Plato's way of seeing the world works itself out in theology and everyday life with disastrous consequences. First, think about where all of this puts God.

If physical reality is a flawed shadow, then a perfect God cannot be definition have any part of it. If he made it with all its imperfections, he clearly is imperfect as well.

And so Platonic thought relegates God to the realm of ideas only. He can have nothing to do with this shadowy place. The very idea that he would intervene in the natural world you and I must inhabit is absurd by definition. The miraculous is rendered impossible, and any hope you and I have to know God while in this shadowy cave is dashed. Think about him, but don't try to experience him personally. Doesn't much of our culture today agree?

If Plato is right, God is a figment of your imagination, literally. Your idea of God may be very different from mine. Who's to say who's right? And what difference does it all make anyway? Can you see why Greek philosophers had such little interest in personal religion? And why our Western culture has a built-in suspicion of it as well?

Growing up, I thought that religion was a crutch for cripples. So did Plato. What neither of us realized is that we're all crippled. And Plato's God is no help at all.

So, how did this cave of shadows come to exist? It seems that God created a divine craftsman, a figure who made both souls and bodies from pre-existing materials. This craftsman did the best he could, but he had rusty nails and warped two-by-fours to work with. This material world is the source of evil in our lives--it is irrational, chaos in perpetual movement. And there's nothing either God or his carpenter can do about it.

The divine craftsman modeled his work on the Forms which exist in the world of Ideas, but he could make only imperfect copies of them. This is why when you contemplate a table you can imagine the "tableness" he was attempting to reproduce. Your soul remembers the Ideal table and is drawn from this chaotic cave of shadows to the real world of Forms.

Here's what Plato's theory of creation means for Christians: this world is a bad place, and you want to spend as little time here as possible. You want to break the philosophical chains which tie you to the shadows you see, by thinking about the world you cannot. You cannot change the world, so don't try. Just don't let it change you.

This is the most popular definition of spirituality I know today. Retreat from this fallen, sinful world. Spend as little time in it as possible. Live at the church, raise your kids there, go to school there, socialize there. Shop from the Christian Yellow Pages; listen only to Christian music; read only Christian books; have only Christian friends. And somewhere Plato is cheering.

Didn't Jesus warn us that salt is no good in the saltshaker?

How would Plato rule a country, given his ideas about ideas? Rather sternly, it turns out. Just as the soul is governed by reason, so society should be governed by the reasoners. The philosophers make up the "guardian" class and order the government and its citizens. They are aided by the "warrior" class (akin to the higher emotions we saw in Plato's epistemology), who work in close cooperation with the guardians to keep the masses in line.

The "working" class (like the lower emotions) must be governed closely. They do the farming, manufacturing, trading, and other mundane work which makes the city-state possible. And so they feed the guardians and warriors who rule them.

How are we to produce these classes? Guardians are deprived of all natural marriage, private property, or family life. They are mated to other guardians. Their offspring never know their parents, but grow up in a general nursery and so are protected from all concerns but the rational.

To make all this happen, the city-state should be located on an island, with all foreign contact strongly discouraged. And you thought democracy was flawed.

The best thing about Plato's theory of politics is that it was never enacted. Makes our politics look better, doesn't it?

What of aesthetics, a theory of art? Plato saw all visual art as a distraction. After all, if an apple you can see is but a shadow of "appleness," then a painting of that apple is a shadow of a shadow. A royal waste of time.

But Plato knew that art, for all its flaws, has great influence on our souls, especially the lower emotions. So he wanted it tightly censured. And music most of all, since it bypasses the eyes and goes straight to the soul. If he thought so poorly of the ordered, mathematically-oriented music of his day, what do you suppose he'd think of rap?

Plato was more helpful when he did science. He was convinced that the earth is not stationary, but revolves around an axis. It would take the Western world nearly two millennia to agree. He urged the standardizing of weights and measures, and was sure that 365 days make a year. If only he'd stuck to science and left politics alone.