The God of Socrates Argument

- One version of the cosmological argument (also known as the argument from first cause):
- Perhaps you will recall a series of movies beginning with "Oh God".
An ordinary grocery store manager (John Denver) is visited by God (George Burns). God has a message that he wants delivered to the world at large. "You human beings hae evrything you need to make the world work---or you can destroy it. It's up to you." Needless to say, John Denver had some difficulty convincing others that it was really God who spoke to him. Even after God appears in a courtroom, the Powers That Be ( a lawyer, a judge and an evangelist) agree that nothing has happened. The problem is that God or the gods visit alot of people and the message is not always hopeful. The Yorkshire Ripper claimed that God sent him on a mission to purge London of prostitutes. Jim Jones and Hitler claimed divine inspiration for their cruelty. I knew a talented folksinger in California who was told by God to "pluck out your right eye---it offends Me". And he did. So what are we to do?
One choice is to believe that God speaks only in the past tense and that we have the definitive Word. The gates of revelation are closed and we hold the key. This choice is popular with conservative clerics. A second choice is to deny that the Gods speak at all. We close the door to divine revelation and focus instead on human concerns and this-wordly meanings. This is a popular solution among humanists. A third choice is to abandon our selves to the voice of the Gods and obey them without question or reservation. We do whatever God/Jesus/Krishna/or Jim Jones says. This choice is popular among true believers and schizophrenics.
I would like to believe that there is another possibility, and find inspiration in the philosopher Socrates. Socrates was told by the oracle at Delphi that he was the wisest of all the Greeks. He did not ignore the oracle, nor did he take it as literal truth. Instead, he took it as starting point for his inquiry. And then Socrates did something truly revolutionary: he devised a method for testing the oracle. He went about the streets of Athens asking simple questions of all those who presumed to be wise. Questions like what is virtue? can it be taught? Are the gods fair? How do we know what is true? Socrates was never sure that he was the wisest among the Greeks, but he discovered many more foolish than himself. The gift of Socrates was to devise a way of testing the voice of the gods in light of human reason and conscience. He later called this method philo-sophia, love of wisdom.
We may not all choose to follow Socrates, but we must admire the cunning courage of his example. If my friend the folksinger had questioned the God who addressed him, if he had wondered more about why a loving God would demand such a cruel sacrifice, he might now be seeing the world through two eyes instead of one. When the gods speak, let us dare to question.
The one exception to this rule is what appears to be a quite sophisticated argument for the existence of the gods in the Memorabilia (1.4.4-18), but we have no independent evidence for attributing this sort of argument to the historical Socrates. Perhaps Xenophon had heard such an argument elsewhere and put it into Socrates' mouth; perhaps Xenophon had a creative moment himself. In any case, as Xenophon himself points out at its conclusion (Memorabilia 1.4.19), such an argument would hardly have been the sort of thing to earn its author an accusation of impiety.



Arguments for the Existence of God
180: Apologetics
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