tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post8421002047792297705..comments2024-03-28T13:39:03.094-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Who wants to be an atheist?Edward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger160125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-11074288125150778102012-10-19T06:22:37.868-07:002012-10-19T06:22:37.868-07:00Jesse,
What you describe in your reference to pan...Jesse,<br /><br />What you describe in your reference to pantheism reminds me a little bit of panENtheism. A worldview that many Christian thinkers such as Hart and Eastern Orthodox are sympathetic to. Are you familiar at all with that view?<br /><br />In your worldview is there life after death by the way? Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-42559219518397670732012-10-18T15:07:36.645-07:002012-10-18T15:07:36.645-07:00Tony:
God will not force his company permanently o...Tony:<br /><i>God will not force his company permanently on those who simply WILL NOT choose to become like Him enough to be able to enjoy his presence. </i><br /><br />But I didn't suggest God should force His company on anyone, just that since humans are changeable creatures, if God doesn't know what a person would do if given more time to change their mind than they got before their earthly death, He should find some way to give them more time rather than treating their rejection of salvation at the time they died as final and irrevocable.<br /><br /><i>They literally CAN'T reverse their choices based on later results that follow from those choices, their choices are fixed and permanently dispositive, they have already fixed their wills in all of the parts which follow. Their choices are definitive. So, for the angels who are in hell, God can't bring them to heaven because they have permanently and fixedly chosen to repudiate God, to reject His sovereignty.</i><br /><br />OK, if we grant that angels work this way that could be a reason why a non-Molinist would say there's nothing God could do to increase the chances a given angel will make a different choice. (incidentally, is this view of angels something that's part of official Catholic dogma, or just a speculation by Aquinas or others that theologians have accepted as plausible?) That still wouldn't explain why hell is usually seen by Christians as a place of torments ordained by God, but perhaps you don't see it that way. In any case, humans are another story, as your next comment suggests:<br /><br /><i>Although here on Earth we humans regularly change our minds, there is no reason to assume that the afterlife is like this current life in that regard: it may be literally impossible, oxymoronic, for God to "give men a chance" to change their minds because that's not what the afterlife is like.</i><br /><br />But here you seem to be <i>defining</i> "afterlife" to mean some different sort of metaphysical state, rather than just treating it as meaning "whatever happens to me after my Earthly death". Why couldn't God just resurrect people to the same metaphysical state they had in life, something we might call "new life" rather than "afterlife"? I think most Christians who believe the story of Lazarus would be inclined to think that Lazarus still had the ability to change his mind and either accept or reject God after his physical resurrection, no? Or are you suggesting it is really not within God's omnipotent powers to resurrect people in the same changeable state they had in life, even though it seems like a logical possibility? And even if it isn't possible, why couldn't God just intervene to prevent people from dying in the first place if they hadn't made the right choices to accept salvation? Perhaps God could even do this in a way that wasn't obvious--say, "teleporting" each person to a different planet at the moment where they were about to die, leaving an identical-looking lifeless body in their place so that no one on Earth would know that unrepentant sinners couldn't die (avoiding the problem that this would create temptation to reject salvation just to live longer on Earth). As long as there are options God could take that could give more people the chance to make the right choices and avoid eternal damnation, options which don't conflict with other divine characteristics such as the need for justice, then if God doesn't bother taking these options it seems incompatible with the idea that He is really infinitely loving and merciful. Of course, a simple way out of this is to just speculate these teachings about hell aren't true in the first place, so if one is already not 100% convinced of the reality of hell, then I think this is a good argument against it.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-47654143213764827612012-10-17T22:38:33.603-07:002012-10-17T22:38:33.603-07:00Anonymous: Slightly off topic, but do Aristotelian...Anonymous: <i>Slightly off topic, but do Aristotelian forms have causal powers?</i><br /><br />Sure, a form is a formal cause of anything that participates in said form.<br /><br />Of course, if you were thinking specifically of efficient causes, then no.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-46414234083162700572012-10-16T04:06:27.955-07:002012-10-16T04:06:27.955-07:00Anyway, keeping in mind the human conceptual disti...<i>Anyway, keeping in mind the human conceptual distinction between justice and love, I would say that morality is a matter of behaving justly, while my criticism of the notion of hell is based on its incompatibility with the notion of God as infinitely loving.</i> <br /><br />JesseM, first, there are other virtues than justice, so "behaving justly" cannot encompass right action altogether. <br /><br />Second, your criticism of hell is a criticism of a God of perfection. "My ways are not your ways", and "you say My ways are unjust. Is it not your ways which are unjust?" A critical part of Christianity is leaving behind fallen human, degraded, benighted ways of thinking (like "he hit me so the universe will be out of order unless I hit him") and putting on Divine, spiritual, grace-filled ways of thinking, like "turn the other cheek" and "forgive your enemies". God will not force his company permanently on those who simply <i>WILL NOT</i> choose to become like Him enough to be able to enjoy his presence. <br /><br /><i>(C.S. Lewis once suggested that God would accept the repentance of anyone in hell, but none of them choose to leave--this would avoid the problem I bring up, but I think most Christians would see this idea as incompatible with the standard doctrine on hell.)