Dear Socrates

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Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.

Dear Socrates,

I have caught you in a blatant contradiction. In a previous column (Issue 48) you dismissed the beliefs of modern-day theists who accept all of the Biblical stories about God. In fact – in what I take to have been a rhetorical flourish – you refused even to believe that people believe such things, for example that Jesus walked on water. Your argument was that such beliefs would contradict other beliefs that those selfsame theists also hold and that are far more certain because they are both commonsensical and scientific.

But, Socrates, you have maintained consistently in these dialogues that wisdom resides in the realization that all of our knowledge or claims to knowledge rest on assumptions.

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