In the Philebus of Plato (429–347 B.C.E.) Socrates considered this all-important question and laid out the two primary possibilities: “Whether we are to affirm that all existing things, and this fair scene which we call the Universe, are governed by the influence of the irrational, the random, and the mere chance; or, on the contrary, as our predecessors affirmed, are kept in their course by the control of mind and a certain wonderful regulating intelligence.”
