God in Proof. Nathan Schneider

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 on the nature of motion.

      There are ten kinds of motion, he explains, but only one, the motion of a living soul, doesn’t depend on being moved by something else. A soul—the soul of an immaterial god—must therefore have been the first motion of all. (Actually, there must be at least two such souls: one causing good order and another causing erratic evil.) “And judging from what has been said,” Plato concludes, “there would be impiety in asserting that any but the most perfect soul or souls carries round the heavens.”¹⁴ These souls, as human souls must, obey the eternal laws of the universe—which include the laws of the city. When you believe in such gods, you can’t help but believe in the city’s laws too.

      For the earlier Plato, arguments about the gods were a matter of pleasurable, rational speculation, a conversation among philosophers. Here, proofs are servants to the social order. But the underlying idea is the same: pure reason is what rules the world, not the whims of an Olympian soap opera. As Frederick Copleston puts it in his canonical history of philosophy, “‘Atheist’ means for Plato, first and foremost, the man who denies the operation of Reason in the world.”¹⁵ It is a definition that might rub many actual atheists nowadays the wrong way. What’s more, in the eyes of his own society, it was Plato who could seem like an atheist for exchanging the meddlesome gods of the poets for law-abiding, reasonable ones. But others, in the centuries to come, would conclude he must have had inspiration from above.

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      When I was in middle school, my parents decided that we should begin taking family trips to Europe. Planned summer activities were unfortunately a doomed proposition where I was concerned; I hated every summer camp I was ever sent to, and being stuck with my parents, together with whichever grandparents could come along, was sure to bring out the brat in me, and it did.

      Each trip had some special significance. Paris, for one, gave my mother a chance to revisit the years she had spent in France studying medieval French epics. Germany, I found when we got there, was my father’s turn. He had taken German as a student and spent a summer hunting down in situ altarpieces by the medieval sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. (He was able to show me why, at a fortuitous exhibition in Munich: faces with joy disguised in melancholy.) His choice to go there, and to learn that language, was especially rebellious for someone coming from a post-Holocaust Jewish family, as he did, that avoided buying German-made things.

      The idea of a trip to Italy came from my father’s mother, but a last-minute medical mishap prevented her from coming. In Florence, Venice, and Rome, we did what you would expect; we went to a lot of museums and churches. The churches were especially a problem because there was one around every corner, and it was hard (for everyone but me) to resist going inside. It turned out, though, that my parents were really good at visiting churches. They stayed away from the tour groups and found some piece of art that even I would have to admit was interesting, especially when one of them explained it to me. They were still always too slow. But even through my boredom I got the message: Something about this is important.

      The day in Italy I have the hardest time forgetting was when we went to Vatican City, mainly because of its unpleasantness. The crowds are overwhelming—thousands of people from who-knows-where who mostly only care to see the Sistine Chapel, yet have to soldier through nearly the entire Vatican Museums on the way. Until, that is, they find something that catches them, something they’ve seen in books a million times and are pleased and surprised—once they push through the huddle of others around it—to encounter the real thing. One of those is relevant here. It’s Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, on the wall behind you and to the left, as I recall, when you enter the Apostolic Palace’s Room of the Segnatura.

      Among the many heroes of ancient thought that the fresco gathers under marble arches, Plato and Aristotle stand at the center. They are side by side, with the younger Aristotle slightly to the fore of white-bearded Plato. They speak with their gestures. Plato holds the Timaeus to his body and points his right index finger to the sky. Aristotle, who was once Plato’s student, looks back at the master and, balancing his Ethics outward against his thigh, holds the palm of his hand toward the earth.

      This is the standard caricature of the two prototypical philosophers: Plato sought truth and order in the utopian clouds, while Aristotle cataloged marine life on the shores of the Aegean. For both, however, the cosmos is basically rational, mathematical, teachable, and learnable. They preferred clear argumentation to epic poetry and believed in a truth higher than the gods of temples and legends. The job of their philosophy was to seek after that truth, that universal reason. They had no scripture, bishops, or savior, yet still their God would land them in the heart of the popes’ palace centuries after they had died.

      The foundation of Aristotle’s philosophy is the system of logic that, for almost two thousand years, provided Europe with its definition of reason. His best-known principle is the syllogism, the basic unit of deduction and proof, whereby a conclusion can be safely and inescapably drawn from accepted premises. Take the simple example that philosophy students inevitably encounter:

      1)Socrates is a man.

      2)All men are mortal.

      3)Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

      This kind of reasoning promised to escape the flaws of human bias, frailty, and confusion, lending authority to all that he wrote. If he can be trusted with logic, why not trust what he says about the universe?

      

      Building on the logical works are Aristotle’s theories of physics and what came to be called metaphysics—literally, СКАЧАТЬ