Is the heaven is ungenerated or generated, indestructible or destructible?

Is the heaven is ungenerated or generated, indestructible or destructible?

All agree that the world was generated. But some say that generation:

• is over
• is eternal
• is destructible like any other natural formation.

Empedocles of Akragas and Heraclitus of Ephesus, believe that there is alternation in the destructive process, which takes now this direction, now that, and continues without end.

It is impossible to assert that it was both generated and yet eternal.

Generated things are always destroyed.

Further, a thing which had no beginning and has never changed can never be changed.

If it changed, then there was some cause of change and it would have changed earlier.

Suppose that the world was formed out of elements which were different in the past.

1. if their condition was always so and could not have been otherwise, the world could never have come into being
2. if the world did come into being, then, clearly, their condition must have been capable of change and not eternal: after combination therefore they will be dispersed, just as in the past after dispersion they came into combination, and this process either has been, or could have been, indefinitely repeated.

But if this is so, the world cannot be indestructible, and it does not matter whether the change of condition has actually occurred or remains a possibility.

Some people think that the world is indestructible but was generated.

They say that in their statements about its generation they are doing what geometricians do when they construct their figures, not implying that the universe really had a beginning, but for didactic reasons facilitating understanding by exhibiting the object, like the figure, as in course of formation.

The two cases are not parallel.

In drawing the shape, when the various steps are completed the required figure forthwith results; but in these other demonstrations what results is not that which was required.

It cannot be so; for antecedent and consequent, as assumed, are in contradiction.

The ordered arose out of the unordered.

The same thing cannot be at the same time both ordered and unordered; there must be a process and a lapse of time separating the two states.

In the shape, on the other hand, there is no temporal separation.

Thus, the universe cannot be at once eternal and generated.

To say that the universe alternately combines and dissolves is no more paradoxical than to make it eternal but varying in shape.

It is as if one were to think that there was now destruction and now existence when from a child a man is generated, and from a man a child.

For it is clear that when the elements come together the result is not a chance system and combination, but the very same as before-especially on the view of those who hold this theory, since they say that the contrary is the cause of each state. So that if the totality of body, which is a continuum, is now in this order or disposition and now in that, and if the combination of the whole is a world or heaven, then it will not be the world that comes into being and is destroyed, but only its dispositions.

If the world is believed to be one, it is impossible to suppose that it should be, as a whole, first generated and then destroyed, never to reappear; since before it came into being there was always present the combination prior to it, and that, we hold, could never change if it was never generated.

If, on the other hand, the worlds are infinite in number the view is more plausible. But whether this is, or is not, impossible will be clear from what follows. For there are some who think it possible both for the ungenerated to be destroyed and for the generated to persist undestroyed.

(This is held in the Timaeus, where Plato says that the heaven, though it was generated, will none the less exist to eternity.) So far as the heaven is concerned we have answered this view with arguments appropriate to the nature of the heaven: on the general question we shall attain clearness when we examine the matter universally.