While Plato may have been wrong about many things, he was often profoundly right in raising the correct questions and introducing most of the necessary elements needed to resolve those questions. That he couldn't put the pieces together perfectly and that his best student was the one who would do so should not be held against him. We also have to remember that we only have his dialogues and not his lectures (and the reverse with Aristotle). You call Plato a big-picture thinker but that may simply be due to the genre that his surviving works are written in. Aristotle was writing lectures for students, of course he is going to be more focused on the details and technical ideas. But the question remains: Would Aristotle have been able to achieve what he did if he were not first a Platonist? (And the fact that Aristotle's thought matured over the years seems to be quite certain, starting from a more Platonist conception in his early days and eventually being able to break free from the limitations of Plato in his later life.)

I'll just give one example of something that Plato got profoundly right but that you seem to dismiss. His dualism, if taken in a literal sense, can seem to be the biggest flaw in his philosophy. And indeed, Aquinas shows that Plato was mistaken. But Aquinas does not dismiss the insights of Plato's dualism all together. The realm of the forms is correct if we mean that the ideas are in the Mind of God in the sense that God knows how His Essence, which is identical with His Existence, can be participated in. So in a sense Plato was right: that which is outside the realm of the forms is less "real" in the sense that it does not have being of its own but merely participates in Being. Sin, then, is a turning away from the Creator towards the creature; a turning from the real to mere shadows. Sin is a movement into the cave of lesser beings, of lesser goods. But the way out of the cave leads us to the theology of grace and to rebuke Plato for not being a Christian theologian seems silly.

None of the above would be possible without Plato's incorrect dualism. Just because something is incorrect in one sense does not mean that it has no use in other senses. Aquinas, especially through Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius was very much influenced by Plato. Aquinas was as much of an Augustinian-Platonist as he was an Aristotelian.

http://www.duawazifa.com/dua-make-someone-love-you/

It's just to much of a coincidence that the early universe was exquisitely fine-tuned with the entropy-driven latent processes for life and, ultimately consciousness.

Such consciousness, as manifested for example in ourselves, is capable of two crucial things: Firstly, of philosophising in abstract terms about the existence of a supreme being, and secondly, of recognising a supreme mind behind the increasingly-revealed order and intelligibility of the cosmos.

That we are able through the power of thought to suspect a Creator without science and then, with the help of science, find that suspicion strongly justified, again represents too much of a coincidence.

When you consider a cosmos uniquely preconfigured for ultimate consciousness, and then consider that such consciousness is naturally capable of finding two separate yet complementary routes to its Maker, then the case for the existence of such a Maker becomes overwhelming.

Yay deterministic universe!

"order and design in the cosmos."

how do you identify intelligent order and design? I'd appreciate an answer this time, not a repetition of your assertion. you have a problem where you don't explain what you are talking about when asked by me at least.

As I said in my reply below, faith in the existence of the immaterial comes from historical revelation and abstract reasoning. It does not come from knowledge or awareness of any material interaction emanating from the immaterial. Therefore, even If science discovers no such interaction, faith in the immaterial remains unaffected.

For your part, you are free to reject the revelations of scripture and the abstractions of metaphysics as evidence of the immaterial and, ultimately, the divine. Even I personally would wobble if these were the only pillars on which to rest my faith.

But there is a third pillar which I've been at pains to emphasise throughout this site, and that's the increasing evidence, thanks to science, of order and design in the cosmos. Combined with the other two, this third pillar makes the case for the divine extremely compelling.

I'm not faulting Carroll for his attempt at understanding the soul, but for his attempt at falsifying it.