WLC: "You can't prove the negative"

[Silver]

It's as though theists are always attempting to peg a square shaped god into a round hole.

[GrandizerII]

This is all very well said, I think! Thank you for posting it. 

(It's pretty much what I've been saying, but since you're much nicer than I am people are more likely to read it with an open mind.)

It allows dialogue. So “You haven’t provided sufficient evidence or sound reason" is perfectly fair, and allows the person making the claim to explore what "sufficient evidence" or a "sound reason" might look like to the respondent. 

We saw earlier someone making two claims: 1) there is no empirical evidence for God, and 2) we should not believe in things for which there is no empirical evidence. 

If people were inclined, this is a very reasonable way to begin a discussion of classical theism, which of course never claimed that God would be some sort of physical object accessible to the senses. Since Plato, God is much more like Justice, or Mercy. Or numbers. These are things we don't sense, but can know of in the mind since we extrapolate their existence from actions and objects in the world. 

I know that most people here won't accept this argument either, but it shows how, when someone presents his reasons, discussion is possible.

Just so that we are clear, the Greeks were pagans (that is, polytheistic), and if you read Homer, the gods were constantly intervening in the affairs of we mortals; that's what the Greeks, Plato included, believed, Romans, too.

The FSM, albeit a silly parody, would be comparable to those gods (like Zeus and such) but not comparable to God in the first cause kind of sense.

The latter is a product of millennia of intellectual thinking on metaphysical matters, and is a reasonable metaphysical position that one may take depending on their epistemological starting points.

[Belacqua]

Just so that we are clear, the Greeks were pagans (that is, polytheistic), and if you read Homer, the gods were constantly intervening in the affairs of we mortals; that's what the Greeks, Plato included, believed, Romans, too.

"The Greeks" were not a monolithic group. 

Platonic and Neoplatonic theology says that there is a single undivided Form, sometimes called God, and sometimes called the One. Any beings who exist between this form and the material world (the small-g gods) are not God. Christians found it very easy to identify this One, Plato's God, the Form of the Good, with their God. A large part of Christian theology is Platonic. (The parts that aren't Aristotelian.)

So when you say "that's what the Greeks, Plato included, believed," this requires more nuance. 

Have you read any Plato at all? That would clear things up.

Centuries passed between Homer's time and Plato's. For most of this time, Homer's work was seen as literature and not scripture. Later Neoplatonists, like Porphyry, went back into Homer's books and interpreted them as containing hidden Platonic allegory. To them, the stories were myths intentionally constructed to show the soul's descent from the one God -- the One -- and its desire to return and reunification. So for centuries after that, Homer was seen as esoterically teaching lessons about the One God.

[Jehanne]

Just so that we are clear, the Greeks were pagans (that is, polytheistic), and if you read Homer, the gods were constantly intervening in the affairs of we mortals; that's what the Greeks, Plato included, believed, Romans, too.

The FSM, albeit a silly parody, would be comparable to those gods (like Zeus and such) but not comparable to God in the first cause kind of sense.

The latter is a product of millennia of intellectual thinking on metaphysical matters, and is a reasonable metaphysical position that one may take depending on their epistemological starting points.

Like the four humors?

---

"The Greeks" were not a monolithic group.

Have you read any Plato at all? That would clear things up.

The Early, Middle and Late Dialogues, yes, and, of course, The Republic. In the latter the statement is found, "If the gods exist...." In the Timaeus, it was argued that we live in a geocentric Universe with circular motion with the Sun, Venus and Mercury moving at equal speeds with the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moving at unequal speeds.

[Belacqua]

The Early, Middle and Late Dialogues, yes, and, of course, The Republic.  In the latter the statement is found, "If the gods exist...."  

OK, so you'll know that while Plato writes about the gods of Greek mythology, he feels no need to describe them in agreement with Homer or Hesiod. Think of the Symposium, where each speaker describes Aphrodite or Eros very differently, to make his own point. This was not considered blasphemous or scandalous. As far as I know, whenever one of the named Greek gods appears in Plato it is used in this symbolic way. 

In the Phaedrus, you'll recall, he is noncommittal on whether the myths about the gods are true. When asked, he tentatively suggests a euhemerist explanation, but says he doesn't really care -- he'll leave it up to the experts. Here he says very explicitly that he uses the stories of the gods as symbols to think about his own character. The words you cite from the Republic also indicate that he is noncommittal.

In the Timaeus he suggests that a Demiurge made the world, but this is a craftsman, and the Forms are above him and determine his work.

Plato clearly believed that the Form of the Good was above the Demiurge, and served many of the functions that Christians later attributed to their God. Whether Plato himself would have called the Form "God" is not entirely clear. Experts who know a lot more than I do disagree about this. 

We can be sure, though, that although he speaks of the polytheistic pantheon of Apollo, Aphrodite, etc., as small-g gods, he also sees a higher, immaterial, unchanging Form above them. It's not clear whether Plato meant this in the way that Plotinus meant the One, but by the time Plotinus was writing that's what it had come to mean. 

The relationship is pretty similar to the Hindu pantheon, in which Shiva and the other higher characters are called gods, but above them is an eternal unchanging ground of being: Brahman. So just because you have characters running around called gods doesn't mean that you don't have something quite like the One over them, containing and determining all of existence. 

So I find no evidence to think that Plato believed in the polytheistic pantheon behaving in ways that Homer described.

[Jehanne]

All throughout his works, Plato tries to use logic, reason and mathematics to justify his ideas, with little to no appeal to empiricism. If he were alive today, he may have thought much differently about things.

[Belacqua]

All throughout his works, Plato tries to use logic, reason and mathematics to justify his ideas, with little to no appeal to empiricism.  If he were alive today, he may have thought much differently about things.

Does the fact that you changed the subject mean that you agree with me about Plato's belief in the activity of the gods?

With some exceptions, Plato asked questions like "what is justice?" or "what is knowledge?" or "is a good life determined by the amount of pleasure one has, or by the amount of admiration one receives, or something else?" or "what is the best kind of government?" These are not questions that can be answered through empirical means. 

Do you think he would have been a better person if he had given up such questions and worked on empirical research?

It seems likely to me that he agreed with his teacher: research into things like the speed of the planets is of little value if we are bad people living bad lives.

[Jehanne]

These are not questions that can be answered through empirical means.

That's where we disagree.

[Belacqua]

These are not questions that can be answered through empirical means.

That's where we disagree.

We certainly won't agree on this, and anyway it's my bedtime.

Oyasuminasai.

[Jehanne]

That's where we disagree.

We certainly won't agree on this, and anyway it's my bedtime.

Oyasuminasai.

Good night.