>>819586>I never proposed an exterior cause, but only saw the cause of "stuff" as internal; e.g. stuff comes from stuff. <Note, then, to begin with, that things cannot act upon each other and turn into one another at random, unless it be by incidental concomitance ; for how (to take an example) could culture, as such, ‘ become’ pallor ? A man of culture, who had been of a swarthy coinplexion, might indeed become pale, and so the person we had described as ‘ cultured’ might come to be a person we describe as ‘ pale,’ but only incidentally to the fact that the cultured person who became pale had other qualities concomitantly with his culture ; for he cannot ‘become’ pale on the mere strength of already having some quality other than pallor to start from, unless that quality is on the specific line of antithesis to pallor—swarthiness or some intermediate shade. P.53, Aristotle The Physics Vol-i : Philip H Wicksteed : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
https://share.google/4RXCkmBwZhxzenv2vIf I read this correctly, something can't change into something else without being the "patient" of an external "agent " - unless it already had the necessary qualities characteristic of what it changes into in it already , in which case it would already be that thing.
>The ancients reckoned that matter is uncreated, and that time was an imposition upon matter by a deity, since time must begin after the margin of chaos. >A deity puts matter into a harmony we call "time", or relative motion; so absolute motion is the same as stillness (as we read in Heraclitus).Like in Genesis?. God doesn't create matter out of nothing, but out of watery chaos.
But what caused the watery chaos?
And later in the Bible, there is a reference to God smiting the heads of dragons in the waters. What were dragons doing in the waters?
It's all very unsatisfying. If the gods didn't cause Matter to physically exist, but just tweaked it to give it Form, the question of why everything exists, rather than nothing, isn't answered.