The Christian narrative
The Catholic Church teaches that God Almighty came down from heaven to save us... from His own wrath... by allowing Himself to be tortured to death. And apparently this strategy worked in spite of the fact that he didn't actually die (people saw him walking around three days later), and most people didn't get saved.
How does a person [moderator redacted] make sense of this? Could it be that most Christians throughout history didn't know this is the Christian narrative? Or did they know, but just held it at arm's length? Are myths always this way? Or is Christianity a special case?
How does a person [moderator redacted] make sense of this? Could it be that most Christians throughout history didn't know this is the Christian narrative? Or did they know, but just held it at arm's length? Are myths always this way? Or is Christianity a special case?
Comments (892)
If God is holy, He could simply forgive our sins instead of this loophole, a part of it dying on the cross, causing torture on Himself, Jesus! That does not make any sense at all. Are you saying that God could not forgive our sins until Jesus' sacrifice was made!? Which kind of Omnipotent God is if He could not simply forgive?
My high school Jesuit teachers had advised me to pray for the Grace to accept (without comprehending) the sacred Mysteries. Well, I couldn't lobotomize myself and thereby permanently gave up God the zombie rabbi on a stick "for Lent" (i.e. eliminated supernaturalia from my ontology aka "magical thinking") forty-five years ago.
Did you ever try to accept it without understanding it?
Quoting MoK
Apparently so.
Is there a reason mentioned in the scripture for this torture? That is the God of the very old Testament, Human sacrifice to perhaps please God to do things no one but God can do. What is the difference between the Old and New Testaments?
Of course not, there aren't any compelling reasons (other than wishful thinking / childish habit) to do so.
As the song says "If you believe in things / that you don't understand / then you suffer / Superstition ain't the way!" :victory: :naughty:
One common theme in religion going back as far as we know, is sacrifice to appease the Gods. It used to be more human sacrifice because the blood of humans was thought to be more powerful for that purpose. Gradually that changed to animals and such, but you had to sacrifice more and more to get the same result because the blood of animals is less potent... If you sacrifice the literal son of God, well now we are talking some real sacrificial value.
People tend to want to blame something or someone for their misgivings, and will look for stories to believe in that give them a narrative that supports that. For more recent examples look at Q 'anon and all the bizarre conspiracy theories that contributed to anti-establishment politics taking over. The Roman empire had a lot of enemies, external and internal. As it started crumbling more and more in the 3th century, Christianity with it inversion of values and apocalyptical vision, had the ideal anti-establishment narrative for end-of-days Roman empire... Christianity was essentially an anti-imperial collapse cult. That there are some holes in the story matters less than the motivational boxes it ticks.
How does a person who expects a respectful exchange of information ask a question like this?
How does a person who has survived life beyond childhood think the explanation for all of human history would simply make sense?
We cant agree if the cat is really on the mat or not. Do you think it will be easy to explain what God is on the cross or not?
Dont you already know the answer? Lobotomies are fairly easy to obtain. Good explanation. Why are you checking your math?
No one brought themselves into existence. Our lives are a gift. We each take this gift and demand more than we even care to give back, and steal more, and murder and lie about it. Instead of crushing us out root and stem, God marked us down as incurring a debt. Then God paid the debt for us.
Make of this second chance what you will. Thats the story. All makes perfect sense to me.
Quoting frank
You could do the autopsy 20 feet away from the body. The cause of death had something to do with all the blood loss from the beating and whipping and spikes and spear in the gut. There was a burial. As far as walking around afterwards, thats up to you to trust, but you would need a lobotomy to say he wasnt dead.
John 3:16 states the doctrine of the Propitiatory Sacrifice. The torturing part probably comes from the way the Romans executed people. Kierkegaard talks about what it was like as a child to contemplate an innocent person being executed in that way.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I wonder if swallowing the cognitive dissonance could be taken as a personal sacrifice. Christianity is really gruesome and then the Holy Communion is supposed to give you some of Jesus' blood and flesh to eat, just in case the whole thing wasn't weird enough up to that point.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
So this is my question: is it more that a bizarre narrative (whether Christian or Q-anon, or whatever) is a expression of something deeper in the community? Or is it something that's warping the consciousness of the community? Or both?
Quoting Fire Ologist
I just typed it in and pushed the button.
I asked for a reason why such a thing is right from God. John 3:16 states what I asked: Whether Jesus' Sacrifice was necessary. I also asked what the difference is between the Gods of the Old and New Testaments.
The OP is asking about the lack of logic in the core Christian doctrine. I don't think it makes sense, but it's survived for about 1800 years. How does a story that makes no sense survive that long?
It wasn't weird at the time, Christianity took from common tropes. Maybe it is now and that's part of the reason it doesn't work as well.
Quoting frank
I don't think the narrative is so bizarre compared to other myths, it is bizarre if you expect it to be realistic in a modern way. But yes I think it is an expression of deeper needs of a community, and it has in turn an effect on the consciousness of the community too yes.
I think a community forms around or with certain ideas and narratives, otherwise it's not really a community. I've said this part before, but etymologically religion comes from the verb 'to bind together'... I think as an eu-social and language-using species we need something that fills that function.
It's pretty simple. But I shan't spoil it for you and others like you.
Basically, back then, there were much, much, much less words in existence that could only be communicated with context in speaking. Written languages are relatively new. Your so called "earliest recorded history" despite proof of intelligent human activity long before.
In the original language before what is commonly attributed to original language in the Bible, the words "large", "tall", and "intelligent" are the same word. So the "giants", or "sons of God" were basically your modern day intellects. Who had to be "flooded" or "overwhelmed with force" otherwise they would have killed off all humanity leaving only themselves. Remember, they weren't murderous, they just saw how we create our own hardship and wanted to relieve unneeded suffering in the world. But I digress. I've said far too much already. Ask and ye shall receive, of course.
We do our best to translate and listen to those greater than ourselves. But we inevitably always fail.
Perhaps people read this exchange and change their minds!
I think it's weirder than you're giving it credit for. John 3:16 is alluding to Abraham and Isaac, with God the Father as Abraham and Jesus as Isaac. That was not a common trope in the Roman world where Christianity took shape. There might have been knowledge of child sacrifice that took place in Carthage centuries earlier, but it would have been contemplated with dread, not devotion.
The twist is that in the Christian myth, Abraham and Isaac turn out to be the same entity. They're two aspects of one God. So at best, the story is horrifying, at worst, it just makes zero sense.
What myth is even close to that bizarre?
It's something you won't understand unless you're raised into it. You'd just go crazy and think the world is a simulation if you knew the truth.
Think of it as being on a desert island before a boat was invented. There's a whole new realm to be discovered, at least, according to those who believe in said branch of religion(s).
Really. Just imagine it. You're on this island, it's all you ever know. And some guy starts talking about how there's "a whole world out there basically like Heaven with flowing waterfalls, delicious meat, food, and such beauty it would make your heart skip a beat." You'd call the dude crazy. Laugh at him, maybe give him a little smack "back to reality" as you'd say, and continue on with your delusion that the world you know is all there is to know and all it ever shall be. That's what's going on here. At least, religious-minded people will equate your sentiment as parallel to the aforementioned scenario. Since you asked. You did ask, after all. At least hear out what those whom you're asking have to say.
I wouldn't expect the typical believer to be that concerned with thinking things through to this extend.
A long string of educated men apparently believed it.
God sent His Son out of love so that He can be both just and merciful. God is not wrathful: I dont know why the OT describes Him that way, but the NT makes it clear He is not.
The death itself is not what fundamentally saves you and I: it is that something of infinite dignity was offered to repay our sins. This could be, in principle, done in various ways.
What do you mean?
Why do you have such hostility for Christianity? This seems disingenuine, an ad hominem, and mean.
Frank, it isnt the Christian narrative. According to Christianity, when you sin you offend God and you cannot repay that sin; so God, out of love, offered Himself to repay that debt so that you can repent.
Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.
If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.
So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).
It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.
What would you say the sacrifice of Jesus was meant to accomplish?
Quoting Bob Ross
If Christianity was just the core message of Jesus, I would say I love Christianity. The doctrine of the propitiatory sacrifice just doesn't make any sense.
Where does it teach that?
Here is the comment which both motivated and suffices to answer your OP:
Quoting Leontiskos
I can understand your cinicism coming from a country where religion is such a dividing line. Im in a country where religion is barely mentioned, plays almost no role in life. Most people are atheist, or just ambivalent and you wouldnt know the difference between them unless you specifically asked.
I see this narrative, along with other ancient religious narratives as a mythology steeped in the kind of discourse that was used at the time. But with a kernel of truth underlying it. This was about the moral and ethical struggles involved in the birth of civilisation. Where order and cooperation were necessary for cohesion. This is laid out quite well in the Moses narrative.
This process probably happened many times in the ancient world before recorded history and the religious narratives which survived form the basis of our modern (last 2,000-3,000years) religions.
History is littered with examples of where order in civilised groups broke down.
I'm not cynical. :grin: I just put in the op in energetic terms.
Quoting Punshhh
I'm interested in the idea of underlying truth, especially when attempts to express that truth result in a convoluted story.
Rome was the cradle of Christianity and it was dying, not emerging. The old Roman religion still existed, but it had become dry and hollow, much as you describe your country's religious climate.
I explained this in my responses to you:
And:
But you didnt address them. Your view is a straw man of Christianity.
God is all-just and all-merciful; so He has to synthesize the two analogous to the debt example I gave. You seem to think God can just forgo punishment for sins and that is best; but that is mercy at the expense of justice. If the judge absolves a person of a rightful conviction sentence out of mercy, then they have sacrificed justice.
Im not a biblical scholar, so I will leave that to others. I will point you to the kernel of truth in the kernel of truth I gave you. That once humanity reached a certain point in intellectual development she was not any more governed by instinct and adaptation to ecosystem changes. But became unshackled from these constraints and was able to do many novel and imaginative things through the power of thinking.
So a new constraint was necessary to avoid all manner of destructive (to the ecosystem and themselves) behaviour. Religion and its precursors played this role.
Have you read my exchange with @frank?
Do you believe that Jesus is God?
Quoting Wikipedia
The reason they give for the fact that very few humans were actually saved from God's wrath is that you have to identify with Jesus in order to be saved. That identification allows you to partake of Jesus' punishment and thereby, be freed of original sin.
The issue regarding the fact that Jesus didn't stay dead is dealt with by saying his resurrection is about "renewal and restoration of righteousness."
Quoting Wikipedia
So this is the concept of a scapegoat. Scapegoating doesn't mean much intellectually, but at a deeper level, it fills a need. But Christianity turns this on its head by emphasizing that the scapegoat was innocent, and then going through his execution blow by blow: the crown of thorns, the nails in the hands and feet, the spear through the abdomen, the final scream before asking God, "Why have you forsaken me?"
This isn't how scapegoating is supposed to work. Do we still do scapegoating?
2 Corinthians 5:21"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (RSV)
All in all, I think I would accept the Penal substitution theory except for the part where God gives himself for the redemption of mankind. That was supposed to be God on the cross. God is the one who was demanding punishment for original sin (which was basically a matter of eating fruit from a particular tree.)
There is no third party. It's just God and humanity. Next: criticisms.
Are you fully and completely equating Jesus and God and saying God sacrificed himself? Maybe I'm not following what you're saying.
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
The message of Jesus.
Lets say you dont speak or write Chinese but you have a question about something written in Chinese. Do you think you will get anywhere stepping into room of non-Chinese speakers and asking them their opinions? Or then going into a room with some Chinese and English speakers and saying having no alphabet makes no sense and using characters cant be a precise way of communicating - the Chinese language is bizarre and cant be logical - but tell me, how do you speak Chinese anyway?
Thats what you are doing here. Are you looking for any actual information or just a sense of confirmation for your bias?
The Trinity is mysterious. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not like portions of one pie. Each one is the whole pie in terms of Godhood, power, and authority. Each one is fully God. This doctrine is borrowed from Neoplatonism. I think the problem sketched by the OP is coming from the fact that Christianity is the fusion of several distinct cultural outlooks. In this one area, it's more of a collision than a fusion. The idea of the Covenant (debt), divine retribution (the Penal substitution theory), and mystical Neoplatonism give us a myth that is inexplicable.
Quoting here
Shouldn't Jesus and the Holy Spirit have different definitions?
They're different persons. They're the same God.
Ok. Isn't that spacetime in which all things are? The Holy Spirit is defined as one in whom all things are.
The Holy Spirit is the same thing as the World Soul. It's from Platonic and Stoic philosophy. Probably closer to being what we would call natural law than spacetime.
Are you saying that the Holy Spirit is the sustainer of material? What is the role of Jesus here? We have the creator, Father, and the Holy Spirit, who is the sustainer. It seems that we need two Persons rather than three Persons. Moreover, the creator can be the sustainer as well. So, one Person is enough to do the job.
It works well as correspondences;
God-creator -law of natureFather
Holy SpiritmeduimenergyMother
Man-creation-matterSon
This system can be applied to many things.
In man, the son becomes the father, so we have the synthesis of Father and Son, resulting in a duality, the divine marriage, as in Shiva and Parvati. On consummation becoming one, again.
What is the duty of Son here if it is part of creation? To just die on the cross? Also, what is the definition of an Omnipotent God to you? I am asking since I think an Omnipotent God does not need a medium to create. Even I can create stuff if I am given a medium to act, so there should be a difference between God and us.
The son is the result of the creator engaging the medium. The creator cant create without engaging the medium. The son cant be the same as either the medium, or the creator. Because the son is the medium + the creative input. And the son cant be the same as the creator, because the son is what the creator has done to the medium.
However, the son is in a sense the creator, because the essence, or signature of the creator is expressed in the meduim. So we have three distinct things, creator, medium, creation.
Also without the son, we have a silent creator and a formless medium. It is only at the moment of creation that there is light and shade. Before this there is only a blank sheet of paper and an artist who has not produced any art.
If an omnipotent God creates something that is finite, then these rules must be present in some way.
Sorry, I forgot to answer your question. The duty of the son is to bring the creator into the world(the medium), upon the synthesis of son with father. Resulting in the divine marriage, the synthesis of creator and meduim, God and matter(energy, or medium).
I dont give much weight to an omnipotent God. I see the Omnis as a human invention, like infinity. I dont think there are any infinities.
You didn't answer the question: What is the duty of Jesus in creation?
I think that your version of God looks to human invention more. A God who needs a medium to act, exactly like humans!
Part of the reason is that they have been taught that belief is of greater import that consistency.
It follows that any argument you might offer is irrelevant, because what is at stake is not rational.
It's why the replies from believers consist mostly of repeating doctrine rather than responding to the inconsistency. To reaffirm the creed is to participate in the truth.
This also explains the segue into theology, which consists in attempting to cover, or as they might prefer, "explain", the inconsistency.
When faces with the profound, inexpressible, existential mystery, the rational response is I don't know.
But silence is difficult.
Its a pretty absurd story and hard to make sense of unless you buy into it emotionally and overlook its incoherance. I guess this is why many freethinkers often describe the New Testament as: God sacrificed Himself to Himself to save us from Himself, to protect us from the rules He Himself made.
Of course, ritual sacrifice is a big element in most religions because its so dramatic and attention grabbing. It lends itself to great slogans like this from John - For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son."
Quoting Banno
Indeed, they often find extraordinarily complex and implausible ways to justify doctrine. Its hard work trying to make human sense out of myth.
I cant tell you why the bible story of Jesus happens, youll have to ask a bible scholar about that.
You accept there is a medium to act in your post here;
Spacetime is the medium in our instance. God isnt spacetime, do you agree? (God is an omni present being who created spacetime).
So already you have two things. Then you have what happens in spacetime, which is referred to as Gods creation, man. Now you have three things.
God doesnt need a medium to act. Rather, when he acts, he creates the medium through which the act is expressed.
I have remained silent on the issue for a number of years. But you didnt seem to have much to say about that. Or even acknowledge that I was doing it.
Perhaps you were also being silent.
Can't say as I'd noticed.
How is that relevant to our discussion? Do you see how your depiction of Christianity was a straw man? That's all I was attempting to argue here.
I literally responded with a philosophical account of why God had to sacrifice Himself, devoid of faith, and @Frank ignored it. I understand many laymen do not take this approach and your critique here can be generally valid of those who do not have a robust understanding of their Christian beliefs; but I gave the consistent and rational position that Aquinas would endorse: so this isn't even a niche or unlikely position for the Catholic Church to endorse.
I have not. I haven't had the time to sift through all the posts in here.
Thanks for taking the time. :up:
Quoting Banno
Maybe they're right? Social stability is a life-and-death issue. Having a logical story isn't (unless it is.)
..
Its hard to have a discussion with a rock.
Especially when the rock carries a slogan on it like:
Argument is irrelevant
Belief is irrational
Further, the non-theists dont mind being the ones to characterize what theism is, and then waiting for the theists to answer their questions about their characterization.
Frank and others already seem to understand all there is to understand about Catholicism, and therefore, their conclusion of bizarre absurdity is not really the issue. The issue is how could someone who claims to be rational actually follow such bizarre absurdity.
That is a recipe for a non-conversation. A sparring match here in the coliseum.
I understand that you were talking about the Trinity. I was wondering what Jesus' role is in creation. He must be necessary to complete God; otherwise, a God with two or one persons is functional when it comes to the act of creation.
Quoting Punshhh
Sure, but I can imagine a God who does not need a medium to create. The point at which God exists and the point that God creates must coincide, though.
Quoting Punshhh
If the definition of the Holy Spirit is a thing in whom things exist, then we are dealing with spacetime since spacetime is what things exist within.
Quoting Punshhh
No, we have one thing, so-called God. You need to show me why the Holy Spirit is required.
Quoting Punshhh
What is your definition of the Holy Spirit? Did God even create the Holy Spirit? What do you mean by "through which the act is expressed"?
I was asking @frank why God does not simply forgive the sins of those who realize their mistake and repent. At the end, we are not perfect, so we are vulnerable to sin. Why does God need to torture Himself so He can then forgive our sins? What is the reason behind Jesus' sacrifice?
Because we're neurotic apes and just part-time rational? Evidently, the elasticity/plasticity of our mental/cognitive lives establishes in such a way that we may be taught, believe, or defend (tooth and nail) false dogmas and fictional stories. Incoherence and incorrigibility make irrational bedfellows in our heads.
Quoting frank
Heck no. :)
I'll buy that. The brain comes with an off-switch. We may flip that switch when we want to. This would contradict Nietzsche's view that religious beliefs hold the key to understanding culture. Official doctrine may be completely opaque. Private, personal beliefs are a different matter.
Have you read any of the great Christian classics, such as the Divine Comedy, The Brother's Karamazov, Dostoevsky's other work, Augustine's Confessions, Charles Dickens, The Viper's Tangle, etc.? Do you think these reflect the view you are putting forth?
A great many theologians would say that it is a grave mistake and egregious misreading to frame the Christian vision of salvation in terms of avoiding extrinsic punishment and gaining extrinsic reward. That's sort of the opposite of the point in texts such as the Commedia, The Mind's Journey Into God, the Ascent of Mount Carmel, etc. (e.g. texts that sort of represent the maximum pedigree within the Catholic tradition for instance).
That said, when it comes to views where God seems arbitrary and inscrutable (which do exist), I am not sure how much this really differs that much from fairly popular and influential forms of "secular" philosophical anthropology and ethics, nor from a view of nature as an inscrutable, inchoate "brute fact." Anti-realism doesn't really tend to address the issue of arbitrariness and inscrutability, it simply democratizes it. Yet to my mind, it's unclear how this makes it any less absurd. Indeed, there is a quite influential tradition that looks precisely at this sort of absurdity for its starting point. I am reminded here of Nietzsche's reading of Hamlet in the Birth of Tragedy, that action itself simply comes to seem absurd and demeaning.
Maybe on some readings that are both literalist and based on a sort of volanturist, divine command theory, which reduces the Fall entirely to the sin of "disobedience" (and makes morality writ large wholly a question of obedience and duty). But such theologies are distinctly modern, with the fundamentalist offshoots largely taking root in the 20th century, and yet your OP is about what "Christians" believe generally, and points to the Roman Catholic Church.
Summing up what Christians believe about Christ's mission in a sentence is a bit like claiming to be able to express "what philosophers think about ethics," or "the meaning of life," with similar brevity. There are many theories of the atonement, and they aren't "stand-alone," since an understanding of the Fall, man, the Imago Dei, etc. are all relevant.
Wikipedia is a fairly terrible resource here BTW. One could come away thinking most of the Church Fathers held to a "ransom theory," in the sense that Satan, almost co-equal with God, is the hinge point of the Incarnation, which would be a rather horrendous misreading, or that "Sin" and "Death" represent a sort of polytheistic pantheon of evil gods who need to be paid off. In reality, Patristic theories tend to be simultaneously "healing/therapy" theories, recapitulation/typographic theories, ransom theories, and moral exemplar theoriesi.e., something much more akin to the modern "kaleidoscope view."
If you're interested, a classic treatment of this (although Western) is Gustaf Aulén's Christus Victor, which can be found free online since it's quite old. If you're just interested in Evangelical theories, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views is from a good series of comparative essays. Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views, is also relevant, and a bit more diverse, including a Catholic and Orthodox view. Or, my personal favorite, Jean-Claude Larchet's, Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses, which, while expensive, has been read for free on YouTube, Spotify, etc. (the quality isn't great, but the guy does a lot of great stuff). Orthodox Psychotherapy by Hierotheos Vlachos is a bit shorter and also good.
It's worth noting though that the sort of extreme volanturism that makes all of ethics and Goodness into obligation, or duty, has had an profound influence on Western thought, including contemporary athiesm. It pays to know this stuff, because even the avowedly areligious or secular are often enmeshed in systems that spring from a particular theology (Nietzsche's athiesm being a great example, in that it arguably fails to transcend the assumptions of German Protestantism). Indeed, my suspicion is that athiest critics of Christianity tend to gravitate towards attacking volanturist "command" theology not only because it is in many ways an easy target, but precisely because they understand it best because it is the tradition from which much influential athiest and secular thought emerged.
John Millbank's Social Theory and Theology or Charles Taylor's work are great examples documenting this sort of phenomenon (i.e. the way the "secular," scientific paradigms, and particularly the social sciences sprung from theological views; just consider here the switch in the early modern period to the language of "laws" and "obedience" in the physical sciences, which still dominates today). Another example comes down through Kant, and can be seen in Rawls' extremely influential elevation of right over goodness, and the fact that the good ends up being defined wholly in terms of the individual, much as if they were the image of the Reformed God.
For example, even athiests will often demand that any truly "ethical" or "moral" ought be framed always in terms of obligation, a "thou shalt," that can take the form of a "law" or "universal maxim." But this isn't so much a result of a Christian heritage, as the creation of a particular sort of modern Christianity, and it makes sense in a metaphysics of will, where God is sheer will and man created in his image (a picture that has had tremendous influence on fields like economics). Hence, I've often come across the claim from anti-realists that divine command theory is the only sort of ethics that would make sense (if God was real, but of course he isn't). But to read Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov's "if there is no God, then everything is permitted," in this light would be a radical misreading. Dostoevsky, coming out of the Eastern tradition, is concerned with intrinsic telos and a formal good that is inseparable from what man is.
As I tried to explain to @frank (but they rudely ignored it), it is because God is all-just. To forgo the repayment required for an offense is to forgo justice. Oftentimes, mercy (viz., alleviating someones deserved misery) is contradictory to justice (viz., upholding what is owed).
God is all-just and all-merciful, so there is a necessary synthesis of both in God. The perfect synthesis of the two for God is to forgive our sins if we are repentant (viz., so as to be merciful) as long as a proportionate price has been paid for them by a representative of the group (viz., so as to be just). In this way, the price has been paid and an alleviation of misery can be done.
Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you would be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.
If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.
So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).
It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.
The act of torturing yourself or others is evil. So, God of the New Testament also allowed evil for whatever reasons one can imagine. You call the reason Justice. How could a God who is Love allow Evil for Justice!? Permitting or doing evil is not allowed in Christianity. This is very similar to the God of the Old Testament, who allowed evil for Justice!
Accepting that account requires accepting that Jesus is the son of god... it's in the first sentence. That's not philosophy.
Webster's dictionary defines "torture" as purposeful infliction of pain or suffering for no other purpose than to do so.
Reason and rationale, or intent in the legal landscape, is as wide as the days are long. Why exercise or eat healthy if we're all just going to die one day? Is that not the definition of torture for someone who holds such a view as paramount?
Me thinks you've fallen prey to the Geuttier argument. In simple terms: stupid things are not evil, they're just stupid. Meaning, while ignorance is the cause of most acts that qualify as such, at least, they ensure they won't be remedied, they're ultimately merely a catalyst to something that would fare quite well without any such factors.
:wink:
Fair. So it comes down to what you value.
:up:
On something like the satisfaction view of Saint Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, this is the general approach. I know some Catholic thinkers (e.g. D.C. Schindler) who are ambivalent about this move, seeing it as a useful corrective to overly concretized "ransom" theologies that overinflated the role of Satan, but also as the start of the move towards volanturism (although this has more to do with Anselm's bifurcation of goodness into "justice" and "benefit" in De Casu Diaboli). The fear here is that "justice" becomes a sort of arbitrary, or at least inscrutable remainder of the Good, which is not itself desirable or beneficial.
I don't think this is necessarily a problem for satisfaction atonement theology. Afterall, Plato spends much of the Republic trying to explain how justice can be sought for the sake of something else and for its own sake.
There is also debate over whether satisfaction in this form was necessary, or simply the most fitting and appropriate solution:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02055a.htm
Now, if justice is truly best, then a deified humanity will prefer justice to unjust benefit, so that's a wrinkle perhaps.
But, in favor of the "kaleidoscopic view:"
Christ is tortured and executed by men through their free choices. He didn't crucify or scourge himself after all.
In Flannery O'Connor's novel, Wise Blood, Hazel Motes proclaims his Church Without Christ where "the dead stay dead, the lame don't walk, and the blind don't see." That's one line from a novel by a Catholic writer. Hazel Motes doesn't think he has sinned or needs salvation.
Another reference, this by Norman Greenbaum, a Jewish songwriter. In his big hit, (one big hit?) Spirit in the Sky, he sings...
Never been a sinner, I never sinned
I got a friend in Jesus
So you know that when I die
He's gonna set me up
with the spirit in the sky
I'm sure there are deep, solid theologians who also think sin and punishment are overrated, but I don't have a quick reference.
If I remember, it was St. Augustine who cooked up the theory of Adam and Eve ----> Original Sin ----> Jesus ----> the crucifixion ----> salvation. Christianity might have been better if Mr. Augustine had stayed in academia as a pagan rhetoric professor. But maybe not. Paul was big on sin and damnation too. Maybe Paul should have stayed in the tent business. But maybe not.
One can put together a decent religion by taking Jesus' commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you." to heart and skipping the rest of it.
The religion in which a person is raised (pick a religion, any religion) is likely to be 'sticky' like burrs in a dog's fur, flies on fly-paper, etc. It can be difficult to extricate one's self from it. I've spent years trying to comb out the large barbed burrs of Calvinism, the dripping glue of unavoidable sin, the various mysteries and gross contradictions of Christianity. It's not the theology that's tough; it's the emotional connections.
Trinity Sunday is not popular among preachers; explaining the trinity is worse than trying to explain quantum theory. When it comes to the 3 for 1, I'm a Unitarian. Bertrand Russel said that "Believing in transubstantiation means you are ready to believe anything." I quoted Russel to a Jesuit priest; his response was "Exactly!" I was raised a protestant and didn't have to deal with bread and wine literally becoming the body and blood of Christ.
The answer is through intermediaries, if we take a look at the first verse of the bible, there are some clues;
God created heaven, (the place where God and all the angels and heavenly hosts reside).
God created the earth, (the place where humans, animals and plants etc reside)
Now heaven is an intermediary and God only resides is essence, because he is infinitely large etc. So the way I see it is that heaven is in some way a place where transcendence happens. Transcendence of God, and what God says and the hosts and angels, translate, or draw it down into something finite.
So one way of seeing it is that when we are thinking, or communicating with God, we are actually referring to one of these heavenly hosts, because God is infinitely inaccessible, removed, distant from us. We cant even conceive of it.
This gives us the idea that God is two people, the infinite God and his representative intermediary in heaven, the Holy Ghost.
Then the third person is the Christ(Jesus), the role of Christ is to be the representative of God on earth. Now in a sense this means humanity as a whole is this representative, because humanity has access to God via the heavenly hosts(the Holy Ghost).
The reason why there is a representative on earth is to bring(create) heaven on earth. Thats why they are doing all of this. This is Gods creation, for some reason he wants to create an earth, where heaven resides.
So in order to create a heaven on an earth three parts, or people are required. God, the Holy Ghost and the christ(humanity).
These can be written in correspondences;
GodGodfather-infinity
Holy Ghostheavenmotherfinite universe
Christ-earthson-a world where infinity is present/understood(heaven on earth)
* I dont hold with infinity per say.
It was an account through natural theology of why God would necessarily freely choose to sacrifice the Son (which doesn't necessarily have to be Jesus) and how it is out of love and not wrath. This is philosophical: it is not dependent on revealed theology.
Even if it were (as maybe I am providing why Jesus specifically had to be sacrificed), the part of the argument I gave is not a historical argument from revealed theology even if it presupposes some truths only derived from revealed theology.
E.g., I can make an philosophical argument for the metaphysics of a mind that presupposes some scientific claims which are not themselves philosophical; like so I can give an philosophical account of why Jesus would be sacrificed which presupposes Jesus was God through revealed theology which is not itself philosophical.
@frank is incapable of responding to my argument for some reason and insists that God meaninglessly sacrificed himself to himself out of wrath. It's just a shame they are unwilling to have a productive conversation.
I read your post. It just didn't make any sense to me.
Torture is defined as the action or practice of inflicting severe pain or suffering on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something. It was common as a mode of punishment in ancient times, such as stoning.
Quoting Outlander
I was mentioning that allowing torture/evil is wrong for whatever reason for a God who is Love. Jesus' death was a part of God's Divine Plan. So, I was wondering how God, who is Love, could have such a plan.
So if someone killed your wife or kid or whatever, and you wanted to make them suffer. That's just magically not the definition of torture. Me thinks you're a bit spirited toward the letter of the law and not the spirit. If I may suggest such.
Jesus could prevent such a disastrous fate! And no, Jesus' death was not the result of men practicing their free will, but their ignorance! So, God put Himself in the hands of ignorant people to achieve a part of His Divine Plan. Apparently, people could not be held responsible for their actions since they were ignorant. Of course, they wouldn't harm Jesus if they were convinced that Jesus is God! So, who could be held responsible for this situation if not God?
Apparently, God knows how to create things, and he does not need a medium. Creation could be the universe. And of course, Earth was not created but formed as a result of dust rotating around the sun.
The act of me causing suffering to the killer is a torture/evil as well.
In the passage from the bible, earth means the universe.
How do you know that God knows how to create things? And how do you know he does not need a medium?
But Earth was formed way later than the creation of the universe.
Quoting Punshhh
Do you mean that Earth and the universe were synonyms in ancient times?
Quoting Punshhh
If there is a God and He does not know how to create, then there is only God. There is creation. Therefore, God knows how to create things.
Quoting Punshhh
Isn't the medium itself created? If yes, then God knows how to create things.
First, I agree, I think it's fair to point out that ignorance reduces culpability. However, isn't it fair to say that both ignorance and culpability exist on a sliding scale? Those who chose to have Jesus killed were aware of the signs and wonders. Indeed, he preforms one as he is being taken into custody.
It's clear in the text that at best, Pilate is at least aware he is about to beat and execute an innocent man. He tries to avoid this, but only to the degree that it won't inconvenience him or cost him anything. His conversation with Christ is full of rhetorical dodges, and he ultimately agrees to kill an innocent man (one who he had reason to think might be more) because it's the path of least resistance. As Jesus says, had the signs and wonders he preformed been given so Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented, just as the Ninevehites repented at the coming of Jonah. Consider also the number of signs and wonders Judas had seen.
So it seems fair to say that the people involved are not without any culpability. More to the point, they are not being coerced into their acts, and they have plenty of reason to think their acts are wrong even if Jesus isn't God. The relevant actions seem about as free as any human acts are. The men making them are not slaves, but men of power and status, acting to protect that power and status (and arguably, a corrupted self-serving vision of what God wants). I think it is fair to say that Jesus' ministry is not such that it "forced them to kill him," or even "tricked" or "coerced," them into doing so.
Sure, Jesus says as much. He could call down angels to destroy the Romans and Jews, or he could have simply cut the deal Satan wanted to make with him out in the desert and pursued temporal power and made himself emperor of Rome, and then the world instead.
The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (you can find it separate) is one of my favorite looks at Christ's decision not to rule as a sort of benevolent dictator and instead to suffer and die as a servant.
As an aside here, very early in the Inferno, Dante is led through the vestibule of Hell, where those angels and men who decided not to pick a side in life are forced to reside. Hell will not have them, for failing to enter into rebellion, and Heaven will not have them either, for failing to be loyal to the Good. Dante mentions seeing the one who "made the great refusal," which might be a few people, but I think it's most fitting if it's Pilate. At the outset then, we see Pilate, who allowed man to kill God out of indifference and self-interest, and at the very bottom we see Judas, who actively worked to betray Christ. I think this geography gets at the issue of culpability quite well.
Okay. Your basic, telling a kid fire is hot instead of momentarily putting their hand on a stove or over said fire, for example. Of course. That's right and proper. Anything else is the hallmark of a beast or savage. Understandable.
So, basically, once someone kills, say your child or mother or father or what have you, any sort of punishment is unjust simply for the fact "what's done is done." Surely you don't mean that. Do you?
Edit: Simply put, all punishment or "justice after the fact" does, not including incarceration of said individual so that they cannot further degrade society, is bring an unneeded and ill-formed sense of "justice" in the mind of the victimized, when in reality all it takes is knowledge and proficiency in understanding the nature of life as it is (perhaps forgiveness?). It doesn't bring the person back. It doesn't undo what was done. It just makes whoever was made unhappy as a result less unhappy. Usually temporarily. Which so does watching a cheap video online or a clown running up and performing a quick skit. Is that aligned to your belief or is it in opposition? If the latter, explain why.
The main question is why the ignorance exists. It is a part of creation for sure; otherwise, the first sin would not have taken place. Now, please tell me, who is responsible for the existence of sin, creatures or God!?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If you think that showing a wonder is a good reason in the mind of a just being for accepting that what you say is right, then how could you resolve the problem of why Jesus was killed? Why was the judge not convinced? Either he was not a just person, which brings the ignorance within again. Or, the judge was wise and was convinced; therefore, Jesus did not die on the cross as Islam says. Which option do you pick?
How, God, could fail to leave such important ambiguity in the history of humans, His Divine plan?
Creatures, on pretty much all mainstream accounts of the Fall.
Does it? What's the assumption here, something like:
P1. If anyone does evil, it is always because they are ignorant.
P2. If anyone is ignorant, it is always God who has made them ignorant.
C: Therefore, Christ actually killed himself when he was executed.
Would that be it?
Anyhow, it seems to me that negligence is a thing, as well as willful ignorance. There are also cases where people simply do what they know is wrong. Pilate would be an example of the latter. He knew that crucifying an innocent man was wrong, and he did it anyway. That such an act is wrong is not only consistent with the culture that produced the NT, but within the context of the Latin culture that Pilate came from as well (e.g., it would be a blameworthy act in the context of the Aeneid, which is from the same epoch).
Saying that Pilate was somehow forced to crucify an innocent man because, had he known it was God and that he'd be punished, he wouldn't have done it, seems to me a bit like saying a serial killer was forced to kill some child, because, had they known the child was important, and that they would have been caught for the murder due to the resources deployed to catch the offender, they wouldn't have committed it, or that someone who cheats on their spouse is somehow "unfree" in choosing to cheat if they are ignorant of the fact that they will be caught cheating. Certainly, these are cases where a person knows enough to be culpable. And more to the point, they aren't being coerced into what they know to be immoral acts, they are choosing immoral acts as an expedient means of achieving ends they desire.
Yes, they had no idea of a universe. Their universe was earth.
We dont know any of that, because the [I]infinite[/I] God is inconceivable to us.
As above. How do you know that God doesnt need a medium?
The question is why creatures are vulnerable to doing wrong/sin. They sin because they are imperfect and ignorant. We can fix ignorance through education, but we cannot do anything for imperfection. God is not vulnerable to sin since He is Perfect and All Wise. He basically cannot do wrong since doing wrong is out of question because He is all-wise. He cannot even bother with sin since He is perfect. The next question is why the perfect God didn't create a perfect God. Perhaps, God could not possibly create another God. I have no argument against or in favor of this. But if God is perfect and cannot create a perfect God, then creation is alright! I don't know what God is going to do with imperfection in us. If He could fix imperfection in us, He presumably could create a perfect Human at the first point! According to Scriptures, Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, but God didn't allow them to eat from the Tree of Life. If this passage is correct, then there is a question why God didn't allow them to eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal as well, so they could become God. God apparently was not the only God in this scene since God mentioned that they would become like Us if they eat from the Tree of Life as well. So, why did God make an exception for them, disallowing the Tree of Life!? They could become God, and all problems would be solved. Instead, He cursed them and sent them out of Paradise. To be honest, I don't see the logic behind the Scriptures.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't equate evil with wrong. I have a thread on "From morality to equality", here. I discussed good and evil, right, and wrong there. So I change your argument slightly in the following form:
P1. If anyone does wrong, it is always because they are ignorant or imperfect.
P2. If anyone is ignorant or imperfect, it is always God who has made them ignorant or imperfect.
C: Therefore, Christ actually killed himself when he was executed.
Yes, Jesus actually killed Himself.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You are either in a state of belief or in a state of certainty. You cannot possibly be in a state of uncertainty if you are shown a wonder. Jesus could make a wonder to change the judge's mind. Jesus was killed. Therefore, Jesus did not show a wonder to the judge. That is one scenario. Another feasible scenario is that Jesus was not killed since He showed a wonder; therefore, Islam is at least correct in saying that Jesus was not crucified. Therefore, I seriously doubt about the idea of NT and the culture around it, like equating right with good and wrong with evil.
Why were they not told the truth about Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars?
Quoting Punshhh
We can be certain about those mentioned things.
John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life"
There is a long list of scriptures that clearly say that Jesus' death was God's plan.
Doesn't it depend on the circumstances behind the debt? If a heroin addict is in debt to his dealer, is not paying off the debt "unjust"? What about being in debt to a person charging you for ransom or blackmail? Do those people deserve to be paid back?
How do we know he felt any pain or suffered? He's part of some powerful trinity, right? For all we know, he blocked the pain.
I have an idea: The person who killed my family is innocent if the act is due to his/her genes. Otherwise, you need to know what brought the murderer to a situation to perform such an act. The main causes of the crime are a lack of proper education or uncertainty in life. We can only fix education. Once this is done, it is what it is: a perfect life!
But if we cannot make meaningful distinctions between such notions as justice and mercy, then we cannot use them to explain the nature of god.
Weirdly, Thomism undermines itself, showing that theology is impossible.
If course, Thomism has responses to these criticisms. But equally, more theology simply serves to undermine theology further.
I was talking about legitimate debt. Are you suggesting that the idea of sin is illegitimate?
Sure, but that doesn't imply that Pilate isn't blameworthy, or that Pilate lacked freedom in any special sense when he chose to crucify Christ (i.e., he did not lack freedom any more or any less than when he had anyone else crucified, or at least, there doesn't seem to be any indication of this).
There might be a stronger case to be made in the other direction with Judas. Consider John 6:64:
"Yet there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. "
And 70-71:
"Then Jesus replied, Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil! 71 (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.)"
But this is really just the same old question of if divine foreknowledge precludes freewill, which has generally (but not always) been answered in the negative (e.g. Saint Augustine, Boethius, etc.)
Yet there are also to consider the mentions of Satan "entering" Judas at John 13:27 and Luke 22:3. In general, demoniacs are not represented as blameworthy in the NT, so this [I]could[/I] be read as absolving Judas. Historically, it hasn't though, the idea being that Judas has already conspired to betray Christ at this point, with Satan's appearance merely signaling the point of no return. Also, in Matthew 27:35 he repents of having betrayed Jesus and tries to return the money he was paid, claiming he has "sinned," before deciding to hang himself.
My invocation of Thomism here was to give @Frank a reasonable Christian answer to their OP's blatant straw manning of Christianity; which doesn't necessitate that I accept the metaphysics.
On a separate note, I actually do find a lot of Thomism plausible. However, I know you have a lot of knowledge of philosophy and if there's alternatives that you would like to discuss with me then I am all ears.
Yes, I suppose that's a possible response, although I Peter 4 suggests that Christ suffered.
I agree. My point is that you can't take the responsibility for Jesus' death off of God without denying the doctrine of the propitiatory sacrifice. You can't resolve the conundrum that God is supposed to have sacrificed himself, to himself, to save us from himself, without denying the Trinity.
I think the best answer to this would be what a Southern Baptist seminary student told me after realizing that I was really trying to understand how he could believe in hell. He paused, cupped his hands together, and said, "Christianity is about loving another person."
Baptist seminary students read the New Testament in Greek. They don't fool around. But this one student was willing to just push all of that to the side to say what religion meant to him. It's in people like that that Christianity is still a living religion. In other words, the answer to the OP: yes, it doesn't make any sense. Christianity is about loving another person.
Quoting Bob Ross
I've suggested silentism as the most reasonable response to such issues - admitting that we don't know the answer.
We can though, at least for St. Thomas, since they're valid conceptual distinctions. For comparison, consider that goodness and truth (and all the other transcendentals) are also merely conceptual distinctions within St. Thomas's thought as well. That is, they don't add anything to Being, which is maximally general. Rather they consider it under some particular aspect (e.g. as relates to desirability/appetite under Goodness). But if, as you say, a distinction being merely conceptual renders it meaningless, then there should also be no meaningful difference between truth, goodness, and existence. Yet there clearly seems to be a meaningful difference between these within Thomistic accounts.
Likewise, the difference between a cup that is half full and half empty is conceptual, but not meaningless.
You didn't just read it, frank, you ignored it and responded to low hanging fruits. I've given you many opportunities to engage and you refuse, which is your perogative; however, it saddens me that you go along with people in this forum in straw manning and condescending claims about views when people have and are willing to provide you with the real positions that you should be responding to.
I understand for @Banno Christianity probably holds no water and has every right to desecrate on it in here (although that also is disappointing); but you made the OP: there's no excuse. I responded to your OP with the Thomistic response and you ignored it and continued to act like no one can give any responses to what you are asking. Banno isn't obligated to read all the other posts in someone else's OP and respond accordingly.
All I am saying is why do you create an OP asking about a topic in a condescending and straw-manning way just to ignore anyone that gives you a response that is actually challenging for you?
It looked to me like you weren't considering the way the Trinity plays into the problem. You wouldn't answer me when I asked you if you think Jesus is God. So from my perspective, it's you who is being reticent. I just exited the discussion when you wouldn't answer me.
@frank wrote in the OP:
Don't you agree this is a straw man? The Catholic Church does not teach this nor is it an iron-manned position on the topic. I think we all can agree that it is intellectually vicious to straw man positions when creating an OP; especially when it is written in a condescending way.
I would not think to purposefully desecrate and straw-man anyone's position in an OP on a philosophy forum: that's just disingenuine, closed minded, and dishonest. Can we agree on that? Can we not agree on being intellectually virtuous when discussing ideas on a philosophy forum?
I don't know what that means. Can you elaborate please?
An absurdity can seem internally consistent.
This:
Quoting frank
may be as helpful as Summa Theologica.
I wouldn't answer because it is irrelevant; but ok, I'll answer to further the discussion. I don't believe Jesus is the Son of God.
This is irrelevant because:
1. I was providing a view that is internal coherent and plausible within Christianity to address why God sent His Son to die on the cross; and
2. One could hold the view I gave and not be a Christian. Nothing about what I said actually entailed that Jesus was the Son of God. It entailed that the Son of God would have to incarnated at some point to be sacrificed for our sins in some way.
Asking me if I believe that Jesus was God is like:
1. Me asking "what are reasons someone would believe that we have a soul?".
2. You give me an exposition of one avenue someone could take to believe in us having a soul.
3. I ignore your exposition and ask you "do you believe that we have a soul?"
Well, that's irrelevant if you think about it: you could hold that we have no souls and that your exposition suffices to give a plausible account of us having a soul relative to some metaphysical theory.
If we're talking about legitimate debt, don't we need to talk about legitimate sin? What, exactly, is a sin? Is masturbation something I need to be forgiven for? Eating shellfish? Homosexuality? Anal sex with my wife? Making a graven image? Suffering a witch to live? Taking the lord's name in vain?
How would Peter know, he wasn't even there?
I didn't ask if you believe Jesus was the Son of God. I asked if you think Jesus is God. Catholics do believe that. In fact, most Christians do.
:up:
Frank asked "How does a person [moderator redacted] make sense of this?"
You provide an answer in the sophistry of Thomism, which is quite unlikely to appease Frank.
(I hope the mod redacting was not one of those participating in the discussion.)
This is not how I would put it, although it's better than your OP. While we can speak of God's "wrath" analogously, the Fathers are pretty much unanimous on the idea that God is immutable and, crucially, impassible.
For example:
Or:
You can see something quite similar in how the Patristics address God's "repentance," for example.
But as a I pointed out earlier, even setting aside "wrath," to say the primary goal is: "to save us from himself," makes it seem like the problem of sin is entirely extrinsic. That is, it suggests that the entire problem with sin is that it has made God mad, not that it is inherently bad and bad for man. This would imply that if God simply chose not to "have a cow" over sin, there would be no issue at all. Thus, the Christian narrative would be all about how this extrinsic evil is removed from humanity, or at least some of humanity.
Yet this is not how Christians have traditionally understood sin (i.e., in the traditional Orthodox and Catholic Churches). I will allow that there are some forms of Protestant theology that hew a bit closer to this (although I imagine they might have qualms with this description as well). There are also many forms of Protestant theology that don't.
Probably not. Bigots almost always think their bigotry is rationally and morally justified, and that engaging in bigotry is a moral act. They also tend to be extremely confident in their understanding of the groups they are bigoted against. No one understands women more than the misogynists of the "Manosphere", no on understands African American culture better than White Nationalists, no one understands Islam better than folks like Tommy Robinson, and no one understands two millennia of Christian thought better than internet atheists.
A Catholic accepts the doctrine of the Trinity, which says the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. A Catholic also accepts the doctrine of the propitiatory sacrifice, as outlined in John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life"
Put the two together, and we have God sacrificing Himself, to Himself, to save us from Himself. If there's a part of this you deny, you're enjoying the good luck of living in a world where the Protestants long ago took charge and provided religious freedom so that you don't have to worry about being burned at the stake for heresy. :wink:
It takes the difference between real and conceptual distinctions for granted, or at least, tries to understand them properly in context. I don't see how that's an absurd distinction though.
Quoting Banno
But wasn't your original argument that Thomism was internally self-undermining?
