Socrates in Plato’s Apology of Socrates is defending himself against three charges. This essay will focus on Socrates’ defense against the charge of atheism and his seeming obsession with the gods. With closer inspection of the script and context in which Socrates is speaking brings up a number of questions. Is Socrates a religious person? Much of what Socrates uses to defend himself proves otherwise; this is proven in the story of the Oracle from Delphi.
He said atheism" is the ideology of 'the death of man.' Just because one does not believe in God why would you want to remove what they believe in? Atheistic are not trying to remove God from people they just feel there is not enough evidence to show God exists. The second alternative to
However, Socrates would not teach daimonia if he did not believe in god. There is an inconsistency in Meletus’ indictment. Socrates points it out. He says, “you say that I do not believe in gods, and again that I believe in gods, since in fact I do believe in daimons” (Ap. 27d).
This leading into the definitions of piety. The first definition that Euthyphro suggests to Socrates is that piety is persecuting religious offenders. However, Socrates is not satisfied with this response because there are many pious actions that do not involve persecution. (page 5 e) The second definition that Euthyphro suggests is that piety is what is dear to the gods, and that what some gods may agree on, others may not agree on. Thus saying that what is pious may be not pious concluding in a contradiction.
First, he states, “In that case it’s what’s lovable to the gods that’s pious, and what’s not lovable to them that’s impious” (13). Euthyphro makes a claim that piety means to be loved by the gods. Socrates questions how something that is god-loved is pious and something that is god-hated is impious. Afterwards, Socrates comes to a new definition of piety saying, “Is it where the just is that the pious is too, or is it that where the pious is, there too the just is, without there being the pious everywhere the just is-because the pious is part of the just” (21)? Here, the definition of piety changes from being loved by gods to being just Kajol 2 or fair.
Commonly, atheists hold the view that organized religions are corrupt and actually cause more harm than good. Contempt for organized religion is not, however, grounds for calling oneself an atheist. An atheist is someone who has considered all sides of the argument and come to the conclusion that God does not exist, not due to opinions on organized religion, but on the actual facts and arguments of the discussion. A
What is sin? ” is addressed (5). Euthyphro’s dilemma is explained by Panos Dimas in his article when he says that if something is “loved by the gods….Socrates characterizes it as something that happens to it and therefore presupposes that the pious has already been constituted” (2). What this means is that we cannot be sure of what is good or bad because we do not know the real essence of what piety is. The basic question of the dilemma is: are morals considered ethical because the gods says so or do the gods say morals are ethical because they actually are?
On one hand you have the philosophers who believe you can speak and write about God, because God is reality. On the other hand, are the Logical Positivists who claim that statements about God have no meaning because they don’t relate to anything that is real. There are a number of philosophers who claimed to have proven conclusively that religious language is meaningful, for example Aquinas’ theory of analogy. An analogy is an attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand and forming relations through attributes or relations that are similar. Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God.
So one can ask, “How exactly can one define sin? Is it actually defined by obeying God’s laws? But then, what are these laws and how exactly are they defined?” One question leads to the next and the questions never end. This is the state of mind John Milton was probably in. He was mystified by the clash between realities of society and destiny of God.
Lewis states, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A person does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line… Consequentially atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we