In the Timaeus Plato presents an elaborately wrought account of the formation of the universe and an explanation of its impressive order and beauty. First, he argues that since the sensible world "is always becoming and is never real" it must have come to be, and therefore must have a cause. This cause he calls "the maker and father of the universe". Later he calls it Mind and God. Modern scholars refer to Plato's God as the Demiurge ("maker", or literally "craftsman"). This divine Demiurge, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order via "shapes and numbers" on preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe. He fashioned the universe out of four elements: earth, fire, air, and water. These elements are solids composed of triangles and arranged as geometric means. Earth: cube; pyramid: fire; octahedron: air; icosahedron: water. The fifth solid, the dodecahedron, is used for the whole of Heaven since it is almost like a sphere. The world created by him is alive, intelligent, eternal, and good, and therefore it is a "blessed god". Time and change were created by the Demiurge at the same moment when the world was formed. Plato wrote: "(the Demiurge) began to think of making a moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This, of course, is what we call "time"."
At the center of the universe is the earth surrounded by circles for the planets. The rational soul infuses the entire universe. Humans, according to Plato, were created by the children of the eternal creator (the "demiurge" or master craftsman), and this explains their dual nature. Because we are not directly descended from him, we are not gods ourselves, but there is nonetheless something "divine" and "immortal" in us: our rational souls, which are god-like.
