plato has him arrive in Athens at sixty-five, with a book of paradoxes written in his defense and a very young Socrates in the audience. + The scene is the opening of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. The old man and his pupil Zeno have come to Athens for the Great Panathenaea, the city’s largest festival; Parmenides is "about 65 years old, very white with age, but well favoured," Zeno is nearly forty, and they are lodging outside the wall in the potters’ quarter. Zeno has brought a book, being read in Athens for the first time, and he is most of the way through reading it aloud when Parmenides himself walks in. Socrates, "then a very young man," has come to listen (127a to c, Jowett translation). The book was Zeno’s paradoxes, the puzzles about motion and divisibility that are still argued over: Achilles who cannot overtake the tortoise, the arrow that is at rest at every instant of its flight. Zeno explains in the dialogue what they were for. "These writings of mine were meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who make fun of him," he says, by showing that the people who laugh at one unchanging thing end up in worse trouble with their many changing ones (128c to d, Jowett translation). That is a student defending a teacher, and it tells you what the reception in Greece was like: not agreement, mockery. Whether the visit happened is a fair question. Plato refers to the meeting three times across three dialogues and treats it as a fact of Socrates’ youth, and the ages he gives are the reason the conventional dates for Parmenides exist at all. No independent source confirms it, and some readers in antiquity already suspected Plato of arranging a meeting he wanted rather than reporting one he knew of. What is not in doubt is the respect. Long afterwards Plato has Socrates call him venerable and awful, as he says a man might be called in Homer’s language, and add: "I met him when he was an old man, and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind" (Theaetetus 183e, Jowett translation).

(●) After c. 450 BC: Nobody recorded his death, and his poem came within one man’s decision of disappearing entirely. + There is no death scene, no last words, no tomb in the sources. What there is, oddly, is a face. In 1962 archaeologists digging at Velia turned up a headless herm, one of those squared pillars the Greeks and Romans set up to carry a portrait bust, cut in the Roman period some five hundred years after he lived. The inscription on it reads: Parmeneides son of Pyres, Ouliades, natural philosopher. Ouliades means a member of the guild that served Apollo Oulios, Apollo the healer, whose physicians made Elea famous in later centuries. Two things follow from that inscription, neither of them dramatic and both worth having. Diogenes Laertius names his father as Pyres, and Pyres is the name his own town was still cutting into stone half a millennium afterwards, which counts as corroboration of a sort rather than as proof. And the town was still putting up his portrait at all, still counting the man one of its own, five hundred years after there was anybody alive who had met him. The poem had a narrower escape. It was quoted in pieces by Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Plutarch and others, mostly a line or two at a time and mostly in the course of arguing with it. Then, in the sixth century after Christ, Simplicius sat down to write a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, reached the place where Aristotle disposes of Parmenides, and copied out fifty-two consecutive lines of the original, explaining that he did so partly as evidence for what he had been saying and partly because copies of Parmenides’ treatise had become scarce. He was right about the scarcity. Every later copy runs back through his commentary, and without that one decision the central argument of Western metaphysics, which is the study of what is ultimately real rather than what merely appears, would survive only as other men’s summaries of it.

What He Taught

(T1) What is not cannot be thought or spoken, so an inquiry has only one road open to it. + Try, for a moment, to think about nothing. Not an empty room, not a jar with the air pumped out, not the dark: those are all somethings. Think about sheer nothing at all. Most people find that the moment they get hold of it, they are holding something, and the exercise slides away. That failure is where Parmenides starts, and three of his phrases are worth having in plain English before he puts them to work. When he says "what is," he means whatever there is, taken just insofar as it is there; the Greek is the participle of the verb "to be," and English has to make do with a phrase. "What is not" is the shadow of that: sheer nothing, the thing the exercise a moment ago kept failing to catch hold of. His third phrase is "the way of inquiry," which is his own image for a line of thought. You set out along one, you follow where it goes, and it either arrives somewhere or it does not. With that much in hand the argument is short. The goddess sets out two roads an inquiry can take. The first is that it is, and that it is impossible for it not to be. The second is that it is not, and that it must needs not be. She then closes the second road, and her reason for closing it is not that it leads somewhere unpleasant but that there is nothing on it at all. You cannot know what is not, and you cannot say it either, since to say it is to say something about it, and there is no it there to be spoken of. One of the only two lines of thought open to anybody turns out to have no destination. From that alone almost everything else follows, which is what makes him so hard to get out of. If "what is not" can never be part of an explanation, then no explanation can ever say that something came out of nothing, or that it was here and then was not, or that there is a gap between two parts of it. Every one of those sentences puts "is not" to work, and he has just taken that tool off the bench.

