Socrates’ Worldview - Conclusion

Conversation 27, Socrates Worldview 21/22

ADEIMANTUS. Socrates, I’ve noticed something about your method? Your famous ancestor pretended he knew nothing ….

SOCRATES. I think it would be more accurate to say that Old Socrates contended, not pretended, that he knew nothing.

A. Maybe. In any case, he questioned experts, acclaimed or self-appointed, and exposed them for knowing much less than they thought they did. You, on the other hand, frequently ask us questions that we don’t pretend to know the answers to, then you tell us, often at length, your answers to your own questions. Why is this?

S. That’s a fair observation, Adeimantus. Firstly, I don’t pretend to be the man my ancestor was. Secondly, the times have changed. In Old Socrates’ time, an intelligent person could reasonably claim to have a fair understanding of all the main ideas and areas of knowledge known to mankind. These days, so much is known, yet so many people are so ignorant of important ideas. They cobble together a ‘philosophy’ from scraps that appeal to them, although what they have is more of an attitude than a philosophy. They rarely attempt to achieve logical cohesion, so it is all but impossible to argue logically with them. And there are so many variants of their ideas that one hardly knows where to start. I am conscious of not being young, so to save time I have opted to set my own carefully thought-out philosophy, or worldview, before you.

A. Are you counting us among the ignorant?

S. Forgive me if I have underestimated you. You, Adeimantus, have frequently hit upon the crucial points in my arguments and asked the right questions. Critobulus has made great progress in his understanding. He now thinks about what he thinks he knows.

EUTHYDEMUS. What about me?

S. I don’t think you are for turning, Euthydemus, and I wouldn’t want to turn you anyway. I’m satisfied that I’ve inserted a glimmer of doubt into your otherwise unshakable faith. It will make you more tolerant.

CRITOBULUS. What about the humanists?

S. I chose to argue against the humanists because, as I said way back, they are closest to my thinking, although wrong, I would say, in some of their conclusions. They are mostly civilised and decent people. I can understand why someone could choose to be a hard-line materialist, but I can’t agree with them that a code of ethics conducive to a good society can be derived entirely by rational argument. My main beef with the humanists is that they dropped their guard and through excessive tolerance opened the door to the cynics.¹

C. Wouldn’t you argue against postmodernists, or the cynics as you call them?

S. It is pointless talking to postmodernists and any other brand of cynic because they have no interest in the truth or logic, only in power. If they feel they are coming off the worse in a discussion, they generally resort to abuse. Have you ever seen a cynic defending their pronouncements in a serious argument? No, they prefer to brainwash innocent minds, starting in kindergarten and working through to the universities, until their charges have no concept of logic and absolutely no basis for moral judgement.

A. If you could get a tame humanist here, say that Professor Grayling you mentioned so often, would tackle him in the way old Socrates would have done?

S. Professor Grayling has been called ‘the velvet humanist’, but I wouldn’t describe him as tame. But you propose a hypothetical situation that is unlikely to be realised. Don’t forget that the humanists we might want to argue with are mostly comfortable professors and they wouldn’t get up early enough to join us in a bike ride.

A. Too true, Socrates. Where do we go from here? You said you were going to wrap up this whole series of conversations by summarising your worldview.

S. So I did. Let me begin. I started way back, when only you were with me Adeimantus, by saying that any worldview I could subscribe to had to be rational and reasonable.² After all the ground we have covered, I would start from a more basic requirement, which is this: any worthwhile worldview must grow out of a serious and honest search for the truth.

A. How do you recognise the truth among all the competing ideas?

S. That’s the right question, Adeimantus. It’s because we are searching for the truth that we are driven to be rational and reasonable.

C. Explain why, Socrates.

S. Remember what we said about rational and reasonable. There are two requirements: your ideas must be logically self-consistent, and they must be supported by, or not refuted by, experience. Remember also that one, verified, contrary experiment is enough to disprove a theory, but a theory about the world is only proven in the inductive sense by experience, that is, the more experience agrees with our theory the more confident we are that the theory is probably right.

C. I still don’t see how this relates to truth.

S. Patience, Critobulus! If a good theory about the world has to be in accord with all experience, then it must be in accord with every person’s experience, not just your own. This means it must be objectively true, not subjectively true. And if it is objectively true, it must be because there is an objective reality, by which I mean a reality that stays the same even when no-one is looking at it.