Quoting Banno
But again, this only seems like a valid criticism if "meaningful" distinctions must be real, instead of conceptual.
You're equivocating here between your initial formulation, which sounds like straight penal substitution theology, and the idea of propitiation. Something like:
God became man and freely offered Himself to save us from sin and eternal separation from Him.
God, in His love and justice, sent His Son to conquer sin and death by His Passion.
Through His suffering and death, Christ made satisfaction for our sins and reconciled us to the Father.
...would be sound.
Not really. It seems you think it consistent, but using a way of talking about consistency that is itself Thomist.
Someone who thinks there is a difference between justice and mercy will not need an explanation of how they are different in the face of the simplicity of god, if they do not accept the simplicity of god.
And so, around and around, the various cogs spin without meshing.
God became man and allowed Himself to be tortured to death. Do you agree with this? Taking baby steps here.
I'm not holding my breath. I don't think there are any teeth on the cogs.
I don't see it gaining much traction for you and I.
Best leave it here, then, huh?
Thanks everybody for your answers!
I can articulate it just fine, it's just based on a claim that is at best (and this is probably being too charitable), very misleading. Feel free to fire:
[Reply="frank;d16080"]
...into ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc. and they will confirm this just as well as every Christian in this thread. Or you can look at some of the many Catholic responses to the idea that the atonement is primarily about wrath.
For example:
Or consider the article from Catholic.com entitled "How NOT to Understand the Cross."
It says of this formulation:
Orthodox theology is even further from this idea. It tends to focus on the healing of humanity and the conquest of death and sin, hence the Paschal refrain: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life!" which is repeated throughout the Paschal service and in the Horologian between Pascha and Pentecost, says nothing about wrath, only victory. Indeed, since there is always diversity of views in theology, it might make most sense to look at the liturgy, or the sermon preached in every Church on its holiest holiday, as it commemorates Christ's death and resurrection:
Is the Reformed view bad theology? I think so. But it also seems to me to be in many ways most in line with some of the core precepts that have come to dominate modern secular culture (which is maybe why it is the easiest for athiests to understand). There is a deep historical influence there. That Hume's Guillotine would be formulated first by someone who grew up in the context of the Reformed tradition is not surprising for instance.
That makes condemnation to Hell a little more horrifying. God has no feelings about it one way or the other.
We're always happy to call the hospital chaplain to tell grieving families that God doesn't really give a shit. :grin:
I'm looking forward to your doing so, then.
You are always giving psychological explanations, which amount to just-so stories, in order to try to debunk what you don't agree with.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus Your explanations lack cogent argument usually. Your articulations seem to amount to "get lost in the wall of words, and quotes from and references to, supposed authorities, many of them obscure". But perhaps I'm being too charitable.
It's not a psychological explanation. The rise of volanturism and nominalism and attacks on final causality [I]were[/I] explicitly based on the idea that natures (and thus the final causes related to them) put God in a sort of metaphysical straitjacket. The reformers also took issue with prevailing notions of human virtue. Hume's finding is the natural consequence of the removal of final causality from ethics and the grounding of goodness in the appetites to the exclusion of the intellect. That's not a psychological influence, it's a direct conceptual influence. Hume is just charting one of the consequences of the the tradition he is a part of.
As Harrison's The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science documents, these shifts were also quite important for the development of empiricism. Theology is all over philosophy and the social sciences into the 19th century. Obviously, this left a legacy.
This is ridiculous. By all means, please explain to me the deep "criticism" I am missing in:
It looks to me like a false claim (the bolded) paired with insults, and confusion about why "Christians" (apparently all Christians now) don't know that this terse (arguably caricatured) rendition of penal substitution atonement theory is "the Christian narrative?"
What's this deep criticism it will be hard to articulate?
Feel free to also explain why even that particular brand of theology would be ridiculous [I]if God existed[/I]. Presumably, if this is a particularly egregious narrative, it cannot be just because it posits the existence of a God/Gods, otherwise the Christian narrative would be nothing special in terms of world religions. So why would it be ridiculous for God to act in the way described?
I have my own reasons for thinking it's deeply flawed. However, I think it will actually prove quite difficult for many ethical systems to explain why an all powerful being ought to act or be one way and not any another (in part because some of these are intellectual descendents of this same theology).
Is it?
You asked what ChatGPT thought. It said:
and proceeds to unpack a series of issues, ending with
It might be helpful to at least recognise the difficulty had by a non-Catholic, in coming to terms with what is not as simple a doctrine as it might seem for Catholics.
The full Chat is at:
https://chatgpt.com/share/687f097f-f0a0-800f-900a-c8f130cc2bb9
(Here I am attempting to use ChatGPT to fill in the account it seems to me you have been unable to present)
It looks like avoidance.
Time for some silentism perhaps.
In one model of damnation, hell is not a consequence of God's wrath. God loves all but can't force people to accept that love. Hell is seen as the natural consequence of the sinner's rejection of that love.
As a human analogy, consider the case of a father that loves his son who decided to join a criminal gang. The father tries as best as he can to convince his son to abandon his ways. Out of his pride, however, the son rejects his father's love and, in fact, resents him. This despite the fact that, after all, the son is actually acting for his own detriment. As time passes, we can imagine that the son gradually becomes more and more entrenched in his ways and it becomes more and more difficult for him to change his ways - not because he is not offered the possibility to change his ways but it is because as time passes, the son becomes more and more entrenched in his evil ways.
In another model of damnation, hell is simply the 'just punishment' that a sinner deserves. Such a punishment is not made out of revenge. In this case, mercy from that punishment is offered from God but the sinner rejects that offer and, then, he suffers the just punishment.
An analogy here would be the following one. Consider a man that made a crime and he is offered the chance of have his penalty significantly reduced if he sincerely repents and cooperate with justice and law enforcement. This man, however, refuses to just do that and he is sentenced to his own penalty. Again, it's not that the judge sentences the criminal out of revenge but, simply, he gives him the right punishment.
Note that the two models here do not view punishment as due to revenge, hatred or indifference from God's part and perhaps they can be reconciled with one another.
You just continue to be disingenuous. I'm done talking to you.
Cc: @Banno @frank
:up:
I can tell now that neither of them want to have a productive conversation: they just want to straw man and desecrate on their "enemy". It's intellectually vicious and stupendous.
BANNO. @frank ignored the Thomistic response I gave: even if you don't think that kind of response will be received as plausible by frank, they didn't even try to respond to one of the top answers historically to the very issue they wanted to address in the OP; and they continued to desecrate on the idea of God's sacrifice.
How can you not agree that that is intellectual vicious? It doesn't matter if at the end of the day you find it implausible: it's one of the most prominent responses to this issue.
No we don't need to talk about it: all you need to concede is that there are some legitimate sins; then God would have to incarnate himself through hypostatic union to absolve those sins. We don't need to agree on specifically what is sinful.
He said:
Quoting frank
So it seems your attempt to reach him was unsuccessful.
Frank would not be the first name to come to mind hereabouts, as being "intellectually vicious".
I gather form your other comments that Thomism was more a rhetorical strategy than a statement fo your actual view? Now for Thomism, Jesus is god. I think I see why Frank may have not understood your point.
Yes, I was providing a common Christian view to why Jesus had to die: I wasn't commenting on if I am a Christian or not. I clarified that to @frank and they ignored that too! :roll:
Wait a minute. If God says masturbation or gay sex or eating the wrong thing is a sin that needs to be absolved, isn't that the end of the discussion right there? Even if I grant that other sins are legitimate and might need absolving, the God of the Bible, by declaring nonsinful actions sinful, is obviously not the entity to do it.
Thank you for reminding me why this is such a dangerous technology in the hands of people who don't understand it (particularly GPT, with its default sycophantic tilt).
Ask it, or Grok, or Gemini, "is this (Frank's post), an accurate presentation of Catholic theology?" That's the point. If you ask GPT to explain why anything is deep, it will come up with something. The point isn't that there isn't tension in atonement theology, but rather than Frank has merely offered a factually incorrect statement paired with "Christians are so dumb they must have had their brains removed. Why don't they know the truth of my factually incorrect assertion," and then you have tried to defend this bigotry as "deep criticism."
You can't just post things as your own assertion. AI is designed to tell users what they want to hear and comes packaged with strong confirmation bias. GPT in particular will praise almost anything you assert as your own as "deep" and "profound" (including plans like selling your own excrement online). This is not how you should use AI, and precisely why it leads people to psychosis and is dangerous.
So, following common advice, open a totally new conversation, and just paste it in quotes with the question "is this accurate?"(i.e., indicate that that you want feedback, and not for it to enter it's default sycophant mode).
If I wrote:
"Most athiests believe nothing is good or bad. Athiest science teaches that molesting children is fine and just as good as giving them medical care! (false claim, tangentially related to real claims, re anti-realism vis-á-vis values, that are being caricatured). How are these people so dumb? Their brains must have been cut out. Do most athiests not realize that athiesm implies this? Do they just ignore the teachings of their science?"
This would be about on par with Frank's post. Would it be a "deep criticism" because it (barely) touches on real issues related to anti-realism?
Hume takes the categories and assumptions of his milieu as a starting point, so this seems totally fair in his case. He does provide a robust analysis, given certain premises. His premises come from his historical context.
Goodness. You've read things into my post that weren't my intention at all.
I meant the OP as a question about the nature of myths. Maybe I should have picked on the OT instead?
Anyway, we're pretty far from a "forum" of trust and charity at this point. I invite you to step back into that domain.
Agree. If someone understand sin only from the outside, as an infraction about which some external judge imposes a sentence, they will not understand our blameworthiness for the crucifixion, and they will not recognize Gods mercy despite this blameworthiness, nor forgiveness despite blameworthiness, and ultimately love, redemption and eternal life. Viewing the Bibles God from the outside, they see wrath in the one who accuses and judges the sinful - sin only leads to hateful judgement, wrath, and punishment and death. They dont see death as a natural consequence, self-inflicted though warned against, but at best they would see death as a punishment extrinsically imposed. Undeserved if not overly dramatic. And they cannot see the sacrifice of a truly innocent one as a triumph over all weakness and vanity. The crucifixion seems vain itself.
Because they instead see innocence as our true baseline condition and one that need never change or is in any need of redemption, (as if we are all just children - boys will be boys and if God created boys then what did he expect), then why would God blame us for anything we boys do? Now some sort of extrinsic theatre like the crucifixion has no impact on such a basically blameless creature, leaving only the impression of its absurdity and bizarreness without logic. They do not see that we are all the crucifiers, and responsible for sin and therefore all of its effects, and do not see that, without Gods help, the consequences are fixed and permanent. It simply cannot make sense to make sinners out of innocent children as if sinners is just a label and not a condition.
I dont blame people for not getting it - but I do blame them for making fools of their brothers who try to answer their insulting questions.
The forum where you opened with the insult "someone must have had their brain cut out to be Christian?"
If you cannot see why your post is pretty much a parallel of:
I cannot help you. I tried, without the insults, to correct you on the factual claim, which you have refused to acknowledge. For someone honestly "interested in what Christians believe," you sure don't seem particularly interested in what Christians have to say about your description of their beliefs.
Ok. Have a good day.
The only thing we can be certain of is that in our finite world, a ground (medium) is necessary for this place to exist. This is the role signified by the Holy Ghost.
Yes an omnipotent God can in theory create without a medium. But in our case there is a medium spacetime (the universe), or heaven. Thats the only conclusion we can come to.
As a former Christian, I was taught that the point was that God is perfect, and, by his nature, cannot allow imperfection/sin into heaven. The sacrifice of Jesus was supposedly the price God paid in order to make human souls redeemable. It wasn't taught like you're describing; it was sold as the sacrifice of Jesus almost acting as a sort of loophole God used in order to save humanity from its own imperfections.
Glad I'm not the only person who realized the holy spirit maps to the Christian God's feminine aspect
I would argue (at least some) Christians believe God would prefer no one go to hell, and the sacrifice of Jesus was the alleged evidence of that.
How did they explain the source of human imperfection? It's often framed in the scriptures as the outcome of events in the Garden of Eden. Is that what you got out of it?
Yeah, the argument is that humans were permanently tainted by the fall, which required the sacrifice of Jesus to make humans redeemable. The logic is that humanity fell through the actions of Adam and Eve and accepting Jesus is the way to use free will to get around our inherent sinful nature.
:up:
Neat! Saving for later. It always made sense to me, as the Holy Spirit seems very feminine coded by the standards of the religion
Right, so the narrative is that Jesus redeems us from the curse of Adam. Without that redemption, we're condemned.
I don't think it's usually assumed that God is contending here with rules beyond His control. Being omniscient, He would have to have known Adam would sin. And being omnipotent, he could change things if we wanted to.
The idea is that there is a mysterious grand purpose in all of this. To some extent, that's coming from the Neoplatonic roots of Christianity.
Not necessarily, if a person is a good person and serves his fellow man. He does not require redeeming. Isnt Christ the fisher of men, seeking out the virtuous ones*.
* It could be argued that virtuous people have learned the lesson of the fall. A lesson they could not have learned had there not been a fall.
I don't think that's how Original Sin works. Catholics believe humans are born cursed. That's why they baptize infants. The death of Jesus offers a way to be redeemed from the curse.
By "those mentioned things", I mean this: If there is a God and He does not know how to create, then there is only God. There is creation. Therefore, God knows how to create things.
I was taught that it wasn't so much rules beyond his control so much as the sin-nature makes us incompatible with his pure divinity. The distinction does seem a bit semantic though. Our particular brand also heavily suspected that God was already planning for Jesus before it happened. Supposedly the angel Jacob wrestled was an early Jesus manifestation.
Correct. God, for example, could remove the tree from the scene. All problems solved! Even I can remove a tree without needing to be omnipotent! :wink:
That view fits well with the Neoplatonic vision that says reality is a grand round trip out of heaven, down into materiality, and then back again, ending in reunification with God. The ground of your being is God, so it's like you're a part of God that has amnesia.
Many early Christians were Neoplatonists who adopted the Christian narrative, consciously using it as a myth. They didn't take any part of it literally. Over time, Christianity settled into dogma, retaining the outlines of earlier mysticism. How literally are we supposed to take the narrative? I don't think there is one answer to that.
He could have had a tea party in the Garden. Instead it's all snakes and apples. :grin:
Yes, and there was no need for torturing himself as well! :wink:
Quoting frank
What do you mean?
True.
Quoting MoK
In the Garden of Eden, there was a snake and a couple of fruit trees.
I see.
The argument I was told was that without the ability to choose, humans couldn't have truly loved God. God allegedly gave us free will knowing we would fail because he wanted us to CHOOSE to love him instead of being forced to, which was why he planned for Jesus down the road.
Also sounds vaguely gnostic
Why should humans love God?
Quoting MrLiminal
But God knew beforehand that a creation with the Tree of Knowledge and Humans would lead to a disaster, including the suffering of Jesus on the Cross! Another scene is a creation without the Tree of Knowledge. So, peace on Paradise!
Right, many versions of Christianity start from a quite different metaphysics, which is difficult to acclimatize to. I used to think the athiest preference for univocal divine command theories and fidesm was because these are most morally counterintuitive (as admitted by some of their own authors, e.g. Luther's letters to Erasmus), and thus represent good targets. However, I also think that they are easier to understand, in that they tend towards a metaphysics that is quite similar to popular forms of secular physicalism and nominalism, since they evolved out of the same tradition.
There are many different responses here, but in general, Christianity embraces realism re morality and value. If God is truly best, it would seem that we ought to love what is better and more worthy, as opposed to what is worse and less worthy.
But the answer actually varies quite a bit between different theologies. Milton's Satan can be read as such a sympathetic character because, on some views, whatever is good is simply good because it is what God wills. Satan, by asserting his own will, is in a sense "being more like God." Goodness is obedience. God's goodness then, seems arbitrary (although few would say it is arbitrary ) and it is at least inscrutable. In which case, why love what God loves?
There are theologians who have embraced the extreme position that if God told us to eat our own children, it would be good, or if God told us we ought to hate Him, it would thus be good to hate God. In such contexts, agreeing with God is still always "in one's best interest," in a sense, since God can bestow both unimaginable rewards and unfathomable, infinite punishments, which in turn makes orienting oneself to God consequentially "desirable." But, the thinkers who go this far also often tend towards denying free will, so you don't really have a choice in loving God anyhow. It's something God has to do to (or with) you.
Personally, I find this view deeply troubling. It strikes me as a sort of maximalist elevation of powerdivine freedom and goodness as a sort of sheer power. Even humanity's freedom becomes problematic, as a challenge to divine freedom (whereas the ability to communicate real freedom might itself be seen as a manifestation of divine power/goodness). It also isn't that common though, at least in its most extreme forms.
In other accounts, God is "Goodness itself." Everything, to the extent that it is anything at all, reflects God through an analogous likeness. Thus, when one loves anything, one loves God. Anything that is good, or even merely appears to be good, is such through its participation in the divine goodness. So, one always loves God in a sense. Any intentionality must be directed somewhere, and there is nothing "outside of God." The issue is rather that we can love God better or worse, more or less fully. And to know and love God more fully is necessarily also to be more like God (to be perfected) which is what is most desirable and fulfilling, by the very nature of rational creatures.
On either account, loving God can be said to be both good, and the most fulfilling path to happiness, although obviously they diverge quite a bit in some other aspects.
As an aside, a criticism of the latter view, which is what resulted in the development of first one, is that this makes God less then wholly omnipotent, because God is constrained by what is good. I think this is a misunderstanding, but it's a hotly contested issue.
Thats an argument from external incoherence for the Bible; but that has no relevance to franks OP: they are asking about why God would sacrifice Himself for our sins.
My point was that we dont have to agree on what is sinful to agree that if we sin then there must a punishment; and from there my argument begins.
Why does there have to be a punishment?
ETA: Scratch that. Let's say we have two people, Bob and Alice. Alice is an atheist who lives a decent life and does no great harm to anyone, just minor sins here and there. Bob is a serial killer who's tortured and killed untold numbers of kids. On his deathbed, Bob accepts Jesus into his heart. Alice doesn't. What do Alice's and Bob's punishments look like?
It is right to embrace a better quality of course. It is also right to achieve a better quality as well. So, becoming Godly is the final goal, and it is all right, too. Adam and Eve just wanted to look Godly. What is wrong with that?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And there is the problem of evil too, for a perfect good God who can only create a good creation. To my understanding God of the Old Testament is closer to being true since He accepted to be the source of good and evil.
The argument would likely be:
1) Because he made us and loves us (he's called "the Father" very intentionally)
2) They would say love without choice is not love. Supposedly God let all that happen because he didnt want to force us to love him. Whether or not that's right or ethical is typically a foregone conclusion, because God is usually interpreted of being all good if not the actual personification of good.
This argument makes no sense to me. A Lovely Father who is perfect does not leave humans in an unjust situation. Why should we return the same? Don't you see injustice on Earth, which is the result of ignorance and imperfection in humans? We are creatures, so we are not responsible for our imperfections. Shouldn't we hate the main cause of the injustice?
Quoting MrLiminal
No, please, I don't want to love anything to such an extreme as is common in Christianity! I always have room for a little hate as well. I prefer to find myself in the state of peace as quickly as possible. So no extreme, please!
Not necessarily, we cant assume that God [I]knows[/I] any particular thing. Also to God the bit of creation that we know might not be a creation. Or it might be something else, like part of his body. Let me explain this by analogy. A human person is in a sense God of the whole of his/her person. But even if this is the case, the person is not aware of many things that form part of his/her body. For example, the person doesnt know the feelings, mind and experience of each cell in his/her body.
To extend the analogy, there may be a disorder/disease in the body, but the person is not aware of it, whats causing it, or how to put it right. There might be this sort of thing in Gods world, or body. Indeed the self destructive activity of humans might be a disorder in his world.
All we can say is what we can deduce about the bit of it that is our world.
This is a hang over from the political decision by the Catholic Church to require confession from all of the congregation. With the aim of knowing all the secret information in the society at large. So as to cement their power base.
There is a grain of truth in the notion that everyone is by birth, or nature, a sinner. In the sense that we can never know the complexity of the world we inhabit, or the consequence of our actions. We may only be aware of a small part of what is going on. So this might indicate that every human will require redemption in some way.
1) I mean, I agree that it is very easy to read God's actions as toxic and abusive from the outside; the Christian narrative only really works if you start at the assumption that God is good and correct. Internally though, they would likely attribute injustice and evil to people not obeying God's will.
2) That sounds like a personal preference, but I see where you're coming from. Again, it makes more sense though when you start from the assumption that God is perfect and good. It doesn't really work otherwise as written, unless you want to start getting into the more obscure stuff like gnosticism.
Yes, this is a profound understanding, as embodied in the father-mother-son relationship. In a sense, this is the trinity in human form.
Thank you; it just tracks too well to not be intentional. The Holy Spirit fulfills most of the functions that people of the time would have likely associated with women, and it makes sense that a God of all creations would have both a male and feminine aspect. I have just rarely seen anyone agree with me, so this is nice to hear.
It might be helpful to continue to distinguish the Thomist view you are using for rhetorical purposes, from your own.
I also think there are some interesting parallels to draw between the idea of living God's will with other concepts like living your Tao or other forms of enlightenment. I have seen some interpretations of hell as being bad not as a punishment so much as the natural state of being separated from God and his love/will, and because God is perfect, he cannot interact with imperfect beings directly, hence the necessity of Jesus as a sacrificial intermediary. In that reading, I think it's possible to see similarities, but perhaps I'm reaching.
We can agree on a dislike for the tone, to be sure. It was your suggestion to make use of it, and again you seem to renege when faced with the consequence.
So I asked it about Frank's post, and it sugested the following re-write of Frank's post:
It then asks :
Now that is a good question. Here's an issue worth considering. Chat is of course only inferring, from a huge DB of word strings, the appropriate next words in a string of words that starts with Frank's OP, and this is what it comes up with. The question follows from Frank's OP.
Is your answer the same as ChatGPT's? That is it a "mystery"?
Or is your reply only the tu quoque of your parody on atheism?
Is it possible to have a productive conversation concerning the consistency of God?
I think part of the post I made directly before yours has some insight there.
Quoting MrLiminal
The idea that children should be held responsible for the sins of their parents is also... problematic.
Doubtless there are theological explanations.
And here again we face a problem with the method of theology, which aims to explain what is already taken as granted. It is not open to the theologian to conclude that God is wrong to visit the sins of Adam on his children. Theology as the institutionalisation of confirmation bias.
Of course, some theological approaches might avoid this accusation. But I do not see them hereabouts.
Wouldn't a god that can interact with imperfect beings, and lead them to the light, be better than a god who cannot interact with imperfect beings?
But the higher point is the methodological one made above, that theology consists in justifying a given series of doctrines, not in their critique.
It starts with the conclusion and works through to the explanation, unable to reach an alternate conclusion.
I would agree, though my understanding was that it was more our fault than his according to doctrine. It's not a requirement, but Christianity hits low self-esteem in an interesting way. Either way, if I were an all powerful god, I would do things very differently, lol.
Quoting Banno
Agree here as well. I added more of your statement than intended, I think. Although I do think your point fails to account for how often the church disagrees and schisms over those doctrines, which possibly indicates that it's not always *entirely* self-affirming. Coming to similar but different conclusions is still coming to different conclusions.
It partly comes from primitive intuitions about inheritance. You have your parent's physical features, so wouldn't you also inherit their sinful nature? On the one hand, telling people that they're born flawed can be psychologically devastating. Catholics even have a name for a condition where that belief becomes overwhelming: it's called scruples.
But on the other hand, it can be liberating to know that certain mental health issues and alcoholism have genetic components. It's not a personal failing. It's a link to your family tree.
Quoting Banno
And I think that's how religions die. They become rigid. Life leaks out and goes looking for better metaphors.
Theology starts with a conclusion, and seeks to explain how it fits in with how things are. It seeks to make a given doctrine consistent.
Philosophy starts with how things are and looks for a consistent explanation.
Theology can't say "That's inconsistent", and so eventually has to rely instead on mystery.
I'm not sure I would agree. Theology is a subset of philosophy dealing specifically within religious thought, as I see it. Religion was the original philosophy, in a way, just operating with much less scientific knowledge and filling in the gaps with assumptions and pre-existing cultural ideas.
Is it open to a theologian to conclude that there is no god and remain a theologian?
A philosopher may do so and remain a philosopher.
Quoting frank
As if blame were genetic. The story of original sin appears morally indefensible. Theology is that defence.
Precisely; this gets highlighted a lot in theology or in "the Bible as literature." Adam and Eve have the right goal, "becoming like onto God," but have approached it in the wrong way. It's an attempt to be like God by turning away from God, which is not how one becomes like God. God alone is subsistent being, "in whom we live and move and have our being," (Acts 17:28), so this is also in a sense a turn towards nothingness/mere potentiality, and away from the full actualization of the human being.
Well, from the orthodox Christian perspective, they are the same God (Isaiah 45:7 is read in various ways here, often as the text speaking about creating "evil" from the perspective of the wicked, i.e., the wicked see just punishment as "evil"). Most, but certainly not all Christian theology follows a privation theory of evil. Evil has no positive essence. Evil is merely the absence of good. Sickness is just the absence of health, evil an absence of properly actualized virtue/perfection. There is a gradation of goodness in creation, but creation itself is an ordered whole. Hence, God does not create evil. However, since creation is free, it is also capable of turning away from God, the "Fall," and this is how evil, as a privation, emerges. This includes the fall of man, but also the rebellious archons and principalities, Satan as the "prince of this world," and the idea that the entire cosmos has been subjected to decay and futility.
I am not as well versed in the Jewish tradition, but I know the privation theory of evil was popular with at least some Jewish (as well as Islamic) thinkers (Philo, Maimonides, Gaon). This isn't the only view though.
If a child was not baptized, it wouldn't be buried on sacred ground, and the mother would be told it was in Hell. Horrible.
As society becomes more concerned with parity and social justice, ideas about God also tend to become less severe and more inclusive. Thats why some Western churches now fly the rainbow flag of diversity, while in less diverse and more rigid societies (generally Muslim), people are still executed for being gay based on religion.
It strikes me as odd that some have built significant narratives about God's intentions and actions, along with the functions of hell and punishment even though weve yet to establish whether any god exists, and if so, which one.
I would not think that constraining philosophical beliefs to a specific framework and set of assumptions would make it not philosophy. It may not be *accurate* philosophy, but I would argue Theology is still an act of philosophy in practice, just a narrowly defined one.
Agreed; religion almost always mutates along with the culture practicing it. I would think many of the inconsistencies in long term religions often arise from trying to square beliefs from different eras cohesively.
CC: @Banno
Punishment to the offender is not per se necessary: the final end of justice is bringing everything under the proper respect of the order of creation. This is why rehabilitation is a higher-focus than retribution for justice; but both are aspects of it.
Retribution is necessary for justice because the offendeds dignity has to be restored, and this may require punishment of the offended (although it doesnt necessitate it); and this is the only aspect of corrective justice that is necessary. Rehabilitation is not necessary but is good for justice, because it should restore the offender back to the proper respecting of things; rehabilitation, however, without punishment is oftentimes mercy without justice because it omits retribution(but this is not always the case). The best option for corrective justice is to provide what is owed to the victim and restore the offender back to the proper respect of things.
This is an interesting, provoking, and common counter-example to the idea of mercy and acceptance of the Sonalthough it isnt necessarily only facially applicable to Jesus forgivenessand I understand where you are coming from here. I also used to think this way.
I would say, to be honest, that both would end up in heaven. Let me break down the general theory first and then address your questions directly.
1. I do not believe that one has to rigidly accept the Son of God (which may be Jesus if you would like) to be saved or that they have to participate in rituals (like baptism) to be accepted. As you alluded to with your example, someone can love Godlove love itself: love goodness itselfwithout knowing the word God, having a concept of God that is robust, or having been exposed to some particular religion. God is judging us based off of our choices we make given the fact that we are not absolutely in control of ourselves (as natural organisms) and is evaluating how well we exhibited the virtues and, generally speaking, loved love (Himself).
2. For the vast majority of us, we have sinned before we die (although infants, e.g., havent if they are killed young); so for most of us we have offended God and, as I noted to @frank who ignored me, retribution is evaluated primarily based off of the dignity of the offended party (hence why shooting a rabbit illegitimately is lesser of an offense and deserving of less of a punishment than shooting a human the exact same way). With finite dignities, which are beings that are finitely good, there is a proportionate finite retribution (at least in principle) for every sin which one could, potentially, pay before they die (and thusly serving their time for the sin as it relates to the immanent victime.g., the human who was murdered). However, a sin is always also an offense against God and God is infinite goodness which is infinite dignity; so no proportionate retribution to something finite whatsoever can repay what is owed. This is why any sin, insofar as we are talking about the aspect of it that is an offense against God, damns us in a way where we ourselves cannot get out.
3. Loving lovebeing the a truly exceptional human beingwill not repay the debt owed to an offended party with infinite dignity: Alice, or anyone of a high-caliber of virtue, is facially damned if they have sinned at least once.
4. God is all-just and all-merciful. He is all-just because He is purely actual and a creator, and so He cannot lack at anything in terms of creating; but to fail to order His creation properly is to lack at something as a creator. Therefore, God cannot fail to order His creation properly; and ordering His creation properly is none other than to arrange the dignity of things in a hierarchy that most reflects what is perfectly goodwhich is Himself. He is all-merciful because He is love and love is to will the good of something for-itself even when that something doesnt deserve it. Mercy and justice, however, as described above, are prima facie opposed to each other: if, e.g., I have mercy on you then I am not being just and if I am just then I leave no room for mercy. To be brief, the perfect synthesis of the two is for a proper representative of the group of persons that has an appropriate dignity to pay the debt of their sins so that if they truly restore their will to what is right they can be shown mercy.
5. God must, then, synthesize justice and mercy by allowing a proper representative of humans to pay for our sins; but no human can repay it. It follows, then, that God must incarnate Himself as a human to be that representative. EDIT: I forgot to mention that God is the only one that can repay the debt because He is the only one with infinite dignity to offer as repayment.
6. The Son must be the one out of the Godhead that is incarnated because God creates by willing in accord with knowledge; His knowledge of Himself is what He uses to incarnate Himself; and the Son is His self-knowledge.
So, let me answer your questions with that in mind:
1. Alice and Bob have NOT committed equal sins: I dont think that the fact that any given sin is unrepayable to God entails that all sins are equal. It just entails that all sins require something of infinite dignity to properly repay. Admittedly, it gets kind of weird fast working with retribution for infinite demerit. For example, in hell both of them will be punished for eternity but Alices punishment would be something far far less than Bobs.
2. Since God saves us through His mercy (as described before), God does not have to punish us if we repent; and repentance is not some superficial utterance I am sorry! or, for your example, Jesus I accept you!. Repentance is normally through the sincerity of heart and through actions. A person who has never heard of God at all could be saved, under my theory, because they sincerely love love itselfGod Himselfthrough action and this doesnt need to be a perfect life that was lived (since God must sacrifice Himself to Himself to allow for mercy upon us). Alice, I would say, would be repentant in action and (most probably in spirit) for any minor sins she commits because she is such a good hearted person. If she were to do a lot of things that are virtuous but have the psychological disposition that doing good and loving her community, family, friends, etc. is horrible and something she despises; then she isnt really acting virtuously. Thats like someone helping the poor as a practical joke or something instead of doing it out of love.
3. For Bob, it gets more interesting: your hypothetical eliminates the possibility of the good deeds part of what is normally a part of repentance since he is on his death bed when he has a change of heart. I would say that assuming he is not superficially saying I am sorry (psst: hopefully I get into heaven this way!), then I would say that Gods mercy would allow him into heavenat least eventually. Maybe theres a purgatory faze where he is punished a bit for it first: I dont know. However, what I do know is that Alice will be rewarded more than Bob; because reward is proportionate to the good deeds you have performed and goes beyond giving someone mercy from punishment. I do not believe that everyone in heaven is equal; or that God loves us all the same. Thats hippie bulls**t.
Let me know what you think.
Good point.
Does the Parable of Laborers not contradict this theory somewhat?
it's not the beliefs, it's the method. Not what is being affirmed, but why it is being affirmed.
Hence:
Quoting Bob Ross
I don't think so, but Protestants would tend to agree with you.
Perhaps we are arguing semantics then.
Interesting.
I would say Catholics and Orthodox Christians accept that not everyone is equal in heaven. There are plenty of refences in the NT to Jesus talking about people sitting at the right hand or left hand of the Father and alluding to it being more glorious and honorable.
It is also the basis for Saints being held in higher regard; and Mary being held in the highest regard among the blessed.
So all that was about restoring god's dignity?
Ok.
More seriously, can you see how to one who does not accept the tenants of faith, that post at least looks like self-justifying, ad hoc confirmation bias?
I suppose that tracks with "the least shall be the greatest among you" and whatnot. I do not have a lot of direct experience with Catholicism.
Well, yes - we are discussing whether theology is a part of philosophy, and that means discussing whether "philosophy" can be appleid to things theological.
Well, I'm not an expert either. I see what you are saying: it is hard to interpret the texts. They seem disparate.
Quoting Bob Ross
There was a time when black people weren't thought of as having the same "dignity" as white people. Hence, it was ok to enslave them. This is another example of how doctrine blinds people to what's moral. The Pope gave his blessing on the beginnings of the Atlantic Slave Trade, one of many cases of all out moral failure.
The United States was involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade at the level of about 7% of the total. Portugal started it and after a few centuries, was by far the largest participant. Most of the proceeds went to the Portuguese Crown. The second biggest participant was the UK, masters of the triangular trade, involving the British Caribbean. At the bottom of the list are the Spanish, the Dutch, and last is the USA. The US ended importation of slaves from Africa in 1808.
The greatest portion of the crime of the Atlantic Slave Trade is not celebrated in films, or discussed every year during Black History Month. The huge number of people who died miserable deaths should be more well known. Those unnamed victims should be brought into the light of day.
That you assume the Pope would have blessed importation of slaves to the US is a testament to that country's fearless admission of guilt. I for one, am proud of that.
ps. Americans wouldn't have looked to the Pope for guidance. They were mostly Protestants.
Then why all this focus on Catholicism?
All these doctrinal abominations you and Banno are going on about are just over reach in the Catholic Church. There are other religions and theologies.
I just used Catholics to pin down the narrative about the meaning of Jesus' death. If you say Christians believe x, there's going to be an exception somewhere.
We may already be in hell, earth may be hell. The spirit in each of us is separated by this heavy dense material substance that we wear like a straight jacket. Indeed we are imprisoned in this physical world. The only freedom we have is our imagination and our free will to live a good, or not so good a life.
I really enjoyed the works of C.S.lewis by the way.
Enjoying your dry wit by the way.
If you imagine that God does actually exist theology makes sense. Although as I was saying to Frank, Catholicism took its theologies too far. Where it became an apology for controlling populations.
By contrast, if you are of the opinion that God does not exist, then its all just pie in the sky.
So really we just need to settle the issue of whether there is a God first, then we can make progress.
Quoting Banno
Right, akin to invention rather than discovery, assumption rather than learning.
One aim is certainly punishment. In fact, it seems to me essential to any concept of justice that it aims at reward the just, protect the oppressed etc but also to punish adequately the unjust. Of course, we can debate about the nature and the characteristics of punishment and what does it mean 'adequate'. But as a general principle it just makes sense. Also, it is quite a common idea found in basically most or all cultures, so I don't think it is particularly controversial.
Of course, perhaps the nature of the 'punishment' is related to the nature of 'sin'. And, even if we remain in the Gospels, we find different analogies for 'sin'. For instance, sometimes it is compared to a debt, as in the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-15). Other times, we are told that sin is like an illness or something that make us ill and in need for a physician (Luke 5:31-32). Also, it is compared to something that enslaves us (John 8:34). So, there are different analogies for the concept of 'sin' and, therefore, we have to reconcile them in some way.
The 'debt' analogy certainly supports a 'retributive' punishment. As financial debt requires repayment (in some form or in some ways), justice requires recompense of sins. This doesn't necessarily imply that God is wrathful in giving the punishment. In my previous post, I compared God to a just judge that sentences to a just punishment the criminal. In doing so, we should not conclude that the judge seeks revenge. In fact, maybe we can even imagine that the judge is, say, the 'loving father' of my first example who still loves the son but, being also just, sentences the 'son' to the just punishment. Possibly this happens after the judge offers mercy to the criminal but, of course, the criminal should cooperate in some way and make amends - if the criminal, refuses, it is obvious to me that it is simply 'just' that he has to experience the full sentence.
The 'sickness' analogy is also interesting. Here, instead, sin is something that makes us ill. We are in need of a physician. A medicine is offered but I can imagine that if we refuse it, we have to experience the suffering that is the natural consequence of the illness itself (and of our choice of rejecting the medicine). Again, the fact that we experience the 'punishment' given by suffering that is due to the illness. Clearly, we can't blame the physician who tried to help the patient that refused to take the medicine and, as a consequence, experience the pain.
Also, the 'slavery' analogy is similar. We are offered a chance to be free. But, again, if we refuse we remain stuck in the condition of slavery. IIRC, in the roman empire a 'manumission fee' had to be paid in order to free slaves. So, the 'ransom' analogy we find in e.g. Mark 10:45 for the action of the Jesus might refer to just this.
Another real life example is addiction. The problem with addiction is that the addict refuses to get help, often even if he knows that it is for his good. As time passes, it is more difficult to get cured from the addiction. Again, the suffering the addict experiences is not due to the revenge of someone. It is simply due to the fact that the addiction itself 'ruined' him and this ruin was also a consequence of his refusal to 'renounce' to the addiction itself by getting help and sticking with the necessary therapy.
As you can probably see, there is no need to literally believe that God seeks 'revenge'. It seems to me quite natural to think that one of the aims of justice is precisely to punish the unjust (at least, if the unjust doesn't repent, make amends and so on). Certainly, the fact that one of the aims of justice is also punishment (and there are different ways to understand 'punishment' here) doesn't imply the 'penal substition' model of atonement. It is perhaps a defensible interpretation but certainly not the only one.
Also, the 'official' Catholic view of Jesus' sacrifice doesn't seem to be the 'penal substitution'. See the relavant section of the Catechism.
As a parellel, consider the Buddhist doctrine of karma (which means 'action'). Also in that case, you find the idea that bad deeds deserve some kind of punishment as a consequence. But, interesting the actions that cause 'bad consequences'/'punishments' are called 'akusala karma', which means something like 'unwholesome action', which also suggests something a notion of illness.
Well, the Catholics have a document where you find the current 'offical' teachings, that is the Catechism. Now, of course, I don't believe that all Catholics follow the Catechism in every respect, but it is clearly the document which I would refer to if I were to describe the Catholic teaching.
For instance, this statement isn't a correct description of what the Church officially teaches now. In the relevant section of the Catechism, we find that:
And, also, the Catechism says that 'hell' is the consequence of 'mortal sin' (see e.g. paragraphs 1033, 1037), not the original sin. This doesn't mean that historically Catholics never said that original sin alone is enough for damnation. But nowadays the Catholic church doesn't teach that. So, at least your statement should be nuanced.
Note that I am not a Catholic BTW. But I believe that before making general sweeping statements it's better to read at least 'official' sources, if there are any (see also the link to the section of the Catechism that deals with Jesus' sacrifice, which doesn't seem to contain anything like the view that you attributed to 'Catholics' in the OP).
If God created the medium, then He should know what a medium is. You cannot act from pure ignorance!
Yes. In broad outlines, the Christian narrative is that God sacrificed his Son to save the human race from something. That alone captures the oddness of the narrative. That Christianity has survived about 1600 years with that narrative intact testifies to the ability of Christians to accept it. Whether they ever really make sense of it is another matter.
Maybe it's like a I Ching poem.
I used to know a Quaker. Awesome guy.
That is God's fault when it comes to sin if we accept that the creation is imperfect. What do you expect? An imperfect creation is subject to sin!
Quoting MrLiminal
The question is, why should I go to Hell? Love God or Go to Hell!
I don't recall any verse from the Bible that proposes an alternative way to become Godly.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
To me, good and evil are the main dual features of reality. Such as a good experience or an evil experience. There is neutral too, which resides between Good and Evil. Of there is no good when we are dealing with evil and vice versa!
Note also that I think that the resurrection is even more central than the death on the cross. That is, by his self-sacrifice Jesus defeated death and that is the source of the Christian hope for eternal life or, in other words, the fact that God participated in humanity is the reason why humans can hope that death will be defeated and to attain eternal life in communion with God.
The whole message is quite powerful. That's the reason I believe, after all, Christianity survived...
God either created out of ignorance or not. Which one do you pick?
Give it meaning, and it will give meaning back to you.
The key theological terms here are "theosis" (used more often in Eastern Christianity) and "diefication" (used more often in the Latin West). The idea is that man becomes "like onto God," and enters into union with the divine, a key theme of many mystics and of monastic and lay praxis.
In terms of verses used, there are lots, but important ones would be:
2 Peter 1:4, which speaks of becoming "partakers of the divine nature." Psalm 8 speaks of man as having been made "little less than a god," and Jesus' use of Psalm 82, "ye are gods," in the context he uses it, is also called on.
II Corinthians 3:18 is another: "But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit."
Or I John 3:2 "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is."
There is also Romans 8 and the idea that Christ is the "first born of many sons and daughters," or Saint Paul's claim that it is "Christ who lives in [him]."
Plus, there is the original vision in Genesis of man ruling over the cosmos, and Christ is often seen as a recapitulation of Adam, only without the turning away from God.
In the metaphysics of God as Goodness itself, the seeking after any perfection, any improvement in oneself, is ultimately still a seeking after God, however flawed and self-destructive. Eating, sensing, knowing, all involve union, and union with being is ultimately always union with the divine, the divine as known through creation, since all things are signs and exemplars of their causes, and God is the First Cause.
So, on these readings, Satan's promise to "become like God," is indeed the very goal of man as God's image bearer. As to why man was not "created perfect," a lot of ink has been spilled here. Building on Plato's psychology, it is often taken that being "like onto God," involves man's transcending his own finitude in search of what is really true and truly good, and not settling for current beliefs and desires. The Fall represents a turning away from the Good that lies beyond, to what lies at hand, created things.
So why didn't God reveal Himself to Adam and Eve to solve all problems, and instead put them in a sinful situation? What is the purpose of the Tree of Knowledge?
Yet the medium was the first creation of God, created among many other things that God could create out of ignorance!?
I don't understand how this response could be a proper answer to my question.
That's one view.
It suggests that justice is concerned with retribution, with affirming a moral order, with giving folk what they deserve.
A clearer view might be that justice involves equity and fairness rather than retribution. On such a view, the aim would be to repair or mitigate the harm done, and re-integrate and reform the wrong doer.
Punishing folk doesn't thereby fix the problem, or take away the injury.
But again there is a methodological point here. The Book says that punishment will occur, so it is not open to the theologian to question whether justice ought include punishment. That's a given. All that remains is for the theologian to attempt to show how this is coherent with a loving god.
Hence your rather long post excusing god's approach.
There's also the issue, raised elsewhere in the forums, of how an eternal punishment can ever be proportional.
A few side issues: Karma is not about punishment, but about restoring a balance. It is far more an example of restoration than retribution. The suggestion that a slave ought pay for their release is quite remise. And there's somewhat more to addiction than mere akrasia.
Rather, if the God described by some given theology makes sense, then that theology makes sense. It's not as if there are no alternative views on God, nor various ways in which folk have attempted to provide a coherent account of god. There is no "theology", there are "theologies".
Almost as if they were made up.
Quoting Punshhh
If Catholicism is right, then if Catholicism does indeed demand "controlling populations", then controlling populations would thereby be right.
I'm not seeing much here apart from the tautology that if some doctrine is right, then it is right.
Much the same goes for the specific issues as well, a consequence of the poor method seen in theology.
The discussion is not specific to Catholicism.
Not all of it, but, yes, retribution is about restoring the dignity of the offended. Wouldnt you agree? When some woman gets raped, a price must be paid to restore her dignityretribution is required for justice. Justice isnt just about rehabilitation: even if the rapist was sincerely sorry, all else being equal there is a price to be paid.
Sort of, to be honest. I didnt appeal to faith; and as we have discussed before I dont believe in God on faith: my belief in based solely on natural theology.
Also, its kind of belittling and dismissive, no offense meant, to me, when I give an elaborate explanation and it is written off as ad hoc. Nothing about it was ad hoc in all honesty.
Yes, and they were wrong. We dont need to reject Gods existence to accept that that was wrong. We dont even need to reject Jesus to accept that.
The catholic church has done a lot of immoral things: thats true.
We dont have to start with the question of whether God exists to decipher God exists. Aristotle just wanted to explain change
Also, theology is a branch of philosophy. All branches of philosophy start with a central question and try to solve it.
Can you elaborate on this? I am thinking Christianity, the herd morality, is what is abolishing it. We don't have the stomach to kill people anymore.
I don't agree. as this is somewhat a side issue, I'll refer you to the SEP article, which might give you som idea of the problems thereof. it's conclusion begins:
Quoting SEP
Retribution is more a caricature of justice than an implementation.
One consequence of this is that a retributive god appears to be morally questionable.
Quoting Bob Ross
My understanding of "Natural Theology" is that it does not rely on scripture, revelation or mystery. Your post relies on god's having a son, and an ontology that includes sin and the dignity of god and damnation and so on. These are from scripture and revelation. So the arguments there are not examples of natural theology.
Further, they take these revealed notions as givens, and present arguments for them, rather than subjecting them to analysis. Now an ad hoc assumption is one that is adopted specifically to maintain a given position n the face of an objection. In that regard, the post is ad hoc. That's about the logical structure of the argument. If you choose to see it as belittling and dismissive, that's down to you.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's not the issue. I'm saying that theology takes revelation as given and seeks to show how it can be made consistent. It doesn't just assume that god exists, but attempts to make coherent the whole revealed shemozzle. It is not a branch of philosophy, although it has links with philosophy. Philosophy isn't only defined by content but also by method. Theology lacks the neutrality of philosophy.
Thomism may appeal to you because it helps justify some of your beliefs - I don't know. But Thomism is one small, somewhat anachronistic approach, with considerable problems of it's own making. So using it to frame natural theology is itself presumptuous.
A quick google search will provide plenty of articles justifying capital punishment, from Christians.
Yes, often the same ones who consider abortion to be anathema.
Presumably there is a theology that explains all this...
Theology can explain anything...
Then you would be right, bingo!
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
:100:
Quoting Bob Ross
This "idea" is just a myth ... since, after all, it doesn't make any sense to say an 'Absolute, Eternal Creator' can "sacrifice" (i.e. suffer a permanent loss of) anything.
Quoting Banno
:up: :up:
Quoting frank
:pray: :smirk: Amen sixteen centuries of canonical nonsense.
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
It's a "debt" so great that God could not forgive it without "human sacrifice"? :roll:
A "God" whose "love" is so shallow that it's easily "offended" and requires mortals to "repent" ... Mortals are set up only to "Fall", we're "created" sick and yet "commanded" to be well (C. Hitchens); IMHO, this "divine" extortion-"Plan" is not all-benevolent and therefore not worthy of worship (re: faith).
