Plato and Christian Truth
In all of the challenges that present themselves to the minds of human beings, the nature of man himself is perhaps the most perplexing. This is one of the reasons that ancient thinkers dealt not only with the nature of the material world of plants, animals, elements, etc., but also and especially with the non-material realm: the world of metaphysics.
If I am piloting a submarine exploring the depths of the sea, there are several ways I can gather information about the undersea world: I can look out of the viewports, I can use sonar, I can press my ear to the hull and listen very hard, I can use external video cameras and microphones.
But what if the information I’m gathering is interfered with by some outside force? What if an enemy agent or a practical joker is rigging the viewports so that they show me a prerecorded image? What if a huge crane has taken me out of the ocean and put me in a huge tank somewhere on dry land? What if there is someone on the hull making faked wildlife sounds into the microphones?
We can compare the human being to a “submarine” exploring his or her environment: to gather information each of us uses our five senses--sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Once the information is gathered, we somehow reason out the nature of what it is we have observed with our senses. Normally we must trust our five senses to give us accurate data to work from.
But thinkers like Parmenides and Heraclitus weren’t content to merely trust their senses to give them true knowledge. Parmenides insisted that everything that truly exists must, in some sense, be permanent--it must have being. Heraclitus, on the other hand, pointed out that everything we observe is in the process of changing all the time--it is becoming. Our senses themselves undergo changes: nearsightedness, hardness of hearing, dullness of taste, tiredness, disease, etc. all affect our senses. Plus, there is never any guarantee that the messages the objects we observe are sending us are accurate and not being “rigged” by some outside force.
If you are familiar with the Matrix film series, you’ll recall the plot device: an alien race had conquered mankind and hooked every human being up to a computer program that gave them the illusion of an outside reality. Everything they thought they were experiencing with their five senses was really a lie projected by this program into their brains. This carries the question of how our minds determine what is true to an absurd extreme, but it touches on one of the goals that all philosophers have struggled with: the nature of knowledge, or, epistemology.
Plato, a student of Socrates, developed a system of thought that attempted to resolve the conflict between being and becoming. At the same time, he hoped to find an adequate understanding of how we come to possess true knowledge. Interestingly, much of his thought was influenced by his experience with the followers of Pythagoras, who believed in reincarnation--that our souls are born and reborn over and over in various forms.
What Plato taught was that man’s soul is composed of three parts: reason, spirit and appetite. When he is born, his soul comes into his body from an ideal realm, what Plato called the world of ideas. Man’s soul arrives already equipped with the true knowledge of this ideal realm. That realm of ideas contains all of the objects we encounter here in this material world, only those objects are in ideal form. For example, in this world we encounter many different chairs. But in the ideal world, there is an ideal chair that embodies the essence of chair-ness. Because my soul retains the knowledge of this ideal chair, I am able to recognize its essence in the material chairs I encounter here.
Plato’s system of two worlds meant that our knowledge of the ideal realm is the only true knowledge we have access to. All of our “knowledge” of the material, physical world is only a shadowy reflection of the ideal world and really only amounts to opinion (or worse, deception). He insisted that the mind was meant to ponder the true, ideal nature of truth and reality, not to be bogged down with the imperfect world of physical objects and carnal appetites. Plato’s concept of “god” was the ultimate, ideal goodness that inhabits the ideal realm and is totally separate from the physical realm.
For the Christian, this meant a challenging obstacle in the Greek thought of the first century A.D. Platonic philosophy caused a continuing denigration of the physical world, considering the human body to be unworthy and soiled. To suggest that the ideal God would stoop to dwell in a human form (the incarnation) was ludicrous to them.
But the Bible insists that God not only created and blessed the physical world, but fully intends to totally recreate and redeem it through His eternal plan. It also teaches that God has revealed reliable truth, by His written word, and by the observable natural world--truth that is accessible to the inquiring mind by means of our senses...truth that can be used by His Spirit to lead us to eternal salvation!
Part 1 of this series:
http://markaikins.blogspot.com/2014/01/early-greek-ideas-and-christian.html
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