Platonism And Christianity

Just as individuals do not need other people to say something to think of a host of logical and conceptual truths about everything from reason itself to sexism, like in the examples above--in fact, only an irrational person thinks truth and knowledge hinge on other people instead of reason--groups who collectively embrace an idea are not necessarily doing so because of someone else or another group.  They might have either come to it themselves, whether or not they were rational in doing so, or heard it from someone else and come back to it later on without supporting it due to its affiliation with another person.  No one needs to either hear certain ideas and truths from others first or rely on the fallacies of appeals to authority.

I do not know that reason provides absolute certainty because someone who lived before me realized this, but because I reasoned it out myself, as literally anyone could.  I do not perceive gravity because of anything said or done by Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago.  Likewise, I am not a rationalist because Descartes or any other popular figure before me was one (not that they were purely rationalistic anyway), and I do not reject the tenets of sexism because someone else did generations before me.  The possibility of this sort of disregard for or lack of focus on other people in evaluating philosophy is what means entire groups of people can still be comprised of individuals that are not just intentionally mimicing someone before them.

The claim that early Christians borrowed ideas from Greek Platonism and either tried to merge them with Christianity or act as if Christianity always overlapped with Platonism is relevant in this context.  Similarities between two philosophies does not mean one borrowed from the other, nor does it mean that either of them are true or false.  Whatever differences there are between them must still be taken into consideration, and even if the similarities were enormous, only an assumption would convince someone that one was meant to have literally been derived from the other.  However, the similarities between Greek Platonism and Christianity are greatly exaggerated and irrelevant to core Christian ideas as derived from the Bible using reason.

Platonism as put forth by Socrates has little in common with Christianity.  The notion of the inherent immortality of the soul is perhaps the most popular supposed similarity, but this is not an idea the Bible actually teaches.  It says people must pursue immortality (Romans 2:6-7), that God alone, as the uncaused cause, is the conscious being that inherently lives forever (1 Timothy 6:16), and that eternal life must be received by fallen humans (John 5:24, 39-40)--something that would never need to be given if people already had it simply by being human.  Even when it comes to other aspects of platonism like the idea of perfect conceptual archetypes from which things like physical chairs or perceived colors come forth as pale imitations of the perfect chair or the true color green, the Bible either says nothing on the matter or contradicts them.

Even if Christian ideas aligned with those of Greek Platonism, that would not invalidate or prove either worldview; individual ideas and philosophical systems would still have to be assessed on their own.  Nevertheless, there is little to no grand overlap between the two except on matters that literally any worldview that does not refute itself at the start entails, like when it comes to the objectivity of truth.  An example of further similarities would be that both hold that something other than matter exists.  More relevant to epistemological verification, Platonism in its purest Socratic form can be refuted with reason alone (archetypal "forms" of something like colors or various physical objects cannot exist because there is not even one shade of a color or one specific kind of chair that is more of a chair than other kinds of chairs, for instance), while Christianity as proposed in the Bible is far more complex due to its interlocking parts, even if Platonism is more abstract as a whole, meaning it has more logically possible doctrines which need to be reflected on independent of Platonism.