Thanks very much to Owen for this illuminating contribution!
While I agree with this mostly, I would offer just this reply: The reason we study pagan (or Jewish or Muslim) philosophy of religion is not necessarily just to serve as a foundation for Christian philosophy. Rather, it sheds light on “natural theology” in important ways. The Timaeus gives us what might be the first reasonably complete cosmological argument, and the Laws gives us the second. As we will see in our study of the latter, Plato thought through several of the sorts of questions of strategy for apologetics that we ask. Isn’t that interesting? I think so. In any case, understanding the origins of the cosmological argument is very interesting. The fact that the Greek philosophers developed arguments of similar sorts to those used by Christian philosophers is itself an interesting argument against those unbelievers who might be inclined to think that such arguments are only rationalizations used by Christian philosophers.
It can also be said that by studying the landscape of conceptual options offered by pagan philosophers (e.g., one god or many; ex nihilo or not; a god-universe distinction, or not; etc.), we are forced to give more careful thought to why we take the positions we take. New or newly reconsidered arguments were tools that made it possible for me to be converted. Only after developing enough “natural theology” in 2019–20 could I begin to think that, maybe, I had underestimated the force of the arguments both individually and together. To do that, it helped a great deal that I worked through certain aspects of the arguments that I had simply never thought much about. As foreign and frankly bizarre as some of Plato’s (and soon, Aristotle’s) ideas are, encountering them raises questions and lays out conceptual possibilities that broaden how we think about the issues.
I think that, by the end of the first three units or so (i.e., cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and special issues about developing teleological arguments), we will be able to explain much more cogently exactly why the fundamentals of the Christian philosophy of religion are so beautiful, coherent, and ultimately compelling, compared to befuddled systems like Plato’s.
Reply to “Timaeus: Is Plato’s Demiurge sufficiently similar to the God revealed in Scripture and general revelation to serve as a foundation for Christian philosophy?”