</i> <br /><br />Let's look at it a different way: the nature of angels are such that (unlike humans who think discursively, part by part by part one after another not all at once) they see all the logical consequences of starting points, all at once and in one fullsome act of thought. As a result, when they make choices they do not make them with the limitations like we have, such as "oh, I didn't <i>realize</i> that Z result followed from my X choice. When they make a choice, they are choosing all of the ramifications which necessarily follow from the choice. They literally CAN'T reverse their choices based on later results that follow from those choices, their choices are fixed and permanently dispositive, they have already fixed their wills in all of the parts which follow. Their choices are definitive. So, for the angels who are in hell, God can't bring them to heaven because they have permanently and fixedly chosen to repudiate God, to reject His sovereignty. <br /><br />Although here on Earth we humans regularly change our minds, there is no reason to assume that the afterlife is like this current life in that regard: it may be literally <i>impossible</i>, oxymoronic, for God to "give men a chance" to change their minds because that's not what the afterlife is like. When C.S. Lewis constructs his hypothetical, he wasn't assuming that even though people CAN (retain the capacity) to change their minds in hell, God knows with perfect omniscience that they won't, and that's why nobody goes from hell to heaven. Rather, his hypothetical was in the nature of a "if it weren't impossible to change your mind (though it really is)," God <i>could</i> allow a person to go from hell to heaven were he to change his mind. He was not claiming the reverse of the fact that the very structure of heaven and hell remove the space needed in which a choice of a new direction can take place. Tonynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-24156731235837089842012-10-15T21:03:59.587-07:002012-10-15T21:03:59.587-07:00Hi, Tony. You said:
""
Redford, I stron...Hi, Tony. You said:<br /><br />""<br />Redford, I strongly urge you to take your pet theories elsewhere, somewhere there is a desire for excessively stupid claptrap, rather than clog up this commbox with this junk. You aren't going to convince anyone here that you understand a shred of physics or of theology or philosophy.<br /><br />Glass, please do not feed the trolls. We can have a perfectly good discussion here about worthwhile questions, if only we concentrate on worthwhile questions and not silly make-believe word games.<br />""<br /><br />Prof. Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology is a mathematical theorem per the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. As Prof. Stephen Hawking wrote, "one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem." (From p. 67 of Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time [New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1996; 1st ed., 1988].)<br /><br />The Omega Point cosmology has been peer-reviewed and published in a number of the world's leading physics and science journals. Even NASA itself has peer-reviewed Prof. Tipler's Omega Point Theorem and found it correct according to the known laws of physics. No refutation of it exists within the peer-reviewed scientific literature, or anywhere else for that matter.<br /><br />For the details on that, see my following article:<br /><br />James Redford, "The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything", Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708, <a href="http://archive.org/details/ThePhysicsOfGodAndTheQuantumGravityTheoryOfEverything" rel="nofollow">http://archive.org/details/ThePhysicsOfGodAndTheQuantumGravityTheoryOfEverything</a><br /><br />Regarding your other comments, they are the logical fallacy of ad hominem attack, as well as being factually erroneous.James Redfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11284915453745539533noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-62159221079719775882012-10-15T10:14:18.856-07:002012-10-15T10:14:18.856-07:00reply to rank sophist, part 3:
To say that God is ...reply to rank sophist, part 3:<br /><i>To say that God is good has nothing to do with morality, which is an idea applicable only to creatures: it relies on natural law, or compliance with nature.</i><br /><br />I don't really understand why "compliance with nature" could have "nothing to do with morality"--are you defining "morality" in a way that requires that it involves making choices between competing courses of action, rather than behaving morally by nature? In the context of theological discussions I usually understand the term more broadly, so that moral behavior just means acting in a way that conforms to some objective moral laws, regardless of whether there was any real possibility of choosing to act in a way that doesn't conform to these laws. Anyway, keeping in mind the human conceptual distinction between justice and love, I would say that morality is a matter of behaving justly, while my criticism of the notion of hell is based on its incompatibility with the notion of God as infinitely loving.<br /><br /><i>God has no limited nature with which to comply, thanks to divine simplicity. God's justice is the same as his mercy, and his goodness is the same as his beauty; one aspect is not divided against another. Hence, it is incoherent to expect God to act according to some set of moral laws, because it is impossible to posit moral laws without limitations of nature.</i><br /><br />Why? Do you think it is impossible to posit mathematical or logical laws without limitations of nature? Most theists who have considered the question would say that God does not have the power to violate the laws of mathematics or logic. Couldn't there be timeless moral truths just as there are timeless mathematical truths, both being grounded in God rather than being independent limitations on Him?<br /><br /><i>For CT, everything that God is, he is all at once: there is no weighing of "justice" against "mercy", for instance.</i><br /><br />I didn't say anything about a "weighing" of one aspect against the other, as if more of one would require less of the other. I don't see why it would diminish God's justice one bit to allow people infinite time to repent if they so chose, or even just to make sure that everyone had the <i>same</i> amount of time to repent.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-15691497497039816482012-10-15T10:12:04.271-07:002012-10-15T10:12:04.271-07:00reply to rank sophist, part 2:
