God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise.
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A hundred years after Parmenides, in the early fourth century B.C.E., the young Plato arrived in Syracuse, Sicily. Athens had only recently executed Socrates, his obstreperous mentor, and Plato had already earned a reputation as a sage in his own right. In Syracuse, he began what would be a decades-long entanglement with the royal court in an attempt to test his ideas in practice, to put philosophy in charge of a whole society. There, he came into contact with followers of Pythagoras and Parmenides, who lived not far away on the boot of Italy, and kneaded their philosophies into his own. If there’s any doubt about the place of abstract reason, of logos, in Plato’s mind, one need only recall the sign over the door to the Academy he founded, just outside the walls of Athens: let no one ignorant of geometry enter.
Plato, like his predecessors, taught that genuine Truth and Reason—capital T and capital R—aren’t to be found in the visible world. Instead, he believed there are higher “forms,” or “ideas”: eternal, unchanging, and perfect molds from which the stuff that surrounds us is cast. The Timaeus, a dialogue written forty years after his teacher’s death, is Plato’s most ambitious effort to explain the nature of the universe. And there is a proof in it for the semblance of a God, culled from habits of mind he learned in Italy and in the Athenian agora.
Look around. Everything in the world is always changing and becoming. Then, look inside your mind, to mathematics, logic, shapes, abstractions. These never change. They’re among the ideal forms, fixed inalterably in the universe’s structure. Among the temporal and the passing, notice something else: everything must have a cause. If it exists, and once did not exist, it was created somehow. The dialogue’s main speaker, after whom the Timaeus is named, surmises that there must be a divine creator who makes the world according to a blueprint of preexisting forms. He calls this creator dēmiourgos, meaning “craftsman” or “common worker,” but its nature and identity remain mostly a mystery: “The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.”7 If anything can be learned about the creator, it will be through esoteric proofs, accessible only to philosophers.
I learned about Plato’s forms from my first philosophy teacher, Ken Knisley, a taxi driver who occasionally taught elective classes at my high school. He had untamable curly hair and a matching beard, ringed with the beads of sweat brought on by his full-body gestures. He also had a show on community access TV, on which he wore a navy blue jumpsuit that said PHILOSOPHER on the breast—except when he wore a toga to act out Plato’s famous cave allegory.
We all live, says Plato, as if we’re prisoners in a cave. There is a fire at our backs, casting the shadows of objects on the wall before us. Truth is something we’re unaccustomed to seeing; we see just shadows. Visible, transitory things are reflections of an invisible reality.
What, then, would happen if a prisoner of the cave escaped and climbed up into the sunlight? There, he finds an entirely new kind of light, blinding him at first. With time, though, the prisoner looks up from the shadows and objects and reflections to the sun itself: “He will contemplate him”—this sun god—“as he is.”
He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold.8
That sun stands for the Good, the highest of the forms, whose light shines on everything that is True, with a capital T.
It was in Ken’s classes that I first felt the tug of exalted ideas. We read philosophers supposedly too difficult for us, and he pushed us to give an account of ourselves in terms of them. Some days, he would forget the assigned text entirely and, in amazement, tell us stories about his toddler son. He taught the pleasure and the payoff of thinking, and the responsibility each of us has to seek out undying truth. The upshot: I had a job to do, to figure out the universe for myself.
The philosophy that Ken offered was one of meaning in the face of meaninglessness. Instead of biblical salvation, we learned about Greek drinking parties and German angst. Mention of God would sneak into our discussions only because of how the existentialists mourned God’s death. These readings certainly suited my emotional state. For one homework assignment, I composed a distortion-drenched, power-chord song on my guitar to accompany a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When I put my recording in the cassette player, Ken leaped to the front of the room and started reciting the text with appropriate vigor: “One must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star!”
Some years later, I learned that Ken had died of cancer without much warning. Later still, I came across a makeshift online eulogy, tacked to the comments of a blog he had started in his last days. A friend of his captured a bit of Plato’s eternal forms when she wrote there, “Some conversations, some ideas, really deserve to continue, even when the person who started them . . . ends.”9 The shadows of human life pass away, but the ideas that we wrestle with never do. Ken would have liked that. But he also refused the consolation of pure ideas. He titled the blog’s first and only post “No Abstraction.”
Plato may have looked to ideas beyond, too, but he did so in this-worldly ways. He wrote down his philosophy in dialogues, conversations among people seeking after truths together. For him philosophizing was inseparable from the love between fellow seekers, between student and teacher, and among friends. Through discussion, one’s soul investigates itself. It thinks about thinking. By reaching for eternal ideas, beyond the cave of the material world, human souls can touch divinity.10 A conversation among philosophers is a council of gods. That was another thing I learned first from Ken: the pleasure of philosophy when done with others. He taught us what was in books, but he also made us his friends. The off-topic talk about his son was on-topic after all.
Near the end of his life, Plato lost faith in the utopian projects that had brought him to Sicily; the Syracusan kings turned out to be irredeemable tyrants. His final, unfinished book, the Laws, describes a city that would be “second best” to perfection, though more realistic in practice. Socrates, who appears in most of Plato’s dialogues, is absent in the Laws. It’s noticeable, and unsettling, as if Plato felt that the teacher of his youth—capitally punished on the charge of impiety—might disapprove.
While his earlier books tended to handle the traditional gods ambiguously, even playfully, here they have a very serious job to do. Plato tells us, in chapter 10 of the Laws, that the root of all crime in society is disbelief in the existence, attention, or integrity of the gods. It’s that simple. “No one who in obedience to the laws believed that there were gods,” he writes, “ever intentionally did any unholy act, or uttered any unlawful word.”11 Lawbreakers, therefore, should endure not only regular punishment for their crimes; they must also listen to lectures containing proofs of the existence and significance of the gods. One of the first recorded instances of proof for divine beings, it seems, is as a correctional device.
Speaking on behalf of civic order, Plato’s Athenian Stranger sounds tired and impatient. He complains, “Who can be calm when he is called upon to prove the existence of the gods? Who can avoid hating and abhorring the men who are and have been the cause of this argument?” He complains about the impertinence of these common criminals “who will not believe the tales which they have heard as babes and sucklings from their mothers and nurses,” and who therefore must be subjected to philosophy. Still, Plato allows, “the attempt must be made.”12
His first two arguments for the existence of the gods are terse and hurried; the first is from the order of the natural world, and the second is from the fact that people of all cultures seem to be in general agreement.
In the first place, the earth and the sun, and the stars and the universe, and the fair order of the seasons, and the division of them into years and months, furnish proofs of their existence; and also there is the fact that all Hellenes and barbarians believe in them.13
Later on, the Athenian Stranger unveils a more detailed argument, which relies