Plato appears among the ancient philosophers whose teachings continue to shape the thinking of unconverted people, who follow these figures as shepherds long after their lifetimes. His philosophy stands alongside those of Socrates and Aristotle as the product of men who were not godly disciples of the great Creator but instead served as instruments of the enemy of everything truly righteous and pure. This ongoing influence illustrates how Satan employs philosophers to embed godless concepts at the foundation of education and leadership, particularly through universities, so that moral claims are reduced to mere opinions rather than facts because the divine Author of Truth cannot be verified by human criteria. The result is a culture marked by angry division over moral, spiritual, and ethical values, since philosophy, as Paul warned in Colossians 2:8, operates according to the tradition of men and the basic principles of the world rather than according to Christ.

Plato's writings contain numerous Gnostic concepts that originated in earlier religions but were adapted and modified as they became entrenched in Greek culture. Through these writings Plato advanced the spread of Gnostic ideas significantly. This development allowed the core Gnostic framework of salvation through secret knowledge and escape from material existence to influence later religious expressions, including efforts to combine it with Christianity. Such ideas promoted reliance on traditions of men and the basic principles of the world rather than on Christ as the fullness of the divine nature in bodily form and the head of all principality and power.

Plato reinforced the Gnostic conviction that all spirit is inherently stable and good while all matter and flesh is inherently evil. He wrote that the soul is the very likeness of the divine immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable. Viewing the body as a temporary house in which the soul is imprisoned, he declared that the soul goes away to the pure, the eternal, the immortal and unchangeable to which she is kin. This teaching supported the Gnostic goal of acquiring secret knowledge that would release the inner spirit from the confines of the flesh so that it might rejoin God in the spirit realm. The same basic tenet appears in the modern doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the widespread belief that a person's true home is in heaven and that the spirit returns there at death.