To say that God is ...reply to rank sophist, part 2:<br /><i>To say that God is "omnibenevolent" means nothing like this, for the classical theist. Everything he does is gratuitous, in that it is done without necessity. He does not act for the "greater good", nor is he obliged to save anyone, nor did he create "the best of all possible worlds". </i><br /><br />This is why it's useful to consider justice separately from love/mercy (at the level of human conceptualization, without denying divine simplicity)--a Christian can certainly believe that God has no <i>moral obligation</i> to save anyone, but at the same time it would be hard to see Him as infinitely loving or merciful if He simply condemned everyone since Adam and Eve to hell without even a chance at salvation. Love and mercy may not be moral obligations, but a being can't really be described as "loving and merciful" if they make no attempt to help others avoid horrible fates whenever they aren't obligated to do so by some code of justice.<br /><br /><i>"Maximally" means "best", which implies degree. Classical theism denies that God can be described by degrees.</i><br /><br />At least according to Dr. Feser, the classical theist God can be understood in <i>analogy</i> to finite beings--see for example http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-divine-intellect.html where he says:<br /><br />'When the classical theist says that God has power, what is meant is not that God has what a mere creature has or might be imagined to have – large muscles, political influence, rhetorical skill, or even telekinesis – only more of it. What is meant is rather that there is in God something analogous to what we call power in us, though it cannot be the same thing since God is immaterial, incorporeal, absolutely simple, etc. <br /><br />Now this does not entail that God is less than powerful in the sense of “power” we have in mind when we speak of human power. Rather it entails that He is unimaginably more than powerful in that sense.'<br /><br />People use these kinds of analogies when evaluating claims about things done by God--both individual claims about things told to them by God, and also when evaluating the claims of different revealed religions, at least for people who aren't already completely sure which religion is the true one. That's essentially what I'm doing here with claims of eternal damnation. Do you think a classical theist would say that such analogical reasoning should have absolutely no place in our judgments about human claims of things God has said or done?JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-20535842085229403172012-10-15T10:10:26.344-07:002012-10-15T10:10:26.344-07:00rank sophist:
I have to ask: are you an atheist? N...rank sophist:<br /><i>I have to ask: are you an atheist? No offense intended if not. It's just that your comments here strike me that way.</i><br /><br />No, but I am not a Christian. My own inclination (I am not sure about these things, obviously) is towards a kind of idealistic pantheism where all of reality is God's experience, and all specific facts about this experience are ultimately just as necessary (non-contingent) as the facts of mathematics. I find a lot that is valuable in the writings of thoughtful Christians about their beliefs--I've started Hart's "The Beauty of the Infinite" and like it a lot so far, for example--but the doctrine of eternal damnation has always seemed to me to be a completely horrible one with no redeeming features, so the dilemma I'm presenting here is an attempt to pinpoint why I think it doesn't make sense, even if we grant other Christian premises such as free will and the need to bar from heaven those who don't repent for their sins and accept salvation.<br /><br /><b>So in this case God cannot really be seen as omnibenevolent--He is much less concerned about helping each person avoid a terrible fate than, say, a loving parent would be.</b><br /><br /><i>What you described is exactly the sort of "ticker tape" scenario against which I was arguing. It makes God little more than a best secondary cause--a callous political leader who aims for the least terrible result, but not without breaking a few eggs. Further, it makes it so God not only sees the choices made, but actually chooses which choices will be made.</i><br /><br />I think you misunderstood the context of my "so in this case" in the statement above, the case I was referring to had been explained earlier in that paragraph as the <i>non</i>-Molinistic view of God where He <i>doesn't</i> know what choices people would have made under different circumstances, and so in no way can He be said to "choose which choices will be made". As an aside, I think it's a somewhat misleading description of Molinism to say that God "chooses which choices will be made" (God can see all possible histories, but in each one He has no control over what choices are made by the possible souls in that history, so God still has no control over what choices are made in whichever possible history He makes actual), and I also think that, for a Molinist who is willing to follow the argument to its most reasonable conclusion, it would make far more sense to conclude that God will not need to "break a few eggs" but rather will find and actualize a possible history where <i>everyone</i> is saved. But since you reject Molinism, then before discussing such issues I would first request your comment on the other horn of the dilemma, the one where Molinism is false and God <i>doesn't</i> know the answer to what-if questions. <br /><br />Consider the example I offered earlier of a 16-year-old who dies unsaved in a natural disaster, like a building collapse in an earthquake--if you reject Molinism, then you would say God doesn't know for sure whether he might have repented and accepted salvation if he had survived the earthquake and lived another 60 years. And even if God can't accept the 16-year-old into heaven in the state he died, there would be various things it would be within God's power to do to give this person further chances to make the right choices, like intervening to make sure he didn't die at that moment, or giving him further chances to repent after being resurrected in the future (C.S. Lewis once suggested that God <i>would</i> accept the repentance of anyone in hell, but none of them choose to leave--this would avoid the problem I bring up, but I think most Christians would see this idea as incompatible with the standard doctrine on hell.) Wouldn't a loving and merciful God who was unsure of what people would do if given more time want to give anyone who hadn't accepted salvation more time to do so, or at least give everyone the same amount of time?JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-48951627746734247752012-10-14T21:23:39.539-07:002012-10-14T21:23:39.539-07:00Slightly off topic, but do Aristotelian forms have...Slightly off topic, but do Aristotelian forms have causal powers?