Quoting MoK
:up:
:fire:
Not quite. A soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his comrades is heroic. A soldier with a ring of immortality jumping on grenades and in front of enemy bullets isn't doing anything heroic.
Yes - what was Jesus' sacrifice exactly - a weekend ruined, perhaps? Then back to the all-powerful, omniscient, immortal ruler of all things.
:100:
Being scourged and crucified isn't fun, but maybe it's like the movie Palm Springs. If you know you can't die, maybe painful "deaths" are tolerable.
Well, one can point out that Jesus felt the experience of abandonment ( "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", Mk 15:34) at the cross and at he experienced agony at the Getshemani as also the Catechism says:
I believe that you are approaching the issue in a somewhat rigid manner.
'Retributive' punishment when "one gets the deserved punishment" and/or a 'punishment' that consists of "experiencing the natural consequences of one's choices" aren't mutually exclusive with the possibility that said punishment can also have other functions. In fact, sometimes it is the experience of experiencing the 'bad consequences' of one's actions that can be an occasion for 'repentance', education, positive transformation etc. Also note that the 'retributive' punishment and the 'punishment as a natural consequence of one's attitude' in some cases can be the same thing. For instance, if a man steals from another an amount of money, we might say that the thief deserves, as a punishment, to give back to the first man what he has stolen. Of course, for the thief it is not a 'pleasant experience' and, in fact, it is obvious to me that it is the natural consequence of his action. A loving parent, if some other attemps have failed, can let his child to experience bad consequences of his or her choice. Now, if these 'bad consequences' are 'natural', one might say it they are 'deserved'. And, again, such experiences can be educative.
Of course, in the case of hell, most Christians believe that that the state of damnation is irreversible and entails a punishment (of some kind) that is without end. IIRC, there are different explanations for such a state that, also, do not involve hatred, revenge etc on God's part. For instance, some say that humans can commit sins of infinite magnitude that deserve an infinite punishment because no finite punishment is adequate for intinitely grave sins. Others say that the problem is that the problem is that the damned are incorregible: their state of damnation is not irreversible becuase God doesn't want them to escape but because they reached the point that it is simply impossible for them to convert*. The second one seems consistent with what the Catechism teaches about hell and, in fact, I believe that it is also consistent with what Pope Benedict said in his book 'Eschatology' (see the section about hell here). As I said before, one can even reconcile the two views: by committing sins one damages oneself and, perhaps, it is possible that infinitely grave sins might damage oneself in an irreversible way, at least if one dies without repenting from them (see the section of the Cathechism on venial and mortal sin).
*One might ask why 'repentance' is necessary if God loves us. But IMO this can be understood even in human terms. A true communion of love between two persons has to be bidirectional. For instance, if a husband ceases to love his wife but the bond of love between them is broken even if the wife never ceased to love him. The bond can be restored if the husband sincerely repents and begins to love again his wife. In a similar way, if the damned can't repent, they can't be in a communion of love with God.
Personally, however, I don't find the argument that damnation must be irreversible compelling. But I do find that some truths.
Or he acted like he did. Or it never happened at all and the gospel writers wrote it like it did. But let's say it's true that for a day or two he felt abandoned. That's still not much of a sacrifice, is it? I've felt abandoned many times in my life.
In any case, Jesus died and then resurrected. This would probably mean that he fully experienced death as humans do. Also, perhaps when he experienced abandonment he didn't have the expecation that such a state would end someday. Does this change anything for you?
In any case, I would like to hear what Christians have to say on this.
Yes, right, perhaps in order to answer that one might have an understanding of what a given model of the incarnation entails. I prefer that Christians give their responses to your question here. I am not, in fact, sure that my previous post was an adequate response.
Note that historically there have been controversies about how to understand the incarnation among Christians. And, honestly, I have not study that controversies in the same way I studied about other matters. So, I prefer that someone else answers to your question - hopefully some that does have a sufficient konwledge of these matters.
Have you ever stood on a nail?
I was suggesting some ways in which God can be the creator of universes, or worlds while not being fully aware (ignorant) of what he was doing.
I wasn't using it as an argument for the non-existence of God. I was saying please, please, please, don't use a dignity-scale as a justification for killing. It's ok to kill rabbits and eat them because you're an omnivore. Your brain is a obligate glucose consumer (which means there's no way to turn off its demand for glucose). You're evolved to eat meat because your survival could depend on it. And plants don't have less dignity either. They're living things like everything else. We eat them because that's who we are: plant eaters.
:smile:
Wasn't the creation medium necessary? How could an ignorant God create the medium first if He didn't know that the medium was necessary for the creation of the rest?
A quick google search also shows a lot of arguments against capital punishment by Christians.
Is your critique of retribution that it is too harsh? In an ideal world, would you say the justice system would never punish people for retribution? Would they just punish people for rehabiliation or future prevention?
My arguments didnt rely on scripture. I keep telling you this, to no avail.
Yeah, so I think this would be a valid criticism of Aquinas; but I am not a Christian and even if I ever were to be I wouldnt begin with Christianity and come up with ways to justify it through natural theology.
Sure, insofar as I was offering a solution that a Christian might take that assumes a starting point of the Bible (and that's assuming it is an attempted patch-work); but, again, someone could be a Christian and it not be ad hoc: they may have come to believe various aspects of Christian theology through means that are not merely the Bible.
Whether it is ad hoc depends on whether the person starts with a position they are trying to rationalize or if they come to rationalize their way into the position.
I would suggest you read my explanation of the requirement for sacrifice I gave to @frank: you are also misunderstanding the point. It's about synthesizing justice and mercy. You can't pardon the person that victimized you and be just: that would be mercy at the expense of justice.
Dignity is relative to the nature of a thing; and I would argue you are implicitly using it to determine how wrong an act is (and the justice system does too).
Thats horrible. You are saying that if you naturally need to do something then it is automatically permissible to do. If there were a species that needed to eat people to survive, would that be permissible to you? What if there was an alien species that needed to torture people from other animals or else they would necessarily fall into deep, deep depression to the point where they necessarily would kill themselves?
The reason we can eat rabbits is because it is not immoral to eat a thing which is not a person if one needs to. That is different than saying that we can eat a rabbit because we need to. It is possible for the dignity of a being to include innate rights.
The dignity of a rabbit does not include innate rights; but we do have to respect its dignity (such as by not torturing it).
Suppose someone mugged me and stole $20 bucks and then a day later ran into me again, broke down crying, apologized and gave me the $20 back. Should I call the police on them? What would be the point of punishing them? I would forgive them and move on. What's wrong with that?
If you have to do it to survive, it's amoral. It's neither good nor bad.
Firstly, that would be a world. Secondly, what do you mean by paradise? That just begs the question: youre appealing to a vague Utopia.
Theres nothing wrong with that: in fact, you should do that. Why? Because the retribution was paid and they have rehabilitated themselves: they gave you the $20 back and are sincerely sorry. Now, if they hadnt paid the $20 back but you knew they stole it, then just forgiving them would be mercy at the expense of justice; and if they pay you the $20 back but arent sorry about it then they need rehabilitation which would normally be in the form of a punishment for something like that.
Ok, so you accept the principle that "if one must do something to survive, then it is amoral". So if I need to rape a woman to survive, it is neither good or bad for me to do it; if I need to murder 1,000 people to survive, then it is neither good nor bad; if I need to commit mass genocide to survive (or the nation needs to do it to survive) then it is neither good nor bad; etc.
Not only is the idea of amorality false; but your principle is atrociously immoral.
You're free to sacrifice your life at anytime. There's nothing moral about that.
A vague utopia? If you were god, THIS would be the world you come up with? How about a world where we don't have to kill other creatures to survive? A world without physical pain? A world without sickness? Etc.
"Theres nothing wrong with that: in fact, you should do that. Why? Because the retribution was paid and they have rehabilitated themselves: they gave you the $20 back and are sincerely sorry."
But they still robbed me and stole from me! Even if they pay the money back, I was violated! Should they not pay for that?
"Now, if they hadnt paid the $20 back but you knew they stole it, then just forgiving them would be mercy at the expense of justice; and if they pay you the $20 back but arent sorry about it then they need rehabilitation which would normally be in the form of a punishment for something like that."
But suppose they were sorry for it and told me they spent the $20 on booze and they can't afford to pay me back because they need to feed their kids. Should they be punished for not paying me back, even if they're sorry? What is twenty bucks to me? I would still forgive them. Is that wrong?
I really hadn't anticipated that restorative justice would be such a foreign concept here. It seems neither you nor have heard of it.
How odd.
But that's not so. You do make use of scripture. I explained this, here: Quoting Banno
These ideas derive from scripture, not natural theology.
Quoting Bob Ross
You take it as granted that justice involves retribution. See the SEP article for some critique of that view, and consider if it is an ad hoc move. Your "synthesis" takes it as granted that God will seek to punish, not to restore and mitigate.
Quoting Bob Ross
Rehabilitation is punishment? No wonder the jails are so full.
I guess that myth-makers create their god-stories for the same reason parents tell their own children about the tooth fairy : to get compliance without argument. "If you do this, something good will happen, But if you don't . . . .". Gods bring the goodies, or not, depending on your obedience.
In the case of religious beliefs, professional priests exploit adults for their inborn trust in authorities*1, in order to get political compliance without rational arguments. Even adults, when they reach the age of reason, may begin to doubt the official stories. But when everyone they know seems to believe the myth, they may go along to get along.
Moreover, communal myths*2 tend to bond individuals into team players and tribal roles. Socrates was condemned for "impiety" : not playing along with the official local worldview. Philosophers tend to ask embarrassing questions of parents & authorities about fairies & gods. :smile:
*1. Born to Believe :
The idea that people are "born to believe what we're told" stems from our inherent trust in authority figures and the narratives presented to us, particularly during childhood. This tendency is shaped by our early socialization and the narratives we're exposed to, which can influence our perceptions of reality. While this inclination is natural, it's also important to develop critical thinking skills and question information, even when it comes from trusted sources.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=born+to+beleive+what+we%27re+told
*2. Communal bonding :
Myths serve as a foundational element of cultural identity, providing a shared narrative that shapes a community's understanding of itself, its history, and its place in the world. They establish social hierarchies, define roles, and offer explanations for the world's mysteries, fostering a sense of belonging and guiding individual and collective behavior.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=myth+core+of+cultural+identity
True, and the sacrifice of Jesus has clear magical connotations: sacrifice this human, get good crops. So the sacrifice is celebrated at Easter, around the time of the spring equinox, which vaguely coincides with the last frost date in temperate zones. It's a fertility rite.
Quoting Gnomon
For some reason, the belief in Hell is particularly potent. I'm not sure what psychology its tapping into, but the original Hel was a Norse goddess. She was just the ruler of the field of the dead. There was no torturing going on.
Quoting Gnomon
And this is definitely true of Christianity even now. Christianity was a base for reformers like Martin Luther King Jr. As somebody mentioned earlier, maybe community solidarity can be more important than the details of the dogma.
Quoting RogueAI
I was asking you what you think the best possible totality of creation would be. I do think this is a part of the best possible totality of creation.
Is that metaphysically possible without removing the possibility of the virtues, free will, and eudaimonia? I dont know: its more complicated than you are making it out to be.
You are blanketly asserting this is metaphysically possible to do and that they would be better; but Im questioning that. For example, an organism that cannot feel pain is much more likely to damage themselves: is that good? Sickness is a consequence of having nature: you cant have a natural world like our own and not have things that can make organism sick.
Thats true: you are right. To be just, the price would have to be greater than the amount stolen. Whether that be in the form of a physical punishment, paying back the debt plus interest, etc.
All else being equal, it would be unjust for you to forgo retribution; but since the Son of God paid the price for our sins you can be merciful without being unjust.
Are you saying restorative justice does not have an element of retribution in it? I find that hard to believe.
Which focus should a loving and beneficent being choose?
What's the purpose here?
And you think that @RogueAI is suitably placed to answer that question? RogueAI, are you happy with that responsibility? And are you, Bob, in a position to assess RogueAI's response? You don't know if a world without carnivores is metaphysically possible without removing the possibility of the virtues, free will, and eudaemonia, so you say. Do you have a basis for saying it is impossible? That's what theology has to claim, if it is to explain how the world as it is is the will of a loving and omnipotent being.
Isn't "I don't know" a good response here, rather then taking on a convolute, ad hoc and unsatisfactory doctrine?
CC: @frank
I understand why you said that, because you are assuming I believe in the Son of God because of the Bible. I dont.
I believe in God, in the classical theistic sense, because of arguments from natural theologye.g., the argument from change, essences/existences, contingency/necessity, parts vs. wholes, etc. The Trinity follows, I think, from the nature of God as understood in classical theism (starting from the aforesaid arguments). This can be outlined briefly as follows:
1. God must have perfect knowledge of Himself because He is an intelligence and purely actual. If He lacked knowledge what is metaphysically possible or what is real (such as Himself), then He would have the potential to learn; but a purely actual being cannot have any potential.
2. God is absolutely simple, so His pure act of will and pure act of thought are identical. He creates by willing something as real and His will and thought are identical; so it follows that Him creating something (i.e., willing something as real) is identical to Him thinking of something as real. His perfect knowledge of Himself is Him thinking of Himself as real; which must, then, be identical to Him willing Himself as real. Him willing something as real necessarily creates something that is real; so Him knowing Himself generates something real out of Himself. His object of knowledge of this creation is Himself: He is both subject and object. However, He knows Himself as absolutely simple (because He has perfect knowledge of Himself); so Himself as the object of thought, in this case, cannot generate another god that is completely separate from Himself. Instead, it generates a real subsistent relation between Himself (as knowledge of Himself) and Himself (as the one that is known). The Father is the one that is known; and the Son is the knowledge of Himself.
3. His knowledge of Himself, the Son, is not merely abstract knowledge like our knowledge of ourselves because He is absolutely simple: when He thinks of something as real, it becomes real necessarily. His self-knowledge is subsistent insofar as there is Himself as the object of His thought that is generated (as real) from His own self-contemplation and is a substance of a rational nature because God is, as the Father or the one thinking, a being that is a person and He is absolutely simple; so the Son collapses in nature into having the same nature.
4. The one known (i.e., the Father) knows Himself (i.e., the Son) as perfectly good because His essence and existence are identical and He has perfect knowledge of Himself. Since His willing and thinking are identical (because He is absolutely simple), it follows that Him thinking of Himself as perfectly good is the same as willing Himself as being perfectly good; and since love is to will the good of something for its own sake, it follows that God necessarily loves Himself in the most supreme and perfect sense (because the degree of love is proportionate to how much a person wills the good of something for its own sake and God must will Himself as the most and perfectly good). Gods willing is what creates though: so His willing of Himself as perfectly good, which is identical to Him willing Himself as perfectly good, generates perfect love as the object of His thought (or object of His willing). The generation of perfect love cannot be a kind of willing of the good for God that creates something different from Himself (because He is absolutely simple): it would have to be a real subsistent distinction in origin between Himself (as Love) and the Son and the Father because Love itselfGods pure love of perfect goodnessis generated out of Himself (as the knower) and Himself (as the known). Likewise, Love shares the same rational nature as the Father because Love is a generation out of the Father about Himself and He is absolutely simple. Love is the Holy Spirit.
5. A person is a substance of a rational nature. The Son, Father, and Holy Spirit all have a rational nature and are subsistent; therefore, they are all three persons but they, given that God is absolutely simple, share one rational nature.
Disagree with my reasoning all you would like, but please do not straw man my position as that of revealed theology. Nothing about this is revealed theology.
A part of restoration is a price being paid to the victim in some form proportionate to the crime. I agree with you: I think you are talking passed my points.
It can be: I dont think our jails rehabilitate.
I didn't make the claim that a world without pain is better: @RogueAI did. That's on them to prove that. You can't shift the burden of proof on me for that. I have my reasons for believing this is the best possible totality of creation, which would include having pain in it.
More generically, this has to be the best of possible totalities of creation (or at least one of them) because God has to create, when creating, what is best; and what is best is ordering creation relative to Himself (as perfect goodness).
I am not sure what the terms in the literature refer to here: I am saying that God would focus on providing retribution and rehabilitation for sins. I don't think this really negates what you are saying, unless I am misunderstanding.
Why?
Some pain is useful, but what's the point of unending agony when you already know you're hurt and can do nothing about it? Why didn't God allow us to evolve so we could block pain? Wouldn't the world be better if we and other animals could do that?
Well, no, since for several posts you have made it clear that your belief is somewhat different. I understand that.
That framing - "the argument from change, essences/existences, contingency/necessity, parts vs. wholes, etc." - is Thomism. So what you are saying is that you accept a framing that derives from revelation, while claiming that it does not depend on revelation... A long stretch.
That second paragraph, for example, in positing such things as an "absolute simple", supposing "pure act of will" makes sense, and so on, adopts a very particular view of how things are. It is very far from neutral, and has been used for centuries to defend christian revelation.
Seems to me that you are getting exactly what you set out to find, which no doubt is most satisfactory.
So while you might believe that your views derive from a neutral natural theology, it does not look that way to me. It looks like you have adopted a particular anachronistic account in order to achieve an already chosen outcome.
Yes. Like most theodicies, it's very ad hoc.
You can see the advantages of restorative practices, to the extent that you now seek to subsume them into your retributive account of justice. I'll count that as progress.
But which is to be master? Is the purpose of justice to punish the wicked, or is it to restore the good?
And what possible place could there be for eternal damnation in a restorative practice?
I can't make sense of eof such a view. It appears morally culpable.
So, basically following a time-tested (or perhaps yet to be tested?) plan (or theory, if it has yet to be tested) and sticking to it. Basically, following the scientific method to a tee. What an odd phrasing when the two concepts are one and the same.
This is the one thing I find annoying about the word "anachronistic." If it were from the past, sure, because we know about it. So we can definitely say, "this is not consistent with our modern society." But if were from the future, it's just weird. Therefore, the word does itself an unforgivable injustice. At least as far as its everyday usage in conversation. It basically just means "This seems to belong somewhere else, somewhere I've never been nor ever experienced, nor that I can say I definitively know ever happened or even could happen, but because of information given to me that I myself never verified, allows me to draw a definitive conclusion." What I mean by that is, say you're a peasant farmer in a very poor country whose never seen a smartphone. To you, seeing one for the first time would be considered "anachronistic". But it's not. Essentially, it's 100% equatable with the word "unfamiliar" or "weird", all realistic possibilities considered. It just means "strange", really.
That's what we in the business call "weaksauce" as far as terminology and use of such in arguments.
What?
You think science assumes its conclusions and then argues for them? What two concepts are the same - Thomism and science?
A weak sauce, indeed.
Of course. I'm not saying the concept doesn't exist simply that most people misuse the word and throw it around to the point it loses meaning and sincerity to those who witness such regularly. Like using the word "literally" as a synonym of "seriously."
Quoting Banno
All I meant was, just because you're unfamiliar with something and attribute that something to "time now past" doesn't mean you know all there is to know. Nor does it mean those who regularly and primarily rely on things and behave in ways you would consider "anachronistic", just because they happen to be in the minority (AKA "doesn't fit in" in your particular society) doesn't mean they're wrong or any less advanced. Not automatically, at least. Look at today's youth. Stuck gazing on smartphones watching mindless entertainment. Sure, it's a smartphone, it's modern. But it doesn't mean they're any more advanced than someone 100 years ago reading a book. The majority would call people reading books on park benches "anachronistic" in full accuracy and use of the word. Therefore, the word has no purpose other than to use it for usage sake.
And yes, many times a theory (if not most all theories) purport or suggest something that isn't currently considered science. Pretty sure all theories do that, otherwise they wouldn't be theories and there wouldn't be any new information. So yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. You propose (or assume a conclusion) and test it. Most theories fail, that's correct. But those that do not, are what define scientific reality. Do you really not agree with that?
You will have a hard time justifying Thomism on falsifications grounds, but if you think you can, go ahead. Using Popper to justify Aquinas would indeed be against time. But trivially, not invalid.
There's a hint of becasue the theory hasn't been shown to be wrong, it must be right somewhere here. I doubt, and hope, that Bob is not content with a demonstration that he might not be wrong. I hope he wants more than just that.
Your 'theory of jurisprudence', Bob, has nothing to do with the Christian metaphysics (magic) of "blood sacrifice" used vicariously to forgive ancestral "sin" bronze Age sanguinary nonsense (re: e.g. "John 3:16" ... "1 Corinthians 15: 3, 4, 14, 17" ... The Nicene Creed). :mask:
Sure, that's a whole topic in and of itself. But. Remember.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Edison
Do you really wish to dismiss such a sentiment as "not useful"? What if we all just gave up the first time, the second, even the 10,000th time. We'd be living in caves at the mercy of the elements. And come now. What have you done that comes even close to comparison to and of such a man. I'd wager not very much. And I could be wrong. But I don't think I am.
There are two people doing that right now and anyone who hears about it gets really angry about it (as I did watching the news last night).
Theyre full because its a good pyramid (ponzy) scheme.
It is, but I suspect that's more process rather than cause.
To be fair, I had to Google at least two terms in this reply. The first, understandable, most "ism's" are simply repackaged from their original authors to fit or appeal to a certain populous.
Surely you can reduce each to a simple sentence anyone not intimately familiar with certain persons but concepts can respond to equally.
Not everyone equates mainstream Christianity or those purported to speak or have influence of such outside of the actual Biblical narrative as, well, legit. Surely it's not fair to dismiss someone who simply believes "it's either in the Bible or it ain't" as what is relevant and not relevant to the topic of the text itself (Christianity), now is it?
Sure, dude has an opinion. He's from a group of people that calls themself Christian and is a government recognized insinuation at the time that claims to represent Christianity. But hey. I have an opinion too. The difference between the two is, he's popular (which the Bible itself says to watch out for, directly in fact "The whole world will be deceived") and I'm not. That's the only difference between what I say and what (your interpretation of, if it's not muddied or flat out changed entirely) the person you're referencing says. Nothing more. So. Yeah.
Yeah, it's popular. That's why there's a Wikipedia article on the guy and his so-called "ism". I get it. But you're revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity itself, which suggests just because those who claim to represent God do so in a way most would consider "proper", doesn't mean they are.
Honestly, I don't know how much this changes things.
I already said in my post that 'punishment' is one goal of justice and not the only goal. In Christianity, furthermore, for the blessed it is assumed that there is an eternity of beatitude that will, among other things, heal them for the harms that eventual crimes did to them. Furthermore, I believe that Christians generally accept that the activity of justice should aim to protect the victims and to the repentance of the offenders, when this is possible. In fact, i also said that I think that in certain cases punishments (both in the form of an active punishment and of a passive 'let the transgressor experience the bad consequences of what he have done') can be educative.
It is undeniable however that even restorative justice involves punishment for the offenders. So, really, I am not sure what your point is. Also, I have my doubt that it actually works in some cases like, say, sexual offenses, murder and so on. In an extreme case, I am not sure how it works in the case of, say, genocide. But even in the case of, say, sexual abuse I am not sure that involving the victim or someone close to the victim is the 'right way' to go - the victim might be traumatized and to protect the victim perhaps the best way is to avoid to trigger the memories of the trauma. In the extreme case of genocide I am not sure how this model of justice would work.
In order, however, to avoid to be misinterpreted here, I think that, yes, restorative justice, in some cases, can be a better form of justice.
Let's however assume, for the sake of discussion, that restorative justice is the best possible model of justice and let's say that for the victims, their loved ones and so on are perfectly ok to adopt the restorative model. In any case, it clearly involves a punishment of the offender. But I have some questions here I wish you could give your opinion. What if the offender is unrepentant for the crime? What if the offender deosn't cooperate with the activities intended for the programme? What if there are cases where, in fact, the best way to induce repentance in the offender is a more 'traditional' way of justice?
I can get on board with that.
Why do you keep straw manning my position?!? I've giving you every reason to believe that I believe that I can justify my claims through natural theology; and you keep acting like I haven't done that.
Like I've always said, justice is about respecting the dignities of things which is relative to the totality of creation (and how everything fits into it). Justice, then, is fundamentally about restoring the order of things and not punishment; however, what you are missing is that retribution and punishment are not the same thing: retribution is a requirement of restoration, but punishment is not.
It doesnt have to be. You are trying to lump me into a broader metaphysical framework so that you dont have to contend with what I am saying.
I want you to demonstrate to me where the argument from change, going back to Aristotle, depends on divine revelation to demonstrate the existence of God. You cant, and you know you cant; so instead you say well, Aquinas used the argument from change as an ad hoc rationalization for his prior beliefs from the Bible. So what? What does that have to do with the argument from change itself? Do we disregard arguments based off of irrelevant beliefs that the author may have had?
So? Again, instead of contending with what I said you just straw man me with but Christians have used these same arguments to defend their positions. I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN. So what? Do you have anything to contend with in terms of the actual concepts of divine simplicity, pure actuality, etc.?
You are pretending to know my motivations for accepting arguments like the one from change; and you are painfully mistaken. I dont know what you tell you: I tried to show you but you always ignore what I am saying and just claim that well, somebody else has used this as an ad hoc rationalization, so you must be too. Its nonsense.
About 60% of incarcerated people in the US are poor people. Maybe better education and job opportunities?
Well yeah, that's the point. Gratuitous pain sucks. It's useless.
Quoting Bob Ross
Why would it be metaphysically impossible? The human body has some very poorly "designed" features. I don't see why it would be metaphysically impossible for God to have tweaked evolution in a way to give us better bodies with better features and still keep up naturalness appearances. Do humans have to get so much cancer? Lower back pain? Dementia? When you hamstring God by saying, "well, it might be metaphysically impossible for God to do that", you're making God sound very impotent. I get why Christians like Leibniz do that, but it's a very weak ad hoc move. Prima facie, this is obviously not the best of all possible worlds.
We're just not going to agree on mercy and justice, but I'm curious why you think Jesus made such a sacrifice. He's an immortal part of some trinity. So what if he was crucified. It's like Wolverine jumping on the hand grenade to save the squad. So what? It's not heroic or sacrificial if Wolverine just regenerates every time.
The myth of god/human sacrifice probably made more sense back in the day, when animal sacrifices were mandatory for many official religions. And the occasional human sacrifice was reputed to be more powerful for getting the goodies. But the sacrifice of a god was of cosmic importance. Obviously some myths were narrative explanations for natural events such as the rebirth of Spring emerging from the death of Winter. Today, we have less inspiring but more technical explanations for natural functions. :smile:
Gods who sacrificed themselves :
Many deities in mythology are associated with sacrifice, including self-sacrifice for the benefit of others or to achieve a greater purpose. Some prominent examples include Jesus (Christianity), Osiris (Egyptian), Dionysus (Greek), and Odin (Norse). These gods often die and are reborn, or undergo symbolic deaths and resurrections, in narratives that explore themes of redemption, transformation, and the cyclical nature of life and death.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=what+gods+sacrificed+themselves
The Christian narrative is a response to a particular human narrative.
Christ is supposed to be God becoming a human being, and supposedly for the sake of human beings, who are all dying by our own hands.
So if we are to interpret the reasonableness of Christs response to the human condition (crosses and sacrifices for redemption, and death for eternal life, etc), dont we need to form some understanding on the narrative describing the human condition, and whether that narrative is reasonable first?
In plain language, do you assume people, much like other animals, are just making their way the best they can in the universe, naturally doing whatever people have evolved to do? Or do you assume people, unlike the other animals, have some ability to work against their own survival interests, capable of sinning against each other selfishly to the detriment of themselves individually and to the detriment of the species, doing what is unnatural?
What is your starting point as a person, assumed or at least hypothesized, before you ask what is the deal with Christ and the bizarre Christian narrative?
Seems to me Christ will never make sense if you think human beings already make evolutionary sense, on some gradient scale with the other animals, all of them also already making sense.
OR, if you think human beings do not make sense, that we do absurd things to ourselves and our brothers, you might say the Christian narrative, although nonsense metaphysically, serves as a sort of psychological distraction; so although it may be internally incoherent, it is just the opiate the doctor ordered for the absurd patient that is mankind. So this doesnt answer your question about the absurdity of the narrative, but explains why it has worked for 2000 years - man is nuts and only a nutty God story will suffice to build room in his mind for hope we could be better.
But this avoids your central question - how does a rational Christian make sense of the Christian narrative? Some of us are no longer affected by opiates.
My response there is, the best way to start to do so, might be to first make sense of a human narrative - understand who God is dealing with - and only then can we reason our way through a narrative of how Christ is said to have engaged with such a being as a person.
So, in the words of Pete Townsend, who are you?
If you are another innocent creature, Christ will never make sense.
:up: :up:
:smirk:
I am not sure the relevance of that point, but to answer: the primary cause of incarceration is, without a shadow of a doubt, the culture in which a person lives. The reason thugs in rough neighborhoods don't make it through high school is not because the high school doesn't give them the opportunity to get a basic education: it's because they are too busy being enveloped in crime, and I'm not saying they are primarily to blame necessarily for that. When your dad is in prison, your mom in at work constantly with no one supervising you, no one parent or father figure teaching you how to be a good person, and constantly being around thugs....that's a recipe to becoming a thug yourself.
Likewise, if you just throw the opportunity to get a decent job to a gangbanger, that won't solve their problems. They are still stuck in that culture. Address the culture, and you make real change.
You are assuming there is such a thing as pointless pain. I dont believe that.
I agree prima facie this doesnt seem like a part of the best of possible totalities of creationwhich is more than just the world itselfbut it has to be (from a theistic perspective). I can go through the argument if you would like.
In terms of the metaphysical (im)possibility of a pain killswitch, I am not contending that it is metaphysically impossible for a natural organism to have that switch. I am contending whether or not it is metaphysically possible to create a world that is ordered in totality to what is perfectly good and be able to have organisms like that. You cant just think about it in terms of one particular entity in the world: you have to analyze it from the entirety of the creation. You also have to factor in that the totality of creation is not the totality of the world.
I dont believe Jesus did; but that the Son has to at some point: it doesnt matter to me when it happens.
Why does the Son have to be incarnated by the Father as a human to be sacrificed for our sins?
Yes, you believe that you have justified your claims through natural theology. But have you? Again, the trinity and the son of god, which you apparently believe are conclusions of your argument, are actually ad hoc add-ons. Look again at your second paragraph, for example, where you move from an impersonal absolute simple to "him" to Quoting Bob Ross
There is no argument there that reaches the conclusion that a simple must also be three, just a confusion of misused words. I haven't payed much attention to your actual arguments becasue as arguments, conclusions reached from premises, they are truly dreadful.
"God is absolutely simple". Ok, a stipulation, god has no parts. "His pure act of will and pure act of thought are identical". Where does the "He" come from? Despite having no parts we can differentiate his will from his action... how's that? But Ok... "He creates by willing something as real" yet "His will and thought are identical", and "His perfect knowledge of Himself is Him thinking of Himself as real" and so on... again and again differentiating parts within the thing that has no parts. "Him knowing Himself generates something real out of Himself"... then isn't he no longer one, and no longer simple? Yes, since "His object of knowledge of this creation is Himself", and yet isn't he seperate from his creation? "He is both subject and object" and yet he is still simple, and undifferentiated... And then, like a rabbit pulled from a hat, "The Father is the one that is known; and the Son is the knowledge of Himself." Where did the father and the son come from? Why those words?
Becasue the bible describes god as male and the father and the son.
That's not natural theology. (Spinoza does a much better job of taking this style of argument to it's natural consequence, but the pantheist conclusion is not in keeping with revelation, and so is not acceptable to Christians)
Now we might accept that a paragraph such as that might serve to express a divine mystery, and not be dependent on things such as coherence and validity, but not if you offer it as a piece of philosophy, and so ground it in that narrative.
That's not a man of straw, but a reflection on what you have actually written. I do not believe I am being unfair to your position, but showing its inadequacies.
Blessed are the cheese-makers, for they shall inherit the earth.
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
It remains that a just god would not seek punishment s such, but restitution and restoration.
Eternal damnation remains inexplicable.
Obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
:lol:
But that's not what I pointed out. The conclusion that god is father, son and spirit is not a cogent consequence of natural theology, but is dependent on revelation.
Quoting Bob Ross
I noted that earlier. I don't much mind what you choose to call yourself. I'm trying to address what you have written.
Quoting Bob Ross
Those terms are at least specialised Thomist terminology with their own language game, or perhaps just language on vacation, verging on word salad.
Quoting Bob Ross
I attempted to infer what might justify your accepting what to me appear quite odd, idiosyncratic bits of language. In doing so I made reference to why others have done much the same.
It appears that you are trying your best to give a logical and reasoned account of a narrative that is inherently incoherent. I'm sorry if pointing this out appears disrespectful, but looking into logic and language is what we do here. You seem to be justifying an iron age myth using Greek logic. We might have moved on since these things were fashionable.
I'm sorry, but that's just word salad to me. I give up.
I apologize: I thought retribution semantically referred to restoration. Retribution actually refers to punishment. I was referring to restoration this whole time with the term retribution.
I can see, either way, that the God of the OT is inconsistent with my understanding of God's nature; including His wrathfulness. So we aren't in disagreement there.
I gave you as a response an argument for it that was not dependent on revelation. Ill give to you again:
What about this requires divine revelation? Are you referring to each person being semantically called the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? If so, those are metaphors: theyve always been metaphors. The fact these have historical roots in Christianity doesnt mean this argument depends on divine revelation. You could call them Perfect Knowledge, Perfect Knower, and Perfect Self-Love if you want.
You never address what I write though: you keep referring to Christianity as if that has any bearing on the arguments I have given. I would be willing to bet you will ignore my elaboration on the Trinity above like last time and appeal to Christianity somehow. This is like the third time Ive outlined the Trinity argument from natural theology to you.
Irregardless, do you agree that it is natural theology?!??
Thats not insulting: thats fine. Ive been trying to get you to engage in the metaphysics instead of straw manning me with Christianity this whole time. Please feel free to show me why this metaphysical framework fails.
So you're making up your own religion?
ok, that makes sense of some of the things you have said. Thank you.
Retribution has a curious etymology, apparently referring back to considerations between the three tribes of Rome - from tri..., tribe, tribune, tribute, and retribution. So it originally had more of the flavour you suggest. Now it is about punishment.
Quoting Bob Ross
I devoted just under three hundred words to directly addressing a single paragraph, .
But I'll do it again, for your 36-point argument.
I think it a terrible argument. It pretends to be syllogistic, to be of the form of a series of syllogisms, but mixes metaphorical statements, leaps over unarticulated premisses, sliding from ontological claims to personalistic language, without logical mediation. The pretense of syllogistic form masks a series of conceptual sleights of hand, category shifts, and metaphorical intrusions.
This is the nature of the Thomistic style, featuring notions such as divine simplicity, pure actuality, pure intellect, and causal emanation via knowing and willing, all of which are to say the least questionable.
Despite claiming god to be a simple, it juxtaposes will and intellect; subject and object; father and son and so on. But those distinctions are the very thing denied by divine simplicity. The argument rests on this contradiction. Now we know that a contradiction implies anything, so we should be wary of an argument that is so dependent on contradiction.
Then there's the idea that if god thinks something is real, it becomes real. Let's set aside the issue of how this debars god from thinking about things that are not real - the common "what if..." of modality. In thinking about himself he somehow brings about the Son. Is the Son then the same as that thinking, and so not more than a thought, or is the Son a second being caused by God's thinking of himself - in which case he is not simple, not One Being? These and other objections will result from the very notion that to think something, for god, is to create it, since in doing so god must drop the distinction between existing and being thought about. But we have that distinction for good reason.
In more modern terms there is a play on the use of the existential operator, a slide from using it as second order predicate to a first order predicate, that is invalid in ordinary predicate logic. Assigning a predicate to an individual presumes there is an individual, it cannot create that individual. See Inexpressibility of Existence Conditions.
Then there is the point I made earlier, the use of anthropomorphic language on which the charge of presuming what you wish to conclude rests. Is this language built into the argument, or is it stretching abstract reasoning to meet revelation? It smells like Anselm's "...and this we all call god"; a conclusion unsupported by the proceeding argument, but fitting it neatly into already accepted doctrine. A slight of hand.
Let's look at a sample.
It's not a syllogism, since it misses the hidden assumption that thinking of something as real necessarily makes it real. God, then, can' think of things that are not real, something that is routine for us. So what we have here is a loaded metaphysical claim, not a deduction, as well as the contradiction in being an absolute simple and yet having identifiable will and intellect.
Reiterating, one problem is that the argument assumes divine simplicity but proceeds by introducing various juxtapositions and differentiations.
Another is that it unjustly slides from the language of necessity into the language of revelation.
Another is that it apparently invalidly moves from a second level existential predication to a first level existential predication - it derives the existence of a thing from it's properties.
Another is the ambiguity of key terms such as "create", "real", "person" and so on.
And the main objection, that it is guided by a doctrinal target.
Now I am sure you will be able to mount a defence for each of these objections. That in itself is problematic, since it will add to the count of 36 lines... Sure, you are able to add and add and add, explaining to yourself why this argument makes sense - but is that enough? Don't you aslo want an argument that others will accept? At what point do you give up the whole enterprise as a Bad Lot?
I've already done so.
As I pointed out earlier, this is a misunderstanding. There is only a contradiction if we assume that:
A. Any distinctions made vis-á-vis God require/imply composition. However, this is not the case. And;
B. All distinctions must be real, and not rational/notional distinctions.
This demand that all distinctions be real is particularly problematic. Must a glass that is called "half empty" necessarily be a different, distinct metaphysical entity from the same glass when referred to as glass "half full?" Such a demand would be particularly fatal for nominalism. It would require that any meaningful speech about anything be based on real metaphysical distinctions. If "true" can be said of all that is, for instance, it would require that truth somehow be metaphysically distinct from, and thus beyond the category of being (which is itself supposed to be maximally general). The goodness of a good car would have to be metaphysically distinct from the car, etc.
If we say: "a simple thing exists," and "a simple thing is non-composite," are we thereby actually committed to a composite simple thing, since we must distinguish the simple thing's existence and its non-composite nature, because we have made a distinction between the two? And because it might also be called "something" or "true," is it also composed of "somethingness" and "truth?"
That's three contradictions.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Can you substitute "half-empty" for "half-full"? In most cases, yep. We call those cases "extensional contexts", and we may use substitution for our definition of equivalence. Doing so drops the whole archaic discussion of "real metaphysical distinctions" and "beyond the category of being".
Seems to be a much cleaner approach.
The substitution is not transitive.
So yes, it does set out something of what is implied in the idea of a trinity.
Without doing the calculation, I suspect that this would result in modal collapse. That might not be a good outcome.
The Trinity is explicitly a mystery. You're not supposed to make sense of it. The hypostases are separate, but each one is fully God.
This is not a matter of opinion. It's doctrine.
The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God but theyre not each other. So is here is not transitive, and trying to make it so leads to either contradiction or heresy, depending on your preference.
To hark back to an infamous episode of American presidential politics, 'it depends on what the meaning of "is" is'. As I understand it, predication in Aquinas is allegorical, rather than literal. This is connected to the 'analogical form of knowing' which was later undermined by Duns Scotus (and according to Radical Orthodoxy, a major part of the decline of the West.)
This is incorrect, but I'm not going to debate it. This is Christianity kindergarten.
So we should be able to substitute his will for his thinking.
So what god wills, god thinks, and what god thinks, god wills. Hence he cannot think what he does not will, nor will what he does not think.
So he cannot think about what might have been the case had I not written this paragraph. To think about it would have been to will it, and hence to make it so.
Perhaps then Thomism commits to Lewis' counterfactuals - that every possibility is an actuality. That would be an odd result.
:lol:
Right, numerical identity (dimensive quantity) is posterior to virtual quantity (qualitative intensity) and anything's being any thing at all. Unit (and thus number, as multitude) is posterior to measure. Which is just to say that, to have "three ducks" requires "duck" as a measure, etc. God's unity is transcendental however, in the sense that all being is unified. "Thing" and "something" are also considered derivative transcendentals (in the same way beauty is). They are prior to numerical identity in that you cannot have "numbers of things" without things; multitude presupposes units. The supposition here is that numbers exist precisely where there are numbers of things, hence their posteriority, although they are prior as an absolute unity in God (normally attributed to Logos).
Part of the idea of their pre-existence God is that all effects exist in their causes. But it's also the case that no finite idea is wholly intelligible on its own (just as multitude is not intelligible without unit). Hegel's Logic is largely extending this idea. Only the "true infinite" can be its own ground.
Well, that's problematic in itself... (See what I did there?)
To say that they are not "numerically identical" is to say that substitution fails.
If transitivity is denied, then the Son cannot be substituted for the Sprit, and hence they must be different.
But they are the same.
Contradiction.
SO back to the point, that the notion fo the trinity is incoherent.
It comes from Neoplatonism. These days we call it mysticism.
But why the recourse to logic? Why not just stick with "It's not supposed to make sense"?
Why all the contrivance?
I think the issue here, is that what classical texts mean by 'thinks' is not what we normally intend by it. I read in The Embodied Mind, that prior to Descartes, 'ideas' were not understood as the property of individual minds:
So when a medieval thinker says God thinks, this doesnt imply that God has something like private mental episodes or shifting representations. Instead, it refers to the divine knowing of eternal truthsor what might classically be called the Forms, which the rational intellect can have some insight into.
In that context, what God thinks, God wills isnt a statement about psychology or decision-making, but a metaphysical expression of divine simplicity: Gods knowing and willing are not separate faculties or processes but identical in the unity of divine being.
Perhaps.
He still can't think about what it would be like if you had not replied to me. If he thinks it, he wills it, if he wills it, it is so.
God results in modal collapse. Either he is a contradiction or a divine mystery.
If we say that the Father and the Son are the same in virtue of sharing in transcendental unity, that may avoid numerical identity but then we are no longer using same in any logically tractable way. Substitution still fails. The contradiction arose precisely because we were trying to preserve intelligible substitution, transitivity, and logical identity while claiming that the Father is not the Son, &c.
The cost is, you can no longer track sameness with logic.
That unit is prior to multitude isn't really about the Holy Trinity, it's just relevant to speaking about the topic. Unlike Bob, Aquinas does not think the Trinity can be known through natural reason, only that God exists.
On the topic of willing/knowing mentioned , this, particularly article 9, would be the relevant question.
God, being eternal, knows all that is or ever will be actual. But God also knows all things that are potential since they exist as potential.
But I think this may just be the same misunderstanding in play again, i.e., that all distinctions must be real, such that willing and knowing can not be meaningfully distinguished unless they are metaphysically distinct. But that a fire is hot, heats, and illuminates, does not require three distinct flames or three distinct composite parts of a flame. Likewise, we see many things with our eyes, but we need not suppose a distinct act of seeing for each thing that we see, although obviously we can meaningfully distinguish between seeing different things.
Sure, Bob deviates from the True Path... and we agree he can't deduce the Trinity within Natural Philosophy. Cool.
I'm not relying on the Trinity being deducible. I'm taking it as it is presented, in the Shield of Trinity, and working out the consequences. And in that Shield transitivity is denied, which has the consequence of modal collapse.
Separately...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Analogical predication. Interesting, since it was the basis of logic in Mohism. The idea is that heat and light are caused by flame, but that the flame remains one. But god's will and his knowledge are not caused by god, not results of, so much as inseparable from, his very nature.
The moment you begin to say something like, God knows Himself as good, and so wills Himself as good, and hence his will is Love you relying on a sequence of conceptual moves that require some functional or modal distinction within God. What has the appearance of having a sound logical structure is no more than a series of analogical or poetic moves.
In the end, what appears to be metaphysical precision turns out to be a kind of rhetoric using philosophical forms to say things that only make sense if you dont push them too hard, and which are accepted not on their own merit, but for the completely different grounds of revelation and faith. Hence the criticism offered earlier in this thread, that the conclusions of the reasoning are already a given, and the reasoning is just huff and fluff.
It's more honest, to my eye, to say that such things are a mystery than to pretend they are the necessary product of philosophical analysis.
And...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
...does not address the particular objection I raised. Quoting Banno
:broken:
CC: @Leontiskos @Count Timothy von Icarus @RogueAI
Now we are getting somewhere! I appreciate the elaborate response.
I see where your head is at, but I think this is a misunderstanding. Gods properties are predicated analogically and not univocally. We can, and should, in fact, collapse them into the same thing and only refer to them as separate to explain something from different angles.
Firstly:
1. Gods all-goodness (perfection) is just a description of His self-unity [since goodness is just absolute unity]. He does not have a faculty or power of good: He is perfect goodness itself by being absolutely unified.
2. Gods absolute simplicity is just the same as His self-unity.
3. Gods necessity is just His simplicity (lack of parts) which is (from 2) the same as His self-unity.
4. God as Being itself is the same as His necessity as a simplicity (since subsistence in-itself is just necessary being that is simple) which is (from 2) the same as His self-unity.
5. Gods pure actuality is the same as Him as Being itself which is (from 4) the same as His self-unity.
6. Gods changelessness is the same as His pure actuality which is (from 5) the same as His self-unity.
7. Gods eternity proper is just His changelessness which is (from 6) the same as His self-unity.
8. Gods omnipresence is just Him as Being itself which is (from 4) the same as His self-unity (being provided to a thing through creation).
So His all-goodness, absolute simplicity, pure actuality, changelessness, eternity, and omnipresence are identical.
Secondly, His all-lovingness refers to His inability through creation to will the bad of something which is just a description of His how His faculty of willing works; and His non-corporeality is just a description of His inability to be affected by space (being changeless). These are reducible to His will and pure actuality (as analogically descriptions), and do not imply any separation in Him.
Thirdly, His willing, thinking, and power are identical. Theres no mind, will, and power in God in a literal sense: analogically, we speak of the one and same being as like a mind, like a will, like power (of pure act) itself. When I say this light bulb is the like a sun radiating light, I am not committed to the idea that the light bulb is a sun. God is like a will; and the shortcut way of describing that is God is will.
Fourthly, the Trinity refers to three real subsistent relations in one concrete nature: they are not separations in that nature. So they do not imply parts in God. They all, in fact, collapse into each other as the same (ontologically) rational nature.
God has two aspects we can describe then: His unified faculties and His self-unity; and His self-unity is just a depiction of His unified faculties as unified. So He is just One.
Lets not! Thinking of a hypothetical is not the same as thinking of actuality. God thinks of metaphysically possible things as possiblenot real; and so what if this then that does not create anything because it doesnt think of this or that as actualit posits their possibility. When I think of what if a unicorn existed?, I am not thereby thinking this real unicorn.
Both. Remember, under this view, Gods thinking and willing are the same: we are not thinking of two different faculties in God when we posit them. Consequently, Gods abstact knowledge is abstract but not like our abstract knowledge because our abstract knowledge is distinct ontologically from our willing powers (and consequently we can think without creatingGod cannot do this!!!!).
Therefore, the Son is abstract knowledge of God and also thereby eternally generated out of God as created. This is necessarily entailed from Gods willing and thinking as identical.