A. So, an objective reality is not in the mind, it is ‘out there’.

S. An objective reality is not in the mind of any human person, although it could be in the mind of God if there is such a person as God. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Now, I would say that a true statement is one that accurately represents some aspect of the objective reality, whether it be about some event that has happened, or about some enduring relationship between things and their behaviour.

A. A statement is made up of words, so you are implying that words must have a definite meaning.

S. I see where you are going, Adeimantus, and I am going to the same place. I told you about my grandson who puts up his arms and says ‘heavy’, by which he means ‘pick me up’, because he has leant to associate the word ‘heavy’ with the objective action of being picked up. No doubt when he gets older he will realise that other people don’t share that association, but all English speakers understand ‘pick me up’. So, words can have an objective meaning. Of course, the meanings of words can shift over time, but they must be static enough and commonly understood by enough people to allow agreement to be reached about the truth of statements about the world. What’s more, meanings must be well understood to allow logical discussion. That’s why disciplines like mathematics place so much emphasis on the precise definition of the terms they use.

C. Not everyone believes in logic these days, Socrates.

S. I know, Critobulus, but that doesn’t make the nonbelievers right. Logic is just rearranging words to say the same thing a different way. So, if I say: ‘The dog is in front of the tree’ then logically the dog is not behind the tree, since ‘behind’ means ‘not in front of’. If you don’t believe in logic, you do not believe in the meaning of words.

A. Can I sum up your worldview, so far, by saying that it is the result of a genuine search for the truth, and this implies that it be rational and reasonable, and that leads you to conclude that there is an objective reality that we can make meaningful statements about in words. True statements are accurate statements about how the world is, as experience tells us, and statements logically derived from true statements.

S. That is a fair summary, Adeimantus.

C. But doesn’t everyone more or less agree with that?

S. You of all people should know the answer to your own question, Critobulus. Your postmodernist former friends don’t believe any of it. You said yourself that some people don’t believe in logic. No, they say that logic is an imposition of the patriarchy, or some such nonsense. They believe that the meaning of words is a social construct from which it follows that statements about the world are neither true nor false. Truth for a postmodernist is relative, not objective, from which it is a short step to say that there is no objective reality. They reject science as another social construct because it inconveniently supports the view that there is an objective reality. This way of thinking appeals to all of those I call cynics because it allows them to weasel out of any argument and to purvey any nonsense as truth if it suits them. The devil speaks with a forked tongue. The first tool in the cynics’ playbook is to corrupt the meaning of words. Troglodytes! Barbarians! Anthropophagi! Scythians! Polyphemuses! Bloodthirsty lions!³ Bashi-bazouks! Gibbering anthropoids!⁴

E. God help us! He’s lost it.

A. Calm yourself, Socrates. You will blow a gasket.

S. I will be fine, thank you Adeimantus. It does one good to let off steam every once in a while.

C. Not long ago anyone who thought like your cynics would have been classified as mad.

S. Quite so, but the cynics are not mad, they just don’t care about truth. They will corrupt anything if it suits their agenda. That’s why I call them cynics. It is not madness, but evil. But let’s go on. It follows from my belief in the objective reality of physical things that I am a philosophical Realist.⁵ I’m not an idealist in that I don’t believe that ideas have objective reality. Ideas don’t exist when nobody is thinking about them, they only exist in minds. I am not a Platonist, or even a Neoplatonist. It is important to be clear about these things, otherwise you end up ascribing reality to an idea like social class, and then you invent a whole lot of nonsense about how historical processes work on social classes. Do you follow?

A. I think so, Socrates.

S. Rationalism and belief in the objective reality of the physical world lead us to the scientific method of investigating the world. We add the working assumption that the world works in an orderly fashion according to laws of nature that can be discovered, and that the laws apply everywhere and at all times. Using these few basic assumptions, humans have been able to build a description of the universe, and everything in it, starting from a few elementary particles and forces.⁶ The laws and theories are embodied in ‘mechanics’: Newton’s laws of motion and the Special Relativity of classical mechanics, and quantum mechanics. The mechanics allow precise predictions to be made of how things will behave, and the predictions have been thoroughly tested by experiments, so we believe that the theories behind the mechanics are true, at least to a good approximation over some domain of applicability. So, the universe is intelligible. The world may look chaotic, but when you eliminate extraneous processes and isolate the process of interest, then everything becomes simpler.⁷

A. You are a great believer in science, Socrates?

S. If I saw a physical occurrence that interested me, Adeimantus, I wouldn’t go looking for an explanation other than a scientific one. Science has built an edifice of theories, one on top of another, like Chemistry on top of Physics, that explains most of what we can observe in the physical universe. The various theories in the edifice have to be consistent with each other where they overlap. Another principle that is applied in science is that a theory should be no more complicated than it needs to be to explain the observations. It should introduce the minimum number of assumptions.

