Wow Mitch, you could have fooled me with your opposition to what I presented, and your ignoring of the mathematics I presented, in the Wigner Friend thread, where you said things like:
Physicalism is a position on the mind-body problem. I am a physicalist. Or to be more precise… I believe the mind is just as physical as the body. post 7
Quantum physics does not provide a shred of objective evidence for anything nonphysical in consciousness or anything else. post 70
and you constantly say God can’t break his physical laws.
If the mind is physical, just as physical as the body, we can’t be spiritual beings. You have said that the resurrection was spiritual, that the resurrected Jesus didn’t have a material body (remember that debate), it seems that you separate and cut off the spiritual from this side of the great divide of death.
So, if I misunderstand, maybe it is because you are extremely changeable and unclear.
On that last quote of Mitch, there are some big name physicists who share my view of consciousness and others who don’t like Mitch. The view we presented of the observer is held by about 42% of physicists, so it isn’t a rare view.
Incorrect. This is one of the lies you constantly repeat and I keep correcting you to say it is not “can’t” but “won’t” God will not contradict Himself and break the laws which He himself created. It is consistency and integrity which makes God great and not some demonstration that He can break the rules just because that is what you want to do.
Incorrect. It just means that the spirit is not the same as the mind.
I suspect it has more to do with repeatedly changing what I say to something completely different.
Big names in physics say that God doesn’t exist and religion is evil. So the opinion of big names in physics doesn’t mean anything. What matters is the evidence and the consensus and frankly I very much doubt your claim of big names or 42%. Let’s hear some real evidence as well as the words of people before you change them into what you want them to say.
And just because QM doesn’t provide evidence for anything nonphysical doesn’t mean that the nonphysical doesn’t exist. I am a physicist so I like to get the physics right to explain what the evidence actually does show.
Let’s see if this list of options is correct. a divine being, an accept the infinite regression of Aristotle or we are part of God (pantheism). Any other possibilities.
I did leave out pantheism because of the audience here and I shouldn’t have. I will also confess that I am not well versed on Aristotle, so that is a weakness of mine–never found him interesting enough to plow though his thoughts. lol
you wrote:
Similar to consciousness. If the mental would just come up from the non-mental we have neither a sufficient explanation for its appearance and being, since it isn´t identical to the non-mental material and on top of that we violated ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) since a prior non-existent property just showed up without metaphysical grounding.
While I agree with this, I am not sure I find it compelling given today’s view of the mental being physical and an epiphenomenon of the brain. The problem is that the categories Aristotle thought in are different from those of today, where our society, our science doesn’t think in terms of dualism, mental and non-mental substances. I think that is another reason I have not chased Aristotle or Aquinas.
I found him interesting because he is the foundation of all the medieval thought of the great philsoophers and theologians. Pantheism requires God to be identical with nature, but this is impossible in the account I gave above. Reality is dependend on God, not identical to him. The act and potency distinction Aristotle uses to account for causality positively prohibits both pantheism and panentheism, since creation is a composite of act and potency while God can only be pure act. The simple God the catholic church and traditional protestants teach could not in principle be pantheistic or in any way identical to the world.
The great thing about philosophy is that the moderns can discuss with the old greeks without there being a necessity of the latter being outdated. In fact it is the modern mechanistic conception of nature that is incoherent and excludes facts about nature without which science would be arguably impossible (e.g. aristotelian teleology which accounts for the function of natural objects). As Hilary Putnam put it “The picture of nature physics gives us has been repeatedly confused with nature itself.”
Epiphenomenalism is such an outgrowth. I don´t see how anyone could find that convincing if they are not strictly committed to such a view on matter. It falls prey to the simplest argument one could give for free will: Every attempt to act as if we don´t have it is immediately self-refuting. One could even say that the fact that we are free is equally as basic as that we are basic and that there is an external world, even if we don´t understand how it is possible (a problem common in philosophy though).
Yes both means it won’t happen. But it is not a distinction without a difference. “Can’t” has to do with ability, “won’t” has to do with a decision about what one will do. And sorry, this bit of empty sophistry is not a good excuse for changing my words. A lie is still a lie no matter what your excuse is for doing so.
Yes God can.
People say no to this question because they want to make God into a slave of their theology.
