A thought on the allegory of the cave

Someone asked me on Quora what atheists think about the myth of the cave. I'm not an atheist, but I did have the following possibly responsive thoughts.

The closest candidate for the title of God in THE REPUBLIC itself is the Idea of the Good. In another Platonic work, TIMAEUS, we learn of another figure Plato called the Demiurge, who actively fashioned the world. And the Abrahamic conception of God shared by the three great monotheisms is in effect a combination of Plato’s Idea of the Good and his Demiurge. The Good (upper case) is also the maker of the world, gazing upon it at each stage and saying “it is good" (lower case).

But let us stay within the terms of the allegory of the cave, and so within THE REPUBLIC, as you suggest.

A stray creature held as captive in the cave escapes, makes his way out and beholds the realities of the surface world. Then he comes to appreciate the uber-Reality that makes it possible for him to look at those realities, the Sun itself. Finally, he returns to the cave to tell the prisoners still stuck there what he has found.

It is easy enough to use this as a map for some of the religious experiences of people within the Abrahamic religions. A contented life within the cave is a predominately secular existence and point of view (explicitly atheistic or not). Escape from the cave is the process of religious conversion. One’s experiences on the surface world are mystical in nature. And the return to the cave is a commitment to evangelical or missionary activity.

I expect that atheists see this as a useful primer on how those evangelizing pains-in-the-butt see themselves, and the commitment one has to deconstruct in order to make, so to speak, counter-conversions.

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