C. Occam’s Razor!

S. So it is called, Critobulus. It doesn’t have the status of a law, but it has been a good guide. On the other hand, there is no fundamental reason why Occam’s Razor need apply in every case.

A. To cut to the chase, Socrates, you don’t invoke spirits to explain an unusual phenomenon that seems to defy the laws of science?

S. No I don’t, Adeimantus. If I were a policeman who discovered a footprint beneath the window of a burgled house, I would be looking for a person whose foot matched the print, not a spirit with a penchant for faking footprints. Quite frankly, it has never been necessary to invoke sprits to explain any event for which the physical circumstances have been well described: a reasonable scientific explanation has always been forthcoming. The problem with invoking spirits is that spirits are completely unobservable and unaccountable to us humans. That means they could do anything. Our ability to isolate the regularities of physical behaviour would be negated completely. Science would not work at all, since experiments would be unrepeatable, but we know science does work.

A. So, you are a thorough materialist? You don’t believe in spirits at all? It’s going to be hard to get to religious belief from here!

S. I wouldn’t blame anyone for being a thorough materialist, as long as they don’t try to find a materialistic theory of human behaviour, or to derive a materialistic system of morality, because science has not given us a mechanics of human behaviour, and I contend it never will. Your materialist would have a worldview that encompasses the physical world, but says nothing about most of human experience, which is not physical, as I will come to explain. I would not be content with such a limited worldview.

C. So, what does a thorough-going materialist use for ethics?

S. I expect they mostly go along with the ethics of whatever crowd they happen to favour. I don’t think thorough-going materialists take ethics or morality very seriously. But let’s proceed cautiously: I need to talk about mind and consciousness.

A. Very well, go on Socrates.

S. In one of our earlier conversations⁸ I gave an outline of how I think the physical brain and nervous system can give rise to the experience of consciousness, to host a mind. I did not describe the neural architecture cell by cell, because I don’t know what it is, nor does anybody else, although some people know a lot more about it than I do, but I did describe the kind of processes that are needed to support consciousness. My point was that there is no reason to suppose that those purely physical processes can’t produce the experience of consciousness. This means that mind, at least human mind, is a product of material processes. Mind does not require an immaterial soul.

C. You are getting deeper and deeper into the hole you are digging for yourself.

S. The question is, Critobulus, is there a way out? I am now going to start heading in the direction of the spiritual world. The first step is to revisit my concept of ‘The Person’.⁹ Of course, there is a physical entity called Socrates, this blob of bones and jelly in front of you. But that is not what you or I think of when we think of Socrates ….

C. Perhaps Perlinte thinks of it sometimes?

S. No comment, Critobulus. I was about to say that none of the atoms in my physical body have ‘Socrates’ written on them. Zoom in on Socrates and he disappears. No, Socrates is a concept in your mind and even in my mind. The concept is a collection of thoughts and memories of experiences and emotions connected with the name of Socrates.

C. You are a figment of my imagination, then?

S. You are free to embellish the concept of Socrates in whatever way you like, Critobulus, but at its base is the real, physical Socrates who did and said things in objective reality. The point I am driving to is that we humans experience our lives in the world of thought. Our very concept of ourselves and of other people inhabit the world of the mind. The experience of a person is much better described by Idealist or spiritual notions.

A. It sounds like you are saying something profound.

S. Whether it is profound or not, I do think it is important. It is not feasible, practical, or even desirable, to try to talk about the totality of human experience in terms of physics, chemistry, and the rest of science.

A. Are you saying that science is of no importance to humanity.

S. Not at all! Of course, medicine and psychology have useful things to say about the workings of the human body and brain, which medicines work, and which don’t, and so on. What I am trying to say, Adeimantus, is that once we cross the threshold to talk about how we experience our lives we cross into the world of ideas, of what I think and remember about myself and others.

A. When it comes to the experience of life, you are a Platonist.

S. A kind of inverted Platonist, I think, Adeimantus. A Platonist thinks that physical things are an imperfect reflection of the one, perfect, ideal archetype, which is more real than the physical copies. I am saying that only the physical thing and objective events that our concepts of a person are based on are objectively real, but that those concepts are how we experience and think about the person.

E. I like it, an inverted Plato.

S. Perhaps you will be pleased, Euthydemus, that I’m now going to draw a parallel between the concept of person and the spirit.

