I am trying to solidify my understanding of why god is necessarily good in Platonic terms and I think I finally get it, but I would love for a double check if anyone is willing. Here's my shpeel
To the Platonists, our minds are a part of the The One. How this part of the One ended up trapped in a material body is unimportant to the Platonists because they know they cannot know this story only that it must be true (The Timaeus is their "creation story" but it is explicity stated within the Timaeus that it is only a "likely" story). Consider this jump, that our minds are derived from the first principle of the One, as a "leap of faith" (I do think it's a weak connection, but I vibe with the idea.)
So since our minds are just a sectioned off pieces of the great consciousness that is the One, then values that we hold dear must be values that the One holds. We can deduce to some degree that cultivating the mind, practicing moderation, being a just member of society are all good things because they allow us to see, be, and communally create beauty in this world. To the Platonists, goodness is beauty, order, things pleasing to the examined mind.
So the logic goes that I feel some sort of connection to a higher order of thing. I can intelligently imagine things that aren't here and create them. So I must have some sort of connection to the entity that has created this world since I have some similar skill. So assuming there is a god and I have some sort of connection to that god, then that god must share some sort of intelligible first principles with humans.
What do humans value? Beauty, Order, Nature, Creation. These are things that we value so these must be things that god values so these must be good because we find them good. We also value virtues like moderation, learning, justice. These are virtues because they help us grow as individuals and help us strength society.
So, I know God is necessarily good because I am imbued with the values of god. And when those values aren't corrupted by the material world, they only seek to continue to create what is good. It is diverting from the core values of god that cause corruption and thus things we call "evil".
2 Comments
Nednarb44@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2d
Please note that this is from a lay persons perspective, so without looking, in not sure what assumptions are baked into "a Platonist perspective". From what I see, there's some question begging and non-sequiturs here. Take the first part of your conclusion. "So, I know God is necessarily good because I am imbued with the values of god." The second part does not follow from the first. Ignoring the assumption that they are gods values, you having gods values in no way implies that those are good.
nagaram@piefed.social · 1 pts · 1d
I'm also a lay person. We all doing a bit of amateur philosophy so worry not.
A couple things that a Platonist perspective implies is
They are religious in a gnostic sense. There's an amount of "this is how I've experienced god so therefore it's an axiom" which is to be expected of any theological arguement.
The world of forms: To the platonists, there is a higher plane of existence in which true forms of base elements exist. The common example is the Triangle. You can draw a triangle and it is never going to be a "perfect" triangle. It will have some amount of imperfection at some scale. However, your mind knows that this is supposed to be a perfect triangle for doing math. This ability to know the thing in front of you is supposed to be a representation of something mathematically perfect leads the Platonists to believe there is a world of forms that must exist because we can intelligibly know what other "perfect" examples of things look like without ever having seen them.
That's sort of the basics of Platonism that everything gets built out from.
Would the conclusion be better if it was something like.
"So since we have a base concept of goodness rooted in the natural beauty of this world and in our ability to craft new things from this natural world, and we know there is some connection between our souls and the One through our ability to imagine the world of forms, then we can assume that the One is good because it must be a pure form of our own minds. The One is in a pure version of existence because it is not in the imperfect world of matter like us. It must be strictly in the intelligible world because it cannot be felt within the world of matter."
Something like that? I'm still not happy with the conclusion.