Does this mean that there are two ontologically distinct beingsthe Son and the Fatherlike two gods? No. Because when something is willed that is how it is created and to will is in accord with an object of desire or thought (which is to be realized/willed into existence); and the object of this thought of God is Himself who is ontologically simple. God then is willing the creation of an absolutely simple being which then would have to collapse into Himself (in nature).
I didnt really follow this: can you elaborate with an example?
But we can only know what God is not from His effects; so we have to use analogies.
I didnt give a syllogism: I recognize that and it was on purpose. I think everyone can see the premises going on in it. It would be painfully overkill to give a series of syllogisms for the entire argument: this one fatal flaw of analytic philosophyit depends these rigid and superfluous graveyards of syllogisms. If you want, I can write it out that way: the argument is logically valid in classical logic.
Interesting, I thought Aquinas made a similar argument. I guess I just diverged from Tommy on this one.
Making a religion in the colloquial sense of that term is more about, in my head, coming up with traditions, superstitions, rituals, etc. I am not really interested all that much in that: I went to a Catholic church once and it all seems so superficial to me. They didn't dive intellectually into knowing God better or cultivating the virtues: they just recited some chants, drank out the same cup (which is nasty), and did some recited prayers.
If I were to have a religion, Bobism, it would be to come together out of reverance for what is perfectly good; to learn more about what is good; to practice being good; and to remember what is good. It would look very different I think than mainstream religions that seem to manifest to the populace as a means of checking boxes off their list of to-dos.
Well, it's complex. Saint Thomas cites Saint Augustine more than any other thinker (10,000+ times!) and Augustine suggests we can see the divine image (including the Trinity) by looking within. The second half of his book on the Trinity is a sort of phenomenological dive into the triads that fill the very conditions of experience. Likewise, there was a long tradition of seeing God, and the Trinity in created things (Saint Bonaventure is a great example here). Thomas isn't really at odds with these, but he doesn't think you can demonstrate the Trinity.
However, if one takes the view that all relations are inherently triadic and that the semiotic triad is the precondition for anything to be meaningfully anything at all, I think it's possible to construct a sort of transcendental argument towards the Trinity.
I don't think so. The analogical reasoning you employ - arguing that because two things are similar in some respects, they're likely similar in others - is not up to the task of providing a proof. The best you might achieve is an understanding of what you already take as true, along the lines that Tim is suggesting.
I don't see that what you have added avoids the critique already made. It repeats the same errors.
I see two key logical issues here. The first is the use of an existential predicate in first order logic. The second is modal collapse.
Existence is usually dealt with in first order logic by treating it as a quantifier - the familiar "?" in "?(x)...". You'll have heard the standard existential arguments for the existence of God at the response that existence is not a predicate? This is the sort of thing that results from the use of a first order logic; that's kind of why most of it comes from Bertrand Russell.
Folk try to get around this by making use of an explicit first order predication, usually written as "?!". The results are mostly dealt with in what has been called free logic. However, one of the conclusions found in free logic is that one cannot conclude from an argument that something exists. However, one of the conclusions found in free logic is that one cannot conclude from an argument that something exists. Existence seems to have to be presupposed by the argument.
Put simply, if your argument concludes and therefore this thing exists, but the existence of the referent is not already presupposed, then your inference is invalid.
This presents problems for things popping into existence at God's will.
This is a genuine issue. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-free/#inexp
For example, consider
At each step, a move is made that runs contrary to the inexpressibility of existence conditions. It's invalid.
The second issue is not unrelate. Modal collapse will occur when necessity and possibility are rendered the same, when what could be is the same as what must be. The problem of intransitivity, related previously, that the Father is god, and the Son is god, but the Father is not the Son, results in the distinction between necessity and contingency collapsing.
?(Father = god)
?(Son = god)
And so
?(Father = Son)
But the assertion is, instead,
~?(Father = Son)
And we have a contradiction.
Also, this last is identical to ?~(Father = Son) with which you would doubtless disagree.
Some theologians resort to non-classical logics in an attempt to avoid these issues. Doing so looks rather ad hoc.
So you said:
Quoting Bob Ross
"Retribution" has to do with repayment or recompense, and in its original sense the repayment could be positive or negative. If positive, it would be a reward; if negative, it would be a punishment. In both cases it is understood as a form of restoration - a kind of restoring of the balance of justice.
In the negative sense which is now the dominant sense, the punishment restores whatever was detracted from the victim of the transgression. The term to substitute for "whatever" is somewhat debatable and also case-dependent. "Honor" would be a common rendering. For example, to apologize to someone you have wronged is to humble oneself while honoring or uplifting the other person, which restores the proper balance between the two of you. In slighting them you demeaned them and placed them below you, and in order to compensate and restore the proper balance what is needed is an act of placing them above you. Depending on the offense, greater recompense is needed.
So it is not wrong to see retribution as intertwined with restoration. A rather precise analysis of this comes in Aquinas' writings on contrapassum, where what is honed in on is specifically the restoration of the imbalance between two wills. For example, if a man steals an ox he must of course return it, and this is also part of retribution. But retribution in a more precise sense has to do with the recompense for the imbalance that has been created between two wills or two persons, and thus the thief who stole one ox must repay five oxen rather than only one (Exodus 22:1). In our current legal parlance this is called restitution with punitive damages, or with exemplary damages. This restoration or re-balancing is much the flip side of the Golden Rule, especially in the neutral sensewhich includes both the positive reward and the negative punishmentinsofar as one receives back their own treatment, whether good or ill. This is both why someone who injures you becomes indebted to you, and also why you "owe" someone who performs a gratuitous act for you, even though these two cases also have some significant differences (i.e. repaying a debt vs. returning a favor).
With that said, I don't have time to get caught up in this thread at the moment. I have too many pokers in the fire as it is. The thread seems to be going well enough. It looks like you, @Wayfarer, and especially @Count Timothy von Icarus have written a number of good posts.
Thats a funny joke. Right? I mean, not so much haha! funny, but sort of hmmm, I think he is kidding around funny. Its a form of mockery, if you will.
Because evil and maybe by nature and atone for sins are figments, right? Or am I the stupid one here?
Or are you the reincarnation of John the Baptist, if I may mix religious imagination (which I cant see why you would mind that)?
Because humanity is not evil by nature. Thats just stupid. Youd have to explain how that is possible or what that means. Sounds dumb to me though, Ill be honest.
You may need to see a psychiatrist. Because I never would have predicted such behavior as this post if you are serious. (Im kidding of course. Youll be fine.)
Or are you sane, and serious and you have really sinned ? In which case, Im sorry for your loss, and you may be in big, big trouble
:up: You can always look on the bright side of death I hope.
So I was right. :up:
Maybe. I don't know.
Well since you say things you dont mean like humanity is evil by nature and then dont explain why anyone needs to know that or how it might relate to you OP, Ill let you you know, since you dont know, I am right. You arent serious. Not so much all is lost we are doomed serious, but sort of this is interesting serious which you are not. I was right.
Interestingly enough, I tried my hand at developing what I called a "meta-religion" called Narrativism a while back. The gist of it was to essentially establish a permission structure between religions by offering the framework of Narrativism as an addition to their beliefs instead of as an alternative. The basic idea was that whether or not you believe other religions, the stories and wisdom that we share culturally can still be enlightening or individually helpful. Narrativism is about finding those stories in other religions/cultures and finding useful ways they can be applied to the self and others. I had some basic tenets and whatnot written up at one point but I'd have to dig them out.
Edit: Found them
The Principles of Narrativism
-We do not concern ourselves with the truth of a persons religious beliefs.
-We understand that belief is a constructed narrative that we choose to accept as true about reality and our lives.
-We accept that while there is much overlap in belief between and among established religions, each persons interpretation of reality, religious phenomena and/or dogma is deeply personal and unique to them as an expression of how they experience life.
-We understand that while someone may not be open to specific dogma or belief systems of other religions, certain narratives within most religions overlap in ways that an inspiration from one may help a practitioner of another.
-We will work to help ourselves and, with consent, others construct or modify personal beliefs for the benefit of the believer and others through promoting education, tolerance and open-mindness.
I believe humans, like all animals, are inherently mostly selfish. That is not the same as evil, but it often overlaps. I sometimes take solace in the fact that other animals, if in our position of global dominance, would likely handle it just as if not more poorly. That said, I do sympathize with that viewpoint. It's easy to look at the world and history and see only the tragedies.
It comes out of the Doctrina Signorum, the understanding of signs laid out originally by Saint Augustine, which predominates across the Scholastic era and was the main inspiration for C.S. Peirce's semiotics and his essential categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
Basically, any relation that can mean anything at all involves three things:
-An object that is known (the Father)
-The sign vehicle by which it is known (the Word/Logos, Son)
-The interpretant who knows (the Holy Spirit)
And you can trace these to the two creation stories in Genesis, where the first is God's Word speaking things into existence (often taken as their forms, e.g., by Rashi), and a second where God shapes things out of dust and then breaths His Spirit into them. God the Father is, in a sense, always "what is known," since He is the First Principle, whereas all intelligibility comes through the Logos, and the sharing in God's Spirit is necessary for experience.
If this triadic structure is required for any meaning (or in terms of physics, any information) then there is a transcendental argument for the necessity of the triadic relationship for anything to mean anything at all (to anyone), and if "the same is for thinking as for being," this holds for being as well. Now, science often tries to view things a dyads, but it does this with simplifying assumptions and by attempting to abstract the observer out of the picture. There ends up being problems here for all sorts of things (e.g., entropy, information, etc.), but more to the point, true dyadic relationships don't seem to appear anywhere in nature. Everything is mediated. We can think of two billiard balls hitting each other as dyadic, but if we look close enough the description involves all sorts of mediation. When we get to the smallest scales, we get entanglement instead of dyadic interaction, which, according to some physicists, is inherently triadic (Rovelli likes to say "entanglement is a dance for three," the point being that quantum states are always relative to an observer or system).
So, this can be taken as the structure of the Trinity mirrored in creation. Likewise, in De Trinitate, Augustine charts the inherently triadic organization of mind in detail too. That's a hazy outline, but the basic idea. The idea that everything is mediated also goes along with the work of Dionysius the Areopagite. In Eastern terms, we might also speak of the Divine Essence, Its Uncreated Energies, and creation.
Saint Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum is sort of a summa here, explaining how God is known in and through created things, through our inner life (microcosm vs macrocosm), and finally by being directed directly upwards, and he ties this beautifully to the six wings of the Cherubim and the architecture of the Temple. The outer reality directs is inward, and inward we look upwards (the pattern of Saint Augustine).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Love it.
I find this actually flows from Heraclitus:
1. Harmony/tension, flows from 2. this, and 3. Its opposite.
(And of course he acknowledged the logos that endeavors to mirror this, or to be held in tension with it.)
And Aristotle:
1. Matter/form, 2. Material informing agent, and 3. unifying final principle (where matter and form can first be intelligible as distinct from one another; the final cause is what allows the agent to see not this matter, but that matter is necessary, to make this form, not that form, so it is here that we can elaborate on number 1 being separated into two distinct causes - the first semiotic product of the ontologically real.)
Or for Aristotle:
1. A substance, is 2. an essence, 3. that comes to be.
Trinity is fabric. The triad is the One. (Cant really be said logically, but is necessary ontologically before one might say anything at all.)
I am not arguing that two things similar in one respect are similar in others: thats not analogical either. An analogy is a similarity between things in some regardeven if they are dissimilar in every other regard.
Yes I have and I think this could be a valid objection to Thomistic metaphysics if one accepts that existence is not a predicate whatsoever. I think being is a predicate insofar as an apple has redness as property just like it has being as a property. Some properties presuppose others (e.g., the property of blackness of the chair is necessary for its property of heating up fast due to hyper-absorption of light from the sun). Beingness is just the first property presupposed and necessarily preliminarily for all other properties of a given object.
The issue with the kind of S5 modal logic argument for Gods existence (a priori) is that possibility is thought of in terms of possible worlds: thats the real issue.
For this ontological arguments from great-making properties like this one:
I would say an Anselm-style argument is invalid not because existence is an invalid predicate but because it also hinges on the S5 axiom in modal logic. I was discussing this with someone a while ago and it was an interesting conversation; but in the end it also does the same trick that the standard argument from modal logic does but instead with greatness. It considers the possibility of greatness an entailment of the necessity of greatness: if something is possibly great, then it is greatand this argument only holds if we think that a great being in one possible world must then exist in all possible worlds. This isnt how they usually argue it, but I think thats the real issue: they dont believe it is possible to speak of a hypothetically maximally great being.
I cannot stress enough that my arguments start a posteriori: not a priori.
How am I doing that in my argument though? I didnt make an argument like Anselms.
Ive never heard of that: thats interesting. I dont think we have to presuppose that a thing we are quantifying over is real in order predicate properties to it: that would entail we cant think hypothetically or in terms of possibility.
Yeah, good objection: lets break this down. As you know, we have to be careful to note when we are predicating, equating, and positing existential quantification.
Lets break down your version of the argument:
First off, why did you use modality though? I was expecting the transitivity version of this (:
This falls prey to assuming we are equating when we say things like The Father is God; but thats not the standard view (nor mine).
The statement The Father is God != Father = God because the former is predication and the latter is equivalency. This is the properly translated parody:
?(Father = God as the knower)
?(Son = God as the known)
And so
?(Father != Son)
When we say The Father is God, we are saying The Father has the nature of God; and when we say The Father and the Son are both God and not separate Gods, we are saying The Father and the Son have the same exact nature of God.
:up:
At the end of the day, I was just trying to convey to @Banno that I was agreeing with them in that God's Justice is about restoring the property ordering of things but that this sometimes legitimately includes punishment.
:up:
S1 through S5 are syntactic systems, not interpretations. S5 is the semantics that allows nesting of modal operators. The modal collapse that ensues from Anselm is a result of the syntax, not the interpretation. It's got nothing to do with possible worlds.
Basically, the Anselm's proof wants to move from god's being possible to god being necessary. But any system in which ??p ??p is true collapses possibility into necessity - everything would be necessary.
Quoting Bob Ross
That is transitivity. Just drop the modal operator if that helps you.
The overarching point remains - you have your conclusion and are looking for a logic that supports it. To that end you might indeed be better served by the pseudo-logic of Peirce's semiotics. However Peirce's semiotics (sign-object-interpretant) was developed in a completely different intellectual context from Trinitarian theology. Retrofitting it to "explain" the Trinity is exactly the kind of post-hoc rationalisation I've been criticising. Peirce's triadic structure is about how signs function in communication and cognition, not about the metaphysical structure of divine being - finding three-ness in both doesn't establish any meaningful connection. Even if you accept the semiotic framework, there's no logical bridge from "signs work triadically" to "God exists as three persons in one substance." It's the same invalid leap I been pointing out in your modal arguments. This kind of move - taking a fashionable 19th/20th century theoretical framework and using it to rehabilitate ancient doctrines - has become common in certain theological circles, but it's more about appearing sophisticated than actual logical rigour.
But of course, that's what I would say. So go and do as you will.
What about respecting their decision as a free agent and not trying to impose upon their will by modifying it through rehabilitation, but instead giving them their just dessert? One ought be rewarded for bad behavior and good.
As C.S. Lewis says, "To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ought to have known better, is to be treated as a human person made in Gods image."
I don't see how my argument is pseudo-logic because it uses analogical reasoning. Can you provide any part of my argument that cannot be translated formally into classical logic?
With respect to S5, possibility collapses into necessity because they are using the possible world theory. If something is possible IFF it exists in at least one possible world and necessity is to exist in all possible worlds, then it logically follows that a possibly necessary being must exist.
This is factually incorrect. Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs is based explicitly on his study of scholastic theories of signs that were developed originally by Saint Augustine. The basic triadic structure is not new to Peirce, but is first put forth in De Dialectica, one of Augustine's early works. He explicitly relates it to the Trinity in later works, e.g. De Doctrina and De Trinitate. Peirce considered himself a "Scholastic-realist," although how well that term applies to his later thought is a topic of debate.
I don't see how that works, though. Augustine explains in De Trinitate, that the sum of the Son and the Father is not greater than the Holy Spirit. In other words, it's one thing with three faces. In semiotics, the sign, object, and interpretant are clearly distinct things. We aren't supposed to imagine them as one. So it's not really the same thing, is it?
I didn't say your argument was pseudo-logic. I said Peirce's was a pseudo-logic. But analogically reasoning cannot be put into deductive form without ceasing to be analogical.
Quoting Bob Ross
This is not so. I explained why. Any system in which ??p ?? will no longer be able to differentiate between possibility and necessity. Collapse occurs at the syntactic level, not at the semantic level of possible worlds.
Quoting Bob Ross
Only if you presume S5. Which is of course to beg the question. And there's no need for the possible world interpretation, since you conclusion is presumed.
So what. Even if you are correct, it would not help. Augustine's Trinity involves a metaphysically mysterious unity-in-distinction that explicitly defies normal logical categories. Peirce's semiotics involves functionally distinct elements in a process. These are categorically different kinds of "three-ness." nails the core issue.
Bob Ross is still trying to deduce the Trinity through invalid modal reasoning that leads to modal collapse. Tim's historical scholarship might be interesting for intellectual history, but it's irrelevant to the logical critique provided.
We'd have to clarify that. "One thing with three faces" (or masks) is a common formulation of the modalist heresy. Granted that the distinction from one ousia three hypostases is subtle. It might not really be that relevant here though because the idea isn't that the sign relation, nor any of the other triads, are perfect models of the Trinity. In the case of being/knowing/willing it is also the case that each are distinct (and indeed, the persons of the Trinity are distinct, the Father is not the Son; denying this leads to the patripassianism hersey.)
Augustine is more interested in different triads in his later work, such as the being/knowing/willing of the Confessions, or lover/beloved/love (he has many). Saint Bonaventure also looks at a plurality of triadsbeing and mind are refracted through analogy like a kaleidoscope, in many different ways.
Anyhow, as John Deely never gets tried of repeating, the sign relation is "irreducibly triadic." It is defined relationally, just as the Trinity is. A sign isn't an assemblage of parts, since each component only is what it is in virtue of its relation to the whole. The sign and the Trinity aren't perfect images of each other, the idea is rather that all of creation reflects the Creator, and thus the triadic similarity shows up even in the deepest structures, yet no finite relations can capture the Trinity.
They aren't models of the Trinity period. It may be that Pierce read Augustine, but the notion that his philosophy should be understood in the context of Christian theology is incorrect.
To be clear, I haven't suggested anything of the sort. What I said is that there is a long history of theologians looking at the cosmos as a revelation of the divine nature (the "book of nature;" Romans 1:20) and that this can be extended to Pierce's discovery of the triadic nature of relations. If a triadic structure is taken to be essential for a meaningful cosmos, this can be used for a transcendental argument vis-á-vis the threeness of God.
Maybe. Likewise, the four gospels correspond to the four elements. Matthew is earth, Mark is fire, Luke is air, and John is water. This, multiplied by the three states: mutable, fixed, and cardinal, equals the number of apostles, the number of the tribes of Israel, and of course, months of the year. There are numbers all over the place, such as the birthmark on my scalp: 666. :grin:
Like in order to have a single open and honest discussion, we have to first have half of such a discussion, and before that, half of that half until we realize this goes on infinitely and a single open and honest discussion was impossible from the start. Too many numbers
:up: :fire:
Great. :up:
A relation is transitive if, for that relation, if A relates to B, and B relates to C, then A relates to C.
Identity is taken as being transitive.
If A=B, and B=C, then A=C.
Identity is also taken as reflexive, A=A, and as symmetrical, if A=B then B=A.
Indeed, taken together, this is a classic definition of identity. This holds in classical and most intuitionistic logics. One exception is Geach's demand that identity always be related to a sortal, which was pretty explicitly an ad hoc defence of his Catholicism. It is very rarely used outside of theology.
My previous comments kept the modal context in order to show that modal collapse ensues from denying transitivity to identity. But this is simply a result of those modal systems having accepted predicate logic, and so transitivity.
To that we might now add that Geach's logic risks in modal collapse. It seems to require that all possibilities are necessities in order to avoid contradiction.
And again, the overarching observation that the task folk here set for themselves is not to see where the logic goes, but to invent a logic that supports the Christian narrative. Even if that means dropping basic principles of classical logic, elsewhere held sacrosanct.
Shall we say that thinking you can derive the trinity from first principles is... ambitious? And this supports the contention from the OP, that there is much tht is problematic in the Christian Narrative.
It's "one nature, three persons." Consider the analogous case of human nature:
Mark is human. (A is B)
Christ is human. (C is B)
Therefore Mark is Christ. (A is C)
This is obviously false. Leaving out that all predication vis-á-vis God is analogical, you would still need to assume a properly metaphysical premise like:
"More than one person cannot subsist in the same nature."
Traditionally, in "the Holy Spirit is God," "is God" refers to the Divine Nature. I suppose another premise that would work is: "'is God' must refer to univocal, numerical identity." However, this is exactly what is denied. As noted earlier, numerical identity is taken to be posterior to (dependent on) God, the transcendental property of unity, and measure. Numerical identity is a creaturely concept. From earlier:
I have not personally seen many theologians reaching for non-classical logics, particularly not Thomists. They generally take this sort of objection to result from a failure to make proper distinctions, often paired with a question begging assumption of the univocity of being.
Historically, the Analogia Entis has its origins in Aristotle, with the study of logic. Nominalism and the assumption of univocity are a much later, theologically motivated rejection of analogy (one that emerged in a somewhat similar fashion in Islam a few centuries earlier). In general, the historical approach of the nominalists and the key reformers they influenced was indeed to say that the Trinity is simply affirmed through faith alone, even if it is seemingly contradictory under the assumption of univocity. By contrast, the classical view would be something like: "the Trinity is beyond human reason but not contrary to it."
Personally, I find this sadly ironic. The main concern of the nominalists was that somehow natures "limited God," making God less fully sovereign and powerful (so too for creatures' possession of any true freedom). Yet, their innovations simply reduce God to "the most powerful being among many," very strong, but just a being like any other. Infinite being comes to sit on a porphyrian tree next to finite being; God sits to the side of the world instead of being fully transcendent ("within everything but contained by nothing"). God becomes incapable of granting creatures true freedom or causality without Himself somehow losing a share of these. God becomes the "divine watchmaker," exercising a wholly extrinsic ordering upon being, as opposed to being the generator of an intrinsic ordering bound up in "natural appetites" (ultimately a "Great Chain of Love" emanating outwards in analogical refractions from the angels down to non-living elements). It is, in many ways, a greatly reduced vision of God.
Do you have a citation where Peirce admits as much? If not it's mere speculation.
Nice extrapolation!
Relating to a different tradition, Hinduism, the three modes: Cardinal, fixed and mutable can be equated with the trinity of creation, preservation and destruction embodied in the Hindu Trimurti as Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. Of course this is a very different conception than the Christian trinity.
And then we have the rhree Gunas:
[i]The three gunas are fundamental qualities in Indian philosophy that describe the nature of all things:
Tamas: Represents darkness, inertia, and chaos. It is associated with lethargy and ignorance.
Rajas: Signifies activity, passion, and movement. It is linked to desire and restlessness.
Sattva: Embodies purity, harmony, and balance. It is connected to knowledge and enlightenment.
These gunas interact to influence human behavior and the natural world, forming the basis of all creation. Understanding these qualities can help in achieving balance and insight in life.[/i]
(I copied and pasted the above because I'm lazy).
Gurdjieff said that man is "third force blind". His three forces he called the Holy Affirming, the Holy Denying and the Holy Reconciling. One example he gave was bread; people think bread is flour and water, but they forget the baking he says. Maybe he got this straight from Hegel, or maybe it is just an inevitable outcome of thinking about how things are for us.
It seems all this trinitarian stuff is basic to the logic of all human experience and thought. As soon as we divide the world into self and other, the third thing of the relationship between self and other becomes obvious. It seems clear that the ideas of creation, preservation and destruction apply to the becoming of all things.
It's very hard to see what you are trying to do here, or how it might help your case. I had presumed you would be seeking to defend trinitarian dogma, but your example serves more to highlight the problem.
Presuming we read "Mark is human" and "Christ is human" as that Mark and Christ participate in a common nature, then we are not here talking about identity. That is, you have moved from identity to predication. If we were to follow that, you would end up with Christ and The Holy Spirit merely participating in godhood in the way that Mark, Christ and Tim participate in being human. You would have three gods, not one. Your conclusion would be polytheistic.
You seem to think that you can avoid this by claiming "numerical identity is a creaturely concept". But that is exactly the issue; classical logic does not permit us to just drop transitivity without contradiction. Your suggestion amounts to saying that logic does not apply to god - to claiming mysticisms.
That idea, "participates in a common nature", is a presumably Aristotelian or Thomist? It seems to be a way to render a relation as a predication. The idea is that individual substances (like Mark, Christ) "participate in" or "instantiate" universal natures or essences (like humanity). Instead of saying:
The scholastic tradition reformulates this as predication:
Now traditional trinitarianism requires identity, not participation - it requires that the Holy Spirit literally is God.
Frankly you seem to be using the ambiguity of "is" to make an invalid logical move seem plausible. Either "is God" means identity and contradiction ensues, or it means predication and polytheism.
____
Your comments on analogical reasoning are similarly puzzling. It doesn't address the issue - even if granted, it leaves aside whether analogical reasoning can actually do the logical work required. You would have it that God is so transcendent that normal logical categories don't apply, and yet claim analogical reasoning somehow captures this transcendence. How?. Your aim may be to preserve the Trinity and avoid contradiction, but how you do this remains unexplained. How could "Analogically, the Holy Spirit is God" be represented logically? - and if it can't be, then it is illogical. Ok, so god is not just another creature - he is special; and again, what this amounts to is the claim that logic does not apply to God!
What you have set out does not help Bob derive the Trinity form first principles, nor show me how to understand the special kind of identity in "Christ is god, The holy spirit is god, but Christ is not the holy Spirit".
It just changes the topic.
____
But moreover, adding more and more assumptions and explanations to an already ad hoc account is not helpful. You seem to be simply digging a deeper hole.
Just noticed this. Here Tim claims significant similarity: "...all of creation reflects the Creator, and thus the triadic similarity shows up even in the deepest structures". Then immediately withdraws it: "no finite relations can capture the Trinity"
So what is it that is similar? If there is no relation, how is there a similarity?
It's a mystery, a sophisticated way to say it's not contradictory without actually resolving any contradictions.
Any work on Peirce that covers his studies should do. It's not an ancillary fact, but central to his whole project. I thought Realism and Individualism: Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern Nominalism by Oleskey was good, but the great popularizer of Peirce, John Deely has the compact Red Book as well.
So it seems you have gone with adding the premise: "classical theologians are wrong about what they think they are saying, and have been wrong since the Patristic era, because when they use "is" it must refer to numerical identity."
But I've already mentioned the response here. They would claim that this is absurd, since God's unity is a prerequisite for there to be number, and multitude is, by definition, a property of the limited and finite.
That's the basic idea of the Analogia Entis.
What individuates particulars that share a nature and formal identity? That's an important question here. It's also a wholly metaphysical question.
Participation is a metaphysical notion as well. Creatures participate, God is what is participated in.
Well, no.
The Trinity is a mystery. It's three persons, each of which is fully God. I think you're trying to waffle on whether it's a contradiction or not. I'm not sure why you would want to do that. That it's contradictory is what makes it a mystery.
I think people who find themselves in opposition about God questions might actually show a bit more support for each others perspectives.
Set Theory is like a neutral ground to understand seeking to logically penetrate a mystery that seems impenetrable.
Sets obviously function.
But then there is the Set of all Sets - impossible and defies all logic (yet it keeps rearing its head and underpinning logical progress..)
This is a type of mystery in the face of clear evidence/logic. We sort of have to live with how simple sets clearly are useful, AND how sets are ultimately impossible. We can call this where logic meets mystery.
So we can give the believers in the mysterious Trinity a pass (letting them have their evidence AND letting them attempt to logically explain and make coherent something that seems must be a paradox and to yield contradictory statements).
Im just saying, the emergence of mystery is not fatal and need not end the reasonable discussion.
Yeah. :up:
Isn't this the same thing that always happens with @Banno? He takes his parochial, historically ignorant version of Analytic Philosophy and pretends that it is somehow the One Ring to Rule them All? It's the same old game of pretending to refute metaphysical positions without engaging in metaphysics.
Relevant:
Quoting Leontiskos
Banno clings to "pluralism" whenever someone critiques him, and then he is all of the sudden a proponent of "monism" as soon as he is doing his anti-religious schtick.
-
Quoting Banno
Are you attempting to attack Trinitarian dogma? What do you take it to be? You're obviously ignorant of Christianity, Thomism, and all the rest of the things you pretend to have conquered. You seem to be specifically attacking your construal of a popular diagram. That diagram is not Trinitarian dogma. If you want to attack the Trinitarian doctrine you would have to find a theological source to engage.* Else, in that alternative universe where a serious Banno exists, he would actually look at the Council of Nicea. Yet even to read the diagram charitably is to not assume that "is" is being used numerically, which you obviously have not managed.
* If someone is actually trying to critique Thomism, then they probably want to engage Thomas. The easiest place is the first part of the Summa Theologiae, particularly questions 30, 31, and 32.
I would say that the OP was a clear rallying cry for bad faith anti-religionists to engage in insults and trolling. The pre-redacted OP itself was just a bunch of insults pretending to aspire to something more. The whole thread may have been given too much credit. It's fairly hard to salvage a thread that begins that way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'd be happy for you to give a different account of "is" that will satisfy the criteria you set, and yet allow a coherent logic. As things stand, you seem to think it fine to just specify that it is not the "is" of identity and leave it at that.
If you are sung a word in some novel way it's up to you to explain that use. And open to others to simply reject that use if it is unexplained or inept.
What you have done is to claim that Christ is God, The Holy Spirit is god, and the Father is God, but that Christ is not the Father, nor the Holy spirit, nor is the Holy spirit the Father; and when the logical consequences of this are pointed out, you say that the "is" here is not the is of identify, "=", but some other "is".
And some how this is not an ad hoc compromise.
They're not.
(I'm assuming you're referring to naïve set theories.)
There are axiomatics that are free from the paradox you suggest.
I'm not sure I'd call it a mystery as such. :)
Further, transitivity is essential to set theory; it's a fundamental result of extensionality.
Set theory is a mystery to some. I don't think 's approach is a great help. If the trinity is a mystery, then leave it as such, without trying to make it fit into this or that logical frame. It just doesn't fit.
Tedious.
@Wayfarer presented the diagram as an explanation of the Trinity. I'm just pointing out the consequences of that diagram.
You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.
I think you can still reason about mysteries.
Like Frege and Russell did. How the hell do sets collapse into impossibility?
It's legitimate if the goals is accepted - if one already accepts the Trinity, and is looking for a coherent account.
But if one does not already accept the Trinity, there is no reason to think much of the logic.
It's special pleading - making up an exception when your claim was shown to be false. That's what Tim does when he says "is" has a special use when talking about the Trinity.
And then adding more exceptions as the discussion proceeds.
Digging the hole deeper.
A better approach might well be to accept that the Trinity is a mystery, and not to look for coherence. If that's your point, I'll agree.
Well, I agree it is impossible to simply grasp the Trinity, especially when trying to do so in a math class or a logic class.
But when two Christians are faced with what they believe Jesus said and meant when he said he and his father are one, they can make reasonable statements about it, to try to grapple with it and understand it more, and correct error about it and discover new facts. Just like two mathematicians grappling with the set of all sets. Its incoherent, but still it is there to grapple with, to perplex, to face head on anyway.
In other words, yes its a mystery, but that doesnt have to nothing more can be said. That doesnt mean nothing can be said as true about the Trinity and no one can say other things are false about it. Ground can be covered while the mystery remains.
I'm curious how far some will go trying to make sense of it. :grin:
How does that look from outside that milieu?
You, @frank, and @Banno are surely proof of this.
Quoting Janus
"If you don't have a quote from Peirce saying its true then it doesn't count!"
How infantile is this thread? How clownish and desperate are these anti-religious hacks?
Quoting frank
:lol:
What more hackneyed attempts at "gotchas" are still in store for this thread?
Might be so.
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6893ead2b2448191918a398bb89f8439
Unverified - might be confabulation.
Of course the main critique of that approach is that it takes all communication as signage - as referential; and that is the exact reason Wittgenstein used a quote from Augustin to begin his Investigations. So in so much as Peirce borrows from Augustin, they share in a compromised view of language.
Serious work, that. An attack on a diagram. :roll:
Where's your logic, man!?
Operating in this way does no service to Christianity.
I provided you with actual texts from Aquinas to help you with your so-called refutation of Thomist Trinitarianism. I was hoping that would get us out of the preschool mindset of attacking diagrams. ...Well "hoping" is much too strong a word, to be fair. It's no coincidence that you're doing nothing more than attacking a diagram. Don't expect a serious response if you have nothing serious to offer in the first place.
If you are in agreement with Tim, then set out for us how "is" is used in the Trinity, such that it is not subject to transitivity.
So you will attack a diagram but you won't look at quotes from religious sources? :yikes:
Quoting Leontiskos
If pointing to the consequences of your doctrine is, for you, an attack, that's about you, not me. I'm just pointing out the logical problem of the breach of transitivity.
It was the elephant in the corner, but now you have made it the elephant in your lap.
No need to restate what you have already failed to answer. If you want to attack the doctrine of the Trinity, you have to tell us what you are attacking. If it's nothing more than a diagram, then who cares? That level of laziness and unseriousness is precisely what everyone has come to expect from you. Stop turning a philosophy forum into your infantile anti-religious playground.
Again, that you see this as an attack is down to you. But this is how you respond, universally, to those who disagree with you. You attack them personally, then misrepresent their arguments, then pretend to have already answered their objections.
If you have an argument as to how it is that the dogma can coherently deny the transitivity of identity, set it out for us.
Otherwise, what use are you?
Quoting Leontiskos
Your whole approach requires hyper-focusing on a random internet diagram and ignoring everything else. You clearly have no interest in looking at actual theological expositions of the Trinity. Surely you see how absurd your approach is?
Put up.
No, dumbass. If you are going to criticize Trinitarian doctrine, then the onus is on you to say where your concept of Trinitarian doctrine is coming from. If your only answer is, "This diagram I found online," then we will have a good laugh and be on our way. Besides, I already gave you the Thomistic texts that your anti-Thomism would supposedly be interested in.
Quoting Banno
Wayfarer may have underestimated the extent to which this is a thread filled with trolls seething to invalidate Christianity. The diagram is a highly simplified heuristic, and one which will consistently backfire when set before a troll (Mt 7:6).
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed. :up:
You have to know when someone is genuinely trying to understand something, and when they're not.
Thanks for that.
Presumably, I can now proceed to present any number of accounts of the Trinity, and for each, you will say "that's not it, Dumbass!"
But you will not put up your own account.
We all may have underestimate the extent to which this is a thread filled with seething trolls, indeed.
For the third time:
Quoting Leontiskos
So if you want to attack Catholicism then you should be objecting to something specifically Catholic, such as the Council of Nicea or the Catechism or a doctor such as Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, etc. I literally pointed you to the Thomistic texts.
Your objection to a diagram is ridiculous. No one thinks heuristic diagrams such as that one are meant to be theologically rigorous, or are meant to repel anti-religious attacks.
Folk here can plainly see your misrepresenting me as objecting to a mere diagram. I am pointing to the denial of the transitivity of identity shown in that diagram, and asking for an explanation.
From Father = God and Son = God we are usually able to derive Father = Son but instead we find not(Father = Son). Apparently, according to Tim, this is becasue the "is" of doctrine is not the "is of "=".
So, the obvious question - what "is" is it?
How does it work?
That's the elephant in your lap.
We all know better.
Look in the mirror. You will see a man who is too lazy to take the time to understand what Christians believe, and is at the same time deeply committed to attacking Christian beliefs. Think about that for a few minutes.
Quoting Banno
If your objection has naught to do with the diagram, then give your objection without the diagram. You can't. Your objection is obviously an objection to what the diagram represents. As I have said, the diagram is not a reliable representation of the Trinity at a philosophical level, and no one thinks it is.
So given that you are hell-bent on attacking the Trinity, you will have to find a real theological source in order to first understand what the Trinity is. Go inform yourself that you may then satisfy your anti-religious passions. Come back when you have something more than a heuristic diagram.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Banno
:roll:
For Tim, the answer seemed to be both that we had to understand the account analogically, and yet there could be no analogically account of God, he being so transcendentally different to his creatures. That doesn't seem very satisfactory to me.
_________
The actual argument Leon is presenting is not dissimilar to that in the article he presented in his thread:
St. Anselm's Proof: A Problem of Reference, Intentional Identity and Mutual Understanding (G. Klima)
His animosity perhaps follows from my dismissal of the argument there.
Klima's finishing point is that those who have not agreed with his argument do so becasue they do not have an adequate understanding of god; and that their understanding is inadequate is shown by their not accepting the argument.
Presumably, that's what Leon is suggesting here; that the proper understanding of "is" in the Dogma of the Trinity is dependent on having spent time reading Catholic doctrine and praying lots.
Again, not that satisfactory.
_________
Leon, we are up to the part where you usually tell us that you already gave the answer, and won't give it again.
That's a pretty idiotic misrepresentation of Klima, but anyone who has looked at the thread is already aware of this. I guess if you don't know how to do philosophy then misrepresentation is the next best strategy.
Quoting Banno
Where are these premises coming from? I don't know of any Catholic theology which says, "Father = God and Son = God..." Oh, right: they are coming from the all-powerful diagram that your whole argument revolves around!
That's the Trinity, dude.
frank said so. How could it not be true?
Well, it is true.
Frank, no one takes you to be an authority when it comes to Christianity, much less Trinitarian theology. Sorry to break it to you. You'll have to do better than, "It's true because I said so."
This is just becoming sad, Leon.
"Tell me what you believe so I can shit all over it."
The correct answer to this request is, "Fuck off," or some variant thereof.
If you guys want to want to attack Christian theology, you'd better have an understanding of Christian theology beforehand. That you don't underlies the problem and the mauvaise foi of this whole thread. If you want to attack a real theological source I would likely defend it, but I am not going to defend heuristic diagrams from trolls.
When someone who is serious offers a critique of Christianity, it is engaged (for example). In such a case there is a serious and charitable understanding of the thing being critiqued. It is also possible that someone genuinely interested in Trinitarian theology would start a thread intending to learn more about it. But in neither of these two cases would the OPs name be "Banno" or "frank."
What's odd is that you think the crazy shit you're whipping up is a straightforward account of Catholic doctrine, but this has already been pointed out to you quite a few times.
Set me straight then.
Cheers.
The elephant is too heavy for your lap.
Instances of God's wrath in the NT:
Matthew 3:7
Luke 3:7
Matthew 21:4041
Matthew 25:41
Romans 1:18
Romans 2:5
Romans 5:9
1 Thessalonians 1:10
Revelation 6:1617
Revelation 14:10
Revelation 19:15
I have no problem if you want to create a hermeneutic that demands an always loving God, but while you're at it, apply it to the OT God as well, and pretend there is only one God referenced in the OT as well.
Nothing I'm saying here is anti-religious. It just forces an admission that belief is not the product of brute force logic and rationality (and the same holds true atheistic beliefs).
To the OP, which asks why folks believe in Christianity, I'll respond by telling you why I believe in Judaism. It's because I explored all the world religions one by one and I chose it after a lifelong search. Yeah, right. Amazing coincidence that I searched the world over and found what my parents had been teaching me was right and true in my own house.
I think we'd all gain a bit of credibility to own our biases and even to unapologetically celebrate them. To those who might want to tell me they are too open minded to accept religion. Save it. You're just a parrot from a different teacher.
I already told you that the Nicene Creed would be the ideal source. If you want to use the Athanasian Creed, on which the diagram is based, be my guest. Do some actual work in understanding what you wish to attack. Use a source that is not so open to misrepresentation by the hostile.
Quoting Leontiskos
There it is...!
I'm off to do some shopping. Cheers.
As @Count Timothy von Icarus pointed out, it's heresy to suggest that God is a category that the three hypostases belong to, as dogs, cats, and mice belong to the category of mammals, rather, each hypostasis is fully God. They're separate, but they're One. The origin of this scheme is Neoplatonism, and it's mystical. It defies logic, and this has been recognized for the last 1600 years.
Quoting CRI
What is "that which makes something what it is" if not identity? It's not a property...
So what we are left with is that Christianity wanted to affirm monotheism, together with the divinity of Christ, and that the Holy Spirit was a distinct person - a problem set by apparently conflicting revelations. The answer was to claim the three persons had the same essence, which might work provided one doesn't pay too much attention to what an essence is. What follows is centuries of increasingly sophisticated theology moving from substance and person, through essence and existence, create enough technical distinctions and qualifications that people lose track of the original logical problem.
This sort of thing perhaps ought upset those of a logical, as opposed to a mystical, disposition. Hence, perhaps, Leon's disquietude.
This isn't an attack, it's setting out dogma, in it's original sense, and instead of saying "this is what you ought believe", asking "why ought you believe this?"
This would be a great take if not for the fact that the Nicene Creed predates Thomism by some 900 years. When religious topics are broached on TPF the level of both historical and general ignorance is breathtaking.
Quoting Leontiskos
I understand that, Leon. You missed the point, again. The creed doesn't help us make sense of you and Tim, of itself. We need the Thomism as well.
Right. There were versions of Christianity that didn't hold Jesus to be God, but they didn't survive.
Sure, but did you catch the other half, where viewing "God" and "hypostasis" as belonging to the same univocal genus is also erroneous? Is it really so odd to think that in the Source of all created being there is a reality that transcends the distinctions commonly found within created being? Isn't that pretty much what everyone would expect to find? That's how analogy cashes out when applied to God. It means that there is not a one-to-one mapping between what is found in creation and what is found in God. It means that there is more in God than there is in creation. None of this is incoherent.
An interesting euphemism...
On that thesis it would be very difficult to understand how Christians got along without Thomism for 900 years. Or how non-Thomists got along even after Thomas. Like before, you are trading in factual inaccuracies.
Ok. So deductive logic doesn't work because of the failure of transitivity, and analogical reasoning also fails.
So faith it is. Thomism set aside.
Nice attempt at deflection. Called.
Called? You say that we cannot discuss the Creed without bringing in Thomism. This is obviously false, but ignoring that for a moment, you haven't the slightest interest in discussing Thomism. I provided you with three central texts from Thomas, and pointed you back to them twice, and yet you refuse to touch them. You aren't interested in the Creed, or Thomism, or any specifically Christian theology. The only thing you are interested in is a simplistic diagram and your hostile translation of its meaning. You know that if you go beyond that diagram then your strawmen will fall to pieces.
No, I didn't. The only connection is the one you and Tim make. I'm just asking for a coherent account of the Trinity.
So we are back to where you intentionally and blatantly misrepresent folk who dare to question your ideas.
Same old.
However it looks, Im sure weve all been there on the outside of some impossible question with some subject - Im sure there is mystery in your life for instance.
Im not going to disrespect your curiosity or attempts to share observations about what is mysterious to you.
This thread could be about Catholicism, but its not.
If you think Its a mystery equates to so there is nothing anyone can say then why ask?
I wouldnt ask someone to explain themselves if I already thought (or knew) they had to be nonsensical.
The OP and most of what followed did not involve honest questions.
Quoting Banno
Some things are hard to say.
Some things work, but it is hard to say how.
That is the starting point. When talking about how Jesus on the cross is God, or how God is one while three persons. Its going to be hard to say.
Do you think there is a step two? Honestly.
How do you think the milieu of this thread looks to someone who understands God anyway?
I dont sense any real curiosity about Catholicism here.
Do you believe that anything that defies logic is impossible?
Life is full of peril. Trinity or not.
God the son told me his father and he are one God. Its a bitch.
I think its everyones preconceived notions of what and who God is supposed to be that impede the clear meaning of his revelation, not the impossibility of it all - but that is just me, another fool Catholic.
I believe in the same God as you do. You just havent met the Messiah yet. You will. God promised Abraham. You will.
God bless brother.
Im sure you understand the concepts. Because you are picking them apart with logical precision.
God is one being.
But in this God, He is with Himself, because He proceeds from himself. God is gift, given, and received, at once.
So to make this easier to understand, lets just say God is one being, in the person of the father, and the son and the Holy Spirit.
Worth any further analysis?
The next step isnt done with a calculator (1+1+1=3 persons and/or =1God.)
The next step isnt done with logic (because logic tells me this is nonsense so far).
The next step only occurs when you say I dont quite get the math or the logic yet, but what else does this mean about me and about God? What is the significance of a father and of a son? Why spirit?
I do agree we have to get back to the logic and the math. It is important NOT to believe there two Gods, so math and reason are important there. We must use logic to see one God, and to distinguish a father from a son. So logic cant be abandoned.
But why is God so difficult to grasp?
Maybe because God is difficult to grasp.
(Now Im using the opposite of a contradiction, a tautology.)
Anything that defies logic is the definition of impossible.
Miracles are impossible, for instance. If there was an explanation, they might not be miraculous, unless the explanation was more impossibility, like a Triune God. Then they make perfect sense.
This is off.
And Im not judging you or your beliefs. Im saying I, as a Catholic (if you are interested in how Catholics think) would never say it this way.
You brought the term ought to believe into it.
If there is a purely logical, rational accounting for the Trinity or God on a cross, we dont ever need to ask the question why ought? If we could make a perfect syllogism concluding the Trinity then its no longer a question of ought believe - its just logical inference. It is just must know.
You are not really asking why ought you believe this.
So here is where the question why ought I believe this arises: you love and trust your father, hes brought you life and raised you, and now he asks you to believe him and do something nonsensical as far as you can tell, but something he simply asked for and simply wants and that he says will help you like he helped you as a child - why ought I believe him? He defies my reason and logic? Why ought I believe him anyway?
That is where a question of ought believe arises.
This whole thread is about what is the logic of Christianity not why ought I believe.
Only after facing a situation where you truly ask yourself why ought I believe AND you choose to believe AND act in this belief accordingly, THEN you start to see the logic in it, and come up with pictures of trinities and Gods becoming human to sacrifice their own lives on a cross to rise before us and then leave us to continue our seeking .
It wont make sense starting with a calculator set at 0. We ought not believe it if we are living in a purely rational world of IS and no real ought to choose from anyway.
But ought is real for us. We are like God in this way (which, in this thread, is ironic).
When you say "the Christian narrative" and then start going on about the Nicene Creed which was arrived at 325 years after Jesus' death, you're just taking about your peculiar brand of modified Christianity.
5.1 in the Stanford General Catalogue of Variations on the Trinity?
"God is Good!" <-> "No, God is Evil!"
:point: :ok:
, I just meant that where a mystery is accompanied by contradiction, you can derive anything; that's the principle of explosion.
This is me and Hanover riding around trying to convert people to Mormonism.
I know.
So what is a self?
How is it that you and me are having this exchange; unless there is an identifiable self in each of us in which this exchange is taking place?
Any discussion of this mystery is going to be full of contradictions, like I said to myself that there is no such thing as the self.
Mystery abounds, and the difficulty in speaking about mystery makes contradiction abound.