E. I hear you say, ‘a parallel’, not an equivalence.

S. What has happened to you, Euthydemus, you are starting to talk like a mathematician?

E. Possibly I have been listening to you too much, Socrates.

S. Well, it’s good that your vocabulary has expanded, if nothing else. Now, Euthydemus, when we deal with questions like: ‘What is a good life?’, ‘What is good and what is bad?’, or ‘How can we agree on rules for living that promote the common good?’, are we dealing with the physical world, or the world of ideas?

E. I would say you were talking about the spiritual world.

S. And I would say you are ‘spot on’, Euthydemus. Because whatever statements I make about the spirit, I can make the same statements about the concept of a person. Even an atheist would concede that it is meaningful to talk about the concept of God as a person. I could say, ‘My concept of God is that he is a father who loves us all.’ When Jesus said, ‘God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, John 4:24), he could have said, ‘God is a concept that we must worship in our hearts and minds.’

E. Jesus would never have said that! God is a spirit that really exists!

S. Of course, Euthydemus. A concept exists only in minds, which are processes of material things, whereas a spirit is supposed to exist objectively. My point is that you can replace a spirit as the subject or object of a sentence with a conceptual person and the sentence will still make sense. For example, I could say, ‘The spirit lives on after a person has died.’, or I could say, ‘The conceptual person lives on after the person’s body has died.’ The sentence still says much the same thing about our experience of the death of an acquaintance, although the metaphysical connotations are not identical.

C. I thought we would get to religion eventually, but now we have metaphysics as well!

S. Religion and metaphysics have something in common, Critobulus. They are both about things that are important to us even though we can never prove or disprove them. They are about what I want, or what I don’t want. It is important to me whether a person lives on in some way after their physical death. The concept of a person survives in the memory of people of people who knew of them. When no person remains who remembers the person who dies, we could say that the concept of that person no longer exists ….

A. Except that by talking about the loss of memory of that person, we are keeping the concept of that person alive!

S. This is what is known in philosophy as a ‘rabbit hole’, Adeimantus. I was just saying that if that person has a spirit, objectively real although immaterial, then that spirit can exist even if there is no-one to think of it.

E. God will remember the spirit of that person.

S. Or perhaps it is God’s remembering that creates and sustains the spirit. I hope you understand what I am saying. Everything that religions say about the spiritual world, as we experience it in our heads, remains valid if we think of spirits as concepts rather than objectively existing immaterial things.

A. I think I get it, but where are you going with this?

S. There is no mechanical theory of concepts like virtue, or good and evil, of forgiveness and atonement, yet these are very real human experiences. I can’t make precise predictions about how any of them will play out in any particular human story. But the great religions hold a vast repository of refined human thought about human experience. I am saying that it not wise to dismiss this repository of thought just because you don’t want to believe in God.

A. You want us to pick the good bits from religion?

S. When we talked about what makes a good society,¹⁰ I quoted Jonathan Sacks: ‘A free society is a moral achievement,’ (Sacks 2020, Introduction). Now, religion is all about morality, that is one reason why some people don’t like religion, but like it or not, religious thought is very relevant to the question of what makes a good society. I say that secular humanists act irrationally when they refuse to consider the value of religion. They do so because they don’t like the idea of God, or because they find religious services boring, or because they don’t like being told what to do by someone they regard as an ignorant twit. But it would not be irrational to take the lessons of religion as a purely human product of human wisdom, told in stories about conceptual persons.

C. They don’t like the abuse of power by the Church.

S. We have covered all that before, Critobulus, in our earlier conversations.¹¹ I am not going over it all again except to say that it was not the Church that abused power, only people. Venal people, whether in or out of the Church, will abuse any system of thought to promote their own power and comfort. I gave you some examples of abuses by non-religious people.¹² When I accused the humanists of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I meant that they throw away the consolidated human wisdom on what makes for a good society, and they don’t have a baby of their own to replace the one they threw out.

A. You are advocating that we should be ‘functional Christians’, following the practices even if we don’t believe literally in God and all the rest?

S. That is more or less how I started out with Christianity once I had concluded that atheism had no answers. Remember I talked about the two aspects of belief:¹³ the theoretical aspect of believing that a proposition is true, and the practical aspect of basing your actions on a proposition even if you are not certain of its truth. I was initially a practical Christian. Any thoughtful, thorough-going materialist could be a sincere, practicing Christian, while only assenting to the stories about spirits as conceptual persons, products of the processes of the material brain.

