section_path: Philosophy/Religion
section_name: Religion
paragraph_text: Religion
  
  Socrates's religious nonconformity challenged the views of his times and his critique reshaped religious discourse for the coming centuries. In Ancient Greece, organized religion was fragmented, celebrated in a number of festivals for specific gods, such as the City Dionysia, or in domestic rituals, and there were no sacred texts. Religion intermingled with the daily life of citizens, who performed their personal religious duties mainly with sacrifices to various gods. Whether Socrates was a practicing man of religion or a 'provocateur atheist' has been a point of debate since ancient times; his trial included impiety accusations, and the controversy has not yet ceased.
  
  Socrates discusses divinity and the soul mostly in Alcibiades, Euthyphro, and Apology. In Alcibiades Socrates links the human soul to divinity, concluding "Then this part of her resembles God, and whoever looks at this, and comes to know all that is divine, will gain thereby the best knowledge of himself." His discussions on religion always fall under the lens of his rationalism. Socrates, in Euthyphro, reaches a conclusion which takes him far from the age's usual practice: he considers sacrifices to the gods to be useless, especially when they are driven by the hope of receiving a reward in return. Instead he calls for philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge to be the principal way of worshipping the gods. His rejection of traditional forms of piety, connecting them to self-interest, implied that Athenians should seek religious experience by self-examination.
  
  Socrates argued that the gods were inherently wise and just, a perception far from traditional religion at that time. In Euthyphro, the Euthyphro dilemma arises. Socrates questions his interlocutor about the relationship between piety and the will of a powerful god: Is something good because it is the will of this god, or is it the will of this god because it is good? In other words, does piety follow the good, or the god? The trajectory of Socratic thought contrasts with traditional Greek theology, which took lex talionis (the eye for an eye principle) for granted. Socrates thought that goodness is independent from gods, and gods must themselves be pious.
  
  Socrates affirms a belief in gods in Plato's Apology, where he says to the jurors that he acknowledges gods more than his accusers. For Plato's Socrates, the existence of gods is taken for granted; in none of his dialogues does he probe whether gods exist or not. In Apology, a case for Socrates being agnostic can be made, based on his discussion of the great unknown after death, and in Phaedo (the dialogue with his students in his last day) Socrates gives expression to a clear belief in the immortality of the soul. He also believed in oracles, divinations and other messages from gods. These signs did not offer him any positive belief on moral issues; rather, they were predictions of unfavorable future events.
  
  In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates constructs an argument close to the contemporary teleological intelligent-design argument. He claims that since there are many features in the universe that exhibit "signs of forethought" (e.g., eyelids), a divine creator must have created the universe. He then deduces that the creator should be omniscient and omnipotent and also that it created the universe for the advance of humankind, since humans naturally have many abilities that other animals do not. At times, Socrates speaks of a single deity, while at other times he refers to plural "gods". This has been interpreted to mean that he either believed that a supreme deity commanded other gods, or that various gods were parts, or manifestations, of this single deity.
  
  The relationship of Socrates's religious beliefs with his strict adherence to rationalism has been subject to debate. Philosophy professor Mark McPherran suggests that Socrates interpreted every divine sign through secular rationality for confirmation. Professor of ancient philosophy A. A. Long suggests that it is anachronistic to suppose that Socrates believed the religious and rational realms were separate.