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-12051313751040217622012-10-14T14:44:42.580-07:002012-10-14T14:44:42.580-07:00before you know it, you're stuck in the Calvin...<i>before you know it, you're stuck in the Calvinistic hole of God planning for and causing the fall of man. It is only here that I think your author analogy has problems. God did not plan for or cause the fall of man, but he did know from eternity that it would happen</i> <br /><br />When you say things like this you appear to reject the very "caused vs permitted" distinction that Thomas makes that you earlier accepted. What about the phrase "Oh Happy Fault" of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas's dictum that God's <i>primary intention</i> of creation was the Incarnation, which, taken together with the Bible's repeated statement that Christ came because of sin, leads one to the necessary conclusion (accepted by Thomas) that God <b>planned to make use of the Fall</b>, though it does not lead to the conclusion that God CAUSED the Fall. <br /><br />I agree that this topic is extremely delicate, and it is difficult for mere mortals to say just what we mean (and to mean just what is right), but we can affirm Providence in God in which we accept that He plans for (and uses) even the evils that people do without ascribing any causality of evil to Him. If your most critical point is that God is not the cause of evil, then you must allow that there is more than one way of describing that. Neither I nor Glenn are suggesting anything of the sort. Tonynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-80619865479467110022012-10-14T11:43:03.888-07:002012-10-14T11:43:03.888-07:00Glenn,
The meaning of the son's death has to ...Glenn,<br /><br /><i>The meaning of the son's death has to do with, amongst other things, the life which transcends the life of being merely alive. As such it also transcends philosophy, so no philosophical argument is offered in support of what has being said.</i><br /><br />As a Christian, Hart would, of course, agree with you here. But notice that you are not placing value on death itself, which is Hart's point. There is nothing ennobling or tragically heroic about death, in the pagan sense, after its inevitability has been overturned by the Resurrection. As a result, death is allowed to be death: the thing that wasn't supposed to happen, that has no redeeming qualities, that is never inevitable. The Christian tradition discusses the Resurrection as the overcoming of death, and the promise of that overcoming for the average Joe: death itself, when separated from the Beatific Vision and general ressurection, is conceived wholly as negation. You'd have to read the entire (very long) passage in <i>The Beauty of the Infinite</i> to understand the context of his comment.<br /><br />JesseM,<br /><br />I have to ask: are you an atheist? No offense intended if not. It's just that your comments here strike me that way. <br /><br /><i>So in this case God cannot really be seen as omnibenevolent--He is much less concerned about helping each person avoid a terrible fate than, say, a loving parent would be.</i><br /><br />What you described is exactly the sort of "ticker tape" scenario against which I was arguing. It makes God little more than a best secondary cause--a callous political leader who aims for the least terrible result, but not without breaking a few eggs. Further, it makes it so God not only sees the choices made, <i>but actually chooses which choices will be made</i>.<br /><br />To say that God is "omnibenevolent" means nothing like this, for the classical theist. Everything he does is gratuitous, in that it is done without necessity. He does not act for the "greater good", nor is he obliged to save anyone, nor did he create "the best of all possible worlds". His goodness is that of primary causality, whereas Molina located it on the level of secondary causality. This is to say that God's goodness is utterly different in <i>kind</i>, and not just degree, from any created goodness. <br /><br /><i>For non-Molinists who think of God as maximally good and loving, I think the argument of the previous paragraph presents a problem (perhaps you don't think of God as maximally good and loving given your comments about the apophatic approach above, but I don't get the impression that all classical theists would agree).</i><br /><br />"Maximally" means "best", which implies degree. Classical theism denies that God can be described by degrees. If you increased a created goodness by an infinite amount, you still would not reach God's goodness, because the difference is in kind and not in degree. To say that God is good has nothing to do with morality, which is an idea applicable only to creatures: it relies on natural law, or compliance with nature. God has no limited nature with which to comply, thanks to divine simplicity. God's justice is the same as his mercy, and his goodness is the same as his beauty; one aspect is not divided against another. Hence, it is incoherent to expect God to act according to some set of moral laws, because it is impossible to posit moral laws without limitations of nature. For CT, everything that God is, he is all at once: there is no weighing of "justice" against "mercy", for instance.<br /><br />Also, needless to say, God's love is not the same as a created love. At best, an analogy can be drawn between created love and God's love; but there is no univocal connection. God can be said to be infinitely loving without acting in the way that Molina's "best secondary cause" would act.rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-45859099960940704332012-10-14T09:39:55.556-07:002012-10-14T09:39:55.556-07:00rank,
