Socrates against democracy?

 WHY SOCRATES HATED DEMOCRACY 

We are used to thinking very highly of democracy – and by extension, of Ancient Athens, the civilisation that gave rise to it. The Parthenon has become almost a byword for democratic values, which is why so many leaders of democracies like to be photographed among its ruins. 

It’s therefore very striking to discover that one of Ancient Greece’s great achievements, Philosophy, was highly suspicious of its other achievement, Democracy.

In the dialogues of Plato, the founding father of Greek Philosophy – Socrates – is portrayed as hugely pessimistic about the whole business of democracy. In Book Six of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates falling into conversation with a character called Adeimantus and trying to get him to see the flaws of democracy by comparing a society to a ship. If you were heading out on a journey by sea, asks Socrates, who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?

Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos in a storm.

Socrates was to have first hand, catastrophic experience of the foolishness of voters. In 399 BC, the philosopher was put on trial on trumped up charges of corrupting the youth of Athens. A jury of 500 Athenians was invited to weigh up the case and decided by a narrow margin that the philosopher was guilty. He was put to death by hemlock in a process which is, for thinking people, every bit as tragic as Jesus’s condemnation has been for Christians. 

Crucially, Socrates was not elitist in the normal sense. He didn’t believe that a narrow few should only ever vote. He did, however, insist that only those who had thought about issues rationally and deeply should be let near a vote.

We have forgotten this distinction between an intellectual democracy and a democracy by birthright. We have given the vote to all without connecting it to that of wisdom. And Socrates knew exactly where that would lead: to a system the Greeks feared above all, demagoguery.

dēmos ‘the people’ + agōgos ‘leading

Ancient Athens had painful experience of demagogues, for example, the louche figure of Alcibiades, a rich, charismatic, smooth-talking wealthy man who eroded basic freedoms and helped to push Athens to its disastrous military adventures in Sicily. Socrates knew how easily people seeking election could exploit our desire for easy answers. He asked us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one who was like a doctor and the other who was like a sweet shop owner. The sweet shop owner would say of his rival:

Look, this person here has worked many evils on you. He hurts you, gives you bitter potions and tells you not to eat and drink whatever you like. He’ll never serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things like I will.

Socrates asks us to consider the audience response:

Do you think the doctor would be able to reply effectively? The true answer – ‘I cause you trouble, and go against you desires in order to help you’ would cause an uproar among the voters, don’t you think?

We have forgotten all about Socrates’s salient warnings against democracy. We have preferred to think of democracy as an unambiguous good – rather than a process that is only ever as effective as the education system that surrounds it. As a result, we have elected many sweet shop owners, and very few doctors. 

School of life

To the drumbeat of JAH II

 Intelligent Design and Planetary Timing 

David Coppedge 

Yesterday I considered the matter of timing as evidence of design. Michael Denton’s book The Miracle of Man pulls together an astounding collection of requirements for complex life that are fulfilled ideally on Earth. Some of these, like plate tectonics, have a timing component; one paper calculates the onset of plate tectonics at 700 million years ago out of the planet’s consensus lifetime of 4.5 billion years. Another temporal factor is a magnetic field, which according to measurements over 160 years, is decreasing in strength. Even if its polarity reverses from time to time and is generated by an internal dynamo as most geophysicists believe, the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that it must lose energy to heat and eventually weaken. Indeed, some of the other moons and planets (like Mars) appear to have lost their magnetic fields. Without the protection of a magnetic field, our atmosphere and life itself would be severely threatened.  

All in the Timing 

Some of the “coincidences” discussed by Denton, like the nature of water, rely on laws of nature and do not have temporal dimensions, but others might. Earth’s atmospheric density and composition, ozone layer, hydrologic cycle, and availability of key minerals at the surface are satisfactory now, but when did they first become optimal? How long can they persist? When was the Earth ready to open shop, and how long can life on Earth take these perfections for granted?

Dynamical perturbations to Earth’s orbit could also affect habitability. Some scientists calculate cyclical changes in eccentricity, obliquity, and precession that could have affected past climate (NASA). A sufficiently extreme perturbation could render Earth inhospitable, as apparently has affected some exoplanets observed to have wildly eccentric orbits, likely due to a gravitational disturbance from a nearby gas giant. Astrophysicists also tell us that many stars go through periods of extreme flare activity, which could destroy Earth’s atmosphere and life. And eventually, they say, our star will balloon outward as a red giant and burn up the Earth. They assure us that we have several billions of years before that happens, but it does point out that our “continuously habitable zone” is a temporary blessing. 

Our Solar System 

A bizarre twist on the moon’s origin appeared this month from NASA. According to computer simulations at the Ames Research Center, researchers posit that the moon could have formed by a collision in a matter of hours! The collision theory has been the leading contender for the moon’s origin for years, but to consider the moon forming that fast should raise eyebrows. They say the lucky collision occurred billions of years ago. It already seemed like special pleading to expect a lucky strike from just the right sized impactor, with just the right composition, coming in at just the right angle and velocity to create our unique moon. But to have it occur on one lucky day exactly long enough before human beings appeared on the Earth observing perfect solar eclipses — now there’s a screenplay that’s hard to swallow.

I remember in 2008 asking a well-known planetary scientist about his attempt to extend the lifetime of Saturn’s rings. He admitted to me that his motivation was philosophical. If the rings were as young as some other scientists were deducing from Cassini data, it would imply that humans live at a special time when the beautiful rings are visible. That conclusion made him feel uncomfortable and motivated his attempt to extend the lifetime of the rings by proposing that they were denser than believed at the time. Unfortunately, later measurements in 2016 disconfirmed his proposal (JPL). But even if his proposal had been confirmed, Cassini witnessed ephemeral rings such as the E-ring (formed by Enceladus) and the F and G rings, as well as other short-lived phenomena like ring rain, propellers, and shepherd moon perturbations that could not persist for billions of years. These temporary phenomena have given planetary scientists a wealth of opportunities to learn about the dynamics and composition of ring particles. 

