Socrates (ca. 470-399 BC) is not just another “dead white male” despised by our academic elite, but a man whose philosophical advances reverberate through the centuries and profoundly affect us today. Athens in the 5th century BC was the time of Pericles. The great building projects undertaken by Pericles, such as the Parthenon, were built during Socrates’ lifetime.
Philosophically, Athens was in a time of confusion, flux, and disorder. The pre-Socratic philosophers, namely sophists like Protagore, Gorgias and Thrasymachus, taught moral relativism in their philosophical schools. The term “sophist” means “wise man” and these wise men implicitly considered their own personal wisdom as the basis for understanding correct behavior.
Protagoras, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus were not natives of Athens and had traveled extensively. In their travels they had seen that what was forbidden in one culture was permitted or even encouraged in another. This led them to the erroneous conclusion that morality is relative and therefore there is no foundation of truth or firm way to determine right and wrong.
The term “sophistry” today carries negative connotations as it should. Since the sophists believed that morality was relative, they descended into philosophical pragmatism, which is the idea that the best philosophy is the one that is practical or “works,” regardless of its moral implications.
Pragmatism is very popular in Western civilization today. The pragmatist philosophy of the American philosopher William James is a flowering of modernist sophistry. In the West we now have a situation similar to that of ancient Athens. The ancient sophists charged high fees for their courses of instruction and this too was a departure from the Athenian tradition which had always held that philosophers did not charge for their instruction. Socrates was tutored by the Sophists, but he could only afford the short course.
The sophists taught rhetoric, which is the art of verbal persuasion. Since the Sophists did not make firm truth claims, they only taught how to persuade. Each man invented his own truth and the most intelligent could persuade the others.
Socrates saw the emptiness of this and feared for his city that the sophists, through their relativism, would destroy the foundations of morality and eventually lead to the extinction of ethics and a return to barbarism. Socrates’ approach to the situation was to look to the intellect to try to discover the ground of truth. He looked at human consciousness. Socrates had stumbled across one of the ways that God gives revelation to man.
The Bible in Romans 2:14-15 tells us that Gentiles who do not have God’s written book, the Bible, do have their consciences telling them right and wrong.
All people throughout human history have the inner testimony of conscience that, regardless of cultural formation, bears witness to the will of God. The Bible also teaches that all people have the testimony of nature (Psalm 19:1-3; Romans 1:19-20) that reveals things about God. Socrates did not have a Bible, but he was not totally without access to the revelation of God’s will. God has given light to all people, including Socrates. Socrates did his best to live off the light that he had.
I do not claim to know whether Socrates ever came to true repentance and received eternal life. I think he made philosophical advances that brought moral reform.
Socrates preferred argumentation to rhetoric. He tried to unravel a solid definition of virtue. His form of argument is called “dialectic.” Dialectics is the practice of examining statements logically through questions and answers. This is how the famous “Socratic questioning” arose.
You can imagine how upset the older sophist philosophers were by this clever young man asking embarrassing questions. They could not answer his questions and their inadequate answers revealed the logical absurdities of the sophist positions.
Socrates changed the course of philosophy and is a hero to those of us who defend principle against persuasive demagogues. Later, Athens lost a war with Sparta and in that confusion Socrates’ enemies were able to bring charges against him that resulted in a death sentence. The parallels between Socrates’ Athens and contemporary Western civilization are inescapable. Universities today are riddled with sophistry. Moral relativism, the idea that there is no real good or evil, that each person invents their own morality, is taught in university classrooms.
At first glance, moral relativism appears to be open-minded and tolerant, but since it does not provide a basis for correct behavior, it threatens to erase ethics and return to barbarism.
There are three worldviews:
1) The modern worldview is the idea that absolute truth exists and can be discovered only by human reason, independent of the Bible or any other verbal revelation from God.
2) The postmodern worldview is the idea that there is no absolute truth and that truth is relative, truth is purely subjective and is created by each individual human mind.
3) The Christian worldview is that God has given us absolute truth through His divinely inspired book, the Bible and God has also given us absolute truth through human consciousness and also through nature (the laws of God). God are embedded in nature, which is the concept of natural law).
Right now there are millions of young people who see themselves in the same position as Socrates. These young people see through the sophistry of the university elite. The difference is that while Socrates had no Bible, these young men are born-again Christians who know their Bibles and receive clear instruction from the Bible on God’s morality. There is an army of these holy Socrates going out, Bible in hand, to give Western civilization the absolute truth, the same absolute truth on which the West was originally founded. This truth is the Christian gospel.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came in fulfillment of more than 300 prophecies written centuries before His birth. No other figure in all of history can make this claim. The fact that Jesus would come to die for our sins and then rise from the dead is foretold by Old Testament prophecies. These prophecies give Jesus Christ supernatural proof of his authority to give us absolute truth.