(Q) "The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion." + Source: Parmenides, fragment 2 in the standard Diels numbering (Burnet translation). The goddess is naming the two ways of search that can be thought of, and this is the first of them. Burnet prints the passage as his own fragments 4 and 5; Diels’ numbering is the one modern books cite.

(T2) Whatever truly is never came into being, will never perish, and never changes. + A signpost at a crossroads carries marks that tell you what lies down the road. Parmenides uses exactly that word. Along the one road left open, the goddess says, there are many signs, and she reads them off one after another: what is is uncreated and indestructible, whole, unmoving, complete, all at once, and one. The argument for the first sign is the one that has never gone away, and it is worth walking slowly. Suppose something came into being. Then it came either from what is, in which case it was already there and nothing came to be after all, or else it came from what is not, and the first road has already ruled that out. Either way, the coming into being that was supposed to be explained has quietly vanished. Then he adds a second difficulty, and he puts it as a question: if it came from nothing, "what need could have made it arise later rather than sooner?" Nothing has no features in it, no clock and no reason, so there is nothing about it that could favour Tuesday over Thursday. That question is among the earliest surviving appeals to what philosophers now call the principle of sufficient reason, the rule that nothing is the case without something that accounts for its being that way rather than another. Think of a coin lying heads up on a kitchen table. Something made it heads and not tails, whether a thumb, a draught from the window, or the way it struck the wood, and if you were told that nothing whatever had made the difference you would go on looking for the reason anyway. Parmenides is asking what could have made the difference in a case where there is nothing there at all to make it. He was not quite the first to reason that way. Aristotle reports that Anaximander of Miletus, two generations earlier, argued that the earth stays where it is because it has no reason to move in one direction rather than another. But that is Aristotle’s report of Anaximander, and this is Parmenides in his own words. The rest of the signs come out of the same refusal. It cannot be divided, because what would separate one part of it from another would have to be a stretch of what is not. It cannot move or alter, because to change is to stop being one way and start being another, and stopping being is out of bounds. What is left is a single, changeless, complete thing, which he pictures at the end in a figure he must have known was daring: "like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre in every direction." He knows how this sounds. Coming into being and passing away, being and not being, changing place, changing colour, all of these, he says, are "but names which mortals have given, believing them to be true." A reader is entitled to feel the ground move here, and to want to answer back. Aristotle did, and the answers he found are still the standard ones. But the argument does not fall over just because the conclusion is unwelcome, and that is exactly the discipline Parmenides introduced into Western thought.

(Q) "One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one." + Source: Parmenides, fragment 8, opening lines (Burnet translation). The beginning of the fifty-two line stretch that Simplicius copied out in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. "Tokens" is Burnet’s word for the signs at the crossroads; other translators use "signs" or "signposts."

(T3) When the eyes and the argument disagree, the argument decides. + Put a straight stick half into a bucket of water and it looks bent. Nobody who sees this concludes that the stick has bent; we correct the eye by something we know. The sun looks about the size of a coin held at arm’s length, and it is not. Parmenides took that ordinary correction and made it a rule. The goddess warns the traveller against a very particular enemy: not stupidity, but habit born of much experience. Long practice at looking, listening and talking is exactly what makes the second road feel passable, because everyone around you talks all day about things that were and are not any more. Against that she sets one instruction: judge by argument. The Greek word she uses is logos, which can mean word, account, or reasoning, and this is one of the earliest places in Greek where it plainly carries the sense of an argument that can be laid out and tested. Diogenes Laertius summed the whole man up in a sentence: he made reason the standard and pronounced sensations to be inexact (Lives IX.22, Hicks translation). That instruction is the seed of a great deal. Socrates questioning a general about courage, Euclid proving a theorem, and every argument since that has asked to be met on its merits rather than by an appeal to how things look, all belong to the tradition of judging by argument. It also has a limit, and the limit shows up the moment the subject is not geometry but history. What a person has seen and touched is evidence, and the Christian claim in particular rests on witnesses who insist on precisely that: "which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands" (1 John 1:1). Parmenides has no room for such testimony in his method. It is one of the places where the road he opened and the road the apostles walked run in different directions.

(Q) "But do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry, nor let habit by its much experience force thee to cast upon this way a wandering eye or sounding ear or tongue; but judge by argument the much disputed proof uttered by me." + Source: Parmenides, fragment 7 in the standard Diels numbering (Burnet translation, who prints these lines at the close of his fragment 1). Burnet notes on this passage that it is the earliest instance of logos in the sense of dialectical argument, the sense Socrates would make familiar.