E. So, Socrates, are you a true believer or just a sincere materialist?

S. After a period of being a practical Christian I was aware that, from the outside, no-one could tell whether I was a practical or a true believer. During that time, I never denied that God might exist, but neither did I fully embrace the faith. Then one day I thought that I might as well let myself enjoy the benefits of being a true believer. This allowed me to relax from the effort of maintaining a sort of suspended disbelief, to be a more ‘congruent’ person. And I was always sensitive to ‘enchantment’.¹⁴ Becoming a ‘true believer’ allowed me to combine enchantment with a practical moral framework, belief in the effectiveness of prayer, and in the reality of souls. Really, I suppose, enchantment was always the motivating principle that led me on my intellectual journey.

A. Wasn’t it Einstein who said, ‘It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion’?

S. I believe it was, Adeimantus. He also described himself as ‘a deeply religious nonbeliever’, and said that ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ Perhaps his position and mine are not so different.

C. Socrates, now you are ranking yourself with Einstein!

S. Certainly not as a physicist, Critobulus, but maybe as an amateur philosopher. Einstein calls himself a nonbeliever, which I don’t. Maybe if he had been prepared to let go of locality in quantum mechanics he might have come to the same position as I have.

A. Was there any breakthrough moment in your intellectual journey?

S. I think it was when I understood that science did not rule out belief in God. Fairly recent developments in quantum science,¹⁵ based on experiments, have shown that our notions of space, time, and locality are creations of our macroscopic state, the fact that we are big and made of lots of moving parts.¹⁶ At its foundation, the fabric of the universe is totally connected and conceals things that we can never see in a scientific way.

A. But you have no proof for God and spirits either.

S. No, but it is true to say there are basic workings of the universe that are beyond our power to investigate. Therefore, we cannot rightly conclude that we know all about the universe. But humanists like Grayling base their argument for the non-existence of God on the observation that science has investigated the universe and explained it all and not found God. It is true that it has not found God as the ‘big man’ of the bible in the universe that is accessible to us, but that does not mean that God is not in the part of the universe that we cannot access. Let me remind you that that part is everywhere and all the time, it is not a tiny hidden corner.

A. I still don’t see why the failure of science to disprove the existence of God leads you to believe in God.

S. It is all about hope, Adeimantus, and hope is an intellectual preference. In that sense, hope is irrational. I admit it. The humanists set great store by always being rational, but they fail to understand that their own ethical and moral preferences are just as irrational as anyone else’s, however reasonably argued their conclusions are.¹⁷

C. So you are a scientific materialist sometimes and a true Christian believer at other times?

S. I’m both at the same time, Critobulus. As I said way back, it’s a matter of applying each system of thought in its proper domain. Science works well in the domain of objective physical reality; religion works well in the domain of concepts and human experience of life. The crossover comes from the observation that science does not rule out the possibility that there could exist some kind of mind, which we call God, that could entertain the concepts of people and confer on them the status of objectively existing spirits.

C. Sounds like clutching at straws.

S. As I said, Critobulus, it is called hope, and it is as good a straw to clutch at as any other. Secular humanists have other straws to clutch at, I just don’t like their straws.

A. So you think science and religion are compatible.

S. As I understand them, yes. Science must be used where it is applicable. I say ‘must’ because where science is validly applicable, it is irrational to seek other explanations. We know from vast experience that science always works, or to be more precise, the probability of it being wrong is so infinitesimal that it would be unreasonable to look elsewhere. I would go so far as to say that God does not break his own rules, although he doesn’t need me to tell him that. I think that if God created the rules, why would he need to break them. Surely he can work within them to achieve whatever he wants. This means that it is futile to look for God in broken rules. It also means that it is futile to look for God by scientific means. It means that miracles are not about broken rules, but highly improbable events, although there is no reason to suppose that only improbable events are miracles: every event might be a miracle in the sense that God controls it. Atheists say, ‘Why introduce God if nature just obeys rules?’ But his is not a watertight argument. It could be the way God works. Occam’s razor is just a preference. There you are now!

C. So, that’s it then?

S. That’s it, Critobulus. The worldview of Socrates the Younger. The human condition does not allow for anything more seamless and watertight.

C. Now that we’ve completed this worldview exercise, do you intend to keep riding and having these chats over coffee?

S. Certainly, Critobulus. I know our topics have been heavy at times, and I thank you all for persevering with me. I don’t foresee us launching into any similarly expansive themes, but I imagine we will find plenty to talk about in the topics of the day.