RE: Potential Christian-Platonist Contradiction?
November 13, 2013 at 2:36 pm
(This post was last modified: November 13, 2013 at 2:44 pm by MindForgedManacle.)
(November 12, 2013 at 11:27 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I assume you've seen the WLC video on absolute morality? He goes a lot into platonism and differences in the Christian view.
The only relevance Platonism has to this is that the response to the Euthyphro Dilemma by apologists is emphatically a Platonic one. I know this because they essentially answer the dilemma the same way Plato did: by appealing to the nature of the Form of the Good in Plato's case, and to God's natire for Christianity.
Quote:As for Jesus, be careful with quote mining. That statement was made in a particular context:
The scriptual bit was admittedly paddimg to an extent. My aim was to show where the similarities to Platonism in Christian theology are likely rooted in passages like that. It's not actually central to my argument.
(November 13, 2013 at 12:09 am)ChadWooters Wrote: I find your post confusing. Perhaps because it is predicated on the idea that God could make something perfect. God cannot make something perfect, because the only perfect thing He could make would be another God. And you cannot have two Gods, so logically anything created must be imperfect. It seems to be a commonplace complaint of atheists. “The world isn’t perfect.” Boo hoo hoo.
My argument certainly isn't that straw man of "Boo hoo"-ing about things not being perfect. I think I can elucidate exactly what I mean:
Christians will tend to answer the Euthrphro Dilemma by saying that goodness is in fact rooted in God's nature, i.e a Platonistic answer. They will also oftentimes hold to the privation view of evil, that is that evil is but an absense of good, not a metaphysical entity in its own right.
But these two theological stances wreck any attempt at a theodicy from the get-go, especially those arguing for a greater good as being the reason God must necessarily allow for evil. If the only good is God - which the Platonistic answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma and the privation view of evil necessitate and entail - then God could never have done anything in the service of producing a greater good. He is the ONLY good. Producing anything entails decreasing the amount pf good in reality necessarily. So theodicies like Plantinga's Free-will Defense can't even get off the ground, since their whole point is to explain evil existing as the necessary result for God to bring about a greater good.