Well, there's a sufficient reason, in t...rank,<br /><br /><i>Well, there's a sufficient reason, in that the son is killed by some event. My point is that there isn't a </i>deep<i> reason, in that the son's death is utterly meaningless. As Hart says, this is why it is a tragedy: because it cannot be rationalized or blamed on any larger, inevitable force.</i><br /><br />In another book of Hart's, to which you earlier referred, he said he was being "bloodlessly clinical". Perhaps here he is being merely overly clinical. Whether he is or isn't, however, is somewhat beside the point. The point is that he is free to convince himself that the son's death is meaningless, and free to fail to see that it is not. Others, of course, are free to agree with him. The meaning of the son's death has to do with, amongst other things, the life which transcends the life of being merely alive. As such it also transcends philosophy, so no philosophical argument is offered in support of what has being said.Glennnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-42647733088306308492012-10-14T00:44:50.468-07:002012-10-14T00:44:50.468-07:00rank sophist:
God knows everything that will ever ...rank sophist:<br /><i>God knows everything that will ever happen, but this does not mean that the total pre-determination of Molinism is true. Why would it?</i><br /><br />My argument was not specifically about pre-determination. Rather, it was just about the question of whether God has knowledge of the answer to what-if questions (counterfactuals), like "would this person, who died in an earthquake at age 16 and went to hell, have repented/accepted Jesus and gone to heaven if they had survived the earthquake and lived another 60 years?" And while I do not say that the notion of omniscience necessarily requires knowledge of counterfactuals, my point is that if God <i>doesn't</i> know the answer to what-if questions, then if He would allow any person to die (especially at a young age) in a state that results in them going to hell, that suggests that God is not really interested in doing everything in His power (compatible with other demands, like justice) to give everyone the best possible chance to make the right choices that will allow them to avoid eternal damnation. So in this case God cannot really be seen as omnibenevolent--He is much less concerned about helping each person avoid a terrible fate than, say, a loving parent would be. <br /><br />Molinists can avoid this problem by supposing that God knows what free choices a person would have made in each possible set of external circumstances, so if a person goes to hell, it is either because God knows that they wouldn't have made the right choices to avoid hell even if their external circumstances had been different, or that the "different external circumstances" would imply a universe that was worse in other ways, perhaps because more <i>other</i> people would end up in hell as a result of the circumstances God actualized, or because the circumstances would require God to lie, for example. In the essay I linked to earlier at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/middle1.html William Lane Craig defends the Molinistic idea that God does know what free choices people (and angels/demons) would make in each possible history and therefore chooses the external circumstances (beyond the control of any free-willed individual) that result in the history that is "best" in some sense. I think there are major problem's with Craig's view, even granted the assumption of a theistic God and the necessity of sending unrepentant sinners to hell, but I won't get into this unless there are any pro-Molinists who agree with Craig's view. For non-Molinists who think of God as maximally good and loving, I think the argument of the previous paragraph presents a problem (perhaps you don't think of God as maximally good and loving given your comments about the apophatic approach above, but I don't get the impression that all classical theists would agree).JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-23235649073918627692012-10-13T22:24:56.251-07:002012-10-13T22:24:56.251-07:00Although I will add that one must be careful talki...Although I will add that one must be careful talking about God's "plan" for the world, because, before you know it, you're stuck in the Calvinistic hole of God planning for and causing the fall of man. It is only here that I think your author analogy has problems. God did not plan for or cause the fall of man, but he did know from eternity that it would happen. I think that the father-son analogy is stronger, in this regard, because it gets this point across more clearly: God in no way causes what he allows. My analogy has problems, of course, in nailing down the exact nature of God's way of inhabiting and sustaining what he allows, which you portrayed more clearly.rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-18034913384167540562012-10-13T22:14:48.356-07:002012-10-13T22:14:48.356-07:00Mr. Green,
As before, I agree with you. This is a...Mr. Green,<br /><br />As before, I agree with you. This is a very subtle subject, and it's easy to get confused by slight wording problems, particularly when dealing with the shaky history of post-Aquinas Thomism. However, we seem to be in near-perfect alignment on the issue. There doesn't seem to be anything for us to argue about.rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-3576534158402036832012-10-13T21:35:08.029-07:002012-10-13T21:35:08.029-07:00"The very fact that you do not realize the ap...<i>"The very fact that you do not realize the apophatic nature of the ST says enough about your interest in seriously engaging Aquinas's thought."</i><br /><br />If he's trying to be apophatic then why does he make direct statements that God is this or that? Its supposed to be all negative right. No, it doesn't count that an opponent provides a negative "God doesn't know the future" and Aquinas negates it "On the contrary, God does not not know the future." That's not apophatic. If anyone was not serious, it was Aquinas himself because he only gives apophatic theology lipservice. He's so ridiculously dogmatic in defining exactly what he thinks God is.