Man is a God-made machine, and my personal computer is a man-made machine. I know that Plato is recognized as one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind. I also know that I have only heard about Plato from people, and never met him in person. I have never met God either, and I know that there are people who believe in Him and people who do not. But I have never met a person who believes that Plato did not exist at the same time as he or she believes that God does not exist.
In fact there are many people who do not believe in the existence of God, just as my personal computer does not consciously know the man who created it even if there is a personal signature of him somewhere in my computer’s hardware and software. I believe that humans know what they know based on their personal beliefs. I can easily say that I know that Plato did not exist, and those who said he existed are complete liars. Someone may refute my words today and say: “But I know that Plato existed!”What if I really do not know that he existed because I am illiterate? Does it matter to anyone? Since it does not matter, my knowledge or ignorance of Plato is of no importance whatsoever. What is the use of such knowledge? “Knowledge has no practical use; it simply exists for the abstract good of the soul,” Plato would answer himself (“Plato”)! Yet I am quite careful about guarding the knowledge that I love, e. g.
my knowledge of the scriptures. It is of practical use to me if not to every other God-made machine.I believe that Jesus Christ was correct about his description of God. So I know that the God-made machine knows what it knows from God, while the man-made machine knows what it knows from the man who created its hardware and software, and he who runs it. The hardware of the God-machine is the human body. In my knowledge, this piece of miraculous machinery carries God’s signature since nobody else I know could have created it.
Plus, I have read a book called The God Code in which the author describes God’s signature in my DNA.My software is my instinctive knowledge, e. g. my knowledge of my creator, and my hunches.
And because I believe in Jesus’ words, I believe in the life-giving Spirit that dwells in me and runs the show! I am totally a God-made machine, in other words. I cannot move without His permission, nor think. My personal computer is as faithful to me as I am to God. I give instructions to my man-made machine, and it works accordingly.
My personal computer does not have a mind of its own.The hardware and software developers whose signatures my personal computer carries have taught my machine thus: “When the user clicks on this link or when the user presses this button – this is exactly what you must do. ” My man-made machine does not question me. And when something goes wrong, it merely prompts me to correct the error by showing error messages to me, without getting personal with me in any way.
These error messages may be compared to the God-made machine crying and praying to God to solve its problems. My personal computer cannot say to me, “I love you this day because you are wearing my favorite color. ” The God-made machine does not say such things to God either.Philosophy of KnowledgeAlthough Plato has discussed knowledge in several texts, his Theaetetus specifically asks the question, What is knowledge? It then reviews three definitions of knowledge, namely, knowledge is perception; knowledge is true judgment or true belief; and knowledge is true judgment with an account. Plato rejects all of these definitions.
So, in the end, there is no definition of knowledge. All we know is the definition of what knowledge is not (“Plato on Knowledge in the Theaetetus,” 2005). Undoubtedly, Plato was talking of human knowledge when he tried to concoct its definitions.I would argue that Plato’s three definitions of knowledge apply to the man-made machine. My personal computer knows when it is mishandled. It shows error messages at those times, or refuses to work.
It can perceive, then, that there is something wrong. And when everything is right, my personal computer refuses to show error messages. This is, of course, due to the fact that the persons who designed its hardware and software, and the way they are meant to run, revealed to the man-made machine through programming language and other methods when to run perfectly and when to show error messages: “When the user clicks on this link or when the user turns you off – this is supposed to be your behavior. ”In this case, my man-made machine also has knowledge that is true judgment or true belief; and knowledge that is true judgment with an account. My personal computer has been personally fed in with all relevant details by men of computer science. Based on their judgments about how my machine must run ideally, my computer applies true belief and true judgment with an account.
The credit goes to the men of computer science solely, who in turn, in my knowledge, have been fed in by God with all relevant details about how to make a computer work. Plato’s view of knowledge must be understood through his theory of Forms, or Ideas at the heart of his philosophy. His theory of knowledge can be explained thus: First, knowledge must be certain and infallible. Second, knowledge must have as its object that which is genuinely real as contrasted with that which is an appearance only. Because that which is fully real must, for Plato, be fixed, permanent, and unchanging, he identified the real with the ideal realm of being as opposed to the physical world of becoming.
One consequence of this view was Plato's rejection of empiricism, the claim that knowledge is derived from sense experience. He thought that propositions derived from sense experience have, at most, a degree of probability. They are not certain (“Plato”). I believe that good computers, too, have certain and infallible knowledge, given that the programs that they run on are based on mathematical principles that provide for certainty and infallibility.
When my computer shows an error message, I have to believe that something went wrong. Otherwise, I find that most programs on good computers are excellent at what they do for us. These programs are perfectionist Forms. They cannot do everything, but neither can the God-made machine.
For Plato, knowledge is a form of recollection of the Forms imbedded in our collective or universal memory (“Plato – The Idealist”). Thus my computer goes back to its programming language imbedded somewhere in its chip memory each time I click on a particular software application that I want to run.It is not as if my man-made machine is consciously thinking about a particular program when it is turned off. Rather, its knowing only is a recollection whenever I – the controller of the machine – decide that I want to run a particular application.
Conclusion My computer does not have a mind of its own. Only “I am that I am. ” The man-made machine cannot know, reason, or think anything out of the box. Only the controller of the machine decides what it must know, reason, or think, either by treating it ideally or by allowing something to go wrong by clicking the wrong buttons.
