Dazzled by Darwin, we tend to think of creationism as the opposite of evolution rather than of materialism more properly. This highlights how thoroughly creationism has become rooted in a biological context in the contemporary world. But it has not always been that way. Paley's watchmaker was no anti-evolutionary argument (how could it have been, in 1802?), and for most of its history, the argument from design was significantly broader than it is now generally taken to be, applying to weather, numbers or planets as readily as to platypus. And although many of the modern arguments go back in some form or other a long way indeed, David Sedley shows how the philosophical contexts of antiquity shaped the original versions of these arguments in ways that will be both refreshing and challenging to anyone with an interest in the modern debates.

Ancient philosophy and early Greek science emerge, in Sedley's compelling account, as deeply theological projects. One of only a handful of recent accounts to examine directly the theological aspects of ancient natural philosophy, this book interprets everyone from the Presocratics through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and then on to the Stoics and even (briefly) Galen. Although it is not unusual to see Empedocles acknowledged as a theological innovator, it is rather rarer to see the theological commitments at the heart of Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of the natural world given full play. In Sedley's version of things, the ancient creationists were the side to beat, and he does a wonderful job of laying out the complex logical, ontological and teleological roots from which the ancient debates grew. When we do see strong anti-creationist arguments, as with the Atomists, Sedley goes to some length to undermine the modern reader's rather easy tendency to sympathize with their purely naturalistic account of causation, by showing how counterintuitive many of Atomism's core ideas were and are. The effect can sometimes be unnerving, as when the fundamental building blocks of the Atomist universe are shown – by an argument from first principles – to be identical in number and kind to the pieces in Tetris (my analogy, not Sedley's). To be sure, the point is only one step in a larger argument for a finite typology of atoms, but it does succeed in reminding us how foreign the reasoning behind Atomism could be. The particular point at issue in this instance is to show how Epicurean Atomism avoided one of the problems that plagued Democritus – a version of the old infinite-monkeys-on-infinite-typewriters puzzle, and one of the cornerstones of the argument for intelligent design. How on earth could something as spectacularly unlikely as this particular beneficial combination of atoms that we find in and around ourselves ever come about? For Democritus, who had an infinite number not only of atoms, but also of kinds of atoms, the answer is more difficult than for Epicurus, who at least saw fit to give his monkeys finite keyboards, as it were, on which they could hammer away.

So, too, Sedley's treatment of the revival of the argument from design in Stoicism shows how skilful and how finely grained the arguments were, both for and against. In his view, ancient creationism reached its culmination in the very fertile pluralism of Hellenistic philosophy, where the different schools took careful aim at the arguments of their competitors. One common strategy employed by sceptics of various stripes was to rework Stoic arguments into parodies, showing how any silly conclusion could be reached by the same means the Stoics had used to conclude that the world was intelligently designed. But, as Sedley makes clear, this amounts to a lot of small shots at a very solid edifice – the Stoics plugged the various holes both deftly and intelligently.

My only wish is that the Galen chapter were meatier. In Galen's hands, creationism and teleology come in perhaps their most formidable form for the modern reader, aware of the recent history of biological creationism. Sedley signs off with a brief summary of a few of Galen's arguments, but it seems somehow dissatisfying. The majesty of Galen's treatment of the hand, for example, in On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, would perhaps have been a stronger example for Sedley to cite than beards and armpit hairs. But maybe this is just me chasing Sedley's arguments into new territory. To be fair to him, the real point of the epilogue is not to stand Galen up as the most sophisticated proponent of the design argument but to underscore further a point argued for throughout the book: how widespread one particular (and underappreciated) line of influence was in ancient philosophy. This is the very powerful influence of Socrates – not Plato's Socrates, however, but Xenophon's – a Socrates who is a theologian to the core.