I just dont thereby conclude from the contradiction that the subject of the mystery does not exist. I conclude I need to keep figuring out a way to talk about it.
So yes, you can derive anything if you want to hold a contradiction is not a contradiction. Or you can say that the contradiction only means the words still fail to capture the diction, and keep talking.
But there is no use talking about a mystery with someone who doesnt believe in the mystery.
:lol:
Yes. People ask questions without any sense of actual curiousity.
The reason the faithful beat this dead horse is because belief in God is attached to hope for all of us - we hope someone might be moved because we hope someone says something clarifying and true.
But yeah, I have no idea why I hope for you all, or me. Im a mystery to myself.
Speaking to some people produces a contradiction of the word communication. We are all living explosions. The contradictory animal.
Which one is me?
I believe that what is logically impossible is impossible.
But do you see how implausible it is for deflationists of the kind found on TPF to try to establish an immutable truth and then apply it to God? Folks around here routinely dismiss the law of non-contradiction, and therefore I don't see how they are going to manage to disprove the religious doctrine du jour with some firm and unchanging truth. As I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
That's what I thought. This is why you think drawing attention to the logic of the Trinity is an attack on Christianity: because you think if God is a trinity, and trinity is illogical, then God is impossible.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm pretty sure @Banno doesn't care about disproving any religious doctrine. He's interested in the methods theologians use to reach their conclusions, but even that isn't a very strong interest for him. For the most part, @Banno couldn't care less. He's just good at creating interesting discussions.
So consider taking the Catholic Church at its word, and accepting that the Trinity is beyond comprehension. It's not logical. Does that really mean we have to rule it out? Think about it. :smile:
How about, its not merely beyond comprehension. There are things we can say about God.
Can you accept that? It would seem you could if you were asking someone to explain the Christian narrative. But then, are you honestly asking for anything new?
Quoting frank
You appear to be continually conflating "mystery," "mystical," and "involves analogical predication," with "involves recognizing a contradiction and then affirming it anyhow because of faith." That's the basic error here. Very few theologians of any influence have embraced the latter, particularly not within traditional Christianity. "Beyond human reason," does not imply "contrary to human reason."
Because you conflate these, you think doctrinal statements to the effect of "the Trinity is a mystery," somehow support, "the Trinity is contradictory." These aren't taken to be the same thing. Nor is it the same thing to say: "logic does not show that the Trinity involves a contradiction," as to say: "the mystery of the Trinity can be explicated through logic." "The Trinity is not a contradiction," is an apophatic statement. And indeed, this is actually the far more typical fideist and nominalist response, to stick to the strictly apophatic, and claim that the mystery cannot be explicated, only accepted by faith. That is, however, something distinct from affirming that it is a contradiction, and then affirming the contradiction.
I can give you a more common example. Suppose we can agree to "love and beauty cannot be explained by logic." It does not follow then that "love and beauty involve contradictions," or that "to say one is in love, one must affirm a contradiction."
No, I think the people who never miss a beat when it comes to an anti-religious topic are deeply invested in attacking religion. The statistics tell that tale.
Quoting frank
The statistics don't support your thesis.
Quoting frank
Consider trying to quote a Catholic source instead of engaging in lazy misrepresentation. Here is Thomas:
Quoting Aquinas, ST I.32.1
But it should come as no surprise to you that Catholics do not believe the impossible to be possible. That such a thing is a strawman should be evident.
Yep. :up:
I know you got into some of this earlier, but there are different schools on these sorts of questions even within Catholicism. Nevertheless, all of the Catholic schools agree that any faith-based doctrine can be successfully defended from charges of contradiction or incoherence. There is a common opinion found especially among Thomists that something like the Trinity cannot be demonstrated [hide="*"](in Aristotle's sense)[/hide] from natural reason, but it does not follow from this that the Trinity is somehow illogical or incoherent.
@Banno has a better sense of what @frank does not understand:
Quoting Banno
Does anybody want to take a shot at this question? If it's illogical, does that mean it's impossible? Or would limiting the world to my own concepts be a kind of idealism?
I don't believe Augustine thought of the Trinity as something humans can understand.
Quoting SEP
Quoting SEP
In other words, the tools used to deny contradiction, person and essence, didn't mean anything to Augustine, other than to draw the triangular schematic in words. It doesn't make sense to say it's three persons and one essence, and Augustine knew that.
You are falsely representing the Catholic Church by claiming that the Catholic Church holds that the doctrine of the Trinity is illogical. You have been misrepresenting the Catholic Church over and over throughout this thread, beginning with the very first post.
I disagree.
And you consistently refuse to present any evidence whatsoever for your claim that the Catholic Church holds the Trinity to be illogical. This sort of thing is why you haven't been taken seriously in this thread.
Your quote does not state that the Trinity is illogical. Care to try again? Care to try to present evidence for your thesis that the Catholic Church holds the Trinity to be illogical?
Deep in our hearts, the light of God is shining
On a soundless sea with no shore
---- Rumi
Yep. No honest curiosity, or basic humble respect.
:up:
And that is why these threads are tedious. "Catholics hold that the Trinity is illogical and I am not willing to offer any evidence for this implausible claim of mine." Or else seizing upon the most simplistic diagram and interpreting it in the most uncharitable sense possible in order to try to score a point against Christianity.
So Augustine claims the Trinity is beyond human understanding. Which part did he think was incomprehensible?
The same applies to God's essence!
What does?
According to Aquinas, God's essence is ineffable!
It's ineffable, but it's totally logical?
You cannot prove such a God since you cannot discuss it!
That would make it more difficult, yes. :razz:
:rofl:
I don't know, you're the expert on Catholic theologians. I was under the impression that Augustine spent fifteen years working on a book on the Trinity which, from its opening lines, purports to be a defense of the Trinity against the sophistries of people who claim things like "I can show that it is a contradiction." But if it's actually saying: "yes, the Trinity is a contradiction," feel free to explain where it says this.
That wasn't very Christian, Timothy.
:lol:
This is quite the thread.
First of all, I think I differ a bit (slightly) from @Leontiskos and maybe @Count Timothy von Icarus.
I do think, in some senses, the Trinity, and even Christ on the Cross, do not make sense. These are valid questions for reasonable people to ask, and the answers are not satisfying to the one who only experiences this subject through logical syllogism.
Like explaining why a song is beautiful - some things said will only make sense to someone who heard the song.
But weve heard enough of that on this thread already. Enough talking over each others heads.
To reset:
So what is a self? How is it that you and me are having this exchange; unless there is an identifiable self in each of us in which this exchange is taking place?
But self is a mystery, no? Any discussion of this mystery is going to be full of contradictions, (because the concept of self-identity is perilous if not illusory and really not coherent and not a conversation about any thing.)
Mystery abounds, and the difficulty in speaking about mystery makes contradiction abound.
I just dont thereby conclude from the contradiction that the subject of the mystery does not exist. I conclude I need to keep figuring out a way to talk about it.
Contradiction is a dead end, but only along one line of reasoning. We can hit the dead end, and reset to try another way.
I dont ignore Freud because he divided the self into id, ego and superego, for instance. We can rationally consider Freud, and the difference between the superego and the id in the conscious and subconscious self, for instance, even though billions of people say the self is an illusion (including in many ways, me).
So @frank do you really wonder about the Christian narrative? Do you really wonder how some Christian can rationally discuss the Trinity, like Freud may have discussed a self?
Here is a premise: logic is like one of the senses; you can rely on it to penetrate the world, and live by it most days, but every so often it leads down a dead end (mirage/set of all sets, the infinite continuum of impossible becoming), even unto death and madness.
So maybe, sometimes, regarding some situations and certain subjects, relying ONLY on our senses and our reason will not deliver us from the dead end. Maybe beings like us have more that penetrates experience besides reason. Or our senses. We have understanding that usually follows after reason, but can understand and not know why or how just as well.
Logic isnt God to me. Its just a tool, like an eyeball.
Sometimes we can relate with things through our ears, but dont see or cant picture them at all. Other times we can relate to things that make no logical sense. That doesnt mean those things cant be seen; or cant be logically explained (by me); but absent that vision or logic, it also doesnt mean those things cant cant be beheld and talked about in other ways (by me).
To say its a mystery is still to logically identify an it. All logic isnt lost in the notion of three persons in one God. Its just not that simple.
Have I already abused language too much for you?
Not worthy of reply?
Something does not need to be contradictory to be a mystery. Indeed, I'd argue that if something is contradictory, in a strict logical sense, it is simply absurd, not a mystery at all. To say, in a univocal, properly logical sense, that God is both numerically one and not-numerically one, and that the Father is the Son and also is not-the Son, isn't a statement of mystery, it is nonsense. It is nonsense because we are saying something, and then negating it, and not in the fashion of apophatic theology, where we affirm in one sense, and then negate the creaturely sense, but in the strict univocal manner appropriate to logic, so that we are actually not saying anything at all, because everything we have said has been negated.
But, there is a difference between strict contradiction and merely apparent contradictions, or contradictions that arise through equivocation, or not making proper distinctions. And there is a difference between what is beyond human reason, or beyond the domain of logic and of univocal predication, and what is contrary to reason (contradictory).
To quote C.S. Lewis from The Problem of Pain:
Yes. Kierkegaard said that faith is like floating in water that is 70,000 fathoms deep. Sometimes having faith in yourself defies all logic.
I think what has happened at points throughout the thread is an accumulation of several minor equivocations. For example, someone who cannot even read music might look at a musical score and move from predication to predication:
What has happened in this thread is that the shift continues:
One might say that the Trinity is "not logical" in the (somewhat idiosyncratic) sense of "not able to be demonstrably proven by natural reason," but this does not suffice to infer, "illogical." The root problem is that a claim like "not logical" is vague and ambiguous, as it has a very large semantic range and could even be construed in positive or negative ways. It lacks precision and is therefore an unwieldy predication, especially when it is to be leveraged as an accusation.
---
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
He is very eloquent. :up:
That eliminates mercy. God has to be both merciful and just at the same time.
The semantic level is a linguistic expression of the syntactic level. My point is that if you reject the possible worlds theory, then you are rejecting S5 as well as standard modal logic.
Again, you are confusing identify relations with predication. When I say "The Son is God" I am not referring to something analogous to "S = G".
I agree with that 100%. And you said it well as usual.
I also do not think it contradicts any of the above for me to say this:
Quoting Fire Ologist
But it was imprecise, and contradicts your quote above, for me to say this:
Quoting Fire Ologist
This is said more precisely as the difficulty in speaking about mystery makes apparent contradictions easily arise.
I agree fully with everything C.S.Lewis said too. However, I think @Banno and @frank would say that the mere reference to three persons in one God is an occasion where meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words God can.
I disagree with Banno and Frank that the Trinity is meaningless and contradictory, but I grant (I think in agreement with Augustine and Aquinas) that it is very treacherous to attempt a straight logical line through it - though not impossible, but understandably difficult to speak about.
Let me digress to make a small point. Its perfectly logical and there is no apparent contradiction to say there can only be one God. Without measuring Gods power, we can say God is the highest power, the immortal all powerful one. If there were two such beings, neither would be God, because neither would be highest or all powerful. God can have no equal nor anyone higher, and if you like a lesser God, we should just come up with a new term because anything under God is in some sense wholly and utterly unlike God. What about a lesser God makes them God at all? Makes no sense.
This is logic. Reason can conclude monotheism makes sense and non-monotheistic religions do not make sense when they use the term God.
If Frank and Banno were arguing against the logic of monotheism, we would need no revelation and would make no reference to mystery - its simple logical inference to say, if there is any God, there is only one God.
Now we Christians have been blessed to know this one God through the Son, as Father. And have come to learn the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son and that the Son says he and the Father are one, and his spirit is God as he and the father are God. The church is the mystical Body of Christ, and his Bride, as when man and woman marry and become one flesh
I see the logic in all of that. I can go on making distinctions, and correcting error (like some of the things Frank said make no sense and contradict what I said and what the Church says). And there is probably some error in what I just said, but I could be corrected, because there is a logic here.
I agree with you and @Leontiskos - the Trinity is the opposite of meaningless.
But I also see that, on its face, (from outside this milieu as Banno put it), if you did not hear the Son speak, a Trinity could easily appear to make little sense. It is like explaining in words how an apple tastes - the words only make sense to apple eaters. Its sweet, but not like sugar, because it is tart but not so much as a lemon, and it crunches but not like a roasted walnut, because it is juicy, but drier than a plumb - we could go on and on but unless you ate an apple you might see only apparent contradiction.
So the OP was fairly doomed. Because unless it was asked with a humble spirit and the open mind of someone who is truly curious, it is highly unlikely the detractors of Christianity will ever get a sense of how the Trinity really tastes. (God even gave us the Eucharist - he did his best to reach everyone from every angle! I have hope, which is why I keep posting )
I betcha I know more about Christianity than you do. Let's quiz each other and you have to answer without looking it up. You first.
1. Yahweh is God. Jesus is God. The holy spirit is God.
2. . Hanover is a person, Bob is a person, Frank is a person.
3. Hanover is Banno. Bob is Banno. Frank is Banno.
Is 1 like 2 or is 1 like 3? Clear this up for me.
If 1 is like 2, then you have three things that fit into a single category.
If I is like 3, then you either have 1 person with 3 names or a 3 headed monster.
Such a weak analogy! Many, probably most, people experience love and beauty. They are simply not governed by logic?not things we use logic to understand?we understand them by feeling them. The Trinity is a concept?either an illogical, that is self-contradictory, concept or incoherent, and not a concept at all but just a string of words that make no sense.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
All that quote shows is that God is subject to logic, just like the rest of us. So, not omnipotent.
Thats enough. I can let someone have that. If they then want to ask about it and ask me how I believe it, and what I believe, I get the perplexity.
But if they are satisfied with that, and that not able to be proven by natural reason sums up the Trinity, and they have no honest question or curiosity about such believers, then it is certainly logical to assume a conversation about what the Trinity is will go nowhere. Which we have assumed from the beginning. Because we are logical.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree with that. I will say Banno was trying to be precise, pointing out specific contradictions.
But unless there was an honest interest in what we are saying, they just wont see the logic. Its not like natural reason.
Maybe. I dont know.
Feel what way? What feeling am I talking about? Who is reciprocating on this thread?
Quoting Fire Ologist
The other thing we have to reckon with is the question of how much any given explanation or account is meant to bear. The diagram that Banno has decided to scrutinize is not meant to bear scrutiny from the hardened anti-religious. It is at best a heuristic tool to help believers remember some basic ideas relating to the Trinity, or to sketch the silhouette of the doctrine. It just doesn't make sense to take refined philosophical weapons and go to war against a simple heuristic diagram.
Pretty much. The reasoning used in the simple theology hereabouts is low-hanging fruit for an analytic approach. It's the little word puzzles that are interesting, more than that it relates to god - but these threads always get a good audience, and plenty of kick back, which is fun. I'm supercilious and condescending, and despite, or perhaps becasue of that, you, dear reader, are here browsing my posts. Are you not entertained?
That, and that the OP was by Frank, who is at the least earnest in his posts.
Leon is helpful in these threads becasue he is so predictable. When someone disagrees with him he will variously denigrate them personally, misrepresent what they have said and claim to have already provided the answer. It's a pattern seen across many threads and against many different posters, and is the reason that he is ignored by so many of the more competent folk hereabouts.
He also borrows a strategy from Tim, to bury the discussion in appeals to specialised theological metaphysics, to insist that those who do not engage in the same texts as he does cannot understand his profundity. At heart this is an appeal to authority, together with a refusal to engage charitably.
Tim of course has a better background in all this than any of us, and so never descends to the plebeian stance of actually presenting an argument. Hand waving and eloquence is sufficient for him to maintain his circumstance.
Fire Ologist presumes that the posts here are trying to learn about Christianity. That's not something I'm much interested in, given it's ubiquity. Olo is right that what is said in this thread is pretty irrelevant to the beliefs of the faithful. It's apparent that it's equally irrelevant to the beliefs of us Pagans.
So is this just performance art? Public onanism?
What if Banno's point is more Wittgensteinian, or Davidsonian - that there need be, indeed is, no explicable final answer in the way that theology presupposes? Then the arc of his assault here is in showing that all Leon and Tim and the others are doing is also a distasteful display of inappropriate behaviour? That in the face of the ineffable and the infinite, any finite discourse must fail?
But he's not cleaver enough to be doing that, now, is he.
Perhaps it's not a good idea to post these musings. But I'll do it anyway. These interminable threads make my point far more eloquently than I ever could.
:100: :up:
These uses of "=" have caused confusion, not clarity.
No, this sort of ad hominem psychologizing and self-portrayal that you often resort to reveals how desperate you are to try to spin a narrative that has gotten away from you, in yet another thread where you have embarrassed yourself. In this case the embarrassment stems from your refusal to move beyond a diagram.
(I quoted your whole post so there's no need to try to edit it away. It's a gem.)
Quoting Banno
"Do you want me to be Frank? I'll be Ernest if you'd rather" Benny Hill.
Oh Banno - you are always more interested in talking about talking, rather than in what is actually being said. Turning every subject into the same discussion: Analytics applied to low hanging fruit.
I know there is a whole person there - not just a living truth table.
Quoting Banno
You asked a lot of questions. I assume they were rhetorical then? For amusement. Fun.
And now I think you might need to learn more about paganism.
Quoting Banno
That is your own psychological issue - and a lot of people around here - disdain for the absolute and dogma. Despite the Spanish Inquisition, theology presupposes no such thing. I am a pretty solid Catholic - nothing, no pope, no dogma, no mystery - nothing oppresses me. I usually rely on reason, but I dont even have to do that.
Quoting Banno
Really?
@frank - youve been earnest with me? Betcha Ive been more earnest with you..
Divine intervention?
Definitely! :rofl:
Divine enough for me that you thought to post that. :up:
Seriously though, Earnest has a bit of perfection in it. God strikes again!
You are here. With a clear line between them. Spot on! :lol:
ADDED: Thanks for the earnest post!
SUPERIMPOSED: Ironically, (where irony is opposite earnestness) the Frank and Earnest that you reposted was most earnest.
Quoting Banno
:lol:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Contrary to protestations and resentment from many, that's what Philosophy is.
Right...as I seem to remember Hegel putting it: "The same old stew, reheated".
Ok. But is that all it is?
I am not being contrary. Complementary yes, but not contrary. (And not complimentary just yet. :joke: ).
Just because analytics accompanies everything we say, why always belittle the fact that so does the rest of the world talked about through the logic of what we endeavor to say?
We have to choose the content too, or there is nothing to analyze, nothing to say and analyze. We dont just make rules and make token uses of those rules - we say things we need rules to make clear.
I would say re the cartoon, I am sympathetic to both red and green, I am there in the middle, not locked, analytics versus ironic poetry, but with both. You are here continues to provide plenty of content.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, these threads have very little value when folks just want to tell us what their beliefs are. It's even more frustrating/annoying/time consuming to hear others' views as if they are authoritative, as in "Christians believe..." or "God requires..." These comments suggest anyone cares what another's theology is or that they think someone might accept that there is a single monolithic view on what God is or what any religion demands for authentic belief.
Here's an interesting quote I came upon:
The image of homo religiosus is that of a man who craves to flee from the concrete, empirical world and escape into the realm of eternal being.
I like this because it immediately implicates true philosophical issues. It's describing a person with a different form of life with such a distinct epistimological system that he relies upon neither empiricism or even reason, but he seeks meaning in an eternal being. They would play a most confusing word game, but a legitimate one nonetheless.
I think that's what your last comment was simply asking be recognized. The Trinity isn't stupid, worthless, or even nonsense, but it's not philosophical. It's not this worldly so to speak. It's not an insult to say that. What is problematic is in refusing to admit that. And along these lines, if one wants to argue that one ought or ought not be homo religiousus, that sounds like we're fading back to personal theology that we need to avoid.
Quoting Banno
We have yet another equivocation from Banno. What he did was give a strange self-referential account of why it looks like his activity in the thread is stupid but it's really quite smart. He is narrating his own activity and trying to construe it as "performance art" and "Wittgenstenian showing." According to his self-narration, he was trying to sink the thread into a bog of pointlessness! This post of Banno's was a very poor and awkward attempt at what the Germans refer to as "Deutungshoheit."
So whether or not philosophy is talking about talking, this self-narration in order to try to salvage one's past utterances is obviously not philosophy. It's just a vain attempt to save face.
This got me wondering if I'm homo religiosus or not. In my case, it's not that I crave to flee from the concrete, it's more that my homebase is in timelessness, but you can't live that way. You have to tune your psychic radio to the practical.
Are you homo religiosus?
Yeah, that was weird. This post has been sarcastic, jaded, ironic from the start.
It almost became a discussion between two sides of an issue a couple times, but earnestness is hard to fake on TFP.
Quoting Banno
Not really. Unless it relates to God, the puzzles do not become so stark, so exaggerated, that they demand interest. The stakes are raised too high for you to ignore. Absolutes set every stage. It can appear delusional to ignore them all of the time.
But then, this sounds absolute:
Quoting Banno
Banno, like a god, making his usual intervention.
No. I see that leading to asceticism, austerity, seclusion, and, you know, other monklike shit.
I believe in doing right because it is right and watching myself and the world becoming right. Spiritual uplifting from doing, living.
The other option is cognitive man, who lives by reason and observation alone. Boring fuck.
I think you have to challenge a belief from within the dictates of the belief system. I think both sides have said it here a number of times, which is to stop telling me how your belief system (whether it be anglo-analytic versus Christian or whatever) says things are. From a Catholic perspective, you have the Trinity entirely wrong, and your opponents have it entirely wrong from your perspective.
I'm not arguing relativism here. You can debate on a meta-level if you want what is the best episimological system (which, by the way, need not be the one that best discovers "truth" in some ontological sense, but it could very well be the one that imparts the greatest meaning), but that is an entirely different argument. It would actually be about hermaneutics generally.
The point here is that none of us care to argue the esoteric points of Catholicism to determine whether the trinity is sustainable within the dictates of that logical system and to otherwise point out the tensions from within that system. That's the stuff of seminary school. By the same token, no Catholic really needs to prove the trinity works from a secular perspective. They may stubbornly insist it does, but it's hardly relevant if it doesn't. They're still going to mass on Sunday (or at least on Easter and Christmas).
I guess what I'm saying is that you're about as likely to shake lose their viewpoint by the sheer force of your conviction as they would yours to theirs. And to be sure, they want you to come to their position far more than you really care about them coming to yours.
I agree. But I would say that if my interlocutor had been Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Heidegger or Plato, etc., a fairly fascinating discussion might have fallen out of the OP. None of them would have felt threatened by the question. They all would have listened to what I actually said instead of responding to demons in the ether. Or maybe that's just how those figures loom in my mind.
This is the point I have been trying to make from the start. If the two interlocutors do not share an overarching norm then one's critique of the other will not be intelligible. The only real norm that Analytic Philosophy is consciously capable of is the norm of consistency (which is apparently the avoidance of being "illogical").
That's fine as far as it goes. Catholics also hold to the norm of consistency. But to show that the doctrine of the Trinity contains within itself a contradiction is a tall task, and I don't find a serious attempt at it within this thread. @frank's most recent attempt was to skip the "discovery" phrase and just declare that Catholics themselves hold that the Trinity is illogical. The problem with such an approach is basic: Catholics, like everyone else, simply do not hold that their own beliefs are illogical. Frank's claim about what Catholics hold is just false, and obviously so. Note too that in the extremely dense and complex history of Trinitarian controversy, the charge of internal self-contradiction is incredibly rare. The Analytic's desire to avoid metaphysics makes his whole approach extremely impotent in the face of real life philosophies, such as religions.
It is a tug of war between the substantiality of the norm and the communicability of the norm. Between the Atheistic Analytic and the Catholic the communicable/shared norms tend to be insubstantial, and the substantial norms tend to be incommunicable/unshared. This is why the whole approach of the OP is misguided. The Analytic, with his tiny set of norms, must ultimately admit that pretty much everything passes muster, at least on Analytic grounds. This is not so with a Muslim, for example, who has a metaphysical conception of God that is at odds with the Trinity.
Water, ice, steam.
Same substance, different form.
Perhaps; perhaps. seems to think the wounds worth keeping open. I wonder if that's why he commits to these fora.
Quoting Hanover
I'll again make explicit that I agree. It has a place in a language game, a use. So it is not meaningless, if meaning is use; nor is it worthless, not for the faithful, and not for those who might try to understand them. And without sense, if we are to understand that in terms of coherence - the contradiction in the Trinity is what leads to the ad hoc self-justification of Thomism and such.
What stands is the view expressed in the OP, that the acceptance of such convolute, complex reasoning, apparently in order to achieve some semblance of coherence, is puzzling.
One question here is surely whether the Trinity is to be understood as a starting point, as a hinge proposition, not to be doubted; or as a deduction from first principles as @Bob Ross would have it; or if those accounts that supposedly render the Trinity coherent can have wider application, or are to be kept only inside the room in which we talk about God.
Number 1.5, Divine Life Streams, in the Stanford General Catalogue of Variations on the Trinity?
Right. I think there are cases where religious discussion can be quite fruitful:
Obviously this doesn't happen too often on TPF, but it is possible.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting Fire Ologist
No, but it might be all that can be said.
It has been fruitful. I've picked up quite a bit about the ancient Greeks from Christians on TPF.
:up:
Yes. Even recently you've shown me a lot of moves I suspected Jewish theology would make but had never concretely witnessed before.
The sanctification of rules results in their analysis being a pursuit of the divine. The point being that the analytic tradition need not be atheistic. If we assert the Talmud a hinge belief, for example, you create a framework for an analytic theology. Analysis becomes a form of worship.
I just point out that both sides to our hearty debate are being myopic if they think analytic thought entails atheism. What entails atheism or theism is worldview, which relates to form of life.
Both analyze, yet one calls it secular philosophical reasoning and the other calls it prayer. Very different languages they're speaking.
I disagree with that, but I don't know how far afield this would take us. Analysis can be worship, but it need not be. I suppose much of it depends on what you mean by "asserting the Talmud a hinge belief."
Quoting Hanover
Agreed.
Quoting Hanover
So when I said "Atheistic Analytic":
Quoting Leontiskos
...I meant an Analytic philosopher who is an atheist, thus implying that not all Analytic philosophers are atheists. Perhaps that was confusing.
There are whole worlds between theism and atheism.
Quoting Hanover
Analytic philosophy as the sanctification of rules...
Not so much. Wittgenstein is traditionally read as an overcoming of the rules of the various language games. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs does much the same thing from a very different perspective.
Obviously, any such generalisation will fail to capture more than part of the analytic approach. It's not monolithic. But it is ubiquitous. You and Leon both make use of analytic methods.
I'm curious if we can start over without hostility or mistrust. If you will, read the following from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, and see if you can understand how a person would get the impression that the Catholic Church holds the Trinity to be beyond human understanding. There is definitely some ambiguity to the concept of mystery, and that's mentioned here. Mystery is not synonymous with incomprehensible. The very fact that they point this out demonstrates that some have taken the word to mean that, but it goes on to say that everything we know is incomprehensible if you dig deeply enough. So the Catholic Church does warn that the mystery at the foundation of all things is unknowable. On the one hand, a believer can be said to know the Trinity, because it has been revealed, but on the other hand, the Trinity is above finite intelligence. We can only grasp it by using analogies. We can't directly understand it.
Quoting New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia
In this passage, there is an attempt to refute Christian Rationaists. Notice
Quoting New Advent
In other words, they're drawing a distinction between incomprehensibility and inconceivableness. At first glance, it doesn't seem that such a distinction is supportable. Don't these two words mean the same thing? When the topic is mystery, the answer is no. A mystery is incomprehensible, but not inconceivable. They're denying that the Trinity is a contradiction, but they admit that it's superior to reason. Another way to say that is that it is beyond reason.
I think it's probably the case that the reason the word "contradiction" is rejected is that this makes it sound like the Trinity is impossible. Though the "mind of a creature cannot, indeed, grasp the inner nature of the mysterious truth" knowledge is available through analogies. An analogy is like the handle on a coffee cup. Your mind is the index finger that holds the cup by as much as the finger can grasp.
I am willing to start over with no hostility on an honest answer about whether the Catholic Church holds the Trinity to be beyond human understanding.
But Id ask for a small step back from you as well in some form of confession that your original post with its reference to lobotomies and belittling caricatures of Christianity might have been a factor in the hostility on the thread. No big deal to me - Maybe I dont know your personality and you meant no offense - but dude I go to Catholic Mass every week. I consider myself fairly reasonable and intelligent and not in any need of a lobotomy to make sense of my faith. Do you really want to speak with me or not?
Quoting Banno
Yes.
But isnt that statement itself, outside of, maybe better said, running parallel to, the ubiquitous analytics of language?
All that can be said, makes use of analytics, or, is about language. This is a metaphysical observation about being human, because we are the ones who say things. Such statements are not possible to avoid making. They are always present with the contents of language - language is not just about itself.
Must we hold that all statements about the world cannot be trusted? Sense certainty cannot be trusted analytically, yet we survive by it.
There must be more philosophy can say about this predicament.
More IS said when we say things like it might be all that can be said so why not embrace this and find new ways to test our theories besides the internal analytics that set out these theories?
If we subject your statement might be all to analytics: might means maybe is, maybe is not. So may be all that can be said means may not be all that can be said, which means there may be more that can be said. So even your statement does not foreclose all that can be said.
What more can be said about language and about what we say, than something spoken about the world and we speakers in it?
We must do better on two fronts.
Quoting Banno
I agree. Its not a sanctification or even a reification, because the object of analytics is not some thing to reify. It analyzes what reifying humans say. The object of analytics is speaking and analyzing, the act of signifying through language.
But it does not refute the ubiquity of analytics to say what I am saying either. The ubiquity of analytics is why one seeks to show the logic of the Trinity. Logic is ubiquitous to speakers of language. So if one such speaker wants to speak about a Trinity one doesnt abandon logic (that is impossible); one is simply saying there exists something in the world, in human experience that language makes difficult to say. It can only be impossible to say if analytics might be all that can be said.
So if you really only thought language might be all that can be said, you would no longer be curious to speak about things like trinities or what is a painting or even what are the limits of what can be said - none of those things could truly be said the way analytics says things. But you referenced one of these impossible things to say (namely the limits of what can be said.). We all need to speak about the world and its truth for all. Lets embrace that.
Quoting Banno
Right, which is why I am suspicious of this thread here on a philosophy forum instead of a theology forum. It gave license to performance art and mockery.
If wed all be a bit more mature and forgo judgment, atheists might have no issue finding the reasoning inside of a belief in the Trinity, and theists might have no issue finding such analytic reasoning lacking. Proving one side need not be a judgment against the other because belief in God or not is a wholly different thing than what is reasonable.
It is precisely the fact that reason is a separate function than belief that one can believe before seeing reason (which we all do every day when we take risks), or require reason first before belief (which we all do every day as well when we figure out what to do next).
Sure. All cards on the table, the inspiration for the OP was the fact that there were two open threads attacking the OT, one on the basis that some of the folktales in it don't seem possible, and one complaining that the OT deity seems vengeful. I was like, did you guys think the NT makes sense? Because it doesn't.
As for whether I'm responsible for the hostility of others, that's a complicated question. Everybody gets stressed, and sometimes a certain attack is the last straw. Emotional immaturity takes over, and a counter-attack is inevitable. That aspect of humanity shows up at the heart of the message of Jesus. He was saying that you don't have to let other people control you in that way. You're free. When someone attacks you, just stop and see that they're just like you. Maybe they have taken on the last straw, and they're passing it on to you. Break the cycle. Stand up out of that web of grief and rage. You do it by the grace of God. You do it through love. One of the advantages of this is that when you drop your own rage, you can see people more clearly for who they are.
Or, the frank-approved MSG version:
Quoting MSG version
Yes, legit questions. But you didnt ask them in a way that sounded like you thought you could possibly get an answer. You asked potential lobotomy patients to respond with a coherent thought.
Turn the other cheek says it all. I tried that and kept getting insulted. But whatever. Always happy to be reminded of the message of the Bible, so thanks for that.
And I dont think you are responsible for the hostility of others. Just your own belittling way of framing things But again, whatever . You seem earnest enough now, possibly open to respecting my response, so the rest is up to me.
The question is:
Quoting Fire Ologist
You quoted the following to support that the church does hold the Trinity to be beyond understanding:
Quoting New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia
So the church says we dont simply figure out through observation and logic that God is the Trinity, and we do not understand this mysterious revelation more deeply through observation and logic either. But the church doesnt say we dont continue to understand the Trinity more deeply and more deeply, and the church doesnt say observation and logic are not present and necessary when we come to understand the Trinity more deeply. The church says merely that the Trinity is a truth whose existence or possibility could not be discovered by a creature, and whose essence (inner substantial being) can be expressed by the finite mind only in terms of analogy.
I am sympathetic to an argument that expressing my understanding of the Trinity in language will yield many analogies; and analytic statements will be hard to come by. BUT, that does not mean: 1. I am not thereby understanding the truth (because analytics fail to prove out the analogy may just point a failure of language and not the non-existence of that which language attempts to say), and 2. it does not mean there is nothing analytic whatsoever to be said (indeed you need to understand identity, transitivity, logic, analytics, in order to behold the Trinity as mystery, and in order to create accurate analogies about it.)
So I disagree with the New Advent quote above where it says can be expressed only in terms of analogy. That is not dogma and I dont have to believe it. The Trinity is a mystery whose depths will never be fully fathomed to be recaptured and restated in syllogism. But there are true things I can know about it and false things I can logically demonstrate about it, now that it has been revealed to me.
Like I can know it is false to say God the Father is the true God, and the Son and Holy Spirit are derivative. Though this seems to fix the contradictions, it is false because the Son is eternally begotten, as the Holy Spirit always proceeds from them. The three persons are immediately one God. So it is false to defeat the contradictions of the Trinity in this way because although a son logically follows after a father, in God, father and son have always immediately been the case.
Human logic needs time to go from premise to conclusion. In God the premise IS the conclusion, and the logic plays out in the instantaneous presence of eternity.
So the analytic empirical scientist could say but what is this object called God with its eternal existence, and why would you need to find some new logic to know this God that is all preposterous. All the theist can say is yes, but then why did you ask me about God and the Trinity - these objects were revealed to me, like any other currently unexplainable, mysterious experience is revealed to us. If you want to know what I understand of my experience of this revealed thing, the above is how I can speak about it.
So I agree with you and @Banno that the Trinity strains credulity. But that is not the same thing as saying it is devoid of all logical analysis and not able to be said in any true sense of the word said.
(And this is why I believe, because now we see another mystery revealed - In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. How can God be with Himself - this is all consistent with the notion of eternally begotten Son and its curious relationship with logical language. And in Genesis God creates by his word And God said let there be light
Language and logic are ubiquitous indeed. But mysterious in how they can be shared with you and me, and in you or me. Language itself, analytics itself, is born out of mystery. Personally, I dont think the writers of the Bible figured this out - they were inspired to write what makes no sense to say because it is what makes sense to God and is for us, not from us. So the absurdity and its consistency with experience is like evidence of its source being from God, not merely from men who speak a language. But this is all perhaps more psychology, or epistemology, than it is the metaphysics/ontology of which you are asking.)
I think Count already addressed this:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What's curious here is that many Analytics would agree with this claim:
Quoting Mystery | Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)
Another way to say this is to say that nothing that we know is fully comprehended, or fully comprehensible.
So if you think that "incomprehensible" and "inconceivable" have the same meaningitself a dubious linguistic claimthen what would follow from this quote is that nothing is conceivable. This too looks absurd.
Quoting Mystery | Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)
Are you claiming that there is nothing which is superior to reason that is not at the same time contradictory? That everything which is superior to reason is contradictory?
Do you find it odd that you didn't bother to reference the New Testament? One cannot make arguments against the New Testament without consulting the New Testament, just as one cannot make arguments against Catholicism without consulting Catholicism. So the consultation of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia is certainly a step in the right direction, even if it is only occurring on page 19.
One can understand what that encyclopedia means by 'analogy' by consulting its entry on analogy. It's different from how we now use that term colloquially.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think a good starting point for this is the quote I gave from Peter L. P. Simpson.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think the whole notion that "the Trinity strains credulity" is premised upon the contentious idea that the Trinity is discovered through natural reason. Something which does not pretend to be demonstrated by natural reason cannot really strain the credulity of natural reason.
For example, suppose a highly intelligent man told you, "I have developed technology capable of catching the rocket boosters from a rocket launch." Does that "strain credulity"? It depends on how intelligent you believe him to be. Whether the claim is credible depends on the man. To say that what he says "strains credulity" is to either hold that he is not sufficiently intelligent, powerful, or honest, or else to hold that what he testifies to is logically impossible.
The problem here is that folks like Banno simply haven't asked the question of where the Trinitarian doctrines come from:
Quoting Banno
In fact Christians believe in the Trinity on the testimony of God. It isn't a "hinge proposition"* or any such thing. The implicit premise for Banno which says that God cannot testify is an atheistic petitio principii.
What I said towards the end of <this thread> is very much on point here. There are only two logically valid attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity: 1) The Trinity is self-contradictory; or 2) The Christian's reasons for believing in the Trinity are insufficient. Both attacks require actual work.
* Incidentally, a "hinge proposition" in the way it is usually understood is a philosophically incoherent idea, whether or not Wittgenstein even held to it.
As I mentioned, it's been said that God is like a coffee cup. The handle is an analogy. The mind is the index finger. In other words, the mind can only grasp God in a limited way.
Analogy in the knowledge of the mysteries of faith. The Fathers of the Church always emphasized the inability of the human reason to discover or even to represent adequately the mysteries of faith, and insisted on the necessity of analogical conceptions in their representations and expressions. St. Thomas, after the Pseudo-Dionysius and Albertus Magnus, has given the theory of analogy so applied to the mysteries of faith. (Cf. St. Thomas, Summa, Theol., I, Q. i, a. 9; Q. xxii, a. 1; In Librum Boëthii De Trinitate Expositio.) The Vatican Council set forth the Catholic doctrine on the point. (Cf. Const., Dei Filius, cap. iv; cf. also Conc. Coloniense, 1860.) (1) Before Revelation, analogy is unable to discover the mysteries, since reason can know of God only what is manifested of Him and is in necessary causal relation with Him in created things. (2) In Revelation, analogy is necessary, since God cannot reveal the mysteries to men except through conceptions intelligible to the human mind, and therefore analogical. (3) After Revelation, analogy is useful to give us certain knowledge of the mysteries, either by comparison with natural things and truths, or by consideration of the mysteries in relation with one another and with the destiny of man.
Yes, that's something of the idea. :up:
Quoting Aquinas, ST I.12.1
This is often captured by the idea that what is infinite (God) cannot be comprehended or encompassed by what is finite (man).
Quoting Leontiskos
The perennialists sometimes bring up the parable of the blind men and an elephant.
Might be better suited for pluralism.
A conjunction of religious faiths does not leave much behind anyway.
I don't know where his either/or is coming from.
Quoting jorndoe
Right, and a pluralism thesis is different from an incomprehensibility thesis, although that parable does leverage incomprehensibility. The key difference for a Christian claim or any revelatory claim is that some truth is entrusted to man by God.
So according to the Hindu/Buddhist elephant-parable contradictions are considered acceptable because it is assumed that they resolve at a deeper level. For Christianity there is no "deeper level" which supersedes divine revelation. Thus the phenomenon of contradiction is being approached differently by the two traditions, albeit with the significant caveat that the epistemic reliability of the claims in question is markedly different. Nevertheless, there are similarities insofar as Christians believe that various tensions and confusions will be resolved in the end. Still, the Christian would be careful to distinguish a tension from a contradiction.
I think we agree.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It only strains credulity when all you believe to be credible is what comes through natural reason. I dont. I trust is many things that strain credulity. The substance of love and value of suffering.
The point to Banno and Frank is, just because their credulity may be strained, doesnt mean all credulity must be strained for all thinkers.
So I think we agree.
And as far as only analogy can capture our understanding of the Trinity, yes, there are senses to analogy where this is true. So my point is, there are other senses to analogy where we must use reason and logic to identify how an analogy points out similarities and how it points out differences; analytic reasoning is subsumed by or contained in analogous explanation, and therefore to say the Trinity can be expressed only in terms of analogy is to include and incorporate analytic reasoning within an overall analogical approach. I dont think we must say can be expressed only in terms of analogy. I think we should simply say is expressed in terms of analogy. Leave room for reason to breathe in its expression, so to speak.
Again, I think we agree.
Quoting Fire Ologist
They should. Sounds like part of the method that an analytic would use to guard against essentialism, for instance.
We approach knowing, but never fully grasp.
May be said to fit with Wittgenstein as with knowledge of mystery.
It's not like scientific efforts to reconcile quantumatics and relativity, which are inherently open to something entirely different. Reality is to tell its own story, if you will.
The Jews don't put much divine stock in Jesus; he wasn't the Messiah according to them. Christians call Him God. Muslims say He was another prophet, superseded by Muhammad, and that Christianity has been polluted. I guess the Mormons roughly want to align with the Christians, but the Catholics (in particular) disown them. These are parts of the Abrahamic storylines and things that adherents believe and proclaim.
Right.
Quoting Fire Ologist
You seem to think that I think that language cannot be about the world. So I'll point out again that language games - moving blocks and counting apples - are inherently embedded in our interactions with the each other and with the things we find around us.
That the limits of our language are the limits of our world is not at all a restriction - there is literally nothing about which we cannot speak...
Hence analysing how we talk about the Trinity is engaging with what's being said about the Trinity.
The elephant in the room was that the Father is God, the Son is God, and yet the Father is not the Son. I pointed out, and there is general agreement here, that the "is" cannot be the is of identity, because while it shares reflexivity and symmetry with identity, it does not share transitivity. (Do i need togo over that again?)
The elephant in the lap of the Theist is to explain what the "is" is, given the constraints they have placed on it by accepting revelation and scripture and the Nicene Creed.
Now the Stanford General Catalogue of Variations on the Trinity lists quite a few suggestions. And that brings it's own problems, the arc I've mentioned - this looks to be ad hoc rationalisation, explaining away rather than explaining.
I think we are still waiting for an explanation of what the "is" in the Trinity is, and why.
I have the impression that you, Olo, might be willing to accept it as a mystery, as an article of faith rather than of reason. If that is so, then we perhaps have nothing left to argue here.
Agreed. There is a lot of misperception:
- the OP said God became man and died on a a cross to save us from his own wrath. The from his own wrath misunderstands what we are being saved from so set up misunderstanding of why dying on a cross might make sense.
There are others
It's not as if the problem's not widley recognised:
Quoting SEP: Trinity
I hope I haven't said that the Trinity is non-mysterious?
Quoting jorndoe
Well the first Christians were all Jews. Beyond that, there are different lines of Jewish expectation and prophecy, and the ones which converge on a figure like Jesus actually exclude the unanimity that modern folk seem to expect.
The Christian narrative is not as simple as some would have it:
Quoting Matthew 10 (RSV)
:rofl:
Indeed.
:up:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Right.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with a kind of anthropocentrism, where one sees themselves and their own age as the center of the universe. On that conception everything is measured against our current form, and so much the worse for anything that doesn't "measure up." Thus there is no possibility of being measured by something greater than us. No possibility, for example, of being dwarfed by greater intelligences.
Edit: The other general problem is that Trinitarian theology requires the most careful linguistic distinctions, and the objectors are basically using careless or ambiguous words at every turn. For example, pretending that the symbol (or rather function) "=" has some precise meaning, or that "is" is an uncomplicated copula, or that 'incomprehensible' and 'inconceivable' mean the same thing. I could go on. It is but one instance of the sort of lazy critique where one expects their interlocutor to do all of the work, and where one purports to be knowledgeable, ignorant, and critical of some particular thesis, all at the same time.
I think there is an explanation of the many instances of is in the Triune God. I can provide some of them. Count and Leon have provided some.
But I dont think I, or Bob Ross, or Leon, or anyone, would have thought of God as one God in the name (not names) of the Father, Son and Spirit who are three distinct persons - this is divine revelation, inspired words whose meaning on a surface level is mysterious. I dont see them as contradictory, but if someone didnt believe in any such thing as any God or revealed word, then I can see why they would only see contradiction.
So you characterized my position on the Trinity as one I accept it as a mystery, as an article of faith rather than of reason. That is not what is going on in my mind, or not how I would say it. It is close, but not precise.
I do believe there is one God who is three persons; I also believe there is reasoning that explains this. I also see that I had to accept all of this through faith, because it is mysterious. But again, my reason allows me deeper and better understanding of this (how the Trinity relates to the substance of love, and knowing, but I digress), so I would not simply end my
position on the issue as its a mystery; believe it or dont if you want. There is much more to say besides mystery about the Trinity and it takes reason and logic to say things.
Quoting Banno
There are a lot of caricatures of what the faith is - bad starting points for the analysis and the questions.
Quoting Banno
Its not that it cannot be about the world, its that what it says about the world is illusion or is self-referential as part of a game constructed on top of the world, but not really about the world.
Quoting Banno
Yes, but, as soon as one talks about the block as if it could exist before one said block, the discussion becomes not about the block, but about how language doesnt talk about such things. There are no blocks, until there are blocks.
Good stuff. :up:
For example, for Aquinas the doctrine of the Trinity is an article of faith, and what this means is that faith is a necessary condition for belief in the Trinity. For Aquinas, one does not simply figure out the fact of the Trinity all by their lonesome. But this does not mean that the doctrine is divorced from reason.
If an atheist were really interested in the theology of revelation, they would want to start thinking about how an intellectually superior being would reveal things to an intellectually inferior being, namely things which exceed the rational comprehension of the intellectually inferior being. (Note that I am focusing on the "intellectual" for the sake of simplicity.)
I think that is the crux of the discussion! I am waining too!
Yep, definitely waning. Nearly done here. :wink:
I was thinking the same thing. Why is there silence on that question?
Again:
Quoting Leontiskos
The transitive property of identity requires that the three relata belong to the same genus. Yet a hypostasis and an ousia obviously do not belong to the same genus. Your argument is invalid.
I gather that you, Tim and Leon disagree, preferring the traditional approach.
Quoting Fire Ologist
One of the issues is indeed the number of such explanations. There's a list in the SEP article of something like a dozen or so differing accounts.
Let's be very specific about the problem. When folk say that Jesus is god, they mean that when they say that Jesus died on the cross, it was god who died on the cross. We can substitute "god" for "Jesus" and maintain the truth value of the assertion. And when they say that they are imbued with Holy Spirit, they mean that they are imbued with god - substitution works here, as well.
But it is not true that they are imbued with Jesus; becasue Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not the same person. And it is not true that the Holy Spirit died on the cross.
Leon's elaborate distinctions between essence/person, analogical/univocal predication, etc. don't address this practical point about how the language actually functions. And you, Olo, don't wish to appeal to pure mystery here since you "believe there is reasoning that explains this".
Trinitarians use identity as it suits them, but drop it when it is inconvenient. The very epitome of "ad hoc".
Quoting Leontiskos
The transitivity of identity doesn't require relata to "belong to the same genus" - it's a purely logical principle. If A=B and B=C, then A=C, regardless of what kind of things A, B, and C are.
