The Unmoved Mover

This surrealist painting by Mariusz Lewandowski, called “demiurgos unmoved mover” shows a haloed figure standing outside of a frame which contains a scene of a vast sky and water tumbling over the lip of the picture — maybe the figure is just watching the image, or maybe they are actually tipping it. Either way, the painting’s image and title gets at the famous metaphysical argument put forth by the Greek philosopher Aristotle of “the unmoved mover”. It has long been used as an argument for the existence of God. But the Ancient Greek didn’t really have in mind “God” in the way most of us imagine.

The unmoved mover argument, of course, goes something like this: everything that exists is caused by something that came before. But if you go back far enough, at some point there had to have been something that caused the whole of existence to get going but was not caused by anything before. These initial causative agents were the gods, according to Aristotle, as he wrote in the 4th c BCE in his work _Metaphysics_.

Aristotle, however, completely disagreed with the anthropomorphic deities in Ancient religion. Instead, as Richard DeWitt writes, he “thought of the gods as being a sort of intellectual perfection . . . . His gods are not in any way religious gods. . . for example, these gods had nothing to do with the origin of the universe, they are unaware of anything happening on the Earth, they are unaware of our existence, and as such it would be pointless to pray to them”. The Greek myths and stories about the gods and goddesses might have been edifying on some level, thought Aristotle, but they weren’t actually true stories.

It was only much later that theologians in the Abrahamic religious traditions, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, decided that Aristotle’s unmoved mover was equivalent to God.