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-88484773003701067402012-10-13T21:33:13.607-07:002012-10-13T21:33:13.607-07:00Rank Sophist: He pre-directs all things toward the...Rank Sophist: <i>He pre-directs all things toward the good, grants all things motion and supplies all things with their goodness. But, again, this is an act of primary causality that is beyond any secondary causality.</i><br /><br />Isn't that what we're all saying? Of course, even calling it "pre-direction" could sound a little "deterministic". This is a very subtle topic, and it's easy to go off course. That's why I'm leery of calling someone on the carpet for saying that God acts for the greater good. If someone is going wrong about that, it's because of trying to fit a true idea into a false philosophy, not because the idea itself is bad. After all, what you've said about God's not planning could easily be (mis)interpreted as arguing for some sort of unconcerned, deistic being. Similarly, there is a way to misinterpret claims about God's providence that would treat Him like a secondary cause (and which you have been arguing against); but there is also a correct way to interpret such claims.<br /><br />God does not predetermine beforehand nor react afterwards — nor does He remain aloof while creation does its own thing. Just as where existence is concerned, God exists "in, around, and through" every creature, so, in terms of history, does He "plan" though every event. In both cases, to see God as a secondary cause would be wrong; indeed, the only way God can exists "in" things without being part of them, or plan "through" events without "manipulating" them is precisely because He acts on a different level of causality.<br /><br />The analogy I'd use is an author creating a story: the author (being finite) has a limited sort of transcendence, but he clearly exists on a different level than the characters in his story. He does not act through "secondary causes", i.e. as one of the characters. He co-exists with — or rather above — their motivations and actions; events in the story have their natural, secondary causes within the tale, but at the same time, they are caused by the author's plan to write a story that goes a certain way. This is all the more so with God, who is infinitely transcendent and can create living beings with intellect and will. Our wills are free because they are not forced on the level of secondary causes; nor are events (evil or otherwise) "manufactured" by God at the secondary level. But everything that happens is part of God's plan at the level of primary causation. (Of course, God can <i>also</i> act as a secondary cause, if and when He so chooses.) But we want to make it clear that God's providence is real and meaningful, not trivial or tacked-on (if such a thing even made sense).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-89043678273906995752012-10-13T21:27:47.579-07:002012-10-13T21:27:47.579-07:00So if your 'classical theism' derives from...<i>So if your 'classical theism' derives from Aquinas or you claim so, I think its you who is confused and not me.</i><br /><br />Again, if you are genuinely interested, read the material in that linked post. Otherwise, I'm done talking to you. The very fact that you do not realize the apophatic nature of the ST says enough about your interest in seriously engaging Aquinas's thought.rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-86628747350437642812012-10-13T21:16:27.089-07:002012-10-13T21:16:27.089-07:00"The definition of God as 'omniscient, om...<i>"The definition of God as 'omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good' is a theistic personalist innovation. Those words are not applicable to classical theism, which sees God as transcending basically any label we give him:"</i> (rank sophist)<br /><br />And who's system of 'classical theism' are you talking about exactly? Because when I read Book I of Aquinas' Summa Theologica he used those terms.<br /><br />Q6 he argues that God is absolute goodness.<br />Q8 he argues that God is omnipresent.<br />Q14 he argues for omniscience.<br />Q25 he argues for omnipotence. He does however seem to argue in Q25.3 that God cannot do what is absolutely nonsensical. And in Q25.4 that God cannot change the past.<br /><br /><br />Further, Aquinas clearly teaches some species of determinism becaue in Q14 article 8 an objection is raised: "Objection 1. It seems that the knowledge of God is not the cause of things...." And Aquinas says "I answer that, The knowledge of God is the cause of things." So if your 'classical theism' derives from Aquinas or you claim so, I think its you who is confused and not me.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-48263467160927557542012-10-13T20:59:19.711-07:002012-10-13T20:59:19.711-07:00Black Luster,
No reason at all? Seems tough to sq...Black Luster,<br /><br /><i>No reason at all? Seems tough to square with something like the PSR. Or is there a reason, just not one that can be "traced" back to the father?</i><br /><br />Well, there's a <i>sufficient</i> reason, in that the son is killed by some event. My point is that there isn't a <i>deep</i> reason, in that the son's death is utterly meaningless. As Hart says, this is why it is a tragedy: because it cannot be rationalized or blamed on any larger, inevitable force. He says in one book that, because the Resurrection overturned any possibility of such rationalization or blame:<br /><br />"One must now confront loss without the comfort of a speculative return to the self; the tragic speculum [i.e. the "heroic tragedy" of "inevitable fate" in pagan society] is shattered by resurrection, and faith is made to see in every death only the meaningless and hopeless destruction of the beloved, the injustice that consumes the other, and hope henceforth must consist in a rebellion against tragic wisdom, against the logic of totality, and a desire for the other in the other's beauty once again. [...] In the light of Easter, the singularity of suffering is no longer tragic (which is to say, ennobling), but merely horrible, mad, everlastingly unjust; it is the irruption of <i>thanatos</i> into God's good creation."<br /><br />JesseM,<br /><br /><i>If you reject Molinism, that seems to imply that God does not really do everything in His power to help people avoid going to hell, even given whatever limits are placed by the needs of justice. In any instance where a person dies and goes to hell (including cases where people die young due to natural disasters), God genuinely doesn't know whether, if He had intervened in some way to allow the person to live a few more years, they might have repented for their sins/accepted Jesus and ended up going to heaven. So it seems like God cannot really be seen as maximally loving or omnibenevolent in this case.