ABSTRACT
We have seen that both Galen and Strabo knew of Moses as a lawgiver to the Hebrews, and they knew also something of the idea of the omnipotence of the Hebrews’ god. The Christians came to accept both the god of the Jews and a great deal of Hellenistic philosophy, and their view of nature and the world was formed accordingly. This came to be widespread in the late antique centuries and was important for the Middle Ages. A central question was: Is the world eternal? We have seen that it was for Aristotle, but not for some other Greek philosophers. For the Jews, whose god was above all a creator and controller, it was unthinkable that the world should be eternal. The arguments for and against were partly concerned with the natural changes visibly taking place on earth, and they thus form another arena in which natural history provided material for another enterprise.
