Excellent job highlighting the differences between the Platonic and Christian conceptions of God the Creator. Plato’s conception is higher than I expected. One true creator, above the Olympian gods, a good God who created a universe of beauty. Though it is not as high as the Christian view, as you rightly point out, the model and raw materials seem to be pre-existing, independent of Plato’s craftsman God. Implying God did not create everything.
Why does God have to be a craftsman (Demiurge) in the first place though? I think Plato is anthropomorphising. He sees human craftsmen re-organising raw materials, replicating a model and assumes God must do the same. He is not following his own precept, that eternal things are comprehended with reason, and temporal things with the 5 senses, which are less reliable. He is letting human experience dictate what God is like. This is the hardest thing, for the created to know his creator. We are part of creation, looking at another part of creation. We cannot step outside the universe and look directly at God. For that deeper knowledge of God, He must reveal Himself to us.
Matt 11: “25 At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Has natural revelation lost its punch over time? Did the cosmological argument become weak with age? Or for that matter, all other more classical arguments?
What changed? Charles Taylor in his A Secular Age tries to explain: “the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” Taylor rejects the simplistic “subtraction stories” (science and reason somehow removing religion) and gives a quite completing case for a historical process that includes disenchantment, rise of “buffered self”, exclusive humanism, and what he also called “immanent frame” focus. But all resulted in loss of meaning, longing for transcendence, etc.
I realize that this topic is quite complex, but it is something that I would like to understand better for the duration of this seminar.
Romans 1:19 (NASB):”For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made”
I see in Plato the same two invisible attributes identified:
– eternal power
– divine nature
This is a very interesting question, and yes, based on your description, The Secular Age (which I admit I haven’t read), will be relevant later on—in the very last unit, on how to assess the cumulative case (or the Argument to the Best Explanation as I call it). Stay tuned!
Looking forward to it.
Oh, and I found James K.A. Smith “How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor” a great summary of Taylor’s masterpiece. I only wished I would’ve discovered this before reading Taylor directly 🙂 He brings it down to a level I can comprehend.
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