You a e simply using technical theological terminology to avoid addressing a straightforward logical point.
Exactly. Nothing, that we say we know (so nothing that we say we believe because all things we believe we also know) is divorced from reason.
Quoting Banno
We can only show you analogies. And then, in between them, you start to see the analytic reasoning and logic. From there you can attempt your own analogy. If you nail an analogy, maybe you have something.
And the full is and explanation is something approached asymptotically. There is always more to say and clarify.
The Trinity is like two people in love. The love is bigger than each one, but also completely known and found in each one separately. (You dont have to believe love is a real thing, but if you do believe in the lib you may share with a child, or a spouse, that is like the life of God.)
We are not going to explain away the fact that one plus one plus one equals three, and three does not equal one, but that one person is fully God, the other person if fully God, and the other person is fully God, but though there are three persons, there is but one God. If you are looking for some explanation that provides a new math, that may never come.
If such explanations are all you are after and all you think are worth discussing and all the world of language has to offer, I think you are just being rebellious against your own experience. Life is full of absurdity and mystery and seeming contradiction - there is more to say than thats absurd.
But imagine a single being who is the one God. This beings personality is to give. Just is. When God gives, he gives everything. So when he gives the Son is begotten and this son has everything that was the fathers so this son is God. But this son, as with the father, is therefore a giver. The son does not take any credit for being God, but gives it all to the father, so much so that between the father and the son is the same spirit of giving, and so much so this spirit is God.
Now imaging this happens all at once in an instant - father giving all to the son who gives all to the father such that the All that is given is the God who is the father and the son.
The Trinity is analogous to something like that.
This is full of things to analyze and subject to scrutiny and refine and correct - all steps requiring reason.
No, that's incorrect. The presupposition when using the transitive property of identity is that each of the relata are the same kind of thing (i.e. belong to the same genus). So if A, B, and C are all numbers, then we can apply the transitive property of identity to them. But if A is a number, B is an animal, and C is a solar system, then we cannot.
Now you could build that condition into your definition of "=" if you like, but it amounts to the same failure; the same invalidity within your argument.
Again, the deeper problem is that you are relying on a heuristic diagram that doesn't try to be theologically precise. One way to remedy such confusions is to talk about Godhead instead of "God," to remind ourselves that what is at stake is an ousia.
The same sort of error is present in claims like this one:
Quoting Banno
When you say, "...it was god," you mean, "it was the god-person," and this is precisely what is not meant when a Christian says that Jesus is God. In fact the theologically precise Christian says that Jesus is the Son of God.
Of course if A=B and A is a number, it follows that B is a number.
That's not about numbers, but about identity. it's not about genus, but individuality.
And then you flee back to the diagram. It's not about the diagram, it's about the nature of "is".
Quoting Leontiskos
...and the issue is, how are we to make sense of this?
This is in keeping with the traditional Catholic perspective. The Trinity is a mystery beyond human understanding. You alluded earlier to John 1:1. Religion scholars identify that as Logos mysticism. It's cool stuff.
And when we question that, the theologians point out, as Tim did earlier, that God transcends creation, and so any analogy will ultimately fail.
Quoting frank
Yep. The honest response seems to be to admit that it doesn't make sense, but that it is true anyway.
Then you've done what I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
And also as I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Your proposition "Jesus = God(head)" is false, given that there is not equality between things of different genera. This is precisely what I said above.
Quoting Banno
Which, again, comes precisely from the diagram. Your continual insistence makes no sense, "It's not about the diagram, it's about that part of the diagram that says 'is'!" That part of the diagram is obviously a part of the diagram.
Quoting Banno
By reading the smallest bit of theology to inform yourself before jumping to attack that which you do not understand?
The Trinitarian term "God(head)" is not a hypostasis; it is an ousia. Christians do not believe that Jesus = God(head).
So, how are you using it? How does it work? And why do you need this special use of "is" just for God? Why is this special use not ad hoc self-justification?
And you are slipping back into attacking me rather than the point being made here. Bad form.
I probably should just let Leon keep digging the hole he is standing in.
So first, replace every instance of "you" with "the diagram." Second, revisit my initial claim that your focus on the diagram is a dead end.
Quoting Banno
Your invalid use of the transitive property of identity is not only applicable to God(head). Failing to keep the relata of the same genus is always invalid.
Quoting Banno
Telling you that you should inform yourself before attacking that which you don't understand is attacking you? It's not attacking you, and it's pointing to the real problem here. That problem is why I was so averse to even entering this thread in the first place.
I know he said that. I disagreed with him.
Quoting Banno
Yes.
Quoting Banno
Well, yeah, but Jesus became a man first, and then died on the cross. The father didnt do that. So it is true to say God died on the cross, because Jesus is God, not because the Father is God. So yeah
Quoting Banno
Yes.
Quoting Banno
Well, Jesus spirit is the Holy Spirit. Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit
I agree it is not true that anyone has Jesus qua Jesus in them, but they may have Jesus Holy Spirit in them.
And I dont know how the Holy Spirit attended to the death of Jesus of the cross. The Holy Spirit may have in fact been with him as he died in the cross and maybe so intimately that the Holy Spirit died with him, and maybe the Father as well, in a sense. But I think we start to misunderstand what the Trinity is and how the three are united and that this eternal union is God. They are immediately not each other and given over to each other completely. It is love; that is eternal life for each as one.
Quoting Banno
I think the way I maintain some rationality is first equate temporality, like a timeline, with linear analytic reasoning (like you say is how the language actually functions) Then equate eternity with the present moment, right now, and only now, but the same now eternally - as if repeating but already repeating what was exactly. We string out God, father, son, spirit, and unity and difference in the timeline and things start to contradict one another. This is the way language works.
But what we are talking about here is an eternal thing - at once the father, son and shared spirit is God. In that present moment, there is no room for contradiction - just diction. And god said and the word was with god and the word was god
So you dont need to accept my answer for is but it is an eternal thingis not a temporal is. (The temporal is came later, by analogy, and led to the son becoming a man, dying and rising again before our eyes to teach us what it is like to be God to love with no bounds
There is plenty of mysticism to be had here. But, although linear, more readily analytic reasoning, may seem remote in some of these sentences, it is not non-existent, and things like this are not just mysterious. It is not beyond human understanding, in my view (despite how it sounds incompressible, I see a solid thing there to understand - just a complex solid thing there that we will ever approach enclosed understanding
These sorts of puzzles arise within Christianity because Christianity is based on natural language, and wherever there is natural language the strict separation between logically distinct categories does not exist. Christianity was not made in a lab.
If one has not studied a great deal of theology, the best rule of thumb when it comes to Trinitarian theology is to use the term 'Godhead' and to simply avoid the term 'God.' The textual ambiguitiesnot to mention the logical complexitiesof the term 'God' are legion. Thus the basis for Trinitarian theology is three hypostases (Father, Son, Spirit) and one ousia (Godhead). When one moves outside of Trinitarian theology that rule of thumb must be dropped, and the complexities of natural language must be embraced.
But cheers - there is an honesty to your replies not seen in Leon's. It's not my aim here to dissuade you from your faith, but to point out the problems with a logic that has become associated with that faith. Your faith is your concern, the rest of us may only asses it by your public displays; and these include the theology one espouses. The theology here does not stand well in public. Might be better to seek an alternative.
Neither does the set of all sets. I will never stop believing in sets either, nor need an alternative. (Im sure you could show me how analogizing Russells paradox to the Trinity is not apt.)
I said many things and you addressed only a few. Thats fine. But I dont see the end result affecting how well the Trinity stands in public. No need to speak for the public.
Sycophantic twaddle, of course, but amusing nonetheless.
But we make set theory work using ZF, dropping the idea that just any definable collection is a set.
Before there is a son, there has to be a father. So the son comes after a father. And for something to proceed from a son, the son comes first and what proceeds must logically proceed afterwards.
That all takes time.
That is also how we reach logical conclusions. We first have a premise, then draw inferences or otherwise, and from these conclude something else.
That is a process having a before (ie if ) and an after ( then ) .
So to talk about Gods inner life (which reason cant discover unless God shares it in revelation) we must talk about something eternally present.
And to talk at all, we need to say things first, and then second and then so on (like taking time ) .
So I mentioned time to in a way acknowledge that the Trinity cant really be said analytically. I just still dont see the analytics as the only priority for us to understand something, particularly another person (or three persons).
Thinking about this, we have some unclarity regarding the analytic method as we're using it here with some degree of equivocation.
To the extent we're using it just to mean adherence to deductive logic and the avoidance of formal fallacies, we have to commit to that else fall into incoherence. @Leontiskos's suggestion that analytic philosophy is overly restrictive when evaluating the Trinity because it demands logic is difficult to accept, especially given Catholicism's reliance generally on Aristotelian logic.
To the extent we're referencing the analytic tradition as elaborated by Wittgenstein and Davidson, particularly with their dispensing with the idea that meaning is based on an internal referent, I see Leon's point. If the soul is an entity and the love one has for God is a true thing in one's heart, it's entirely inadequate to suggest these words refer to just their use and not some mystical entity.
And we've got to keep in mind that the linchpin of Wittgenstein's enterprise is in denying private language, which is a metaphysical impossibility to the theist because his internal state is publicly shared by God. That is,a theist might see Wittgenstein's theory as a brilliant reductio that proves without God you are limited to an absurdly restricted system of language. Of course, the secular analytic embraces this conclusion and runs with it.
I recognize there are plenty of fully analytic philosophers (in all ways that word is used) who are theists, and I appreciate this spin in negating private language by insisting God speaks within us is my own. But I like it, so there's that. I fully commit therefore to a language game between God and his children, as it were.
But then I disagree with Leon in his hesitation to accept that logical thought (which here I mean logical reasoning, which includes analogizing and the use of precedent as authority) by itself is not a religious act. Fundamental to Jewish orthodoxy (see, e.g., Rav Soloveitchik) is the sacredness of assessing a priori Mosaic law (as it is accepted as divinely given) against a posteriori events. In fact, Yeshiva learning is considered prayer-like even when the assessment of law is upon purely hypothetical situations without any practical application because it advances an understanding of holy law.
The Judaic reliance on logic is, to be sure, beholden by analytic principles, but it goes far beyond just that with its legalistic precedential reliance and its considerations of worldly situations and what law might be implicated. It is of a very different logical feel than what you see with Catholic thought that can at times be entirely syllogistic, as in the logical arguments for God's existence and the Trinity, but to be fair to my Catholic brethren I suspect some degree of Judaic type analysis occurs as well. But, broad strokes, it's different.
The point being here that likely any of these systems (secular, theistic, analytic, formally logical) can work internally, but I don't think it's correct to suggest the Trinity struggles because it's unfairly subjected to Wittgenstein's restrictions on metaphysics. I think it struggles if it's subjected to basic logical demands (e.g., law of identity, law of non-contradiction, etc.). I appreciate that great lengths have been made in Catholic theology to save the Trinity from logical defeat and it would fly in the face of these efforts for a Catholic to admit the Trinity is contradictory or fails under the law of identity.
But does this not mean that Banno is not wrong to subject the Trinity to this logic, even if it shouldn't be subjected to greater Wittgensteinian analysis?
I don't give much more import to the Son coming from the Father than I do to Pegasus springing from the blood of the decapitated Medusa. You do. That's fine. Similarly I have more interest in the inner life of Sam Vimes than of the Christian God.
And logical precedence is a different animal to temporal precedence.
Quoting Fire Ologist
But... I hope you will agree that it's a good idea if what we say about God or Sam Vimes is consistent and coherent. The analytics just is checking that consistency.
Yes.
But the trinity is not a math/logical problem. If you make it one, and see that as a threshold issue to making the Trinity anything else, it will only make no sense. (Which is I think where you want to leave it.). You dont yet see the Trinity let alone start to see how to do the math of the eternal Trinity.
(How is that amusing. :angry: )
But yes, that is exactly what I want. Is it either a something of a mystery or something of a rational explanation? Will quantum behavior ever be predictable? Any mystery versus rational explanation there?
Quoting Banno
Well you should quote me, because I was talking about any normal son and any normal father (temporal relationship) to make a point about eternity (God the Father, God the Son, with self-same Holy Spirit - one being in eternity .)
Is the concept of eternity incoherent? Just the concept of the eternally present now? Kind of makes no sense what of now was before and what of before is still now? At the very least what was before, was before now so not like now so not eternally present. Maybe ask Claude - how can we use eternity coherently and validly ?
As far as import. Id love to know what is more important to you, worth speaking about, than the analytics and coherence of things spoken? I knew all along you didnt give any importance to the content of this discussion, other than whether some sort of linguistic puzzle might provide token content to dissect and/or prove. I get that. I am saying to you, you didnt allow yourself to get to a place with the content where the analytics might begin. Thats fine. Im surprised and thankful it went this far. But I remain puzzled at how you address speaking about the world, and about people in the world and knowing such things apart from any language that might attempt to capture them. I dont know how analytics cannot be damned at times because of something more important. Im sure it is (as it is for all people and as all people deal with mystery at some point). That life is the content of interest to one seeking to understand the Trinity.
I admit I am not able to directly answer your question.
I also think you just dont see the content of which I am speaking.
The Trinity is as mysterious as the human self. Hard to speak of these persons.
And tell Claude he doesnt know his USB port from a hole in his head.
Yes, but they are analogous.
Like logical immediacy in the Trinity is analogous to temporal immediacy in eternity.
"Atheist" is not an epithet that I would apply to myself so readily as it might appear. But we can let that go for now.
I'll throw in the following from my Bio, by way of setting out what I at least think of as analytic philosophy.
Quoting Banno
While I have a preference for Davidson and Wittgenstein, I'm certainly not of the opinion that they constitute the whole or even the majority of analytic philosophy. The emphasis in analytic philosophy seems to me to be making things clear and coherent. Hence the emphasis on formal logic and on looking very closely at the language we use in our discussions.
Nor would I call private language a "linchpin" for Wittgenstein. That honour must surely go to treating meaning as the use to which some piece of language is put, and seeing the private language argument as a consequence of this rather than its precedent. The private language argument is in effect a stipulation of where we might best stop looking for the uses of a piece of language. Since the sensation "S" mentioned in PI §258 is such that it can be accessed by one individual only, then that individual cannot be sure that they have used it in the same way over time. Its capacity to have a use is therefore questionable.
Wittgenstein does not think that our internal states have no influence on what we do. Quite the contrary, as can be seen for example in his lectures on ethics.
Your reductio is reminiscent of a view sometimes attributed to Anscombe, for example where she critiqued "moral ought" without a divine lawgiver. As her example shows, only a very narrow reading of Wittgenstein would see it as atheistic.
Anyway, your support for the critique of Thomism is appreciated.
This is a very strange interpretation given that I said just the opposite:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Hanover
I don't see theology as private, even if we are prescinding from the idea that God is part of the group. Theology has always been a public, social enterprise.
Quoting Hanover
I said that logical thought can but need not be worship. I would say that the fact of logical reasoning is not itself worship even if the material object is construed as "religious." So for example, if an atheist is logically analyzing Rabbinic literature, he is not engaged in worship.
@Hanover, @Baden - isn't this literally against the rules of TPF? An entire post of AI? Further, Banno is constantly telling us that "I win because AI said so," all the while failing to provide even the prompts he is providing to the AI. Is this really what the forum has come to? Is this rule still being enforced?
Quoting Baden
Making AI say whatever you want it to say is pretty easy. Hanover knows this:
Quoting Hanover
Again, @Banno's argument is invalid, and obviously so:
1. Son = God(head)
2. Spirit = God(head)
3. Therefore, Son = Spirit {transitive property of identity}
Again, the transitive property of identity requires relata of the same genus:
Quoting Leontiskos
4. 2+2 = 4
5. 3+1 = 4
6. Therefore, 2+2 = 3+1 (transitive property of identity)
7. 3 = giraffe
8. giraffe = Copernican System
9. Therefore, 3 = Copernican System (transitive property of identity)
(6) is valid whereas (3) and (9) are not.
Count has already pointed this up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A nature (ousia) and a person (hypostasis) are not of the same genus, and this is why Banno's argument is invalid.
Analytics like Banno seldom have any idea what they are doing when they say, "x = y," as they assume that anything can be placed into that form. They don't recognize the mathematical context and the single genus of the relata that their formulation takes for granted. This is one example of why Banno's philosophy is so unreflective. In a philosophical sense, "x = y" pertains to epistemic moves, where a single object goes by two different names. There are just too many reasons why this sort of approach is utterly inappropriate when talking about the Trinity. The underlying idea that, "'Son' and 'God' are formally substitutable terms," requires an insane ignorance of Christian Trinitarianism. It is such an unlikely strawman that very little attention is paid to the idea at all.
Well we can look at your argument too, which I would say comes down to this:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting Hanover
You are giving a dilemma:
4. Either "is God" means something like "is a person" or else "is God" means something like "is Banno"
5. Either way we arrive at an anti-Trinitarian outcome
6. Therefore, the doctrine of the Trinity is inconsistent
As I alluded to, the either/or of (4) is ad hoc and false, and therefore your argument is unsound. Christians say what "is God" means, and it means, "is divine," or, "Homoousios with the Father."
Again, basing the entire discussion on a heuristic diagram which is famous for its oversimplification is not a good approach. Here is a clause from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that most closely approximates the same idea:
Quoting Catechism of the Catholic Church, #262
We could disambiguate the modern phrase, "The Son is God":
(A) is theologically true whereas (B) is theologically false. The Son is never apart from the Father and the Spirit. What is happening in this thread is that (B) is being claimed as Catholic teaching, and this is false given that (B) is not Catholic teaching. (B) is a hostile translation of a highly compacted and oversimplified diagram.* In the contemporary colloquial idiom when Catholics speak of "God" as a sort of proper name they are talking about the Triune communion of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For Catholics the inner life of God is tri-personal, and this creates friction with the standard account of 'God' as mono-personal. The hostile translation (B) is presupposing 'God' as a mono-personal hypostasis, which would place the relata into the same genus and accord with a transitive property of identity. But anyone with knowledge of historic Christianity will know that this is a misrepresentation, that for Christians the generic "God" is triune rather than a single hypostasis, and that "Son" and "God" therefore belong to different genera. was correct in saying that what is at stake is a predication rather than an identity relation. That is a remarkably accurate interpretation of Nicene Christianity.
()
* The misrepresentation is also being used by @frank as a support for the strawman of the OP.
I was looking through your posts to try to understand where you are coming from. Maybe part of the problem here is that you are depending on Mormon sources. At least the second sentence of your article is candid:
The source was openly an LDS source, That's why @frank provided the picture of the Mormons on bikes. @Banno then cited another article describing other views on the Trinity. The point then was just to point out there wasn't Christian consensus on the Trinity.
Okay...
I've pointed out the problems with appealing to Mormonism on Christian questions. Banno is quoting from SEP and is mistakenly transferring its philosophical authority into a religious authority. SEP is really not a reliable theological source. In that article it is adopting one particular way of ordering very recent logical approaches to the Trinity.
None of that has much to do with consensus. There is a Christian consensus on the Trinity, and it is based in the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople (325 and 381).
Quoting Nicene Creed | Wikipedia
If the LDS are to be counted as Christians, then they account for 0.61%, and SEP's logical taxonomy has nothing to do with representation or consensus. So I would say that the OP's focus on Catholicism is representative of Christianity generally, especially if we favor the general Nicene tradition.
@flannel jesus called attention to this song from The Book of Mormon. I think it will clarify things.
Thinking now of these metaphysical premises, presumably it is no coincidence that a numerical objection to the Trinity has become popular in an individualistic age. The core argument is something like this:
1. The Trinity is a unified multi-hypostasis reality
2. But there are no unified multi-hypostasis realities
3. Therefore, the Trinity cannot exist
For example, in our day it is commonly believed that a social reality constituted of persons is reducible to persons. So someone in our day might say that a "family" is a fiction, and all that really exists in a family are the individuals.
On that assumption the Trinity is "illogical" (precisely because it contradicts the metaphysical doctrine of (2)). But a negation of (2) is not implausible. Families are arguably multi-hypostasis realities, and not mere fictions. The "superorganism" of a beehive is another example, where the hive is more than the sum of its parts. The Trinity will be seen as possible so long as we see unities which are more than the sum of their parts as possible. The Trinity is a bit like a beehive where the hypostases are in such elegant concert that it is hard to tell where one begins and another ends, and where the bees are nonplussed about this fact. This extreme unification is precisely why Christianity holds that Trinitarian activity ad extra is not differentiable from standard monotheism.
It seems notable that the analogies you use (family, superorganism) are complex. Those seem like problematic analogies, for a God that is supposedly simple.
A part of analytic method is to use formal logic to model natural language. The bits and pieces of a formal logic are much more rigorous than those of a natural language. We can borrow this rigour in order to show clearly some differences in use in natural languages.
This is brought out nicely in predicate logic. Three differing uses of "is" are:
1. The "is" of predication - "The ball is red" - f(a)
2. the "is of equivalence - "Two plus two is four" - a=b
3. The "is" of quantification - "There is a ball" - ?(x)f(x)
We can see similar uses in a natural language such as English. A clear English sentence containing "is" might be parsed as one of these, but it may be that there are English sentences that include "is" but do not parse into one of these three; or at least that are somewhat ambiguous or difficult. Consider auxiliary uses, "What Im telling you is, dont touch that switch." So the list is not intended to be exhaustive.
It's also worth noting that (2) is a special case of (1). The "=" is a binary predicate over a and b.
In syllogistic logic, all relations are reduced to single-places predications. Socrates is taller than Plato have to be paraphrased into one-place predicates like Socrates is-a-thing-taller-than-Plato before entering a syllogism. Something like "Tully is Cicero" has to be treated not as a relation, but as a single-placed predicate. It has to be treated the same way as, say, "Tully is a writer". Tully is a member of the group of writers, and Tully is a member of the group of things which are Cicero.
An adherence to merely syllogistic logic might explain some of the difficulties had hereabouts.
The danger is reading "Jesus is God" as that Jesus is one of the things that is God - and, since other things may also be god, accidentally committing to polytheism.
The response is to simply assert that there is only one god, and so deny transitivity - that Jesus is God, and so is the Father, and yet Jesus is not the Father.
The problem is that this appears to be nothing but special pleading. Olo's response is, if I've understood him, to say that God is indeed a special case. That works, so far as it goes. Leon's response is to attempt to have his cake and to eat it - to say that the special pleading is not special.
:up:
This is just more ignorance of history, in this case syllogistic logic. Syllogistic logic is predicative. For example, "Socrates is human," is not the single-place predicate H(S). Pretending it is is a kind of myopic projection of predicate logic beyond its bounds. That's what your strange analysis of "is" is: an awkward shoehorning of natural language into the straightjacket of specialized logical devices.
But all of this is based on your insistence that we must stick with your bumper sticker formulation, "Jesus is God," despite the fact that the theological sources simply do not rely on such bumper sticker formulations. Were we to abandon the bumper sticker, your strawman would fall apart. So we can't do that! :grimace:
As was pointed out before, "=" is reflexive, symmetrical and transitive; A=A; if A=B then B=A, and if A=B and B=C then A=C. Other relations can have all three - if your birth month is your birth month, and if it is the same as mine, then mine is the same as yours, and if mine is the same as yours and yours is the same as hers, then mine is the same as hers. Taken together these three give us equivalence but not identity.
Classically we can add x=y??P (P(x)?P(y)), Leibnizs Law. This is the standard definition of "=" for first-order logics. Two things are identical if they have exactly the same properties.
It's extensional. What that means is that if A=B, then for any theorem that contains "A", we can instead stick "B", without changing the truth value. The truth of the theorem is not dependent on the term used, but on the thing - the extension - of that term. So since "A" and "B" refer to the very same thing, we can swap 'em, and what we say stays true.
But Leibnizs Law falls over in modal contexts. The Opera House is in Sydney, but might have been instead built in Melbourne (God forbid! Picture it on the banks of that dank cloaca, the Yarra, in the rain...). But if we keep Leibnizs Law then it would not be the Opera House, that very building, that was built in Melbourne, and so on... The answer to this, From Kripke, is to drop Leibnizs Law but keep extensional substitution - that is, to use rigid designation.
That's the reasoning behind the substitution argument given earlier. If in "Jesus is God" and "The Holy Spirit is God" the "is" is that of identity, then we ought be able to substitute and get "Jesus is the Holy Spirit". But Scripture won't let us.
Now to be sure, there are a bunch of important issues here. None of them have to do with the anachronistic idea that identical things are of the same genus.
Are you now denying that Jesus is God?
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting Banno
You literally don't know what you mean when you say, "Jesus is God." You literally have no idea what you mean by "is," and now you are trying to leverage your ambiguous, bumper-sticker phrase to try to somehow shame me. :lol:
Well, I know what I mean... and the thread is now pretty much about trying to make sense of what you mean.
Quoting Leontiskos
I've now set out at length, not just how I am using "is", but how it is used in the general philosophical literature. If that's mistaken, it will not do for you just to make the accusation. You must set out where it goes astray.
I don't think it's me who has no idea.
Tell me what you mean by 'is' and what you mean by 'God' and I will tell you whether the proposition "Jesus is God" is true.
Curiously, when I typed "Shield of the Trinity" into Google, the AI gave an overview. Part of the overview was that the diagram can be misleading insofar as some might see four entities (Father, Son, Spirit, God), and that they might therefore mistake "is" for a copula of identity. Ding ding!
-
Edit: Else, to avoid repeating myself:
Quoting Leontiskos
For "is", see the extensive explanation just given, above. For "God", I have no firm opinions on the issue, and will happily copy your usage.
The elephant is still in your lap. Tell us what the "is" is for you.
Try this as your starting point for explaining "is."
Quoting John 1:1-5, 14
The Word is Jesus. Jesus was with God, and Jesus was God. Explain it.
98% of Christian denominations accept the Trinity from a doctrinal point of view, yet only 16% of Christians actually accept it. https://www.arizonachristian.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AWVI-2025_03_Most-Americans-Reject-the-Trinity_FINAL_03_26_2025.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
What this means is that there is a distinction between self avowing as a Christian and being a part of the institution of Christianity. Such is common among religions, particularly large ones.
I see myself less indoctrinated into analytic thought, particularly the Wittgensteinian approaches, and portraying this as a tension between old school and new school analytics and Christians defines a battleground that doesn't really exist.
I have always thought Christians were polytheistic, not as a criticism, but just a fact, not having any reason to particularly care to save them from it. I found Mormon belief clearer and just more forthright, but, again, there were no consequences for my view. I might as well have been studying the Greek gods.
My point here is that I can fully understand preposterous views, like a snake talking to Eve, but you're arguing from incoheremce. While you may say it all makes sense if you think about it long enough, it really doesn't.
This is the official view of the Catholic Church:
"The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith (CCC §234)
The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense We cannot come to know the Trinity by reason alone. (CCC §237)
This is a direct nod to mysticism. While you might use reason to get at it somewhat, ultimately it's "a mystery."
I do note in the Creed that it refers to "we," which could simply mean human reason cannot be used as a basis to understand the Trinity, and it would follow also that it can't be used to reject the Trinity. We can neither come up with reasons to prove it exists or that it doesn't, but we accept on faith that it does.
If Christian, confirmation bias is dogmaticaly imposed and it eliminates the possibility of disproof and it entails belief regardless. You can understand then the feeling that there is no value in the debate. Your mind can't be changed by operation of law, so to speak.
You're therefore not in a battle with the analytics or the users of reason. You're in a battle specifically with non-Christians who reject your demand of acceptance of Church dogma and refuse to humbly accept their human rationality cannot comprehend divine rationality.
This therefore has nothing to do with secularism versus theism or analytics versus whatever. This is just whether one is willing to be Christian or not. If true Christians tied to doctrinal belief (98%) constitute the authentic Christians, then this is just about being Christian or not, and not about being an Analytic, a rationalist, a theist, or whatever.
My belief holds, for example, that death is mourned because the opportunity to perform God's law has ended. Heaven, in all its glory, is not sought after, but is brought to earth by good acts. We seek to bring God here, not to go to the heavens for God. It's a this worldly religion based upon what you do. It's not a religion centered around eternal rewards.
My point is that you probably find that profoundly wrong, and you may find issues within it unresolvable, but why should I pretend to care. I don't hold my views because they are logically consistent, empirically provable, or factually credible. I hold them for meaning, purpose, comfort, morality, sense of community, sense of beauty, utilitarian benefit, belonging, etc etc.
I guess I'm asking, why the grappling in the muck with the non-believers when you've got enough reason to believe even if some of their academic objections can't be readily overcome?
Excellent post.
I'm struck by how much this resembles the roughly Wittgensteinian view, that meaning, in life as in language, is what we do, the use to which we put our lives.
That is Catholic as well.
Faith without acts is dead. The kingdom of God is now.
Thats not true at all.
This is actually a really excellent question and objection, given that my claim is that "The Son is God" is never used in early Christianity.
In the Greek of Jn 1:1 the first instance of 'God' includes the definite article whereas the second does not.
So if we use your NIV translation but include the articles and omit the capitalization, we get this:
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with the god, and the word was god."
The reading that you and Banno see is, "...and the word was the god," which is on par with, "Jesus is the god."
In the Biblical mindset god (theos) is not a binary notion. For example, angels and demons would also be described with theos or similar terms (which have to do with generalized divinity). Nevertheless, the Hebrew authors still differentiate the one god or the creator god from lesser divinities. In the New Testament Greek this is usually done with the definite article ("the god"). This is why, for example, Jn 1:1 was not a knockdown argument against Arius, for Arius saw the Word as a divine being unequal with the one god.
So in that Jewish and Early Christian idiom, "the god" is the Father, whereas Jesus is the Son of God. This same idiom is present in the Nicene Creed as well as in current Catholic and Orthodox liturgy. "God" used hypostatically refers to the Father.
So the opening Collect of a Roman Catholic liturgy is conditional in the following way:
Now I bolded each instance of 'God'. You can see that instances 1, 2, and 4 are a Triune use of 'God', whereas 3 is the ancient hypostatic use of 'God' (the Father).
Another example is the opening Collect from the first Sunday of Advent (chosen at random):
Again, instance 1 is hypostatic whereas instance 2 is Triune (despite the fact that the Father is never without the Son and Spirit).
I cannot come to know any person by reason alone. Not you, not Banno, not my children. I cannot come to know many things by reason alone.
But knowing is tied to judgment and reasoning, and believing, so everything I know is mixed with my reasoning. Reasoning is a part of being awake and thinking about anything.
Quoting Hanover
Maybe not BECAUSE, they are logically consistent, provable. But you can probably formulate them into coherent sentences. You can probably correct people who assign belief to you that you do not hold - all of that takes discussion and reasoning.
Quoting Hanover
Because they asked. Its as simple as that. And we are all in the exact same muck, here together. I hoped this would be a discussion, and it pretty much became one.
"Wittgenstein." Sounds like an MOT to me. https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/319
I don't have a good explanation for theodicy. I admit that, yet I persist in my beliefs.
Quoting Fire Ologist
That does an injustice to the Trinity. The mystery of knowing the Trinity is not akin to the mystery of truly knowing the nuances of me, Banno, or a fine wine.
We don't have official declarations that we can't know each other. The Trinity is not just a routine complicated thing.
Quoting Hanover
Nicely put.
It's the name, yes - although he was buried as a Catholic...
It's a mystery.
The word was God is like Superman can fly. Or Clark Kent is Superman. Its content. Its about the world. It is what is, like I am.
The word was with God is like analytics. Its the word about the word. This is the reason when God first told his name to Moses he said he was to be called I am. He is an analytic/ontological puzzle, in only his name.
Here is another point that I thought was interesting for people focused on language and analytics.
The Christian name of God is a whole story. I am was a name that could breathe. But because of Jesus we speak of God in the name of the Father, Son and the Spirit. Its like a story playing out. When just saying his name.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363461506070780#:~:text=Most%20accounts%20of%20Wittgenstein's%20life,.%20.%20.
Fine. You're saying John 1:1 is saying that the Word was with the Father, and the Word was divine.
My give a damn is now officially busted.
I think it only means that not everyone studies Trinitarian theology.
Quoting Hanover
The Mormon view is clearer. But it isn't representative of Christianity.
Quoting Hanover
Well you presented an argument and I pointed out why your argument fails. Calling it "preposterous" but being unable to present a valid argument against it is not helpful.
Quoting Hanover
We've covered this ad nauseum in the thread. "Mystery" does not mean "preposterous" or "contradictory."
Quoting Hanover
No, that is incorrect. The Catholic view is that the Trinity is not contradictory, and that is why Catholics such as Augustine answer charges of contradiction, and they do it substantively. They do not say, "Oh it's a mystery so you can't argue against it by definition." That's not what Catholicism means by "mystery."
Look, our religious difference seems to have everything to do with the truth-aptness of religious claims. You always go back to the idea, "None of this is provable or disprovable or rational or irrational, and none of it really matters anyway (for there are no differences that arise on account of these beliefs), so let's all just stop arguing about it." I think that is deeply mistaken. If one has that view then a lackadaisical approach to religion is warranted, such as failing to distinguish Mormons from traditional Christians. But if one does not have that view then the lackadaisical approach is not warranted. In that case we would have to take the objections seriously and admit that religion is susceptible to rational objections. It seems like I think religion is susceptible to rational objections and you don't, and therefore we approach all of this from significantly different vantage points.
Quoting Hanover
I've explained why this claim fails quite a few times. Check out my posts towards the end of <this thread>.
Quoting Hanover
This is an incorrect framing, and it evinces the same lackadaisical attitude that led you to interpret me to be saying the exact opposite of what I had said. You aren't reading or interpreting posts carefully, likely because you hold to an a priori position which says that none of this matters anyway.
Quoting Hanover
Believe it or not, people don't just decide whether to be a Christian or not for no reason whatsoever. It has to do with other holdings, including things like rationalism, theism, atheism, etc.
Quoting Hanover
I don't think religious positions are inadjudicable. I think your belief in the inadjudicability of religious positions is mistaken.
Quoting Hanover
Because a fallacious argument against Christianity impedes others from life in God.
Look, if you believe something is good and shareable, and someone gives a fallacious argument against it, then (ceteris paribus) you should point out the problems in the argument. If you don't do that then you don't care about others sharing in the good.
Obviously Judaism is not an evangelistic religion, and that's a big difference. But the idea that one should protect what is good and true is not a strange idea.
Saying that the Trinity is a deep mystery says this as dogma whether you understand it or not, this is the faith. It doesnt say you cant understand it, never will, and shouldnt try.
In fact, we are basically all here to know, love and serve God. Know is first. Knowing God means knowing he is Father, Son and Spirit. So knowing about the Trinity increases our knowledge of God; it doesnt add a layer of mystery.
There is a bottomless pit of mystery who is our God. The Catholic Church says, dont let that stop you, God has given us a ton of clues about who and what he is. Some of them are a philosophers and a scientists challenge, but so are many things and that is just one aspect
We cannot come to know the Trinity by reason alone. (CCC §237)
That doesnt mean we cannot know the Trinity.
Quoting Hanover
Nah, @Fire Ologist is right on the money. Here is the Catechism:
Quoting Catechism of the Catholic Church
The inner life of others is also opaque to us unless they "let us in," and once they do that their outer works are made transparent. Granted, the Trinity is moreso, but the similarity is significant.
I want to be a member of the tribe. I hope I am.
There is one tribe now, but it still goes back to Abraham and is his as well.
We come to know God but seeing him in others.
We come to do Gods work by doing good for others.
We can know the Trinity. We just have to put our calculators away for a bit. Someday the math has to work. Calculus and irrational numbers were new once. There is math of the Trinity, but that is less important and has not been revealed or figured out.
If I could explain the math of one God/three persons, /each who are God - would you believe in Jesus? Its interesting to a philosopher and a theologian, but it hasnt been laid bare yet. Thats my hope
Yep, and it's the same with predications of the Son. His nature/ousia is God/divine. But he is not "the god," where "the god" means something like the Father or else a generic god-person. The Nicene Creed says, "Consubstantial with the Father," which is the much more traditional phrase.
Quoting Catechism of the Catholic Church, #262
The Trinity comes from a Jewish guy named Philo. He believed Greek philosophy actually came from the OT. He believed God is everything.
No difference between us - theists just suck at forming coherent sentences. We still believe in coherent sentences. We just find there are messages that are clear despite the incoherent sounding sentences and the analogies. Messages that are loud and clear.
Fine. The use of Logos tells that it's related to Plato, the Stoics, and Philo. The basic idea was that God is everything. That's what Plotinus believed. I'm happy to give you the victory over sorting out what Catholics believe.
Christianity is built on Neoplatonism. They believed God is everything.
No. Three persons who each are God, is one God. Thats unique information.
I was talking about Plotinus.
In the sense that God is everything - God is the in and with of all things.
But in the sense that each separate thing is separate from each other (like this rock and that drink), each separate thing is not God and God is not that thing.
So, confounding the analytics, God and his creation both get to have it both ways.
First, God is everything so we are ultimately somewhere in The One, and second, I, for a time, am NOT God and he is not me
Thats where the cross comes in. I am separated and yet I can remain in Him and he in me.
We become like Gods, like Jesus is God ..
So now heres the analytic side of it. @Leontiskos does the above make sense to you? Its not expressly dogma, or from someone else - just my attempt to speak about the Trinity and how is see it. Where is there blatant error and where is it correct?
I think you, @Leontiskos can check my math and see coherence with the basic doctrines in some of the above, see the logic of it.
(And you made a distinction between God as a category of being and God as the living being we know as God. And you talked of the God versus God. These are all necessary distinctions, but I think it can confuse this further. Meaning, I follow you, but I could see someone misconstruing that you are saying there is more than one God.).
Quoting frank
I thought you were showing other places like Plotinus were the source of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus Christs words and deeds are a better source.
Word was God. (Father)
word with God. (Son)
These are the same word. (Same Spirit in each.)
These are more pieces to say what Trinity is, and where it comes from, and what the idea reflects.
Do I call myself a person? Do any of us call ourselves people?
I just said I call myself. But I call myself sounds like two people.
And now that I am talking about what I just said (analytics), Ive drawn a third person view, on me thinking to say I call myself a person.
@Leontiskos
Language itself is tied up in my being a person (Davidson) (and what Im saying regardless of if its like what Davidson is after). And the minute there is language, like the minute there is a person, we, in reflection, take third person views and first person views, we multiply our sense of self even though alone, just to think at all.
Each one of us, is like a Trinity.
A mind is like a community of sorts, in order to reflect, to have a mind, and a language.
To know, and to give, and to love, and know that you are loved
The real personal stuff of life.. Requires a layered activity within ourselves.
The word was with God and the word was God.
The logic of the Trinity is like the logic of being a reflecting thing, a person.
Added:
Quoting Wayfarer
This discussion is tied with a discussion of being.
(Now that I havent really cleared anything up, lets discuss the being and becoming of it all. :razz:
A quote attributed to Meister Eckhart: God is your being, but you are not His.
Theyd have to be Jesuit :lol:
:wink:
The Jesuits are a way to keep the smart people in the Church.
Okay, well thanks for that. Logos was a philosophical term of art, but it was also a common linguistic term. Both are probably at play in John's prologue.
Quoting frank
Not for any of the figures you mention (i.e. pantheism).
I'm glad you concede that Catholics do not fall into the transitive problem. More generally, I would say that in an anthropological sense it is mistaken to attribute extremely simplistic mistakes to millennia-old traditions. Millennia-old traditions do not make extremely simplistic mistakes, such as failing to recognize the law of identity or transitivity, and this includes all sorts of religions and traditions. This is because 1) just because someone lived before the 21st century does not make them dumb; 2) adherents of a tradition will tend to scrutinize their tradition more thoroughly than outsiders given that they think about the issues more seriously; and 3) when you have the input of billions of people over thousands of years, extremely simplistic mistakes do not survive. It is this remarkable underestimation of millennia-old traditions that I find especially problematic.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Right. So to take a group like the Stoics, the Logos is seen to order all things without remainder, but what is at stake is not an ontological thesis. Logos-providence does not entail pantheism.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think the general thrust is correct. The traditional Christian metaphysics of the God-world relation tends to be participatory rather than a matter of identification. God does things like create, sustain, and guide creation, but he is not himself creation. An ontological creator-creation distinction is maintained in traditional Christianity.
Quoting Fire Ologist
To simplify the whole question, because the ancient Greek texts did not have the uppercase-lowercase distinction, and they did not have indefinite articles, therefore they were unable to linguistically represent 'God' in the way that we commonly do today. But there are pros and cons. One of the cons of our own idiom is that although everyone uses the term 'God', it is not at all clear when the term is being used with any clear sense.
Quoting Fire Ologist
:up:
Aquinas sees this as the preliminary question to the whole discussion.
The only way for me to be correct about my own interpretations/applications of the Trinity, and for you to confirm the general thrust, is if there was a coherent logic to the Trinity.
So another person who simply concludes the Trinity is as nonsensical as a square-circle, cant be seeing the difference between Trinity and a square-circle. And further, cant see the logic of the Trinity that enabled you to check my math.
I would think this would be mildly intriguing to an analytics first proponent.
Quoting Leontiskos
How did I end up analogizing the Trinity to a single human person, and it jibes with Aquinas, but I didnt go to Aquinas? Incoherence in the notion of a Trinity would make this an utter accident.
Spot on. Apparently this has been explained quite a few times throughout the thread. :up:
Do you mind elaborating on what you mean by essence?
This also ties into the aphorism I quoted from Meister Eckhardt (whom we will recall was a 13th c Dominican friat and preacher whose sermons are still in print.)
The rationale for this is that God is not a being, but Being. Therefore, our being or actual existence is not other than God - our ground or real nature is rooted in the divine. As Eckhardt said in one of his sermons, "The ground of my soul and the ground of God are one ground." This is the non-dualistic heart of his teaching.
"but you are not his [being]": we are a created entity (which is original meaning of 'creature'), an instance of Being, we ourselves are not God. So this is another illustration of 'both is and is not' that is seen in the Shield of Faith. So the God is the 'three persons' of the Trinity, but each of them is not God.
I'm not.
Right. So if we stumbled upon an organism, we might wonder whether it is human. We might come to decide, "This thing is of the same nature as John Doe (and is therefore human)."
The genesis of Trinitarian theology is the same. Folks were wondering what Jesus is. The Council of Nicea came to decide, "The Son is consubstantial with the Father (and is therefore divine)."
Yes, and what's interesting here is that the development of the concept of personhood had a great deal to do with Trinitarian theology. The precision that we now have around the word "person" did not exist in the 4th century. Theater and Trinitarian thought were two of the principle ways that the concept was developed.
There is a similar way in which someone might think that a cardinal (bird) looks like a Roman Catholic Cardinal, or that cappuccino looks like a Capuchin's habit. In fact the bird and the coffee were named after Cardinals and Capuchins, and so the causality is reversed.
This all helps give the lie to the idea that religious thinking is somehow private or irrelevant. Religious thinking forms the basis for much of our current thought and language.
@Count Timothy von Icarus already explained why that isn't the Christian view, here
I don't think either of you are Catholic, though, so you don't have to worry about the consequences of heresy. :wink:
Quoting Banno
It occured to me after describing the 'both is and is not' meaning of the aphorism I quoted, that this communicates the sense in which the divine nature transcends logic. Aristotelian logic assumes the law of non-contradiction, which states that something cannot be both A and not A at the same time and in the same respect. In this perspective, paradoxes are flaws or errors.
However some religious teachings exhibit paradox not as a logical error, but as an insight to higher logic. The "both is and is not" language communicates that the subject is beyond the limitations of human reason. (I have encountered a scholarly article on Buddhist logic which echoes this, The Logic of the Diamond Sutra: A is not A, therefore it is A.)
'Foolishness to the Greeks', indeed.
He knows more than either of us, but I've known since childhood that Catholics don't believe that God is category that the hypostases belong to. The Trinity is supposed to be beyond human understanding. All we do is contact it through analogies. When Augustine used the words essence and persons, he didn't mean for you to bring God down to earth and sort it out the way you sort out a crowd of persons.
Quoting Wayfarer
Although now I've read that entry of Timothy's, I understand better the signficance of the term 'participate'.
Mystics, not mysterians. Different things.
That's not how the Trinity works. I don't think that message is going to get through to you, so peace, buddy.
Always sounded like a band name to me.
It's just that you're going to give the same wrong account over and over. One can avoid frustration by walking away. :up:
Ok. One last time. If you say the same wrong thing again, we'll just go our separate ways with no hard feelings, ok?
Quoting Wayfarer
In this analogy, man is a category that two people are in. If you say Luke is a man, you are predicating. Luke is the subject, and man is the predicate. You're identifying a higher category, of which Luke is a part.
When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that. If this sounds like a mystical multiplicity, that's because it is.
Eckhart would have understood this because his views were Neoplatonic, which is one of the sources for the Trinity.
Banno is one of the things that is a man, so is Bob and so is Frank. Three different things that are all men.
So Jesus is one of the things that is god, and the holy spirit is another, and the father, another. Three different things that are all god.
Right.
But surely describing the persons of the Trinity as things is even greater error than was mine.
Augustine came up with the word "persons.". He didn't mean for that to be taken literally.
I meant that Augustine came up with the use of "person" to talk about the hypostases.
Quoting Wayfarer
I guess so. If you asked an ancient Westerner what makes apples fall to the ground, they would say "God."
Whether the Westerner in question was thinking of God as a person or not depends on the place and time.
Christianity is the most ideologically dynamic of all the global religions because it's a fusion of several different sets of cultural outlooks and values. It contains directly conflicting views, and for a while this allowed it to act as fertile ground for intellectual exploration. It's far from a simplistic religion of a bearded man in the sky.
Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder.
Sounds about right.
Quoting Banno
Bernardo Kastrup makes the case that all individual minds are dissociated identities of a single intelligence. Alan Watts says something very similar in The Supreme Identity - that individual beings are simply projections of the one intelligence who has become so entangled in the game of life so as to forget their real identity. So it may not be an unreasonable analogy.
How does the Trinity work? :lol:
How is something like disassocistive identity disorder even possible to imagine as a coherent thing? What creature can make that category and what creature might live it!?
You are so full of shit sometimes.
And sounds about right.
Cant help yourselves.
Now you annoyed @Wayfarer enough to want out.
Men is plural. God isnt.
You must do better.
No. Actually they are both predicating and identifying. Thats part of the uniqueness of God being three persons.
I know you dont understand.
The father is a god. Predicate.
It just so happens that there is only one god and that god is father son and spirit. Identity.
Or, the son is a god. True statement. Predicate.
It just so happens that there is only one god and that god is three persons. True statement of identity.
Etc
You almost have it now? Its actually easy to show you you are wrong about it, once you have it. Its a mystery to me how you cant see it sometimes.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Take it up with DSM-5. Are they also full of shit?
Im talking about you comparing God to a mental patient. And you, totally incurious about personhood and its disorders and explanations.
