Plato’s allegory of the cave is appropriate for the ideas that Plato was trying to present, but I think he fails to distinguish between different layers of meaning. I think using a mountain would perhaps be clearer. For example, let’s say a cellphone rings and begins to play Mozart’s Sonata in C Major. In Plato’s terms, there is one Form for the Sonata in C Major (despite being a construct on the part of Mozart, but whether constructs can be Platonic realizations is a separate philosophical question), and that this ringtone is just an example of it. However, the ringtone isn’t just Mozart’s Sonata in C Major: it’s also a cellphone ringtone, a series of pitches, a piece of synthesized music, a particular type of wave propagating through space, a movement of air causing bones in the ear to vibrate, and a series of nervous signals between the ear and the brain, among many other things. So either it’s a realization of many manifestations of one Form, or it’s a realization of multiple Forms. Consider the first choice: if these were all manifestations of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, what about printed sheet music? Surely the appropriate sheet music is also a manifestation of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, and yet it is not a piece of synthesized music or a sound wave propagating through space. Therefore, these properties are not intrinsic to the Form of Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, and may be considered the Form of a cellphone ringtone, or perhaps of aural music itself. In object-oriented terms, this piece inherits from at least two classes (doubtless more). So how can we prioritize these? Well, since Plato’s philosophy strove towards a universal Good in the realm of the abstract, it would make sense to prioritize them according to their generality, with the Forms themselves being the most general of all concepts which are expressed. Thus we have a mountain, rather than a cave – “Gradus ad Parnassum” (steps to Parnassus), in a sense.

One possible resolution to the “problem of evil” (the paradoxical existence of evil in a world ruled by an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God) might be a reinterpretation of “omnipotence”. Simply, anything might be possible… but it might be hard.