(T4) He gives a full account of the changing world and warns in advance that it is not the truth. + Here the poem does something no summary prepares you for. Having argued that what is cannot change, Parmenides turns around and gives a complete account of the changing world: how the heavens are arranged, where the Milky Way and the outermost sky came from, what the moon is doing, how living things are conceived. And he introduces the whole of it by telling the reader not to trust it. He is closing his trustworthy speech about the truth, the goddess says; what follows is the beliefs of mortals, and the reader is to listen to the deceptive ordering of her words. Imagine a man who is convinced every map of a coastline is wrong in principle, and who then sits down and draws you the best one anybody has. That is roughly the position. Mortals, he says, have made up their minds to name two forms, light and night, and everything in the world of appearance gets built out of that pair. Then he builds it, and the workmanship is first-rate. There are bands or rings of fire and darkness, with a goddess at the centre of them who steers all things, and the first of the gods she contrived, he says, was Eros, desire. The moon shines "by night with borrowed light, wandering round the earth," which is a correct account of where moonlight comes from and one of the earliest anybody has. Diogenes Laertius adds more to the list, crediting him with being the first to say that the earth is a sphere and sits at the centre of the universe, and reporting the identification of the morning and evening stars under his name too, while noting that others gave that credit to Pythagoras (Lives IX.21 to 23). What is he doing? Readers have argued about it since antiquity, and there is no settled answer. Perhaps he is showing his students the best that can be done on the wrong assumptions, so that nobody is caught out by a rival cosmology. Perhaps he means that appearances have a second-class kind of truth. Perhaps, more simply, a man who had spent his life looking at the sky could not bear to leave the sky out. The honest summary is that he tells us the account is not the truth, tells us he is giving it anyway, and does not tell us why.

(Q) "Here shall I close my trustworthy speech and thought about the truth. Henceforward learn the beliefs of mortals, giving ear to the deceptive ordering of my words." + Source: Parmenides, fragment 8, closing lines (Burnet translation). The hinge of the poem. Everything before it is the way of truth; everything after it is the cosmology he has just disowned.

(Q) "Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all." + Source: Parmenides, fragment 1, from the goddess’ welcome (Burnet translation). "Meet it is" is old English for "it is fitting." The goddess is setting out the whole curriculum in one sentence: first what is unshakeably true, then what people believe, and the student is to learn both and keep them apart. Diogenes Laertius quotes the same line to explain why the poem falls into two parts (Lives IX.22).

What Later Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Plato called him father, and then said that answering him would be a kind of parricide. + No Greek thinker got more respect from Plato, and none gave him more trouble. Plato named a dialogue after him, and in it does something almost unheard of. Plato’s own theory of Forms holds that behind every ordinary thing stands an unchanging original that the thing is a copy of, so that a just verdict is just by sharing in Justice itself. In the dialogue he hands the old man from Elea the strongest objections to that theory, lets him press them, and never fully answers them. In the Theaetetus Socrates will not take up the Eleatic doctrine at all, on the ground that a question that large would not get its due if it were handled in passing (184a). But Plato could not live with the conclusion, and he knew exactly where the trouble lay. If "what is not" can never be said or thought, then nobody can ever say anything false, because a false statement is one that says what is not the case. That would put an end to the whole business of correcting people, which is to say an end to philosophy. So in the Sophist he sends in a visitor from Elea to do the deed, and has him ask leave first, since what he is about to attempt is a kind of parricide, the killing of one’s own father: "Because, in self-defence, I must test the philosophy of my father Parmenides, and try to prove by main force, that in a certain sense not-being is, and that being, on the other hand, is not" (241d, Jowett translation). The solution, worked out at length, is that "is not" often means nothing more alarming than "is different from." When you say a horse is not a house you are not conjuring nothingness; you are pointing at a difference. What Plato kept from him is larger than what he gave up. The split that organizes all of Plato’s thought, between a world of change that the eyes report and an unchanging reality that only thought reaches, is Parmenides’ split. Plato’s Forms sit on the Eleatic side of that line: ungenerated, imperishable, always the same. He took the changeless being of the poem and, instead of making it the only thing there is, made it the thing everything else depends on.

(†) Aristotle answered him by showing that "being" is said in more than one sense. + Aristotle begins the Physics, his book about nature and change, by clearing Parmenides out of the way, because if the Eleatics are right there is no such subject. He is respectful about it. In the Metaphysics, setting Parmenides beside Melissus of Samos, the other great Eleatic, and Xenophanes, he sets the other two aside as "a little too naive" and adds that "Parmenides seems in places to speak with more insight" (I.5, 986b, Ross translation). His answer has two moves, and both became permanent furniture. The first is that Parmenides treats "being" as if it meant one thing, when in fact it is said in many ways: a man is, a colour is, a size is, and they are not there in the same manner. Once that is granted, "what is" stops being a single lump. The second move is the useful one. Between sheer nothing and full actual existence, Aristotle says, there is a third condition: potentiality. An acorn is not an oak, and it is not nothing either; it is an oak in potency. So when an oak comes to be, it does not come from nothing, and it does not come from an oak that was already there. It comes from something that was able to become one. Change turns out to be neither the impossibility Parmenides proved nor the brute fact everybody had assumed, but the passage from being able to be to actually being. That distinction is the reason Aristotle could go on to write about physics, biology and the soul at all, and it is the tool Christian theologians would later use to say that God, unlike everything else, has no potentiality in him waiting to be actualized. The whole apparatus exists because one man in southern Italy asked a question nobody could answer.