Added: Googling "Multiple persons sharing one being" returns DID. Googling "God: Multiple persons sharing one being" returns the Trinity. Don't shoot the messenger.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Bernardo Kastrup points to a 2014 fMRI study of subjects diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. In one striking case, a dissociated personality who believed herself to be blind showed no neural activity in the brains visual cortexyet the same subject, when embodying another personality, displayed normal activity in that region.
Kastrup uses this as a metaphor for the relationship between individual minds and what he calls mind at large. Just as each dissociated identity experiences itself as a separate person, we experience ourselves as separate individualswhen, in his view, we are all expressions of the same underlying mind manifesting in different ways.
This is a metaphor that sits comfortably in Vedanta. Swami Sarvapriyananda of the New York Vedanta Society (with whom Kastrup dialogues from time to time) sees it as another way of expressing the teaching that ?tman (the true Self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality) are one. In this light, Vedanta would say that, in a sense, we are all mental patients so long as we identify with the ego and remain ignorant of the Self.
Enough for the excursion. Back to class now, everyone.
Sure, we are the metal patients maybe because of our disassociation between Atman and Brahmin.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good stuff.
One (rather limited) way of approaching the Trinity is as a mean between the extreme of a strong emphasis on the persons (which moves in the direction of polytheism) and the extreme of a strong emphasis on the unification of the divine nature (which moves in the direction of emphasizing the divine nature at the expense of the personal distinctions).
So on this scheme we're sailing down a river where the north shore is polytheism, the south shore is ousia-overemphasis, and we want to stay in the middle of the river and avoid crashing into either shore. As with all areas of subtle philosophy, overcorrection is a constant danger.
Banno presented " an unlikely strawman that very little attention is [historically] paid to the idea at all." You responded by pointing to the idea that "is God" is indicating the predication of a nature, and that is definitely the right response to Banno's odd transitivity argument. You gave an example of two men who participate in the form of 'man' (human), which is also a helpful illustration. The quibble against your example is that the persons of the Trinity are not separated from each other in the way that human persons are separated from each other, and that if for some reason we take your example to be identical to the Trinity, then it fails: it veers too close to the north shore. This objection is intelligible, but I don't see any reason to assume that you were offering the example as something more than an analogy.
(Another way of viewing that objection is as a utilization of Euthyphro-like reasoning against the reification of the ousia.)
Quoting Banno
No, Catholicism (and Western Christianity in general) has always veered closer to the south shore. Polytheism is the danger for Eastern Christianity.
Quoting frank
No, this is not right. I would go back to my posts where I quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We can say that the Father is God (in the Triune sense), but by that we include the Son and the Spirit with the Father, for they are never apart (except notionally, in the single notional case where an exclusive relation of origin is being considered). More commonly, we would say that the Father is divine (and this is a matter of ousia).
Regarding my post to you about John 1:1, there is an ancient sense in which "God" ("the god") is used hypostatically to refer to the Father, but the semantics of the hypostatic use and the Triune use are distinct.
Quoting frank
Perhaps this is most true of Christianity given its geographic sprawl, but it is also true of many other religions to a lesser extent.
Quoting Wayfarer
In a more individual way Trinitarian thought is often applied analogously to psychological health. When the various aspects of one's personality become dissociated, one becomes mad, corrupt, divided, schizophrenic, etc. When the various aspects of one's personality enter into a symbiotic and fruitful union, one achieves psychological health. Monomania would be the case where only one aspect of one's personality is allowed to continue existing.
Is that really a surprise?
Banno is a case in point for the future in which LLM-based arguments become synonymous with a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy bias. What Narcissus would have given for an LLM to reflect back to him his own prejudices!
The Trinity is absolutely affirmed as mysterious and beyond reason (super rational); it is not affirmed as contradictory and irrational (in a sense, beneath or bereft of reason). God does not have an essence or nature in the way creatures do. Creaturely essences are necessarily a limitation on being (which is what allows a finite mind to possess their form), whereas God's essence is existence itself. Hence, "hypostasis" and "ousia" are applied differently (God is not a genus). Nevertheless, they are not wholly equivocal terms either. God, as first cause, is the exemplar of all things, and so also of fullness of the terms of finite being. This is why Eastern Christianity often speaks of progress in the spiritual life as being what makes someone more fully a person, because the fullness of "person" is measured by the persons of the Trinity, not human persons. To be "dead in sin," and a "slave to sin," beset by the "civil war in the soul" of Romans 7 and The Republic is to be less a person, more a mere jumble of external causes. Indeed, to be irrational is to be less fully anything at all.
One way to conceive this is to recall that in classical metaphysics human logos is a participation in Divine Logos. In the great chain of being, it is the very bottom, the material, that tapers off in multiplicity and irrationality, and essentially, nothingness. The source, by contrast, is the fullness of rationality. God is, using the Dionysian language common to the East, "superessential" and "super rational." Man, as a "middle being," is not the measure of reason. Human systems and speech are not their own ground, because man is not his own ground.
Indeed, the whole ordering of epithumia and thymos to logos is justified (logos has property authority) because it is radically open and always beyond itself, and so capable of transcending its own finitude. In the East, the nous is even often considered as wholly discrete from discursive dianoia.
So, to your later questions, the example of multiple people sharing human nature, but not being the same person is apt, to the extent that it shows how many people [I]participate[/I] in one nature. Nonetheless, we would not say that the Father or Spirit participates in the Divine Nature the way finite things participate in their essences. God is what is participated in. The persons [i]subsist[/I] rather, possessing the essence in total fullness, without derivative participation. They are defined (for us) by relations of origin ("begotten," "procession"). The Eastern view is not dissimilar, their tropoi hyparxeos (modes of being) is sometimes translated as "manner of subsistence." By contrast, finite men are generally considered to be individuated by their matter, but God is pure act (or even the individuating principle for creatures is their "act of existence," God is one actuality, existence itself).
Now, if all language about the God was entirely equivocal, one could say nothing meaningful about God at all. Hence, the claim that terms like ousia and hypostasis have absolutely no applicability to God would be extremely problematic for someone defending orthodoxy, because it would mean that even revelation wouldn't apply to God. But when Catholics claim that "natural reason" cannot discover the Trinity, they mean, "just human reason and common empirical experience." They don't mean that we cannot know anything even with the testimony of the Scriptures, tradition, and saints. Personally, I find the Catholic nature/supernature, natural reason/revelation dichotomies somewhat unhelpful, and they are a later development. Eastern Christianity tends to make no such distinction here on the ground that Adam's natural state was "little less than a god," (Psalm 8), and his telos diefication, whereas the fallen state is itself what is "unnatural." The understanding of the Trinity is utterly beyond man inasmuch as the Divine Essence is unknowable precisely because it is infinite (and not merely inexhaustible for man, as finite essences are). Any finite reckoning of the infinite is always only encapsulates an vanishing share that approaches zero.
Man can, however, know God through God's energies and creation (including revelation). And so there is a sense in which the Trinity can be known more fully, through these (filtered through an analogy of proper proportion). But it is not by dianoia but rather by the unclouding of nous and its conformity with God (through the "heart," the "eye of the nous"). That is, one reaches theoria, a knowledge of God through creatures, through praxis (the spiritual life, ascetic labors, the sacraments, etc.), and beyond theoria lies theology, which is given by God to the saints. As Evagrius famously puts it: "If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian." Or as Saint Maximus adds: "theology without prayer is the theology of demons."
The Patristics make the essence/energies distinction so it's in Catholic thought to some degree, although the East extends it to a much greater degree with Saint Gregory Palamas, seeing the divine union of Catholic "infused contemplation," as contact with the divine energies (often through a transfigured body). Again, I'm not sure if differences here are as great as they might first seem. Has Palamas encountered Bonaventure instead of the Western transplants he fought with they might have gotten on quite well.
Which is all to say that there is a very key distinction between "grasping the Divine Nature as finite natures" and any experience of God that is informative. You have to recall the very high standard out of "knowledge" in Greek thought. We are absolutely not talking about the form of God existing in the intellect. But we're also not saying there is no experience, such that affirming sacred doctrine is just a sort of contentless affirmation (we could consider here the very experiential writings of Saint Simeon the New Theologian of Saint Bonaventure's Mind's Journey Into God).
The prescriptions of praxis are actually incredibly broad though. One does not understand creatures without the Creator either. One might apply reason instrumentally to "problem solving," and yet this will only compound vice and suffering without the spiritual life. Wholly instrumental analytic reason is in a sense diabolical (in both its original and current sense).
Not really, or at least not without many important caveats. The Trinity appears in Origen and others (although not in its mature Capaddocian formulation) but Origen is an [I]older[/I] contemporary of Plotinus in Alexandria. For a long time, people spoke matter of factly about a sort of one way influence between Neoplatonism and Christianity, but this has largely been revised in scholarship because it makes no sense given the temporal ordering. That is, scholars were following the order of Saint Augustine's biography, and not the order of intellectual development in Alexandria where the Gnostics, Philo, Origen, Clement, etc. are prior to Plotinus and influencing his milieu.
Plotinus writes a tract against the Gnostics but that doesn't change the fact that his thought might well be seen as repaganized and abstracted Jewish/Christian Platonism from his city, with particular influence seeming to come from the Gnostics and their system of emanations. He mocks them, but no doubt they would have simply dismissed much of the criticism as a facile, surface level understanding built up into a straw man. But he probably felt the need to attack the Gnostics precisely because of the similarities and their ability to draw the same audience.
Nevertheless, the Plotinian hypostases cannot be mapped to the Trinity (although a few did try) precisely because they are organized hierarchically. There is an unfortunate tendency in philosophy thought to equivocate between the Pagan "Neoplatonism" of Plotinus and his descendants and "Neoplatonism" more broadly, covering the "Golden Age" Islamic thinkers and figures like Saint Thomas or Eriugena, which makes it seem like the one is simply a reskinned version of the other, which is not the case.
Tertullian introduces persona as a legal/theatrical metaphor. But the language of hypostases (which is arguably poorly rendered as "persons") goes back at least as far as Origen. Arguably, the original metaphor is deficient in that it suggests modalism, but it is reworked a great deal. All the terms become quite technical.
I wouldn't put much stock in that. Even if I was prepared to ignore all my personal experiences at a variety of churches for a survey that includes no descriptions of its methods, there is something very suspicious about the large variances between 30-somethings and 20-somethings. Do we really have good reasons to think 20 year olds are much more likely to believe in "the God of the Bible" than their older siblings, but then much less likely to believe in the Holy Spirit? Is there really a substantial minority of practicing Christians who don't believe in Christ and yet attend traditional Christian services?
Somehow I doubt it. The generational variances in particular seem like noise or error.
Quoting Leontiskos
I said this:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Here is the question for the analytic mind who thinks the Trinity is just an incoherent idea, and contains too many contradictions:
How are me and Leon identifying the same flaws in @frank reasoning about the Trinity, and able to put into totally different explanations, different words, our reasoning and logic as to why and how Frank blew it? How are our separately developed explanations reflective of the same reasoning and conclusions? How did we both see franks flaw?
That must mean there is something objective and particular about the concept of the Trinity (besides dogma and what someone else says about it.). Leon and I each separately worked out and expressed the same conclusion in our own ways. That requires logic and facts, sorted from franks illogic and wrong facts. About the Trinity.
So @Banno and frank, how is that possible?
The OP asked for an explanation of the Christian Narrative.
Then Frank admitted (by his actions) he didnt think such explanation was even possible.
What Leon and I just did is evidence that there is a logic and reasoning going on that therefore might allow for an explanation of the Christian narrative.
So @frank, was your OP in earnest?
Good to see you back.
OK. Just Platonism, then.
Quoting IEP
Ok. But you can't make an apology for the Catholic view by referring to Eastern Orthodox. Let's just leave it at this: on it's face, the Catholic Trinity appears to be contradictory. Catholics are aware of this, but deny that it's a contradiction, because the truth is beyond human comprehension. If we were enlightened, we would see that it's not a contradiction.
If by the essence you mean a set of properties and abilities, then we are on the same page. Otherwise, I don't understand what essence could possibly mean. That is true since we have something that exists objectively, so-called God (which I think It is a mind); God is therefore a substance, given the definition of substance as something that objectively exists. Such a substance needs to have abilities and properties in order to interact with reality.
I don't understand what that definition is referring to unless essence refers to properties and abilities!
That was a very good bringing-together of various different strands of the thread. :up:
I was revisiting Damascene's exposition of the faith to see how much more accessible it is than Aquinas. It is certainly more accessible, but perhaps still not accessible enough for what this thread would require.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Agreed. And we can hold that such an approach is diabolical while also maintaining that it need not be explicitly atheistic (for example). The issue has to do with a closed-off-ness to both analogical reasoning and transcendence.
-
Quoting frank
If there is a contradiction, then present the argument for that conclusion. As I noted earlier, internecine differences over the Trinity do not turn on the question of contradiction. They turn on the question of consistency with Scripture, the Fathers, or other such sources.
I think this is right. The "sensus fidelium" could not exist if what is agreed upon were truly incoherent.
Trinity appears to include specific contradiction. Yes.
The rest of the quote is muddled but may be accurate. It is better restated:
Catholics see the apparent contradiction, and we see that the depths of the Trinity will proceed beyond full human understanding, but we also believe we will forever understand more and more about the Trinity because it is not a contradiction - we will learn more about God, like God knows himself.
So you could say if we were enlightened we would see that its not a contraction because though it appears contradictory to simple logic, it still appears, so it must have some accounting, and this will take further enlightenment.
I wouldnt really say the truth is beyond human comprehension but if all you mean by that is the fullness of all there is to know about the Trinity is infinite and so never finite as we humans like to make things, then sure, I can leave it at that.
Quoting Leontiskos
That should be a huge flag for those who say things like Trinity is a contradiction that is beyond comprehension. It cant possibly be the case where two people independently come to the same conclusions that there is nothing coherent to the Trinity in itself for us the determine for ourselves. (Unless maybe we are both saints! :lol: )
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Good stuff. This is about the old relationship between change/becoming (irrational) and permanence/substanc (fully thing). The problem of how particulars actually participate in the forms; and the ontology of these.
Some people think it is rigorous to leave personhood undefined but analyze what persons do. When, somehow, what we do IS who/what we are, and it is impossible to analyze either one without the other. We, as persons, are more like a Trinity than they will allow themselves to admit. (Resorting to psychosis without realizing that is again, more apt to describing the human condition than they would like to admit. The analysis of it is too confounding and preposterous. (Like so many other things about experience and being a person, although they are less fun to mock than God and those who say they believe such things.)
Do you think I am offended?
Or were you offended by me?
Heated rhetoric need have no relationship to any offense or insult.
No insult intended, and all due respect but, it may actually be the case that you might be slightly full of shit sometimes. If you really think the God who is a trinity of persons is like the person who is suffering from DID, then I take it back and apologize if any offense was taken.
So were you full of shit? Or was your DID observation meant to advance the discussion. I hope so, because I think a discussion about how any human person (DID or not) relates to the Trinity could be instructive towards the Christian narrative, which you seem interested in to some playful extent. (Im guessing you were just shitting me. Good one. Me and myself - we both saw the humor in it, although one of us was also a little disappointed. But haha.).
No, I don't think that. What I've shown is that the description of God presented here is muddled. The arc is that the muddle is continually papered over. This is now the bit where you pretend that you and Leon pretend to have answered the problems raised. You haven't.
Ok. To make one of the issues real clear (as it did for Claud), lets put the issue as follows.
Trinity lovers think they can say this:
One plus one plus one equals one.
And/Or maybe it should be said, one equals three.
But that makes zero sense, is contradictory and incoherent.
You want an answer to the above math problems.
Well that answer will never come. So if the above two statements are each a key important (dare I say essential) facet of the Trinity, and there is no answer coming, then you are done. Trinity is incoherent. All you see is people papering over this basic math inconsistency with pretense.
Right? End of discussion.
Trinity means one plus one plus one equals one, and thats impossible to even conceive as a coherent thought so discussion never really started. Right?
Way back in school, we were doing formal proofs, so we were given exercises and their answers, and had to fill in the proofs, "Solve this-and-that", except one of the answers was intentionally wrong. One student then kept retrying until they got the given, but wrong answer. I don't recall how many sheets of paper they used, just that they also arrived at the right answer. :)
Quoting Fire Ologist
Unfortunately not.
I think you're the only legit Catholic in the discussion, so let me assure you: if it's meaningful to you, you're right where we all are. None of us have final answers.
Hmmm.
Is this a reluctant way of saying you are still mildly interested?
You havent given any new effort to show me some pretenses.
Isnt life in general full of muddle to be sorted out? Then we try to communicate whats been sorted tk some other person, who adds their own muddling influences.
Muddle doesnt raise any new critique.
I think there is plenty unaddressed in the above pages directed to you by me - pick something if interested in proceeding.
Im not exactly sure what you are saying to me.
Quoting frank
I agree, I think?
Final answers.
When it comes to the Trinity, like most meaningful things, knowledge increases (for fools like me), but is never final.
So did we just become best friends or something?
no
Not sure what that sentence is. The ball remains in your court, so far as I can see.
How does 1+1+1=1? By misunderstanding either "1" or "+" or "=", or using at least one of them in a way that is not in accord with their usual use.
The standard modern definition of an essence is as those properties had by some individual in every possible world that includes that individual.
It's not too far from the classical definition as what makes a thing what it is, and not another. It avoids the circularity of "'Essence' is 'what is essential to the being'". There's still room for ambiguity and interpretation.
Right, so 1+1+1=1 cant possibly be right, and/or, if it is forced to be right, there is a misuse of "1" or "+" or "=".
So we have to get back to that, because that is a huge pickle.
Forget the Trinity pickle for a second. You have to, in order to re-approach the life inside God and ask about the math of it. You need to start over because those are the wrong starting questions.
Lets just say there is one God. And lets just say this one God is called the Father, and he created all things.
There is nothing heretical about that being full stop who and what Catholics believe in.
God the Father is all 4 year old kids think of when they say they know God. Those kids are right, and in full alignment with the Catholic Church, and full agreement with the life and example of Jesus, who taught people to pray the Our Father, which makes no plain reference to the Son or Holy Spirit. You can refer to the whole and to all of the one God by simply saying Father. That is not heresy.
Period. End of Catholic narrative.
Also sounds like the Jewish narrative, but they didnt use the name Father.
We have a long way to go to get back to asking so what is the math of it? So far, the math is simple. We can get there, but you dont really participate in my posts
Do you want to grow into the fourteen year old God, the Son? Ask, why did he call God Father in the first place, and not just something like Lord or some name, like Elijah?
Sure - that's the encyclopedia definition. But I am stressing the link between 'esse' and 'is' (esse is the Latin verb for 'to be'). So the essence is the 'is-ness' of something.
Quoting MoK
I don't think that classical theology would ever say that God 'exists objectively'. Whatever exists objectively can be discovered scientifically. Here some references: God does not Exist, Bishop Pierre Whalon; He Is who Is (review of David Bentley Hart 'The Experience of God'. I'm linking these articles as illustrations of the ideas of 'apophatic theology' in modern parlance.)
Quoting Wayfarer
What's "Is-ness"? Isn't that a reaffirmation of A=A, that the essence of A is that A is A? Doesn't that leave you with defining the "is" of identity in terms of essence, and then defining essence in terms of identity?
Or are you saying that the essence is what makes something a particular thing? In which case, if God does not exist, how is god a particular thing? Does god not then have an essence?
"Is-ness" is no clearer a term than "essence" - and even that's being generous. It's better if an explanation is clearer than the thing it is trying to explain.
But of course this is philosophical imperialism and I have entirely missed the point.
This is why they executed Socrates.
They're not that different on the language here, or even the praxis. I used the East to explicate the West because the Western language (e.g. substance) has been adopted by later philosophy and the terms have become loaded with all sorts of unhelpful connotations. In English, Eastern Christianity is still largely described using the Greek terms (indeed, we still use Greek in the liturgy and hours to some extent) and this avoids those connotations. Also, the East tends to be a bit "looser" and more focused on "praxis," which I think is helpful.
A great example of this is Hieromonk Damascene's explanation of Christianity (particularly Eastern Christianity) through Taoism, in "Christ the Eternal Tao." It's an orthodox presentation, but the use of Chinese instead of Greek terms helps avoid all the loaded terms.
I don't think it's prima facie contradictory. The most obvious analogate is the way different individual existences (substances) possess the same nature (formal identity), and this is not itself contradictory.
Indeed, and this is in the Catholic tradition as well. If you look at the Catechism's section on the virtue of faith, you'll see the whole idea of illumination. The classic formulation is praxis ? theoria (illumination) ? theology (gnosis), although this comes out in several ways. The Reformation left the Catholic tradition with a greater desire to codify things, but such efforts are ultimately futile when detached from praxis and the theological virtues because man's nous is clouded, and it is clouded inasmuch as it is improperly oriented.
[I]
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.[/I]
Romans 1
It has many ways of dealing with many placed predicates and relations. The ancients and medievals did not lack a notion of polyadic properties. Indeed the core sign relation for language, supposition, and epistemic relations are all triadic.
It is an interesting question, how metaphysics and natural language affected the development of logic. Obviously, changing notions in metaphysics were themselves often motivating factors for innovations in logic, the early nominalists being a key example.
This is not what is meant by an essence in classical metaphysics. This would seem to lead to something like a commitment to a "bundle metaphysics" where things just are collections of properties (plus or minus some bare substratum or haeccity that properties attach to; i.e., "pin cushion metaphysics"). Such theories are reductionist, but they also tend to be nominalist, although I suppose they could also align with some sort of austere realism that reduces all things to a basic set of properties (e.g., ontic structural realism, reduction to a platonic mathematics).
Actually, I think "SQL metaphysics" might be the better term for these theories because they are basically positing some sort of lookup array that is matched to things (usually on the basis of "sense data"), so that things just are whatever produces matches for the array. But this of course leads to the question: "from whence the array?" and "were there butterflies and stars prior to the generation of the array as a set of lookup values?" .
But in the classical metaphysics that underwrites the early expositions of the Trinity an essence is primarily a metaphysical explanation of how anything is anything at all and interacts with anything else, not how terms refer to things. The original point of an essence is to explain the preconditions for there being properties in the first place. The SQL metaphysics leaves the core concerns of nature (interaction), and quiddity (whatness) out of the picture, to focus wholly on definition. This is perhaps most obvious with the Divine Nature. God is not God because God checks a set of boxes on what God must be in "possible worlds."
Exactly. The rationalists are a prime example here. They generally have good aims, such as securing faith in reason, trying to resolve sectarian disagreements, creating a firm foundation for a wholly instrumental science based on the "mastery of nature" for the benefit of man, etc. They were, in general, religious. But there is a neglect of praxis here that cuts against tradition and Scripture, and a move towards instrumentalizing and proceduralizing reason and wisdom. And when they are unsuccessful in an approach that is almost wholly ratio, the result is skepticism, but also a view of the nous that is no longer radically open to what lies above it, and a participation in a greater Logos.
I'd suggest that the sheer instrumentality of the "new science" is a major culprit here. It leads to a sort of pride. It's a particularly pernicious pride in that it often masquerades as epistemic humility. Its epistemic bracketing is often an explicit turn towards the creature and the good of the creature without reference to the creator, as if the one could be cut off from the other. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools," and exchanged a holistic view for a diabolical process that cuts apart and makes it so that "reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions."
My impression is that Greek Orthodox has more acceptance of mysticism. Do you have a favorite Orthodox writer?
So true. :fire:
---
Quoting jorndoe
I continue to be impressed by the anti-Trinitarian "mysticism". "It's totally contradictory. I don't have a coherent argument for that conclusion, but just take my word for it!~" Usually one comes to the conclusion that something is contradictory after making a serious argument to that effect. Not on TPF, though. :wink:
And what's interesting to me is the way that philosophical and cultural degradation is often very subtle, especially at its inception. For example, it is quite difficult to pinpoint where this "proceduralizing" of reason began, even though we can see it fully flowered in the modern period.
Then beginning where we are now, medicinal movement in the proper direction poses the same sort of question. People and especially cultures cannot do a 180° reversal in a day, and usually the reordering must be done via a multitude of small and subtle shifts or re-orderings. It's remarkably difficult for a rationalistic mindset to yield even the smallest concessions (and thus re-orderings) to a more holistic paradigm. It's almost as if the rationalistic context must be abandoned for a time, in much the same way that someone who has developed bad habits of gait should just go swimming for a few hours in an attempt to forget and reset the whole realm of walking.
Cool. I am happy with this definition, but it seems that @Count Timothy von Icarus disagrees.
Yes.
I see Nietzsche as providing one of these pivotal moments - he trashed everything. Made it fun to trash all that was supposed to be good. And it changed many things (philosophy, ethics, culture, influenced politics). It still wasnt a day of course.
We need to course correct again.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes. For sake of reasonableness. For sake of truth and wisdom. And good. And happiness and peace. The forgotten pursuits of philosophy.
I completely agree. I think we have much to learn from mystics and novelists regarding the best way to clarify what it is and how it is and why it matters, and, here is something people today overlook, what doesnt matter.
We need the anti-Nietzsche. A prophet of the under-man, who always, all-along understands truth, eyes fixed on light, delivered as eternal gift, not merely constructed as temporary will.
We dont need to clarify what Lois was really saying about Superman anymore. Thats all grave digging work. Necessary, but completely turned away from the dynamic and the living.
Science, with all its successes, cannot explain mental phenomena and how they could be efficacious in the world. It is not difficult to see that a model that includes the mind resolves the mentioned problems.
Could we agree that something that exists is either objective or subjective? If yes, then God must objectively exist; otherwise, He is only an idea in the minds of believers. Now, this thing that objectively exists, God (generally, something that objectively exists is called a substance), must have a set of abilities, for example, the ability to create; otherwise, there would be no creation. God also has to have the ability to experience, as well, since otherwise God would become blind to His own knowledge, so He cannot act based on His knowledge. Such a God is a single thing and therefore is a good candidate to be the creator. If there are three substances, of which each is God, then we are dealing with the Trinity. Each substance is either distinguishable from another substance or not. If they are distinguishable, then there must be something to help us distinguish one from another, so-called properties. The properties also required to tell how the whole functions as a united thing. If they are not distinguishable, by this I mean they have no properties, then having more than one substance does not grant any functionality that one substance doesn't have, so the Trinity is unnecessary. So, I have one question here. What are the properties of each substance?
Many ways. All of them are ad hoc workarounds. Compare the tortured "Socrates is-a-thing-taller-than-Plato" to Taller(Socrates, Plato).
Quoting Open Logic
While you are there, check out the rest of the Open Logic text, a summation of recent logic, and contemplate how few of those thousand pages might be put into Aristotelian terms.
And that is an introduction.
Quoting MoK
Yes.
Now, what exactly is an essence for him?
I've asked, but not received a clear answer. Just verbosities such as "... an essence is primarily a metaphysical explanation of how anything is anything at all and interacts with anything else, not how terms refer to things."
I don't find these satisfactory.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Logic as the work of the Devil? The retreat from rationality is the only response left for those who must accept the dogma of the Trinity despite it's incoherence.
I think it is proper to ask for a concise definition of essence. I think that something that objectively exists must have properties and abilities to be functional. I don't see anything more that can be added to this set, properties, and abilities!
Yep. We might even go a step further and ask if the idea of essences is worth keeping.
If you don't mind reading the Devil's works, have a look at Why alchemists can make gold. Let me know if it's paywalled.
Do you mean like you and Frank asked for an explanation of the Christian narrative?
Did Sartre's idea of essence appeal to you?
Quoting frank
Essence as a choice? It's an improvement. What is, is not fixed eternally. But again, I'll go with essence being a philosophical invention, petty thoroughly undermined by Wittgenstein yet given a brief reprieve by Kripke. I'd be happy to consider alternatives - if they could be given clearly.
Yep - the issue is what they are. Talk of the properties had by some individual in every possible world is much clearer than "a metaphysical explanation of how anything is anything at all and interacts with anything else" or "is-ness".
Quoting Janus
How do these differ from just plain properties - that is, we can identify the kettle form others if we specify that it is the one on the stove; but being on the stove is not, I suppose, a part of the essence of being that kettle.
There's a medieval idea of working down the chain of being, specifying each level by genera, sub-genera, species and so on, giving a criteria at each level. Common hereabouts, but problematic.
I was thinking in terms of identification of things as kinds of thing, not identification of things as particular things. For the purposes of the latter we could bring relations into consideration. Although all indivduals have unique identifying qualities too.
For example we could say that there are essential characteristics that all tigers share, while there are also unique individual variations of those characteristics. A question I've wondered about is, in the context of modal logic, how far we can go in considering all those properties to be contingent, that is not logically necessary.
Why alchemists can make gold
Potted up tomatoes, caps and eggplant seedlings this morning to get going in the greenhouse. Put seeds for celery, cauliflower, cabbage and silverbeet in the heated tray. Hope to start lines for carrot, beetroot and parsnip in a bit.
The essence of good gardening.
In the Existential sense, yes - it's what I choose to do, since the existence of the seeds precedes the essence of good gardening. :wink:
Added: Not sure we should count Camus as an existentialist...
How did you fare in the rain?
Quoting Banno
I have also read a bit of Camus?The Outsider, The First Man and The Myth of Sysyphus. If I recall correctly he disavowed being an existentialist and was opposed to any and all philosophical systems. I also seem to recall he and Sartre fell out over the latter's adherence to Marxism. I think his fiction is much better than Sartre's (although that said I've read only his Nausea).
Nausea is pretty tedious.
Lantana is a bit of a bugger?though it's much easier to get rid of than devils fig. I just drive into it with the bucket of the tractor up and the blade of the bucket pointed down, lower the leading edge of the bucket to the ground and then reverse the tractor dragging the lantana out as it is so shallow rooted. Then I run over it with the slasher?it breaks down really fast?problem solved. The only bummer is that it serves as habitat for quite a few species of small birds, so I'm a little conflicted about getting rid of it.
I haven't been to Lake Cathie or Comboyne, but I stay at Flynn's Beach sometimes when I'm on my way down to and back from Sydney. I guess Lake Cathie would have been pretty conservative back in the day.
No its not. We need all of the different ways to talk about this shit we can get. They are all insufficient.
Quoting Banno
What does properties had by mean?
What does properties had by some individual mean?
How does some individual have properties?
Can you answer any of these without any reference to essence? You already mentioned properties had by some individual .. so youve as good as shown something participating in the forms, just with a new element of possible worlds. A new context, or, muddle, for the same phenomena of what it is to be whatever it is.
Nothing about essence is much clearer once youve used some individual to fix properties across all possible worlds ..
Plenty of room to insert some muddle, at least possibly. Might as well give @Count Timothy von Icarus and @Wayfarer the same benefit of the doubtful muddle. Like I said is-ness helps complete the picture as much as statements like some individual in every possible.
Camus is only existentialist because what else would he be. Hes a way better read than Heidegger. But Being and Nothingness is existentialism defined if you ask me. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard sort of built the house and opened the door, Satre moved in and set up all the furniture, Camus is hanging out back on the porch. ADDED (Hes sort of a stranger to his own genre.) Heidegger lives next door but never really visits. Dostoyevsky lives in the basement and scares everyone.
Cheers, Olo.
I think we might be straying off topic, but I don't think God will mind. Apparently he's very interested in everything we do.
That I didn't is clear evidence of divine intervention. God is on my side. Turning and seeing the wheels three feet off the ground was very - sobering.
Three persons, on one side?
I am waiting to see if they can offer a definition of essence as a thing that is not in the set of properties and abilities.
[quote=Neils Bohr] The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.[/quote]
Spot on Neils.
Maybe a little harsh on the pointless comment.
But thats what I am often saying to @Banno about how analytics is unconcerned with the world. Analytics is essential to science and knowing truth. But the points it makes are not about the world; it is about talking about the world. It points out what cannot be said about the world, but nothing that CAN be said. It does not talk about the world itself. It supports statements about the world, but it need not, and can use Clark Kent and Lois Lane to make its most salient points. A truth found in the world, and not just in an analytic proof, requires having another point besides the truth-table of it all.
In other words, sometimes it is wisdom to say things that sound contradictory or that cannot be born out in formal logic. We can aim for the world first and ask analytic questions later - treacherous, but so is learning all formal logic and not using it to say anything about life.
It's coming to Broadway next month with Keanu Reeves. I hear the music score and dancing are amazing..
First sentence is true. Second, not so much. I'll be in NYC the week before opening, alas.
Come on people. We all know what essence is.
It is hard to say, Ill give you that. But come on.
A definition points to an essence.
A definition is an essence.
Essences point to definitions, to language, to intelligibility.
Essence is a difference.
A difference points toward essences.
This is different than that says the same thing as the essence of this is different than the essence of that. There is an essential difference where there is any difference.
But we all deal in essence, basically, in every unique individual dealing. When we distinguish, or identify, a thing, we invoke an essence.
It is what.
It is the what in whatever you say, or what you are speaking about, or what you are speaking for.
It is what you just said. You asked what is the definition of essence.
What is essence?
Essence is whatness. This complete answer also, literally, begs the question, so I get the 2500 year old conundrum with essence. This is why above I said it is difficult to say - words presume, essence, so the essence of essence assumes itself exists. Words fail, but we cant avoid them, when it come to what is essence.
Essence is intimately connected to speaking, the object spoken about, and the speaker; but more simply, essence is the intimate connection between the spoken (the language) and the object spoken about (the world or the whatever). (The speaker is presumed in the language.)
Essence is able to be demonstrated in physical experiment, or shown in words, in a form of logic. So there are two different directions in the world to seek essence - the object, and the speaking subjects words.
We turn this in on itself when we make the object language itself. What is the essence of language?
What is the language that defines essence?
Same question.
What is essence completed, the what it is to be.
Essence is the meaning of a word that might be compiled from an analysis of all of the uses of a word - if we quantify and collect all of the uses of a word and find its mean use, wed hold the essence.
Please read that again @Banno.
Definition is the linguistic representation of the essence of some thing.
So a definition is like an essence when it is accurate and complete (extremely rare).
Essence is the idea, that is or can be put into words. Or it reflects an idea like it reflects a substance/object. It can be an idea of something in the world, or an idea of some other idea; both the word and ideas contain essences. (Ive already said this in other words above.)
Essence happens, as you predicate subjects.
It is essentially easier to use essence in a sentence, than it to simply define what is essence, because each word in any definition has its own essence, and its own definition ..because words are intimately connected with essences . like we can link essences to things in the world. Its all a moving, intertwining target from which we seek to sort out the essence.
Its impossible to sum up essence as it is tied to is and existence. What is? is as essential to the conversation as What is?. Both necessitate the other; both what and is rely on each other as cause, and cause each other as effect. Like a Yin Yang.
What is is what. Essence is the what part, if one is seeking to try to dissect this with precision.
(@Astorre, this is the other side of your discussion of being/becoming. The fixed thing part of the process that is being/becoming - and this is just as difficult to speak clearly about, because it is so pre-Supra-non-all-linguistic.)
But we use essence expressly everyday, if not impliedly, all of the time. Like right now, as I demonstrate both how difficult it is to get to the essence of something like essence, and how easily some of you are reading right through this.
Essence, as it might be said to exist in an individual subject, is able to be universalized as a category, if there are multiple similar subjects and a desire to categorize them. For example, I am a speaking thing, you are a speaking thing, speaking is part of the essence of what it is to be me, and what it is to be you, so if we want to create a universal category such as person, we can say part of the essence of all persons is they are things that can speak. So essence relates to the individual things and to the words about things - it is found in things and in categories of things.
Essence is in categorization, as it is in particularized identification.
[b]Sets have an essence; members have an essence.
What makes two penguins each count as individual penguins, is what makes both penguins count as members of the set of all penguins.[/b]
Essences put into words, are practical, and natural, and make it easier to speak and communicate about things. Like a proper name. If we called everything this and that and it, we would easily get confused about which one we were talking about. So we use names like computer screen or English to point out deferent things in front of us, and what it is we are speaking about in particular. Essences fill in more details about what is named - essences are like really long names - man is a name, whereas man the rational, speaking, thinking, willing, absurd, loving animal is a longer name, providing something of the essence of a man, universalizable as the essence of all men. (This risks Nominalism, so sample it, put it aside and we can revisit later.)
A definition conveys something of the essence of a word. It is extremely difficult to outline all the elements of the essence or definition of some particular thing, for many reasons.
So necessary and sufficient in all possible worlds is like an aspirational goal when capturing an essence in language.
We can admit we do not know all of the necessary and sufficient conditions about some essence while also admitting that we know some conditions of some essence. Gold is essentially different than H2O. I may have a long way to go to outline the full essence of gold or h2o, but we can easily enumerate some essential differences between buckets of gold and buckets of h2o. Therefore, we see something of the essence of gold and the essence of h2o by seeing they are clearly not the same thing.
Essence is the intelligible aspect of an individual thing.
Essence is for mind what texture is for touch.
To get to the essence of what an essence is, there is much, much more to say. It is important to first recognize, before we say anything more, that with each sentence we utter that has a subject and predicate, we invoke reference to some essential distinction. For instance, my last sentence made each sentence the subject; this subject must have some particular essence such as subject and predicate we utter. That is what I am referring to as the essence of a sentence (there is more to say to capture the complete essence of a sentence, and perhaps something to be removed from what I have said, but with each step, we grapple with essential distinctions )
We dont move through language without grappling with essences, like traversing a jungle of differences. Always dangerous.
We cannot escape a conversation, or the jungle, without defining the essential, and tracking our now fixed progress.
To dream essences exist in the world of the forms (Plato) - ok, why, how does that help explain what it is you are explaining?
To intuit they exist inside a substance (Aristotle) - ok, why, how does that give account?
To admit they only exist in mind, and language - ok, why, do they still serve their purpose of facilitating an exchange of information about a world (intelligibility of some other thing)?
But to deny essences exist? Doesnt seem possible to say. Or think.
Quoting Banno
What practical difference between an idea and an essence is there?
So this suggestion is incoherent.
Essences are only a kind of idea. Ideas are of the ideal, the essential. If we abandon the idea of essences, what will be left of our ideas at all? What do we think about? What do we think with? What does mind deal in, if not essential form? Isnt there an essence of idea that distinguishes idea from the brain it sits with? How are there any essential differences between different ideas without essence?
So how is the notion of asking whether the idea of essences is worth keeping even possible of consideration? It sounds incoherent to wonder about ideas without essences.
And I didnt even get into is-ness. So much more that is essential to essence and not worth losing sight of.
@Leontiskos @Count Timothy von Icarus
This doesn't suggest that you are willing to consider the possibility that you (and a great many others) are misunderstanding things.
Quoting Fire Ologist
The mind deals in patterns recognized by neural networks. The recognition you have, of the patterns you recognize is a characteristic of your mind rather than a recognition of something essential to things which your mind recognizes as fitting some pattern.
Of course Plato didn't have the benefit of the neuroscientific understanding that is available to us today. So it is understandable that he foisted the notion of essences on so many philosophers. You, on the other hand, have an opportunity to develop a better informed understanding.
What is a pattern?
Lines drawn distinguishing this from that, as this repeats and in a repeatable pattern.
What links this to that to reveal some repetition?
A pattern is multiple different instances of some one sameness, some essence. Otherwise you wouldnt notice the repetition and call it a pattern.
So something essential to any pattern is repetition of something fixed.
Quoting wonderer1
It doesnt suggest anything regarding what I am willing to consider. Ive considered many things and will do so again. I am considering your post now.
Quoting wonderer1
Not now that I am reading your words. I am considering characteristics of your mind, not mine, or else we are speaking different languages. I am looking for what is essential to your meaning. You sound physicalist. I guess essences sound spiritualist to you, so they need to be refuted as something to things.
I havent really discussed how essences exist, just what they are, and pointed out that they are. How? Maybe magic, or neural patterns and brain functioning. Thats an essentially different conversation.
And what is whatness?
A being is something that objectively exists and has a set of properties and abilities. The properties allow us to distinguish between one being and another being. A being without ability cannot act, so abilities are necessary as well. So to me, the set of properties and abilities completely explains a being. Could you please tell me what is missing when it comes to a being, what you call an essence, if it is not a property or an ability? If by essence you may mean a set of properties and abilities, then I would be quite happy to accept otherwise, you need to explain what the essence is.
Like its a form floating in Plato world, or a substance emerging in Aristotle world?
I said from the start it is hard to say. We are asking what it is to ask what?, so we have already presumed our answer.
What the essence is?
Do you mean to ask How the essence is?
Because if you are asking for what the essence is then you are asking for the essence of whatness. Essence IS whatness. So go read my above post again to keep restating whatness and essence.
But if you, like @wonderer1, are really asking how an essence can exist, that is a great question, but another subject (more along the lines of what is being/becoming). Do we really need to get into that to think through essence a bit more?
What is wrong with my post above about essence? You are asking me to say more. To say what the essence is. But show me where something I said doesnt help define essence already.
Quoting MoK
That is one way to say it.
Another way to say it is that every being that independently (objectively) exists has an essence (set of properties).
So why do you need more? You seem to be in full agreement with all that I said. What do you think an essence is, that you have not invoked essence by talking about a being that objectively exists with a particular set of properties?
You miss the abilities. Other than that, we are on the same page. Now, going back to the Trinity, why are three beings with different properties and abilities needed? To me, a single being with the ability to create and who is knowledgeable suffices.
I don't necessarily disagree with that. There is however, IMO, a quite good argument against "substances" that is advanced by process metaphysicians on this front:
The general point here being that processes seem to be more necessary than substance. But, against this we might consider one of the great weaknesses of many forms of process metaphysics, that they make all substances (things) essentially arbitrary and just end up positing a single, universal, wholly global process. That is, they collapse the distinction between substance and accidents. This turns out to just be the old Problem of the One and the Many, with the process answer being a sort of hybrid of Parmenides and Heraclitus, siding with Parmenides on the one hand vis-á-vis the unity of being (there being just one thing, the global process), but with Heraclitus on all being flux.
Against this, we can consider that activities and properties seem to have to be predicated of some substance. One does not have a "fast motion" with nothing moving, or nothing in particular moving. A dog can be brown, or light, but we don't have "just browness" with nothing in particular being brown. So we might suppose that some properties, even if they are processes, are parasitic on a different sort of process. Substances themselves are changeable (generation and corruption), yet there is something that stays the same between different instantiations of the same substantial form.
Second, there is an ostentatious plurality within being in that we are each individual persons; we experience our own thoughts and sensations and not other people's. Hence, there seems to be real multiplicity, and real unity as respects individual minds/persons. Essences are primarily concerned with the metaphysical principle by which things are the intelligible unities that they are. Thus, they are there to explain how there are specific properties in the first place. That is, they are primarily an explanatory metaphysical principle, rather than serving primarily to explain how words refer to different types of things. So, not our ability to pick out and refer to ants, but rather the fact that ants exist as a particular sort of thing and represent relatively self-determining and self-moving wholes.
Unity here occurs on a sliding scale, since unity and multiplicity are contrary, as opposed to contradictory opposites. Hence, the desire to pick out the exact limits of ants, people, trees, etc. in terms of superveniance is misguided. Physical substances are constantly changing. Their essence is the principle that explains how they are what they are.
Another difficulty with ignoring substances would be the fact that most of a thing's apparent properties only show up in particular contexts. Salt is "water soluble," but only ever demonstrates this property when placed in water (i.e., an interaction). Hence, the idea of potencies and powers.
Anyhow, an essence helps explain a thing's affinity to act one way and not any other. In terms of organism's, which most properly possess essences (i.e., are substantial unities rather than bundles of external causes) the essence helps explain the end/final causality related to the organic whole, and how an organism's parts are related to it as a whole (the idea in biology or "function.")
The problem with making essences into static sets of properties is that it:
A. Neglects how physical things are always changing (hence physus); and
B. Only really gets at the epistemic and linguistic movements of picking out types of things, not the actuality that must underlie their having their observed properties.
The article from @Banno is a sort of classical misunderstanding of universals/essences. It opens by pointing out that under realism they play some sort of a metaphysical role, and then presents an argument that presupposes that what is at stake is the use of categorical terms. If categorical terms could be otherwise, then there are not essences. If categorical terms are socially determined, then there cannot be essences (presumably because essences are just lookup lists of properties that link a word/concept to some things).
This misses the point entirely. Realists have generally not denied that terms are based on human ends and they don't deny that they are historically influenced. They don't deny that we can make up more or less arbitrary terms by dividing and concatenating intelligible wholes. Nor do they maintain that universals must exist for every common term. The rebuttal to the idea of essences is that there are not truly such things as tigers or trees, but rather that man finds it useful to name them such, and that this is what makes them so.
But the immediate question here would be "what caused this convention to be useful?" The most obvious answer is that there are such things as cats, flowers, etc. and that they are not ontologically dependent on language or man's will to exist as such. Nominalism seems to either end up acknowledging a prior actuality that is the cause of "names" (essence) or else (more commonly in recent thought) defaults into a sort of extreme volanturism where "usefulness" or "will" becomes an unanalyzable metaphysical primitive that chooses what everything is (i.e., John Calvin individualized or democratized; "In the beginning the Language Community created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the soup of usefulness. And the Spirit of the Language Community moved upon the face of the waters. And the Language Community said, Let this be light: and thus it was light.")
Whereas the reductionist realist wants to say that essences can be reduced to properties because more basic actualities can explain more complex beings. The difficulty is showing that this is so. Exactly which set of actualities corresponds to catness and the organic unity of cats, or which component actualities combine to form man and his ends? Of course, there are higher, more general principles, but if these are analogously realized they are not subject to any univocal reductionism.
I don't know if I'd put it quite like that, although that is how commonly how it is put. Mystical author's like Saint John of the Cross or Saint Bernard of Clairvaux are extremely popular and influential in Catholicism. I would say rather that there are different stresses. The Orthodox put less focus on systematic theology, and so this makes mysticism more central to theological discourses. They also put a greater focus on asceticism in general. Just about half the days of the year are fast days, and recommended fasts tend to be more austere. I might say they are more praxis focused, at least in the Anglophone context, but even this seems hard to justify completely. They do make a very different distinction between the active and contemplative life. For Catholics, the active life is mostly service and evangelism, while the contemplative life is all forms of prayer, psalmody, the Hours, fasts, etc. For the Orthodox, all that latter stuff is also the "active life" and the contemplative life is strictly noetic prayer.
They are definitely different, but it's hard to say just how. The Rosary is in some ways similar to the Jesus Prayer/prayer rope. The Orthodox hours are more "noetic" in a way (they call out the nous in particular). I cannot think of a better word. They also seem somehow more inwardly, and thus individually focused in a way that I cannot quite put my finger on, even though they are also performed corporately. The biggest distinction is that they are vastly longer, too long really to be practical for the laity unless they are only keeping Matins and Vespers or Compline, whereas Catholic laity keeping the full Hours seems much more common. Their Lenten compline is legit an hour and a half long lol.