But the power over oneself is the most important power of all – to be what one chooses to be. So I say yes. God can impose limits upon Himself. God does have the integrity to stick to His own decisions. God can give privacy to people if He chooses or as the Bible says He can forget our sins. God can take risks and create living things with free will. God can be sorry He made them when they turn to evil continuously. God can even sacrifice knowledge and power in order to become a helpless human infant.
Yes God CAN. But the question is whether God would do this just to impress a bunch of ignorant savages who wouldn’t know the difference anyway because they haven’t clue what the laws of nature consist of? We can also ask if that is what we see God doing in our own lives or do we have to invent a change of policy just in order to make this true in distant past when it obviously isn’t true now?
@gbob
What kind of question is that even? If we put aside the incarnation for a second, this question becomes literally meaningless and makes me ask how you view God?
If you are interested, James Dolezal (Baptist) gives one of the best account of the traditional conception of God by any modern writer. Perhaps you want to check that out:
I disagree with most or even all Mitchell wrote, because I think the terms applied are inappropriate for the absolute and even imply an impossibility, like God forgetting something or not knowing something. But I don´t want to start that discussion.
Only because people have confined God to their definitions of Him and thereby made Him into a slave of their theology. But I think the reasoning which goes as follows is nonsensical…
God is all-powerful therefore He cannot…
I say wrong!
God is all-powerful means that He CAN.
And this includes imposing limitations on Himself and therefore making it so that He can’t anymore. Indeed I believe that that is what all of God’s actions and decisions are essentially doing and it is part of the difference between us and God. He starts out as non-contingent but then He makes decisions and thus what He is thereafter is contingent upon those decisions. He is a being who gives of Himself to others – a being who shares and gives others a role in deciding what is to come.
And watching the video… I do not agree with doctrine of divine simplicity. But I am still watching so I will have more to add on this topic. Ok… so far… I am not impressed… will do some skipping ahead to avoid his repetitions. Mostly I think the doctrine is empty words. I would say instead that God is not composite. I would deny that God is without anything. God has everything. But God does not exist because of whatever He has. He certainly is not reducible in any way to these things. OK… so at 18:50 he seems to be saying the same as what I am saying here.
Sure, but only if we say just say that God is all-powerful, rather than deriving that fact from his nature as the absolute. If a person committing a sin is a fact, then that fact has to be grounded and as a existing fact it cannot not be grounded in the divine nature. And this grounding is something intrinsic, so that “forgetting” that fact (which in this context would just be it fully going out of existence) would be for God to loose something intrinsic, which is impossible. Of course I agree that God can forgive, but forget? I don´t know if this can even made sense of. He is purely actual and not knowing a fact would be an unactualized potency, which would prevent this version of God from being the absolute.
Btw I agree, that omnipotence implies what God CAN do, rather than MUST do. In this context the act has already occurred though. And omnipotence doesn´t require doing logical impossibilities.
I respect that. The main concern of simplicity is aseity (though of course there are others, too, especially when it comes to the concept of the absolute). Could the God you are describing in some of your posts (the passage before this quoted actually bears some resemblence to what defenders of simplicity argue (the doctrine has been interpretated in many different ways, Dolezal defends the Thomistic version)) really be its own reason for its existence, like a necessary being would require? I see several reasons to doubt that, while the Thomistic version in which God is existence itself could do that.
This shows the usual sort of problem with saying you agree or disagree with a doctrine. Generally it depends on precisely how the doctrine is stated.
So I disagree with the version which says God is without anything and I agree with the version which says that God’s existence does not depend and is not derived from anything which He may have – rather it is the other way around that all He has derives its existence from Him.
In fact… I would suggest that this is true of spiritual things in general.
Oh… looking up “aseity”… Yeah that looks good to me.
But that is just the thing… I don’t think any power or knowledge is intrinsic to God. These are things He has, not things which He is.
Omnipotence doesn’t include doing logical impossibilities. Logical impossibilities are, after all, nothing more than meaningless phrases and thus not referring to anything all.
I certainly would never agree to that!
Got to the part of the video where He sums up with “Nothing that is not God makes God be God.” Couldn’t agree more! Guess I believe the doctrine of the simplicity of God after all and simply have to clarify what this doctrine really says! Yep… I am still learning and delighted to do so!
Ok… Getting to the part of the video where he talks about form and matter. And this is getting to why I disagree with the version of simplicity which says God doesn’t have parts.
