Article 25 of 29

Subject:      Re: Difficulties with "Miracles" - no quantum mechanics
From:         Sam Dodsworth <sam@aristos.demon.co.uk>
Date:         1997/02/10
Message-Id:   <N+vFzBA2Fy$yEwLQ@aristos.demon.co.uk>

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>>Lewis makes
>>no attempt to demonstrate this and it is, in fact, not true. Platonism
>>(or at least a certain type of Platonism) is one possible counter-
>>example: the relation between our world and the World of Forms is
>>exactly that of the Natural and the Supernatural, but the World of Forms
>>is not the same thing as a god or gods. Since Lewis was undoutedly
>>familiar with Plato, this passage is probably best read as a rhetorical
>>trick - but it's one that leaves a distinctly false impression of what
>>Lewis is about to attempt to prove.
>
>It's clear from Lewis's arguments that the Greek Gods, if they literally
>existed, would not be the Supernatural Thing since they are part of the
>total process of the universe. The Gods have origins, and when their
>story begins, the Universe is already a going concern. Plato's "world of
>Forms" is as you say, exactly what Lewis has in mind when talking about
>the supernatural, but then Lewis would take it as read that "the form of
>the Good" -- Plato's final, irreducible reality -- was God. I think that
>anything which we could postulate that is final and irreducible and
>genuinely outside the universe could usefully be referred to as "God"
>and would have a good deal in common with the Christian conception. The
>rhetorical fallacy that Lewis falls into is, that, from his lips (in the
>context of a Christian book) we naturally assume that by God he means
>'Jehovah' or at any rate "an ethical being more like a human mind than
>anything else we have experience of." It is striking that in the
>'Abolition' he specifically avoids this by referring to the Tao.

        Plato doesn't (as far as I can recall) grant his "form of the
Good" any of the attributes we normally associate with God. For a start,
it has no desires or goals - it's not even really a being. That's
nothing like a god and, I re-iterate, it's not useful to assume that it
is.
>
>There is an interesting point here about the usage of the term "God."
>The Greek gods were not what Lewis means by "God" even though they had
>cults and rituals and a religion associated with them; The Form of the
>Good is a closer candidate, although it didn't. I seem to recall that
>Lewis remarked that he had know people completely convinced that the
>ontological proof established the existence of a necessary perfect
>Being, but that this belief had no *religious* significance whatsoever. 

        Lewis dismisses the Greek gods for the same reason that
Lucretius does: they're part of the universe, not "basic and original".
This was a big problem for the Greek philosophers, and it's one of the
issues that Plato was addressing with his theory of forms.
>
>More later, maybe. 
>
        The only other thing I really wanted to cover in my original
post was Lewis' (mis)conceptions about the nature of scientific laws,
but I've covered some of that in this post, implicitly. I'd be
interested in some comments on my reading of Lewis' arguments against
Naturalism, though.
 
Sam Dodsworth (sam@aristos.demon.co.uk)
"I think there should be more sex and violence on television, not less. 
 Both are powerful catalysts of social change, at a time when change is
 desperately needed."
                        -J.G. Ballard