</i><br /><br />God knows everything that will ever happen, but this does not mean that the total pre-determination of Molinism is true. Why would it?<br /><br />Jay Kay,<br /><br /><i>Anyway, whether you think God is personal or impersonal is irrelevant here since so long as you hold to the "outside of time" doctrine, you will end up in determinism.</i><br /><br />I don't see an argument for your position.<br /><br /><i>I don't see how classical theism without its God of absolute omnipotence and absolute omniscience escapes from the same criticism.</i><br /><br />The definition of God as "omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good" is a theistic personalist innovation. Those words are not applicable to classical theism, which sees God as transcending basically any label we give him: classical theism is, by and large, apophatic. If you are genuinely interested in understanding CT, I recommend that you start here: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/classical-theism-roundup.html. As someone who has come upon CT in the past year, and who has had concerns similar to yours in the past, I can tell you that you do not even have a beginner's understanding of the system.rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-68679871531267831212012-10-13T17:11:33.593-07:002012-10-13T17:11:33.593-07:00The Bible is replete with God saying that he is th...<i>The Bible is replete with God saying that he is the cause of things that look like bad things to us - plagues, wars etc. We can dismiss these sayings as purely mythic or purely anthropomorphic language to point to something else (like God's wings), but Christians since before Augustine struggled to accept them as more than those. In that tradition, God is both the cause of good alone, and the cause of a created order that harbors evil, and the cause under which that created order will (does?) fulfill his 'purpose' in creating.</i><br /><br />And all of these three things can be obtained without thinking that God decides ticker tape-style, as Aquinas clearly showed us. He gives existence to everything, and evil is only a privation of existence: nothingness. He pre-directs all things toward the good, grants all things motion and supplies all things with their goodness. But, again, this is an act of primary causality that is beyond any secondary causality. God's gift of motion is not the same as that provided by a "big engine"; nor is his pre-direction toward the good some sort of "force" enacted on creatures; nor is his gift of goodness one of a "higher good" to a "lesser good". Otherwise, again, we are left with a "best secondary cause". As Hart says:<br /><br />"He would not really be beyond suffering at all, but simply incapable of it; to call him impassible would be then to say no more than that, in the order of the mutable, he is immutable; or that, in the order of the contingent, he is rescued from contingency simply by virtue of being that force that is supreme among all other forces. This would, in a very real sense, place God in rivalry to all finite things, though a rivalry that—through the sheer mathematics of omnipotence—he has already won."<br /><br /><i>Look up Fr. William Most on grace and free will. He too disagrees with Molina and G-L, and does a masterful aggregation of the entire range of the early and late Fathers, together with the Doctors (especially St. Thomas) on the point.</i><br /><br />Might have to check that out after I've finished Hart's book on this very subject, The Doors of the Sea. Thanks for the recommendation.rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-23383911888872652872012-10-13T17:11:31.315-07:002012-10-13T17:11:31.315-07:00Rank,
"His son dies for no reason at all--no...Rank,<br /><br />"His son dies for no reason at all--not because he intentionally let him die; not because he let him die for a "mysterious reason.""<br /><br />No reason at all? Seems tough to square with something like the PSR. Or is there a reason, just not one that can be "traced" back to the father?Black Lusternoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-322333232258012442012-10-13T16:54:57.739-07:002012-10-13T16:54:57.739-07:00Well, since I have argued most vociferously agains...<i>Well, since I have argued most vociferously against the Molinists, it hardly seems likely that I am a Moninist. I haven't checked out Banez, so I can't speak to that directly. I have read Garrigou-Lagrange, whom I believe is Banezian, and I have argued against his thesis as well.</i><br /><br />Ahhh. I see.<br /><br /><i>That's the principal distinction I was getting at. You seemed to deny this distinction above:</i><br /><br />I am denying a very specific version of that distinction. Let me see if I can make it more clear.<br /><br />Let's say that a man is sitting in front of a switchboard, and two switches are available: these are labeled "act" and "do not act". Now, let's say that this machine at which he is seated emits a string of ticker tape, which he reads as it is printed. At specific points in the ticker tape message, he must flick the "act" or "do not act" switches. Before doing so, he consults a large manual that provides the entirety of the ticker tape string from beginning to end, so that he may make the best decision given the circumstances. Afterwards, he flicks one of the switches.<br /><br />Now, ignore that this situation, interpreted literally, contradicts divine impassibility. My point is related only to the brand of decision made here. Withholding action itself becomes a choice, made for particular reasons, and so we are left with the conclusion that God <i>specifically</i> did not intervene during the 2011 Japanese earthquake and subsequent nuclear crisis, for instance. He allowed it to happen for some reason--"soul building", perhaps--, and we are left quite possibly shaking our fists at him. Why? Because, simply, this version of God's permission makes bad events in a way <i>his fault</i>. The core problem is that it puts God in the same order as creation: he is, in the end, a "best secondary cause". It means that what God wills must be identical to what occurs. It would be incoherent to say that the ticker tape man wills otherwise than he allows, because his allowance itself is an act of will.