The problem is that there really are three distinct notions here
Something has parts because it is composed of them and derives their existence from them.
Something has parts because intellectual analysis can identify these distinct concepts as part of understanding what this thing is.
Something has parts because these are separable and removable so that they can be without those things.
So I have agreed to divine simplicity only in the first sense and it is the second sense which brings out my most immediate rejection of simplicity and it is my rejection of simplicity in the third sense which connects up with our previous discussion of whether God has power over Himself.
The question of form and substance (matter) is I think an example of second of these. And thus I would apply this same thinking to God saying that is an infinite form of the same potentiality of being stuff that everything else is a form of. But in according with simplicity in the first sense, I would also say that the substance of God derives its existence from God. In fact this would point to a difference from other spiritual things. For while I would say that for all spiritual things what they have derives from what they are, ultimately the substance of their being comes from God. I suppose in that way I would even agree with the the claims I often dispute that “God upholds the existence of all things” or that “God is existence itself.” That is an interesting way of viewing those claims which I never considered before. (whew! that could aid considerably in discussion of those topic if they come up again)
I’m on my way but will answer some of your points on Friday. Until then I think what helps in understanding simplicity is keeping in mind that it is almost exclusively a piece of negative theology so that it is arrived at by excluding ideas like a complex absolute being.
Further more ideas like God being “existence itself“ should be understood somewhat analogically and it follows from the real distinction between essence (nature) and existence Aquinas applied (we can know what a thing is without knowing that it is like e.g. fable creatures like unicorns or if we remember deceased individuals). Others like Duns Scotus or Pseudo-Dinosyus rejected such accounts while still affirming divine simplicity.
Now I have come the part of the video where he talks about the principle of “whatness” and the principle of “isness,” saying that while in our case existence is something attached to us, in the case of God existence is something God has because of what he is. All of this looks like theology derived from the ontological proof for God’s existence and that is something to which I am very opposed. While I do believe that God is a necessary being rather than contingent, I don’t think this means that you can conclude God exists simply because you define God in such a way. So why do I say that God is a necessary existent? Because I do not believe that God has a cause. I guess you can also state it according to his summation of the doctrine of simplicity… “nothing that is not God makes God be God,” and that includes the temporal sense where we change “makes” to “made.”
In other words, while we can conceive of the possibility of a being with existence which is not contingent upon something else, this doesn’t mean that we cannot also conceive of the possibility that no such being exists. So I do not think it follows that the whatness of God is not separate from His isness in that sense. These are two completely separate things, but these are only parts in the sense of number 2 above and not in the sense of either 1 or 3. It is, in fact, absurd to say that our whatness and isness are composite part of us. They are merely abstract ideas and it is only as abstract ideas that they are at all separable. In a very real sense our whatness and isness are completely the same thing. Existence precedes essence. We are what we are because we are and it is part of our existence that we grow and make choices to become what we are.
I will answer you on Friday in greater length. Suffice to say though that the idea of the real distinction between essence and existence is completely independend of the ontological argument. Aquinas is (imo unfairly) rather dismissive of it. Every one of Aquins Five Ways leads us to a necessary being which is pure act. The divine attributes are derived from the, state of pure actFreude. The most direct argument for the distinction can be found in the third way or in Fesers version of the aristotelian argument in his book “Five Proofs for the Existence of God“ as well as in his article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways“ where he argues for the doctrine of Divine Conversation.
Now that is something I definitely do not believe in. That is the dreamer god which is far too pathetic to be worthy of consideration – a panentheist god which cannot even create anything real or apart from himself. Anybody can dream, and no matter how detailed the dream may be, it still isn’t creation.
However, as I discovered above, what I can say is the substance of all created beings, which we can perhaps call the potentiality of being itself, ultimately comes from God. In that sense only we can say that God is existence itself – something like… the substance of existence comes from God. The difference from panentheism is that this substance has been truly given to others so that they have an existence of their own. God creates things which are other than Himself and not just things which are an emanation or an extension of Himself. This is because God seeks an authentic relationship. And towards that end, the angels are more like an extension of God while the universe and mankind are a true creation – not only existing by its own rules (the laws of nature) but arising from self-organizing phenomenon. It is our participation in our own creation by our growth and choices that makes for a real relationship rather than just a child playing with dolls.
