RST3709
Assignment 1

Write an essay on the God of the philosophers. Who or what is God according to traditional Classical philosophy? Refer in your answer specifically to Plato and Aristotle’s objective idea of God. Also refer to Augustine’s response to Classical philosophy. Conclude your essay with your own critical assessment. Do you agree or disagree with the philosophers?

Use Chapter 4 of your prescribed textbook (‘The God of the Philosophers’) in order to answer the question.

Contents

1. Brief summary of the God of the philosophers 2. The traditional God and gods 3. Plato and Aristotle’s objective ideas of God 4. Conclusion 5. References

1. Brief summary of the God of the Philosopher:

In the book ‘God: A guide for the perplexed’ Keith Ward goes into fascinating debate and detail of ancient philosopher, their writings and the way the world understood them. Each philosopher mentioned in Chapter 4; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Augustine had their own image and debate on what the godswere and how they perceived them and how they believed they came to be and what they are capable of. Plato, when learning about the Greek gods, never understood why they were there or where they came from. He believed that good was the only essence that mattered in all the beliefs and religions and ways of life. He believed in a god that was faultlessin everything he did and that is why the universe was created. (Ward 2002: 145)
Socrates on the other hand denied that there were even gods at all. For this statement he was sentence to death. (Ward 2002: 136)
Augustine however based the foundations of Christianity on some of Plato’s writings by adding the Greek gods under one God in a hierarchical order. Between the two of them they lay the system in which 31.5% (wiki) of the world population believed in a God
2. The traditional gods and God:
In the traditional sense the Greek and roman gods were created as moving stories to strike fear, bring courage, denounce hardship and enrich love in the hearts of those who believed. The stories were of great magnitude and the beliefs were storing throughout the societies of the Romans and the Greeks.
When a new, more modern system of belief came in, somewhat established by Augustine and maybe even so by Plato, the old gods of Olympus started to fall away and the power of one all mighty God was instilled into the working of the human belief system. This changed the way human beings viewed themselves by becoming more obedient to one God instead of many. I don’t think the philosophers saw the gods or God in the same light as most others did. They wanted answer to questions they couldn’t understand.
3. Plato and Aristotle’s objective ideas of God:
Plato didn’t favour the stories of the gods and pleaded that only the goodness and the righteous stories be told and taught. He believed that everything was done out of goodness and for goodness. Plato then created a god of his own (Ward 2002: 137). He says that truth is knowledge and that is being, and anything that can be made from that must be made by and an all good, all perfect God. Plato also didn’t believe in an evil entity. Only that there was goodness to be shared but sometimes from that there came conflict.
Aristotle on the other hand thought that God only created because he wanted to and because he could. Not because he had to. He was already the most perfect being in the universe and already had all the happiness he needed.

4. Conclusion:
So many different writings and explanations of one God, many gods or a whole genealogy of gods have been debated, fought and slaughtered over. But that is more over the entire belief system and structure of what the religion is with and behind that/those God/gods. What I’ve taken from this book, or the chapter that I read, is that the way the philosophers look at the gods and the way of the world isn’t in the stories told by rhapsodies and clergymen. It is taken and torn apart question by question on why and how and when all has come to be will come to be and why it has come to be.
The thought pattern of Plato, Augustine and the like are so fascinating and if not for the brilliant literature of Keith Ward, would not be comprehensible to me and I assume many.
God will always be a big question mark that we will ponder over for millennia to come but the works of our ancestral philosophers have made way for new thinking and different ideas on what God might be.

. 5. Refrences

Keith Ward, God: A guide for the Perplexed 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations “I declare that this assignment is my own work and that all sources quoted have been acknowledged by appropriate references”.