The Case of Enceladus 

Enceladus is an especially fascinating case. Nearly 100 geysers of water ice are currently jetting out of its south pole at supersonic speed, creating the vast E-ring between Mimas and Titan. The particles are subjected to enormous forces from Saturn and its magnetic field. If the geysers stopped, the E-ring would dissipate within a few tens of years. So why do they exist now when scientists can watch the dynamic changes in the geysers and the E-ring? Enceladus is not alone in this regard. Jupiter has thin “gossamer” rings composed of smoke-size particles. Both Uranus and Neptune also have sparse rings. Planetary rings are temporary phenomena that humans are privileged to observe and learn from at a time they can use telescopes and launch spacecraft to observe them. While the temporal brevity of these phenomena does not in itself prove design, it adds to the number of solar system coincidences that seem to be fortuitously timed for scientific discovery. 

Iraeneus on the supremacy of the Father.

 Irenaeus (AD 115-200) is the earliest surviving witness to recognize all four gospels as essential. He is perhaps the most clear in his language defining the relationships between the Father and the Son. "...the Father himself is alone called God...the Scriptures acknowledge him alone as God; and yet again...the Lord confesses him alone as his own Father, and knows no other." | " . . this is sure and steadfast, that no other God or Lord was announced by the Spirit, except him who, as God, rules over all, together with his Word, and those who receive the spirit of adoption, that is, those who believe in the one and true God, and in Jesus Christ the Son of God; and likewise that the apostles did of themselves term no one else God, or name no other as Lord; and, what is much more important, since it is true that our Lord acted likewise, who did also command us to confess no one as Father, except he who is in the heavens, who is the one God and the one Father." | "This, therefore, having been clearly demonstrated here (and it shall yet be so still more clearly), that neither the prophets, nor the apostles, nor the Lord Christ in His own person, did acknowledge any other Lord or God, but the God and Lord supreme: the prophets and the apostles confessing the Father and the Son; but naming no other as God, and confessing no other as Lord: and the Lord Himself handing down to His disciples, that He, the Father, is the only God and Lord, who alone is God and ruler of all;" | Irenaeus also refers to John "...proclaiming one God, the Almighty, and one Jesus Christ, the only-begotten, by whom all things were made." 

To the drumbeat of JAH.

Fine-Timing as Evidence of Intelligence Design. 

David Coppedge 

Often in movies a scene depicts some highly improbable event on which the plot pivots. Viewers suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment while knowing that the coincidences are matters of contrivance by screenwriters. In real life, though, how many coincidences would it take to convince a reasonable person that something non-random is going on?  

I’ve witnessed two total solar eclipses so far, in 1991 and in 2017 (another is coming to America in 2024). I concur with Guillermo Gonzalez that a total eclipse “summons all the senses” and becomes one of the most emotional celestial events one can experience. Many have noted the remarkable coincidence between apparent sizes of the moon and sun from Earth that make perfect total eclipses possible. Moreover, the size of the sun and the moon are intimately tied to the habitability of the Earth. As a G2 main sequence star, our sun’s size and temperature determines the radius of the habitable zone where liquid water can exist. And the moon plays vital roles in governing the ocean tides and stabilizing Earth’s tilt. In The Privileged Planet, co-authored by Jay Richards, Gonzalez noted that “the requirements for complex life on a terrestrial planet strongly overlap the requirements for observing total solar eclipses” (p. 7). As they further argue, these requirements also overlap with the ability to do scientific discovery. 

A Gondola on Saturn 

Gonzalez calculated all possible instances of eclipses between bodies in the solar system, 64 in all. On page 11 of The Privileged Planet he included a graph of the results: the only other possible eclipsing body the right size to produce perfect eclipses is Saturn’s tiny moon Prometheus. If one were to be riding a gondola in Saturn’s cloud tops at the right position, one might get a half second total eclipse as Prometheus crossed the sun. On Earth, by contrast, the duration of totality can last up to 7.5 minutes. 

But don’t forget “the rest of the story” about Prometheus. Gonzalez notes that its “highly elongated shape compromises the view of the chromosphere” (p. 10). Sure enough, when the Cassini mission, on which I worked at JPL, took photos of Prometheus, its irregular potato-like shape was revealed in detail. Prometheus would never, therefore, be able to cover the sun exactly. That leaves Earth alone as the only place in the solar system where a perfect total eclipse can occur. In the Privileged Planet documentary, Gonzalez remarked, “the one place that has observers is the one place that has the best eclipses.” 

Getting the Right Moon at the Right Time 

But there’s another aspect of this “coincidence” not often discussed: the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth at 3.8 cm per year (The Conversation). Over time, the moon would be too far away to exactly cover the sun’s disk. After that, all eclipses would be annular. Simultaneously, Gonzalez points out, the sun’s diameter is increasing. “These two processes, working together, should end total solar eclipses in about 250 million years, a mere 5 percent of the age of the Earth” (p. 18). But consider too that eclipses will become progressively shorter long before that deadline, and therefore less useful for scientific discovery. On the other hand, if we can extrapolate the recession speed far into the past, the moon would have appeared too big to produce some of the special effects that eclipse watchers and scientists love, like Bailey’s beads, the flash spectrum, and the “diamond ring” effect. We can witness perfect solar eclipses, Gonzalez concludes, during a “fairly narrow window of Earth’s history, including the present” (p. 9).

The narrow window for perfect solar eclipses leads us to consider the matter of timing as evidence of design. Where else are coincidences of timing discernable?