What I should have said in my post #37 above was that as a ‘polytheist’, he couldn’t ‘ground’ his concept of ‘piety’ properly because he didn’t ground it in an absolute, unchanging, Sovereign God (capital ‘G”, singular not plural). He was just as responsible as you or I for a ‘knowledge’ of this absolute, unchanging, Sovereign God (Rom. 1:19-20), and we might even say that he wrote and sought more than others, or truly wrestled in his thinking about these matters, but in the end, based on his writings, ‘for even though he knew God, did not honor Him as God, or give thanks, becoming futile in his thinking and darkened in his foolish heart’ (Rom. 1: 21).

I appreciate your correction.

Like a lot of Plato’s dialogues, there is no answer at the end. Only towards dialogues like Phaedo does Plato come outright and state his opinion. The point of Euthyphro was not to state Plato’s belief in the gods (or the god), but rather to criticize Euthyphro’s conception of piety. In fact, the Euthyphro dialogue was not about the existence of any sort of god, but rather of the conception of piety.

Plato was definitely not a “secular humanist” philosopher. Not just in that such a term is an anachronism, but rather that his view of the forms is counter to secular humanism. Humanism would deny such transcendent models like the forms. Plato’s doctrine of recollection is also definitely not a secular humanist idea.

While it is true that Plato did not worship the Hebrew Jehovah, he did in fact believe in some sort of abstract divine guidance. In both the ‘Republic’ and the ‘Timaeus’, he alludes to some form of divinity or ‘gods’ (or at least the necessity of their existence).

I would argue that Plato, although not a believer of the God of Abraham, did believe in some form of divinity.

“Hmmm, Plato’s ‘God’ was the sum total of the pantheon of Greek gods as the total. This is hardly the ‘Jehovah Elohim’ of Jewish scripture.”

Maybe I missed the meeting, but as I recall, Theist does not mean one must worship Jehovah. The Greeks and Romans were polytheists, but theists nonetheless. Additionally, I don’t think anyone here is arguing that Plato was a Hebrew. In fact Nikolai even said, “While that isn’t tantamount to affirming any Abrahamic god, he is still a theist.. YES, we know he didn’t worship God, but I think there is more evidence that can be found that he is a theist of some kind rather than a secularist.

I’m not convinced Plato was a secularist.

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity put it beautifully when he said that we all have a sense of ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’. The argument is that we are imbued with a moral code from birth, not something that is ‘culturally’ conditioned. But why is this the case? Our Judeo-Christian Scriptures claim that this is because we are made in the image of God, and that moral concepts flow out of God’s character and are embedded in us as made in His image. There is a consistency here within our ‘system’.

The atheist, being also made in the image of God, loves his wife, his kids, his dog, tries to do ‘good’ by his neighbors, ‘cares’ about the environment, ‘grieves’ at a friend’s funeral, stops at a red light, pays his taxes, and seeks to live by this ought and ought not that Lewis speaks about, but from within his ‘system’ of blind, impersonal, unguided chance, he has no ‘warrant’ for behaving in this manner.

Perhaps some atheists could join the discussion, to provide some insight that we may be missing?

Thanks Nikolai and Tom for your comments concerning Euthyphro. The dilemma might serve as a good topic for one of your posts ‘Tom’?