“Never,” Mom said, “believe a thing, because you wish it to be true.” She brought us up to pursue the truth, even if inconvenient.
She spent an entire Saturday, precious childhood time, pressing me to defend my pro-Northern views regarding the Civil War. She agreed with me, of course, after all, where else could I have gotten my ideas if not from my parents (!), but she refused to let me be intellectually lazy.
“Why,” she said, “do you think you are right?” Mom knew we had moved to state (New York) at a time (1970’s) when nobody was going to challenge me. I had the right idea, true opinion, but my defense was weak. Mom made it better by refusing to let me rest with the accidentally true opinion.
I needed reasons for my belief, not just the right opinion. Mom despises the coward afraid to follow the truth where it leads. She has no patience for the false faith of convenience. Biblical faith, the sort she lives by, is trust in the truth that is aligned with best reason and best experience. Christians might be wrong, since we have faith and not absolute certainty. We are not certain, but we are betting on a rational probability. Given all we know, our hopes are substantial: evidence our hopes might be seen indeed.
Plato understood that best truth could be inconvenient to our comfort and an accommodation to the culture of the powerful.
Plato is a forerunner to many Christian ideas that combined with Greco-Roman thought produced the Scientific Revolution. His dialogue Timaeus was his only work available in Western Europe for centuries. Christians mediated on ideas gained from Divine revelation and Greco-Roman inspiration to change everything. If any establishment, even a Christian establishment, disagreed, then faith, the best proximation a human can have, demanded following the argument wherever it led.
This is inconvenient, but intellectual convenience damns cowardly minds. Plato makes this point slyly in Timaeus. The aristocrats of Greek cities claimed to be sons of the gods. What’s to be done?
Timaeus says:
As for the other spiritual beings [daimones], it is beyond our task to know and speak of how they came to be. We should accept on faith the assertions of those figures of the past who claimed to be the offspring of gods. They must surely have been well informed about their own ancestors.*
This is “faith” as convenient belief, no faith at all. The Establishment killed Socrates for refusing intellectual convenience. The state ran education for the benefit of the powerful to the detriment of students. The state claimed divine origins to prop up diabolical lifestyles. The state hated true faith, because true faith denied certainty and trusted the Logos, the path of reason.
False certainty in state run assumptions was convenient, but even trickier was the temptation to give up on knowledge altogether.
“Who can know?” We say this and so our lack of certainty, which is real, allows us not to act at all. This too is convenient. The decadent state will tolerate the sophist who quibbles, quails, qualifies unable to act for justice in the city as he looks for certainty.
The just live by true faith.
The just say that the powerful are not the sons of gods (daemons), but demonic. The just live by a faith that is often inconvenient, always not quite certain, but never irrational. Plato gave us a likely story in Timaeus, a probable tale based on mathematical modeling and a trust in the goodness of the Divine.
Christianity gave us a divine Revelation that we can doubt like Thomas, but can test like Thomas. We can say: “My Lord and my God” not because the Romans will not kill us, but because reason compels us. The Romans would have accepted the dilettante that abstractly challenges, but murdered the simple souls who refused convenience for faith.
God grant me true faith.
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*Timaeus translated by Zeyl. Note that even these decadent men did not claim to be the sons of God, just daemons (gods). God could have only one Son.
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