(†) Christian theology found his changeless being useful for saying what it means that God does not change. + First, a distinction that keeps the story honest. The church did not learn from Parmenides that God does not change. It read that in its own Scriptures, long before any Greek philosophy came near them: "For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed" (Malachi 3:6); the Father of lights "with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17); the heavens wear out like a garment, "but you are the same, and your years have no end" (Psalm 102:27). What the Greek tradition gave Christian writers was not the doctrine but a set of tools for stating it precisely, and the sharpest of those tools were forged at Elea. The line runs through Plato and his heirs rather than through the poem itself, which was already a rare book by late antiquity. Augustine is the clearest case. Reaching for a way to name the God he had found, he kept coming back to a word that could have been lifted straight out of fragment 8: God is idipsum, the selfsame, the one who simply is, while everything else is always on its way from what it was to what it will be (Confessions IX.10; Expositions of the Psalms 121, on the Latin numbering). Boethius, sitting in prison under sentence of death and writing the Consolation of Philosophy, defined eternity as the complete possession all at once of unending life (V.6). That sentence lands on the same note as the "all at once" of fragment 8, and it does not have to have been taken from it to do so. The medievals put the same thought to work in a more technical way. Anselm argued that God alone exists through himself and that everything else exists through him (Monologion 3 to 6). Thomas Aquinas held that in God essence and existence are one, so that what God is and that God is are not two facts about him (Summa Theologiae I.3.4), and that God is pure act, meaning there is nothing in him that is merely able to happen and waiting to be made actual (I.9.1). Every one of those formulas is a way of saying, with more precision each time, that the God of Scripture is not a thing that becomes. Christians could take the tool because they had already turned it around. The Eleatic argument says that whatever truly is cannot come to be, and therefore nothing comes to be. Scripture agrees with the first half and denies the second: God alone has being of himself, and everything else is his gift, called out of nothing and held there. "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). What was unthinkable at Elea, a real beginning, becomes thinkable the moment there is Someone whose being does not begin.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a world that truly began, truly changes, and was truly entered. + The disagreement is not about whether reality has a changeless foundation. It is about nearly everything else that follows. - The world is not a rumour. Coming into being and passing away, he says, are names mortals gave to what they took for real. Genesis has God make a world in time and pronounce it very good (Genesis 1:31), and the New Testament will not let the material creation be demoted: all things were made through the Word, and nothing that was made was made without him (John 1:3). A Christian can say the visible world is not the deepest thing there is. He cannot say it is a mistake. - Something can begin, because Someone gives it. His strongest argument is that nothing can come from what is not. Taken as a claim about the world on its own, Christian thought agrees with it entirely: things do not pop into existence unaided. The doctrine of creation from nothing does not say the world came out of nothing as a source. It says God, "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Romans 4:17), gave it being. The Eleatic argument holds against every explanation except that one. - Witnesses count. His method comes down to one instruction: judge by argument, and hold off the wandering eye and the sounding ear. The apostles do the opposite. They stake the whole case on what was seen, heard and handled, they name the witnesses who were still alive to be questioned, and they invite the reader to go and ask them (1 John 1:1; Luke 1:2; 1 Corinthians 15:6). Reasoning and testimony are both ways of knowing, and a method that admits only the first has ruled out the news before it has heard it. - The changeless entered change. His premises make the central Christian claim impossible in principle, and it is worth saying so plainly. What truly is cannot move, cannot come to be, cannot take on what it did not have. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Christian teaching holds both ends: God’s own nature does not change, and the Son took a human nature and a human life, born under an emperor, dead under a governor, raised on a particular morning. - His One has nothing to say to anybody. He gives it every perfection he can think of except the ones that would let it matter to a person. It does not speak, act, promise, judge or forgive. The strange thing is that Parmenides plainly wanted a voice, since he put his entire argument in the mouth of a goddess who takes the traveller by the hand and calls him welcome. The poem reaches for a personal source of truth that the philosophy inside it cannot supply. He was reaching in the right direction. Paul told the philosophers on Mars Hill that God set men in the world so that they might "seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him" (Acts 17:27), and a man who worked out unaided that whatever truly is must be uncreated, indestructible and one is a fair example of the feeling. He got further along that road than almost anyone. What he could not get, and what nobody gets that way, is a name.