The first thing that strikes me is that he presents persuasion as much preferable to coercion. Looking through history, I have to admit not all Christian theologians have been quite as charitable as Plato. Today though, I think most modern Christians have learned (the hard way) that threats of imprisonment and persecution, while they might change behavior, don’t tend to genuinely change hearts. In the parts that follow the assigned passage, Plato seems to have been perfectly ready to use punishment if persuasion failed, and I agree punishment might sometimes be needed, but that’s for God to issue out, not my own hand.
Plato’s arguments about motion are rooted in the idea of cause and effect. He understood just as well as Isaac Newton that an object at rest will remain at rest unless it is acted upon by some kind of force. If anything is moving, something must have caused it to move. This is similar to our modern day cosmological argument that all the causes and effects we see today must have their origin in some eternal uncaused cause. The apparent alternative, infinite regress (the idea that cause and effect have no beginning), is really just another way of saying that the universe is itself an eternal uncaused cause. The only real alternative is that the universe just popped into existence for no reason at all, and that still makes it an uncaused cause, just not an eternal one. Also, once you accept that things can happen for absolutely no reason, natural science and philosophy and reason itself all go out the window. That’s probably why you don’t often encounter that argument in the wild.
Now Plato did not have any inkling of the other part of Newton’s first law: that an object in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by a force. In his mind, if something continues to move, something must be actively causing its continued motion. As the sun, moon, planets, and stars all seemed to be revolving around the earth, that proved something or someone must be actively moving them. Today, the discoveries of Newton, Kepler, Galileo, et al. have made this part of his argument seem quaint and naive, and we would be foolish to continue using it. Fortunately, for every arrow modern science has taken from our quiver, it’s given us a whole truckload of high-end match grade ammo to use for arguments from design. I am really looking forward to that part when we get to it.
Plato’s arguments against the indifference of the gods and the notion that they might be corrupt and easily bribed seem fairly similar to the ones we use today. I’m sure we’ll deal with those objections in more detail when we come to the problem of evil, but the gist is that since we are unable to see all ends, we cannot rightly judge what is truly best for us and the world as a whole.
“So what?” – this was the reply of one of my agnostics friends after a long conversation about the evidence of Jesus’s bodily resurrection.
I see a lot in common between how Plato and many Christians have done apologetics over the years: using persuasion with classical arguments, morality benefits in particular and human flourishing in general, and internal consistency as well as external coherence with our world.
Which brings me back to my friend, I think that sometimes there’s a risk to overestimate the power of reason. Humans for sure are not brains on sticks; so how can persuasion be more effective? I recently read “The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness by Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen (2023), and it resonated with me. In it, the authors are arguing that Augustine’s City of God shows us a more nuanced, pastoral approach to apologetics.
It was my father who first got me interested in apologetics, and he had a similar experience as a young sailor. He had just become a Christian, and an atheist shipmate took that as a challenge and began asking him a series of difficult questions. As there were no online encyclopedias in those days (he was trained on one of the most advanced computers in his day, and it had a whopping 32K of ferrite core memory), research meant waiting to get back to shore and hunting through bookstores for titles that looked like they might have answers. After many months of work, he finally answered every question, and his shipmate had to admit he was right in every case. But after all that, the atheist ended it by saying, “Well I don’t care if there is a God; I’m not going to knuckle under.”
You can’t convince everyone, and the arguments people use against God are often just smokescreens for their real objections, which could be pride, anger over some tragedy, shame for their own failures, or the raw allure of some sin or another, to name just a few possibilities. God knows their real reasons, so keep praying and keep trying.
We don’t know what became of that atheist, but Dad’s time spent in all that research wasn’t wasted. His own faith was stronger than ever, and he raised his sons up to pursue answers with the same kind of doggedness. A lot of Christian parents, for good reason, dread sending their kids off to college. Not my Dad.
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