<br /><br />Now, let's consider a second kind of permission: a father allowing a son to join the military and fight in a war. He knows, somehow, that this will result in the death of his son. But he allows otherwise than he wills--that is, he allows the death of his son while willing his life. He gave his son the freedom to go to war out of love, and he continued to will his life out of that same love. He might have interfered--gone overseas later and hauled his son back--, but this would have been a special event that no one could have expected. Unlike with the ticker tape man, the father <i>is</i> capable of willing one thing and allowing another, and he has no obligation to make a choice based on some "manual". His son dies for no reason at all--not because he intentionally let him die; not because he let him die for a "mysterious reason". This is a true split between primary and secondary causality that the ticker tape man could never hope to achieve, because, unlike him, the father is able to stand "above" the situation entirely.<br /><br />Needless to say, something like the second version is what Hart has in mind. It preserves divine impassibility and innocence, the distinction between primary and secondary causality, the difference between nature and miracle, and so on. Recall that the father could have intervened in some major, unheard-of way, but did not. Compare this to the ticker tape man, whose every action is a type of intervention. His every allowance is a thinly disguised action in itself, for whose consequences he may be blamed. The father, on the other hand, has enough distance from the situation to allow what he does not will, without receiving blame for not intervening in some incredible way. rank sophisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01644531454383207175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-42389887666083996722012-10-13T15:29:35.261-07:002012-10-13T15:29:35.261-07:00rank sophist:
Ah, so you're a Banezian (or Mol...rank sophist:<br /><i>Ah, so you're a Banezian (or Molinist). I completely disagree with you, and I concur with Hart that this doctrine is not only false, but evil. It destroys free will and leaves us with a God who creates certain people from eternity for the sole purpose of damnation.</i><br /><br />If you reject Molinism, that seems to imply that God does not really do everything in His power to help people avoid going to hell, even given whatever limits are placed by the needs of justice. In any instance where a person dies and goes to hell (including cases where people die young due to natural disasters), God genuinely doesn't know whether, if He had intervened in some way to allow the person to live a few more years, they might have repented for their sins/accepted Jesus and ended up going to heaven. So it seems like God cannot really be seen as maximally loving or omnibenevolent in this case.JesseMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09993568347649474812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-81963134807593974092012-10-13T15:23:25.948-07:002012-10-13T15:23:25.948-07:00"I don't think that they're determini...<br /><i>"I don't think that they're determinists--I simply think that their version of God is broken, because he becomes responsible for evil through direct allowance. The difference between miracles and secondary causes is erased. As I said before, this god is little more than a touched-up Zeus: a mostly benevolent, unpredictable being who is willing to achieve the greater good by any means necessary. Your sister dies in a car crash? Welp, God didn't stop it because it would have interfered in some greater good. Perhaps saving her would have created some major disaster in a few years. How, exactly, does this differ from callous political leadership? How is this god worthy of worship?"</i><br /><br />I don't see how classical theism without its God of absolute omnipotence and absolute omniscience escapes from the same criticism. If anything, because of the absoluteness he's more liable to it. If you believe that God is only as omniscient as its possible to be and that its not possible for a physical world to exist without physical evil (i.e. death) because it would become so overcrowded everyone would be literally piled up and living in each others' feces after a while, then God is no longer liable for the evil, the nature of physicality is. The same thing with time: if God can't know the future exhuastively because the future is unkowable in an absolute or exhuastive sense then God is free of the charge "You knew this would happen!" and the like. The absolute nature of the classical theist view of God is what brings forth these charges. The problem with most theistic personalists is they are mimicing you classical theists, trying to make a God who is absolute in power and foreknowledge. This monkey see monkey do results in yet another view of God which is liable to these charges.<br /><br />Now, you can say "But if God is not absolutely omnipotent or absolutely omniscient then he is a god and not God." Not so, for there is only one, and he created the world, so he is still God. The definition of God should not be "that which is so uber awesome nothing greater can be conceived" but rather "that which created the world." But then you will say "Big deal, he created the world, but he's not worthy of worship!" That's a subjective judgment of course. I fail to see what's worthy of worship in a God who is absolute in every way. After all, if an absolute God does great things, big deal, of course he does, since he's absolute. If a no absolute God does great things, its more impressive because he's not absolute. That's why we tend to root for the underdog, isn't it? What makes Luke Skywalker more worthy of praise than Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine? Palpatine is more powerful, so let the classical theists praise him! Ah, but because he is so powerful when he does anything great we're not surprised. When weak old Luke does its shocking. Plus the moral dimension. (I know my analogy is bad but you get the jist I hope.) Basically, classical theism seems to me to be nothing but the tired old Calvinist worship of raw power with no moral concern whatsoever.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com