I think this is a misrepresentation from the outset. Isn't this just exactly what Heidegger criticized about the objectification of metaphysics? The original Greek term was nearer in meaning to 'being' than 'thing', and a great deal is lost in equiviocating them. 'Being' is a verb.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think we can agree that God is simple and irreducible. To me, that is the definition of the mind, too. The mind is a substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and create. These abilities are needed to guarantee that a change in things could exist, such as ideas that we are entertaining right now. Mind itself can do one thing at any given moment since it is simple, so I think more minds are involved in intelligent creatures like humans. God, however, is a different beast. It is a mind, but has access to Knowledge. God has the ability to create stuff, too. Our minds create ideas always. The act of creation and the point that God exists must lie at the same point, though since otherwise you need a time, you need time for time, etc. which leads to a regress. The act of creation was necessary, too, necessary in the sense that it was a must-do since no other points were available to God. Saying all these, I think God/mind is not subject to change, going from potentiality to actuality, whereas the stuff, non-mind thing, such as matter, are subject to change, so they are going from potentiality to actuality. So we have two sorts of substances, mind-sort and non-mind-sort.
I can't wait for Disney to release the animation...
Fucksake.
The 20th century just didn't happen for some folk.
But it seems you can never quite say what "catness" is.
Catness is that which is had by a cat, such that it is a cat and not some other thing.
As if this were an explanation. Somewhat circular, no?
I suggest that we do manage to use the word "cat" without having available some essence that specifies what is a cat and what isn't.
We can of course stipulate such an essence. But we do not need to in order to use the word.
It simply is not true that there is some fundamental unchanging nature which all cats possess, unless we stipulate such a nature.
Added: for those watching on, The article in question is Why alchemists can make gold.
:up: :100:
Good post and article. Simple but effective. Should put the whole thing to bed.
You'd think.
But we have a couple of folk who insist on using syllogistic logic together with essentialism, in order to defend a particular theological dogma.
The thread isn't going to end any time soon.
Cheers.
What does this even mean? I gather up 5,000 definitions of "dog" and I add them together and divide by 5,000? How do you add definitions and divide them?
Calculate one out for me so I can see what you mean. Use the word "essence" as the example so I can see if your definition of essence is even correct. Wouldn't that be crazy if we used your definition engine to show your definition engine produced wrong definitions? What would that mean?
Meaning is use.
You find the word in a context.
You gather up as many uses and contexts.
From them you could distill an essence, a meaning of the word in the most contexts.
Sloppy thinking, but that is what analytics seems to make of seeking whatness.
Actually it's don't look to the meaning, look instead to the use.
I understand that. I think looking to the use only, over many uses, reveals what could be called an essence. You can ignore the word essence, use words like use in context, and instead look to the use.
I think this is not just looking to use, but an overlooking if emergent meaning.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Thats really what I don t get - why do we ignore what is essentially right in our face every time we speak, every time we point?
Neither does anyone say how catness is used. You just use it.
No one is saying it is easy to define the essence of cat. Not one is saying that it is easy to say what catness is.
Catness - involves a certain shaped ear and face on a typically furry four-legged ..
You want to throw out the the whole substance baby with the lack of completeness bathwater, yet you are willing to use catness over and over and leave it all incomplete and vague anyway.
You choose to ignore the fact that we ubiquitously use words without having at hand an essence.
We just don't need essences to get on. They are a philosopher's invention.
How so? At any rate, the "problem" you have identified exists just as much for reductionism. If we say a being a cat consists in having some set of properties then for each property we can ask, "and what does that consist in?" And this process can be repeated for each sub-property and the properties that define them. This will eventually have to either bottom out in irreducible properties (what you have claimed is "circular") or it will end up with us describing various properties in terms of each other in a circular fashion (although this does not appear to be a viscous circle). The problem will be just the same for popular forms of nominalism (e.g. tropes); it isn't unique to realism.
At any rate, that cats and trees exist seems obvious, hence the burden of proof for reductionism would seem to lie with the reductionist.
Yes that's a good point, although in context Rescher is talking about modern substance/superveniance metaphysics. He acknowledges early on (more than Heidegger IIRC) that Aristotle could rightly be classified as a process metaphysician to a good degree. As Paul Vincent Spade puts it, his via media between Parmenides and Heraclitus tends a good deal more towards the latter, because substances are always undergoing generation and corruption.
The Thomistic take on this same sort of argument is:
This, of course, does not rule out the role of context in essences, which was a particular contribution of the Patristics in fully fleshing out, e.g.:
Or there is the Hegelian response, which is perhaps more relevant to 's original point.
The problem is not unrelated to the notion of haeccity introduced by Scotus.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, if you can't see the circularity in setting out the essence of cats in terms of catness, and catness in terms of what it is to be a cat, and what it is to be a cat in terms of essence, there's not much more to say.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Not something I'd agree with. It presumes that there is a something it is to being a cat...
Simpler to just say that some individuals are cats. Telling, in it's way. You appear to think that the only alternative to essentialism is reductionism, so that's what you are addressing. But what is being mooted here is that we simply do not need access to an essence. Not even a reductionist one - if by that what you mean is "some set of properties."
A particular picture of how language works has you enthralled. In that picture there is a something that is the meaning of a word, and the aim is to set out what that something is.
But what if there is no such something? What if we just use words, and in using them get on with life?
Perhaps you cannot see how this would work. Hence your rejection of Quine and Wittgenstein and most anything more recent than the French Revolution.
But sure, we agree that there are cats and trees.
So is everything that is irreducible also circular? Are definitions of mathematical objects circular?
Yes, that cats exist is an assumption here. The denial that cats, trees, or human beings exist is prima facie absurd though.
So there is nothing that makes cats what they are, but then there are "some individuals who are cats?" Either the term refers to something specific to cats or it doesn't. Either there is something on account of which some individuals are called cats, or the term is arbitrary. So on account of what are cats called "cats?"
Further, an explanation of why something is called such is not the same thing as an explanation of why it is such, unless we are committed to linguistic idealism (which you often seem to be).
Hardly. But @MoK seemed to suggest the reductionist thesis and you have defended the reductionist modal thesis time and time again as vastly superior, so that's what I responded to. Plus, it's at least more plausible than "there are no such things as cats, just the utterance "this is a cat."
Indeed, to say there are "individuals" called cats itself also suggests the question "in virtue of what are there individuals? When is something an individual?" If things are individuals just in case they are called such, then this explanation is hollow. It's just restating the fact that these words are used, which is undeniable (although, to be fair, so is the existence of cats as living organisms).
As noted above, essences are not about language or signification, except inasmuch that the former explains the causes of the latter (e.g., disparate cultures all developed a word for "ant" because there are ants). This is the same mistake your article makes, assuming that essences are entirely about philosophy of language.
I don't think I'm disagreeing with Wittgenstein here. Wittgenstein is very careful not to tread into metaphysics. You frequently use Wittgenstein to make metaphysical claims that he himself does not make. Anti-metaphysics cannot make claims like "essences don't exist" without becoming metaphysics.
How is this not a preformative contradiction. Aren't you arguing that there is nothing that makes trees trees and cats cats? Hence, you are equivocating here. I am saying, such entities as trees and cats exist, not that they are spoken about. You are essentially saying "yes, we use the word "tree" and "cat." But why do we use them? Presumably because these sorts of things exist. And indeed, the entire field of biology supports the conclusion that trees existed long before human language. The linguistic idealism at play here would make more sense if it was explicit, rather than relying on continual equivocations. If what makes a tree a tree is man saying "this counts as a tree," then there is an important sense in which trees did not exist before man and his language. But I'd maintain that such a claim is absurd.
I dont ignore that. I get it. I said you dont say how to use cat either, you just use it and I knew what I was saying. I get that it makes Witts point. You can stop there if you want, and sit in silence with Wittgenstein.
I think its just plain giving up. Its not wise. I think we can do better. I see more than use.
Witt is leaving meaning and essence on the table as if they were never there. As if there never need be a table to use table.
Quoting Banno
Meaning is use is precisely a philosophers invention. So philosophers invention is not helpful. And we DONT get on without seeking the essence of things, or without seeking the meaning of our words, simply bumbling through ever-changing uses. We bicker and confuse and speak falsely. The lack of essence you see is only us using words poorly.
There is a trinity involved in speaking meaningfully.
There is the speaker.
There is the word spoken.
There is what is spoken about.
To even have this conversation at all, we need at the very least: speaker - words - about what. Three separable pieces need to attempt to line up for any useful, meaningful utterance.
All three are always there, where words are being used.
All three are necessary to even conceive of notions like there are essences or meaning is use.
But the meaning is use proponents simply de-emphasize what is spoken about. They ignore one leg of the stool. For them, meaning/use need only be found between the speaker and the words used.
That way you can use words and see if they work, instead of saying what they mean. But meaning doesnt disappear; meaning and essence arent discarded, they are just ignored because they are difficult to find, and because they are only found in the world, in the things that are essentially unique individuals, in the muddle. We must do better.
Quoting Banno
Are you simply trying to explain how to say things simply? Or are you ever actually talking about cats, and what cats do, and how cats are, and are not? Because in that case, its simpler to just say you are talking about what it is to be a cat.
Its only simpler to say some individuals are cats after there are things that are cats.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There is the speaker.
There is the word spoken.
There is what is spoken about.
Essence is intimately connected to language, and intelligibility, but it is not wholly subsumed by language and more rightly sits in things, as what is known and said about them.
Right, and theories of essences and universals are not primarily about naming and referring. The idea of use fixing the meaning of stipulated signs is in realists, such as Saint Augustine, John of St. Thomas, etc. The analogy between languages and games doesn't preclude realism either, provided it isn't stretched too far into positing a sort of sheer formalism.
Right, in general what is more directly relevant is metaphysics and physics, or the basic intelligibility by which arbitrary terms can even be coherently formed via composing, concatenation, and division. Final causality is probably the most relevant issue, not signification.
From my perspective, no one here is saying cats don't exist. But the idea of bundling up the characterization of cats neatly in terms of essences feels ridiculous when if you want to be as veridical and precise as possible about it, cats are clearly emergent structure from impossibly intractable physical processes. Yes, we can obviously identify commonalities, structures, properties, patterns that cohere under the "cat" name we have chosen to use in their vicinity. Is this what you mean by essence? Well it doesn't deserve the name because rarely are things in here either neat or essential, especially not without coarse-graining over very real details and invoking vagueness and fuzzyness into one's characterizations. The whole notion of essence just seems seems either over-reductive or completely redundant in its vagueness. There certainly isn't an essence of cats that wouldn't suffer these criticisms, and there are probably various posaible candidates.
I must mention that non-mind-sort substances possess properties, whereas mind-sort substances possess abilities and properties. Mind-sort substances are irreducible only, whereas non-mind-sort substances can be irreducible (like ideas) or reducible (like a cup).
I would think it would be more precise to say, no one here is saying things dont exist.
The issue is how to say what each thing is, or, from where different things get identified as such?
Some are saying you call this thing a cat and you call that thing a squid because people just do. And like things are in flux, what people do is in flux.
Others are saying you call this thing a cat because of something about the thing, and you call that thing a squid because of something else about that other thing. And you identify the something else (the property) because of, again, something about that thing.
Some are saying language of cat or squid comes first (we exist inside languages already being used) and we just jump in and do what people do with those words, and watch things all come together for speakers and language users, or not. And ones recourse, when things go awry with language and speakers, is to reevaluate whats been said and what speakers are doing.
Or,
The thing that is a cat or squid comes first, and we develop our language about those facts. When things go awry with language, they dont just look at the speakers and whats been said, but also at what was intended (purpose, final causality) by the speakers words - or in other words, by looking at the thing in the world that is being spoken about, like a cat, or a squid.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:up:
Well, no, and it's odd that you would supose this. Of course a circular argument may be formal valid - but the point is that as an explanation circularity is a bit useless. Wittgenstein's hinge propositions are an example of an irreducible item that is not circular.
The definition of mathematical objects from ZFC are certainly not circular, so I can't make much of that part of your comment either.
Your reply here misses the point. (indeed, it a non sequitur). It remains for you to present a way of dealing with essences that is not circular.
You'll have to lay out what you understand by "essence" because I'm not sure how these objections apply to what I've said or realist uses of the term more generally. In its most basic terms, the rejection of essences would be something like: "there is nothing in virtue of which all cats are cats."
The essences might be "emergent" is a pretty common position among those philosophers who hold to a position that requires emergence (process philosophy normally denies that it needs any such notion).
Essences are principles, so they are by definition, general. They are a unifying one by which a many are known. To wit:
What exactly is the difference between a property and an ability? Or is it just that minded things have abilities instead of properties for whatever "properties" relate to their mindedness? Or are abilities volitional? For example, is the ability to feel pain or get angry and ability? Or is it more like the ability to choose to walk across a room?
Sorry, I am not familiar with this distinction.
Neither of us is denying that cats and trees exist. You seem to have the idea that unless there is an essence, there cannot be cats and trees. That's odd, since it seems you cannot actually tell us what an essence is, beyond "that which makes something a cat or a tree". That, again, is the picture that has you in thrall.
What makes a cat a "cat" is at least in part, that we use the word "cat" to talk about some things but not others. It's we who seperate cats form dogs and from kittens, and we who manage to use the word despite not having to hand an explicit essence of catness...
This is a lesson not just from Wittgenstein, as cited above, but from Quine's Gavagi parable. But you could not follow that in our previous conversation, either.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You've tried this argument before. The term "cat" is indeed in a sense arbitrary. We could have used any word we like, we could have not had a word for cats, or had one word for both cats and dogs, or any of innumerable other combinations. That we happen to have the word "cat" is not ordained by God, but an accident of the history of English.
Me?
This arguing in terms of "isms" is a hedge. You never quite say what "reductionism" is.
So let me be quite specific, and lay this misrepresentation to rest. I have been at pains to point to a non-reductionist position. I do not think that there must be a set of properties that are necessary and sufficient to set out what it is for something to be a cat. I have consistently argued, using material from both Wittgenstein and Quine, that we use such word despite there not being such a set of properties.
There remains the possibility of our stipulating some set of such criteria. We do this, in some circumstances. But it is not necessary that we do this in order to make use of such words.
There is also the term of art, "essence", that in modal logic is the set of properties had by some individual in every possible world. This is simply one way in which we might understand the word "essence", a way that has huge advantages over your "what makes a thing what it is", since it brings with it the structure of modality and possible world semantics.
We do not need to have access to to such a set in order to make use of words.
Right, this is the extreme volanturism and linguistic idealism I was talking about. Cats would not exist if man was not there to call them forth as such.
But my point would be that disparate cultures all came up with names for species, and the notion of species, because those things exist. That is, simply appealing to use is a not an answer. There are causes for what appears to be useful. The fact that biological species exist (prior to man and his language) is the cause of such categorizations being useful in the first place.
First, name one culture that conflates cats and dogs, or any other domesticated animal.
Such categorizations are not arbitrary. If you try to mate cats to dogs you don't get offspring. If you try to get cats to help shepherd your flocks it will be an exercise in futility. You cannot lash cats to a sled to pull yourself around, etc. What people find to be useful has causes that are prior to any human consideration of usefulness. The entire example of a civilization that is "just as technologically advanced as ours," but doesn't understand the periodic table is absurd. They could obviously categorize things in many different ways. But categorizations that allow for modern technology will necessarily be isomorphic to one another.
As I put it before, I reject the idea that:
Wittgenstein carefully dismantles presumptions of metaphysics. To say he is not doing metaphysics would be an error.
For me, when we say that people just call things "cat" just "because people do" its alluding to the fact that we are very good at identifying, recognizing, picking out patterns and commonalities in the world, but often this is much more intricate, subtle, flexible than one can possibly articulate. To me, essences just seems like an easy way of being over-reductive about things in the world when often we can't even characterize what we are talking about in a way that is unambiguous, precise, unique, informative enough to deserve the name "essence". The whole thing seems completely redundant. If I want to learn about cats, I will look at the field of biology for facts about cats and all the subtleties which, from where i'm standing, don't seem easily compressed into a simple essence. Essence just seems like unnecessary inflation that has the connotation that there is something more to cats than the underlying physics from which they emerge. There is no homogenous, self-contained entity attached to the word which has "catness" in virtue of itself. "Cat" is more a kind of label to bundle together structures and properties that will often co-occur -but not in any strict, rigid, deterministic way -and to communicate our inherent abilities to identify, distinguish, predict those things. If I want to learn about those things, I can talk to a scientist. Essence is unneeded baggage, vestiges of antiquated world views.
Ism, ism, ism...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course there would be cats. Just no one to call them "cats" - except your God, of course, and perhaps this is what your argument is actually about. You want to set up a theory of language that needs God.
The arc, again, in which you only accept those ideas that are compatible with your dogma.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course they are not arbitrary. They are useful.
You are repeatedly attributing the ism of linguistic idealism. That just shows a lack of imagination. Have another look at "On the very idea of a conceptual schema" as an example of an alternative. We do not need the odd juxtaposition of idealism and realism.
Babies use words despite not understanding Aristotle
You left out the interpreter. In doing so you ignored the fact of communality that is inherent in language. Hence your account is inherently incomplete.
I'd suspect a Wittgensteinian analogy could be used to describe computer recognition - thousands of examples with certain statistical patterns revealing family resemblance, with no required certain characteristic. However, there is no shared form of life from within the computer, so that analogy has some limits..
I'd also suspect computer identification error that humans would not make, which is an interesting suggestion because it posits humans as the gold standard. That is, if humans say the picture is not of a cat, then it's not. The computer must rely upon the human fed data.
Obvious as this is, I am pleased that at least you have understood this. Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, and will stay that way until the challenge is met.
Notice the rhetorical move:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sigh. Attempting to throw the ball back to you.
We await Tim's providing an coherent explanation of what an essence is, and why it is needed.
Yep.
Perhaps picture a large statistical model connected to appropriate sensors, comparing what is said to what is sensed, and making a statistical connection between hearing "cat" and certain things it is seeing/hearing.
The code might not be algorithmic, would not set out explicit criteria, but would perhaps use the word sometimes correctly sometimes not, and change the various weightings of it's model to accomodate further information.
What Tim is proposing is like a database lookup table - an analogy he used - where the computer runs down a list of criteria until it finds "cat". (Added: appears to be stuck in the same trope.)
That's not how neural nets and LLMs work.
What do you await? How it's used? It's irrelevant that there are no essences we can point to.
Well, what do you think of the notion of principles outlined above? And could there be a principle by which different individuals are the same sort of thing?
Do you also think there are no natural kinds? Or are there at least some, like the photon, electron, iron atoms, helium, etc.? Do things have accidental and essential properties, or are all properties accidental (or essential)?
The key idea of a nature, physis, is precisely that things are always changing and that there is no strict, univocal measure of the sort you are speaking against. In later refinements of the idea there is also the realization that things are defined in terms of their contexts. For instance:
I'm afraid the rest doesn't give me much to go on. What exactly is the notion that is antiquated? To 's point, "Sigh. Attempting to throw the ball back to you." That isn't it. The term "essence" has been used in very different ways throughout the history of philosophy. Locke's real/nominal essences are very different from what Hegel has in mind and both are very different from what modern analytics have in mind, with their "sets of properties"/bundle theories, which is wholly at odds with how the Islamic and Scholastic thinkers thought of essences. So I am just trying to disambiguate.
My first thought on your first response was that it didn't seem to contradict the idea of essence I laid out last page, and that's sort of how I feel about this one. Unless the idea is simply that "metaphysics" is antiquated as a whole, and that this is why "science" answers questions about essences?
Well, there has to be some thread of invariance running through any coherent process. Linear algebra's change of basis theorems and basis-independent operators are a good window into this. Invariance under transformation is essential for deep learning and other machine learning models' ability to generalize. What allows for this is that the same underlying relations endure despite shifting representations. Were there no conserved structures or consistent symmetries it's hard to see how any learning would be possible.
Ok, then explain in virtue of what they would be cats in this case?
I think we may be equivocating on "exists." If to exist is something like "to be the value of a bound variable," it should be obvious that this is not what I have in mind, or what is commonly meant by the term.
Is this inane strawman more "performance art?"
I really do not know...
I'll leave it to Tim.
In virtue of the supposition of a world that includes cats but not people.
That's how modality works. We can stipulate a possible world in which there are cats but no people to call them cats. It's a world that is logically accessible from our own. In that world there are cats, because that is how that world is specified.
If you are not going to study modal logic, I guess you will have to take my word for it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It shows again that we do not need a theory of essences in order to use words.
It might well be the core of our differences. I take effective language use as granted - it's foundational that we are talking here about cats and essences and possible worlds. If that is not granted, then our talk would indeed be incongruous scratchings. You, in opposition, seem to hold that we could only have this successful practice against a complicated Aristotelian or Platonic theoretical base.
But babies do talk, and the do not understand Aristotle.
The performative contradiction is in your already using language in order to formulate the very theory you think you need in order to use language.
So cats would still be cats in a world without people in virtue of the fact that people have created a logical system that allows them to say "cats would still be cats in a world without people?" And I suppose that trees were trees before there were people in virtue of the fact that people can make the claim "there were trees before people?"
Use of modal logic has nothing to do with your explicitly metaphysical claim that cats are cats in virtue of the fact that modal logic allows us to say that cats are cats in a world without people. We could also have the supposition that cats would not be cats in a world without people, so I have no idea what this is supposed to show. If things are what they are simply in virtue of our ability to simply state that they are so this would seem to lead to a sort of Protagorean relativism.
Indeed, it looks like the supposition is doing all the lifting here and modal logic has nothing to do with it. "Cats are cats in virtue of the fact that we say they are cats, and they would be cats even if we didn't exist to say this in virtue of the fact that we say that they would still be cats even if we hadn't said so." I am not sure if this is contradictory or not.
Can you see why I call this extreme volanturism?
Anyhow, for someone who says they logic is just a tool, and that any logic can be used just in case we find it useful, you sure do like to appeal to formalisms quite a bit to make metaphysical claims.
Essences are not primarily called upon to explain common terms. I have pointed this error out before.
I'd say it's becasue of your penchant for rhetoric over logic. Ism, ism, ism - the need to find the right box, rather than take the argument on its merit. I'm not overly impressed with what you have said here, nor in the referential opacity thread. I think you are showing the limits of your grasp of logic.
Possible worlds are posited, not found. You can specify one with cats, or one without, but either way there are already cats (?(x)(x is a cat) in order for you to do the specifying.
To see how it works, you have to do the work.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep. That's becasue as a tool it is quite good at showing where mistakes are being made.
The concept cat wouldn't exist do to there not being a language, but the fact (the state of affairs in which cats exist) would still obtain. In other words, facts would still exist without the concepts that refer to them. Modal logic does apply. Modal logic deals with possibility and necessity, and you're positing a possible world without humans, if I'm following you correctly.
English.
The word "deer" comes from the PIE dheusom, "creature that breathes". In Old English it referred to any non-domestic animal.
Old English conflated any non-domesticated animal - dear, pigs, foxes, whatever - into the one word - "deor". Perhaps becasue of the preference for retrieving venison in a hunt, the word came to pick out only the cervidae.
Near enough.
Not only different cultures, but also different forms, levels or states of consciousness. Something the Scholastics and Islamists will understand that the analytics will not.
A lot of fuss about very little here. I think I triggered it, by trying to point out that the word 'essence' is obviously a form of the Latin 'esse', 'to be'. So it denotes the essential qualities of a particular, what makes it what it is.
Apropos of which Max Delbrück, a physicist turned biologist, famously argued that Aristotle, in his biological writings, had anticipated the core principle of DNA: that a living being's development is guided by an inherent "form" or plan. Delbrück saw Aristotle's concept of the soul (psuche) as the form (morphe) that shapes and directs matter, mirroring the way DNA encodes the blueprint for an organism's development. He even humorously suggested that Aristotle deserved a Nobel Prize in biology for this insight (however Nobel prizes are never awarded posthumously, much less to someone who died more than two millenia ago.) Delbrück highlighted that it's the formal aspect of DNA, the information it carries, rather than the physical material of DNA itself, that is crucial for inheritance and development. This aligns with Aristotle's view that the soul (form) is distinct from the physical body. Also, presumably, one of the reasons that Aristotle's hylomorphism is still very much a live option in contemporary philosophy.
Aristotle, in his writings on embryology and reproduction, emphasized the role of "form" or "entelechy" as the principle that shapes and guides the development of living things. He saw semen as carrying this form, which directs the development of the offspring.
What has this to do with essence? It's that the same philosophical heritage that gave rise to 'essence' and 'substance', also gave rise to the scientific disciplines that discovered DNA. And I don't think this is coincidental.
African Elephants were long thought to be one. While there is some morphological difference between savanna and forest elephants, they were taken as the same species. However their DNA was shown to be statistically quite different.
Are we to count them as one species with two subspecies, or as two distinct species? Mitochondrial evidence showed that the two groups had not interbreed in any large scale for millions of years. So the decision was made to count them as two species.
Actually, that decision was made over time, as the differences in data became clearer. But the final step had some conservation implications. By splitting into two species they (the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group) were able to list the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) as critically endangered, and the savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) as Endangered - whereas together they only met the criteria for being endangered.
Australian Eucalypts are notorious for mingling their DNA - to the extent that it is now not uncommon for them to be considered a cluster of species rather than insist on separating and shrinking the number of individuals in a species.
The take away is that DNA does not divide the world up neatly in to species. We do the dividing, sometimes using DNA evidence, sometimes not.
DNA does not provide clear natural essences or clear-cut natural kinds.
You could have just reached for "domesticated animal" or "livestock." But no, I was clearly asking for a culture that doesn't distinguish the species at all. Find one and I would be shocked.
There are also slightly different words for colors across different cultures. And yet not a single one has a unique name for colors in the ultraviolet spectrum. Why? I think it's easy to chalk this up to causes that are prior to usefulness. Such differentiations are not useful because of what man is and which colors he is able to distinguish with the naked eye. Color schemes are also remarkably similar, despite lacking the more clear distinction of species.
I'm not arguing against the formalism, but the claim that cats are cats in virtue of someone being able to write down "x exists and x is a cat."
So everyone who truly understands modal logic believes that things are what they are in virtue of our ability to write that it is so? I suppose very few people properly understand it then.
In response to: "Ok, then explain in virtue of what would [cats] be cats in this case [where there is no one to declare them cats]?" You wrote:
You don't need modal logic for this sort of metaphysics. You can just put it plainly: "cats are cats because I stipulate that it is so. They would still be cats even if I didn't stipulate this however, and this simply because I can say 'I stipulate that this is so regardless of whether or not I have actually stipulated it."' The appeal to logic just dresses up the reliance on assertion to make anything any thing.
As a consolation, he and Darwin remain the most cited people in the field IIRC (although often in a pretty cursory fashion to be fair). Although, arguably this is old news by Aristotle's day and he is just formalizing it. The earlier parts of Genesis, which pre-date the Hebrew language, and some of which go back at least to almost 4,000 year old tablets, have to notion of "each according to its kind," arising from seed according to its kind, with an animating life force of sorts that disspates back into the "dust" of no longer ordered matter. I don't recall Homer focusing on animal life in quite the same way though (although he does have canine virtue in old Argos!).
On a related note, I have often considered that the ancients, who spent considerable time with animals, often sleeping with them, using them for all forms of work and transportation, and traversing wilds that were actually still wilds instead of depopulated reeling ecosystems, might make better psychologists vis-á-vis the man/brute distinction than many moderns who are writing from a perspective of maybe having owned a pet.
Indeed, but we could also consider here epigenetics and developmental biology, or the possibility of non-DNA life, or self-replicating non-living systems such a silicone crystals. The idea of an essence and substantial form is the more general one here, which is partly what makes it more useful. It isn't pinned down to any particular material. So, in the case of xenobiology, were there different forms of life discovered on Mars or the Jovian moons that were close to "bacteria" but also distinct in chemical composition, it is the broader notion that would help capture the similarity (principles unifying the disparate "many" into a knowable "one"). Information theory is a pretty popular way of doing this now, and the etymology is not incidental, "information" being what "in-forms."
Yet information is sometimes presented in a way that tends towards reductionism, although it need not be. It seems to me that hardcore mechanists realize this best, and this is why they still largely deny the existence of biological information as anything but a useful fiction, mere mechanism as seen through the lens of the illusion of function.
Right, Schrodinger's (a big Platonist fan) landmark "What Is Life?" which was the first to clearly posit something like DNA to look for builds on these notions.
Facts are facts [I]in virtue of[/I] modal logic? The question here is metaphysical, what makes things what they are. No doubt, modal logic can be used descriptivelyas you saybut I am not sure about modal logic as an explanation of why anything is any thing at all. Or "anything is anything at all [I]because[/I] of modal logic.
That is:
"Why are cats the specific sort of organic wholes they are?"
"Because modal logic allows us to stipulate x exists and x is a cat."
This is still an explanation that posits that logic or human speech is constitutive of what things are, that things are what they are in virtue of us saying so.
By contrast, a truth maker theory would say that states of affairs/facts obtain in virtue of actualities that are not posterior to human logic or speech.
Are you saying the essence of a my dog, Bee, is her DNA?
I know. I had a longer post discussing that and took the interpreter (communicant) out. You dont give me much time.
Like here, why do you raise the interpreter? I have no idea of what you are thinking or how/if this addresses essence. To me, you are now taking about the essence of communication, or of a discussion between two or more people.
Speaker.
Words
What they are about, to the speaker.
Interpreter
Same Words
What they are about, to the interpreter.
The words line up, because the same words are said as are heard, so enunciating and hearing are not your issue.
But when what the words are about lines up between the speaker and the interpreter, just like the same words line up, we have a successful communication.
So what? How does this scenario eliminate essence?
We still need at least all of these three speaker/interpreter - words - about world to have meaningful language and exchanges - these are exchanges of ideas, of essences.
And when the interpreters meaning of the words and the speakers meaning for the same words dont line up, the missing piece is something in the world to refer to upon which the two speakers/interpreters can argue.
Like which category makes sense for which elephant. You need to point to the elephants, not to meaning as use (because you havent used a distinction between Savanah and forest before, and how do you ground this distinction but again by drawing DNA samples from the world . Discovering the different elephants sub-species supports essence, not use.
Quoting Banno
We use such word despite there not being
That means, the essence of the word essence is as a placeholder for speaking. You, and Quine and Witt just want to misuse essence. So Witt and Quine are avoiding the issues not resolving them.
And Count is right, this is metaphysics. Despite there not being.. is something Witt said we shoukd be silent about.
Quoting Banno
But you have no use for the word essence and when people use it anyway you dont take their language use for granted.
Language use begs the question. It doesnt provide the answer.
Babies use language. So what? What are they doing?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think that this is what is going on. But none of that means there is no such thing as essence.
And no one, not Aristotle, no one says defining the essence of some thing is easy. Looking for essence is an easy method of saying HOW to say what things are, but there is no need to ever say weve ever listed every necessary and sufficient condition essential to some thing (especially if the thing is a physical thing, subject to change). Understanding and saying what is essential is the goal. We can know something essential about some thing in the world, but we have much more to know if we want to say we know the entire essence of that thing.
We all live in the same world of muddle for the senses and use and misuse of language. Essences help us organize it and speak about it.
Quoting Banno
So then why argue? Elephant has been sloppy use for years in Africa apparently.
No.
Im sure youd rather hear Counts answer.
I would think not. A stray hair has your dog's DNA. A severed cat tail or paw has cat DNA. In theory, you could take a cat embryo and tweak its environment so as to make it develop into nothing but muscle tissue or nothing but liver tissue. But a stray hair is not a cat, not is meat a chicken, or a severed tail a monkey. Likewise, the form of a cat can be, to some degree, present in a statue or photograph.
I think information theory and complexity studies is perhaps the better lens to think of essences in terms of physics. They would be informational structures/morphisms. Although, whether or not what things are is reducible to information is questionable. There are a lot of open problems in the philosophy of information that are relevant to this. I would lean towards saying that such principles are realized analogically. The idea of essence/form is very broad, it's just the idea of a prior actuality that stands in relation to interaction.
A what?
:up:
But that's sort of the point. Again, although you represented "a spreadsheet lookup array" metaphysics as my position, I actually presented that as a deeply flawed conception of essences. Unifying principles are realized analogously in the many. The idea of a sort of univocal, mathematical lookup variable for essences is critically flawed. This isn't how the term was originally used, but is rather a product of late medieval nominalism and its demand for total univocity.
The question isn't: "how exactly do we categorize species?" or again "how do words signify species?" but rather, how are there species? English, for instance, is full of unique words that specify domestic animals by sex and age, or by having been castrated. The exact classification scheme isn't the point. That there are species does not require a "lookup array." The negation of the position is not "but species cannot be defined as static, logical entities (as in a computer database)" but rather "there is not any actuality that is responsible for different species being different species." Or, something like: "there are no different species and genus simpliciter, but only things called such," which also suggests "there are no things, no organic wholes, but only things called such."
Think about it this way. Prior to my writing this post, it only existed potentially. That it has become actual shows that it existed potentially. My post had to become actual before you could read it. Its moving from potency to act, i.e. actually being written and posted, is prior to and causally related to your act of reading it (which is also a move from potency to actuality).
So too for essences. Different kinds of things interact in different ways, which has to do with what they are (their form/actuality).
But the basic point doesn't require this terminology. It's simply the point that some actuality must preceed and determine any move from potency to actuality. If it didn't, and things/events could spontaneously move from potency to actuality, they would occur "for no reason at all." That is, they would be wholly uncaused.
Different things interact in different but reliable ways. The idea of substantial form is really just the idea that there must be something that causes such interaction to be one way and not any other.
The quote from Norris Clarke here lays this out in terms of epistemology.
I dont think that anti-essentialists think this is the case.
Which is an odd way of interacting with the world.
So if I throw a pair of dice, snake-eyes is in potential. Let's say snake-eyes shows up in actuality when the dice land. Where is an example of essence in this?
I think my main issue is just that, given how my views toward scientific realism and anti-realism have evolved over time, I just don't see the point of this area. I don't see what it is doing anymore. It just seems like a pointless field of study - trivial, redundant, not informative, not interesting in light of my perspective on the world.
Its more like what are dice?
- they come in pairs
- each die is six-sided
- each side has a number 1 through 6 represented on each side.
- etc.
Dice are things in the world. These non-specific things are potentially dice when recognized or built by an intellect and actually dice when built according to my plans above
Every time you see what you point to an essence.
It just seems like a pointless field of study - trivial, redundant, not informative, not interesting in light of my perspective on the world.
What is it.
What is a field and where are its limits? How do you limit thing thing you call field?
What is a perspective and is that different from a view or experience, and if so, what are the specifics.
What world - if we both have different perspectives, what gives you this notion of the world apart from our perspectives on the world.?
Essences are everywhere to study in your statement.
To experience, freely decide, and create are examples of abilities that only mind-sort substances have. Mind-sort substances have properties as well, such as location and other properties; let's call the set of properties that mind-sort substances have X. Non-mind-sort substances, such as matter, have a set of properties as well, such as mass, location, etc., let's call the set of properties that non-mind-sort substances have Y. X is a subset of Y; otherwise, mind-sort substances neither could affect non-mind-sort substances nor could be affected.
So essences is just giving definitions.
Definite description maybe
The way St. Thomas puts it in De Ente et Essentia, which is fairly standard, is that essences are the metaphysical reality, and definitions are the signification of that reality (the signification of the quiddity). A "nature" by contrast, is the same idea as respects change and motion (interaction), it's the essence as a principle of action.
Now in the classical metaphysical tradition (Pagan, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian) there is no distinction between primary and secondary qualities à la Galileo, Locke, etc., and so the phenomenological "whatness" of things is included in this picture. The phenomenon of understanding is considered to be the primary datum of epistemology.
All that says is that an essence is what a definition signifies.
Yes, exactly. :up: So if we say an essence is a definition, it'd be a bit like saying New York City is the name "New York City," or that smoke, as a sign of fire, is fire.
What amazes me is that this makes sense to you.
Three things:
Speaker
Words (definitions, significations of..)
Essences (reality, what the words are about, quiddity)
If a theory of how names work does not account for modal contexts, it's broken. That's what went wrong with the description theory of reference. If essences are understood as a theory of how names work - that the name refers to the essence - then they will have the very same issue with modality. The response would be to say that the essence is had in every possible word - that is, necessarily. This amounts to the view that essences are the properties had by an individual in every possible world in which it exists.
It's not a question of needing modal logic, but of seeing how names work.
But I'd understood that you rejected defining essence in terms of necessary properties. I think it is still up to you to give an account of what you mean by "essence", or to accept that your account - that which makes a thing what it is and not something else - is circular and unhelpful.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Both you and Olo miss the bit about it not being "I" but "we". That the word "cat" refers to cats is a fact about the way the community of speakers of English use "cat", not some individual foible.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"They would still be cats" already uses the word "cats".
Think on that. You are already using language, in an attempt to talk about a world without language. So you end up using the word "cats" in the very act of explaining that there are cats despite our use of "cats".
And all you are doing here is saying that cats might have been called something else, or that we might have divided the world up differently, not differentiating cats from other mammals. And of course here you would be right.
So we return to what might be the fundamental issue, that your are already using language in order to formulate the very theory you think you need in order to use language. You want to talk about a world with no cats, without reference to cats, but of course can only do so by referring to cats.
We are always, already, embedded in an interpretation of the way things are.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There aren't, not until we name them. Yet we give different species different names becasue of their differences.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I understand it, Old English used "hind" for the female of the species we now call deer, and "hart" for the male, but had no word specifically for the species. They divided things up quite differently to us, being perhaps more interested in sexual dimorphism than genetics, around reproduction and hunting rather than taxonomy. That's becasue the divisions are made by us, as a part of a community, and not handed down by god or found in nature independently of our language. They did not distinguish the species at all. That's what you asked for. But no doubt you will somehow contrive not to be shocked.
This sort of thing:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
...misrepresents what is being said in reply to your essentialism. It's not what @Sam26 said. Sam might reply, but seems to me not worth addressing further.
I think the dialogue may be ending, since I don't see anything new today. Doubtless the thread will go on for a few more pages. that's to be expected, in a forum where a simple problem will attract five hundred replies. I think my case is carried.
As I understand it, and Heaven forbid, were it to come to pass that your dog Bee was caught in some terrible calamity, such that her mortal form were utterly destroyed, provided what was left was not incinerated, then her identity could be definitively ascertained from her DNA, by comparing it with remnants left on her artifacts etc. So, yes, DNA is very much like the molecular counterpart of 'essence'.
Banno and I have discussed this before, but a Platonist riddle is sometimes presented in school texts, in regard to the question of form and identity:
A man (not a man)
Throws a stone (not a stone)
At a bird (not a bird)
On a tree (not a tree)
The solution is, a eunuch (not a man, because, you know...) throws piece of pumice (not a stone, because it floats) at a bat (has wings, but also fur) hanging from a reed (not a tree, because no branches.)
I suppose it's a rhetorical exercise in appearance and reality.
I think the undercurrent to all of this (and metaphysics generally) is indeed the search for definition, in the sense of the ability to see what is. When reduced to textbook examples for pedagogical purposes, it seems straightforward, but in real life, it's often considerably more difficult.
Becasue language inherently involves interpreting utterances.
I'm sorry, I wasn't able to see what you were saying.
Yet, here you are :wink:
Is your claim that if the dog we call Bee had a different DNA, it would be a different dog? That seems to be agreeing with the modal definition of essence - that "Bee" has a certain DNA in every world in which she exists, and that if we stipulate a world in which @frank's dog bee has a different DNA, then we are stipulating a world in which Frank has another dog that happens to have the same name as Bee.
But this is part of the problem here - the sliding between different definitions of "essence".
So Tim, from what I have understood, would reject the modal definition of essence, maintaining somewhat hyperbolically that essence is what makes a thing what it is, but is not the necessary properties of a thing.
You seem now to be saying that essence is what makes a thing what it is, and that is the properties it has in every possible world.
Asa I've maintained, the modal definition has the benefits both of not being circular and being arguably consistent.
Of course, but it would still be a dog, not an elephant or a cat. Surely the distinction between different canines can be accomodated by the Thomistic distinction between essence and accident.
So if the "Thomistic distinction between essence and accident" is understood as the modal difference between properties had in some possible world and properties had in ever possible world, we could move on.
But if we do that and invoke god, a being for whom every possibility is a necessity, we again risk modal collapse - there would be no difference between necessity and possibility. The devil is in the detail, and so, perhaps, is God...
So we are back to the challenge to theists: give a coherent account of god's nature.
Neither do I see what you are saying.
Language only involves interpreting utterances?
How about more context for whatever you are trying to say.
Language involves utterances, a speaker who utters them, what the utterances are about.
What the utterances are about seems to be broken out into how the speaker interprets his words, and how the listener interprets her words.
So what? How does that say anything about essence?
Essence is what the utterances are as out. Its how the speaker exchanges and idea with a listener through the language.
In essence, you are blowing me off as usual. You didnt make your point.
Quoting Banno
Whoa. Then you want Gods essence? One step at a time.
I've pointed to Davidson once or twice. That's were I'm pointing now.
If I havn't made a point, it;\'s becasue I can't follow what youa re saying.
And there's stuff like this:Quoting Fire Ologist
No. Why did you choose to include the word "only"? Language involves interpreting utterances.
I agree. Metaphysics is about what is. Throw out metaphysics, there is no point speaking about the world in any scientific way.
And it seems straightforward, but is considerably more difficult.
Seeking what is is impossible (or pointless) if you think meaning is use, because if you think meaning is use, then what is becomes what is used as well. We make reality up when we speak about it, so who cares about any other reality.
Because you wont talk about anything else. For fuck sake! :lol:
I keep listing all of the other things language involves and you wont talk about them. Like speakers, and what is spoken about (notice what or quiddity )
I still do not understand what you are saying.
Cant quite capture the essence of my words?
ADDED:
So is that a problem with the words,
or with me the speaker,
or is something vague about what the words mean,
or is it a you, the interpreter, thing?
Even though I can see your point, I understand Banno's bafflement. You're saying it goes deeper than language, and I agree.
I've mentioned before the book Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition. (bookmarked .pdf file). The introductory section on Parmenides, and the chapters on Plato and Aristotle, help to re-state the terminology of classical metaphysics in their original context.
But the point is, modern analytical philosophers have a pretty jaundiced view of metaphysics. As far as they're concerned, it's archaic or superseded even while it deserves respect as part of the Western canon. That's a big part of their 'plain language' approach.
I've tried to read up on contemporary modal metaphysics but found little sustenance in it. This is where Catholic and Orthodox philosophers are significant, as for them, philosophy is part of a living faith, a way-of-being. That's what I think you're trying to articulate. (There are also secular sources. Iris Murdoch's books on the Sovereignty of the Good and the metaphysics of morals for instance.)
There's not a lot of point in many of these threads, because the theists will always look for reasons to believe, and the non-theists reasons not to. I'm nearer the former, but I do try and stay within the lanes of philosophy, rather than appeals to faith.
(Another Catholic author and editor I very much admire was the late Stratford Caldicott. Poignant, as he had the same birth-year as myself, but died in 2014. Worth studying in my opinion.)
I doubt Charmers would agree. Like most of the generic critique of analytic philosophy - itself now an anachronistic term - that's more a caricature than anything of content.
One thing I've taken from this thread is that I'm somewhat intrigued by the reliance of your "classical tradition" on a logic limited to single place predications. I conjectured earlier that this might explain much of the reification of being. It'd be a big topic to address, but might elicit some interest.
I'd maintain that more recent (ie, post-enlightenment) logic shows that the way metaphysics was done was quite muddled. Metaphysics is still happening, but with less of the making shit up and more of the working through the issue.
As for Olo, I just haven't been able to interpret what he said as a coherent chain of statements. Harsh, perhaps, but that's what it amounts to.
Given your affinity for neoplatonism, I'm quite surprised it doesn't at least make some sort of sense. In its broadest sense, the general idea is quite flexible.
Me, too.
While there are various ad hoc workarounds, and no doubt Tim can give you the details, syllogistic logic deals in A,E,I and O, and these are single-placed predictions - all predicate letters have one argument-place, f(a). So "Socrates is older than Plato" has to be changed to "Socrates is a-thing-older-than-Plato". This pictures relations between individuals as properties of substances. Relations are reified - they become "things" - rather than relations between things.
In the case of identity, "Socrates is Socrates" is parsed as "Socrates is a-thing-that-is-Socrates", an a strange substance is invented, a-being-that-is-Socrates.
Consider cats again. "There are cats" in more recent logic is ?(x)(x is a cat) - "there is an x such that x is a cat". But in syllogistic logic it is parsed as something like "The cat has the property of being a cat", thereby inventing "the property of being a cat", which is subsequently reified into "catness" and the rigmarole of essences.
So it seems that adopting a primitive logic leads pretty directly to an odd metaphysics, inhabited by "catness" and "Socratesity" and so on.
Of course, it's possible that there are aspects of reality captured by syllogistic logic but lost in more recent work. But that's a case to be argued, not an assumption to be made.
That's an interesting thought.
Relation is one of the categories in the Categories though. It isn't a "thing." That would be substance. This is quite explicit. The logic was developed with the metaphysics in view.
However, what you have described might be responsible for the later calcification of essences. I've seen that thesis expressed before. But one doesn't find such a reification in the Patristics or early-high Scholastics. Everything exists in a "web of relations" as Deely puts it. It's a very relation heavy ontology. The calcification and reification is more of a post-nominalism thing. Commentators have supposed that it has something to do with the limitations of logic at that point, but this is also combined with a particular (new) view of what logic is/does and a particular metaphysics of univocity. Whereas, in the earlier metaphysics, metaphysics always deals in analogy.
I think this would be more a question about universals in general though.
Cheers. No more than a conjecture, and even a literature review would be a months of work.
Good counterpoints. I suspect that Aristotle's distinction between relations and substance is different to what I've suggested, since in first order logic relations are not so much an ontological category as a syntactic one. Any work here would need to avoid this category error. The various permutations would need to be worked through in detail. We might be heading in different directions yet again. And doubtless the development of these ideas was not complete in Aristotle. We've talked about the limitations of analogically reasoning previously.
You were talking about definitions as if the definition is the words used, and the essence is what the definition refers to. That's garbled. A definition is the content of uttered sentences. The definition is what the words in the definition mean, which is, what they refer to.
This isn't a logical point. It's just how we use the word "definition."
Ah, I see the disconnect. I should have clarified, I mean "definition" in the sense Aquinas or the later Neoplatonists/Scholastics tend to use it. So, there is a proper definition that signifies the essence of a thing, it's quiddity (exclusive of accidents), generally through the convention of specifying its genus and species specific difference. Whereas the practice of dictionaries today is that the definition is simply a function of how the word [I]is[/I] used.
That's not really an Aquinas thing though, it comes through Aristotle, but I am pretty sure it is somewhat common by late antiquity.
It's like all the debates over the meaning of terms in Plato. The point isn't that people cannot communicate because they lack the proper definition of terms such as "piety" or "justice," but rather that they don't understand them, and so they fail to achieve/desire justice, etc. They can still engage in dialectic though. Guys like Euphyphro and Thrasymachus do have their own "definitions" of these terms.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Gyula Klima recently made available his contribution to the The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic, "Consequence." It offers a helpful remedy to the historically ignorant opinion that Medievals did not study non-syllogistic forms of logic.
Certainly,
op cit.