Is this proof of trinity in nature

Faith & Science Conversation
21

My claim did not concern starting points in general. I’m not a relativist. But for mathematical formalisms, you have to accept the fact that many aspects depend on the convention you pick. For a good example, read my recent blog series here on BioLogos to see what stuff someone can do with Special Relativity by using a different convention.

It was my observation that the particular line of reasoning of 3 being special because 1+2=3 depends on a rather arbitrary assumption. If you restrict yourself to the collection of natural numbers, there is still an ambiguity of whether 0 should be included as being the first. See this Wikipedia entry for a discussion of natural numbers. Mathematical definitions of natural numbers vary in whether 0 or 1 is the first, because mathematicians agree that it essentially depends on one’s convention. If that doesn’t convince you, then we have to agree to disagree on that point.

So 1 apple + 1 banana + 1 pineapple = 1 fruit bowl. You see that the sum is different than the parts. But within categories it still works: 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples.

However, that doesn’t work with the Trinity.
The Father = God,
the Son = God,
the Spirit = God.

The Father + the Son + the Spirit = still one God, not three Gods.
Each person of the Trinity is fully God, yet they are God combined. 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 :slight_smile:

I believe the Trinity is a beautiful and logical teaching. But during the only course I ever had in divinity school, I was taught that there is no perfect analogy for the Trinity. So mathematics also fails to describe it. It reminded me of this small video clip on three heresies: modalism, arianism, and partialism.

22

Hi Paul, thanks for joining the conversation!

I believe that approach boils down to modalism or Sabellianism. It is non-trinitarian because it teaches that Father, Son and Holy Spirits are only different “modes” of God, instead of being three distinct Persons.

23

@Casper_Hesp

Yes, I believe that the triunity of the mind-body-spirit is an important “spiritual” truth. It is also an important scientific truth and philosophical truth. Now the words of Jesus are not specifically what makes up a human being, they are quoting the OT about how we are to love YHWH with our whole self. There are definite hints there, but the process is thrown off track by Platonic mind/body dualism.

Again I apologize for the shortness of the analysis of this situation made complicated by history, philosophy, and culture. If you want the full explanation, I will send you my book, because things are not as simple as they might seem.

Of course the mind, body, spirit trinity is different from the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Trinity. If they were the dame we would be God. Still Gen 1:27 states that God made humans in God’s own Image and since the Trinity is God’s Image, how we humans understand God to be, there would seem to be some way we resemble the Trinity.

You say that the Son does not depict the relationships of the Trinity. The relationships of the Trinity is Love or the Holy Spirit. No one can truly say that the Son, Jesus Christ, does not depict divine love.

Jesus is perfectly God and perfectly Human. if as God He is He is Triune, then it follows that as Human He is also triune. Jesus certainly was perfectly Body, Mind, and Spirit.
Luke 2:40 (NIV2011)
40 And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him.
Luke 2:52 (NIV2011)
52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

In these two parallel passages from Luke 2 we see the triune nature of Jesus depicted. Jesus grew and became strong, in stature (body); Jesus was filled with wisdom, and grew in wisdom (mind); and the grace of God was on Him, Jesus grew in favor with God and other people ((spirit.)

Jesus, perfectly God and perfectly Human, is depicted in the Bible as triune, Body, Mind, and Spirit.

24

@Paul_Lucas

Thank you for your response.

Your view does a good job in explaining the unity of God, but not the diversity. We play a number of roles in life, some more dominant than others, but the unity is ourselves, or our self as a Child of God, so it is not a true Trinity where all Persons are equal and interdependent.

In my view roles are important because we need to use our minds, bodies, and spirits differently to adjust to the demands of each role, but we are still the same person for good or for no good.

25

@Casper_Hesp

Maybe there is an ambiguity for you, but I see no ambiguity. For instance, The Wiki article says that natural numbers are used in counting. No problem.

Then it says that ordinal numbers are used in counting. Now I had not heard of the word zeroth and I was surprised that it is a word, however when researching it I cannot find where it is really used in counting or mathematics. Therefore I do not see how 0 using the definitions you gave me through the Wikipedia can be called a natural number.

Most people know that 0 plays a special role in math different from 1, 2, 3, etc. If you can show me when 0 plays an important role in counting in the natural world, I will drop my claim that 1,2,3 are all special numbers that play key roles in understanding our world. Three important because the triangle is the basis of geometry which is the key to math and philosophy.

26

The negated existential quantifier, which is essentially the same as counting 0, plays an important role in formal semantics and logic.

27

Some computer programming languages start counting with zero rather than 1.

As to what qualifies as a natural number (1, 2, 3, …) or a whole number (0, 1, 2, 3, …) or an integer or a real, etc., those are all mere conventions agreed upon by mathematicians and would have no bearing on theological significance.

As to the importance of zero in everyday counting, if I owe the bank $50 (meaning I have -$50.00) according to the bank, and then I pay the bank $50 against that debt (adding +50 to -50), I sure do hope that the bank’s computers are willing to recognize and apply that very important number: 0 to the status of my debt. I would be very unhappy if they insisted that there is no zero meaning my account must always remain unsettled one way or the other! So zero is a very real number (in every sense of that word!) And it was a brilliantly used it as a placeholder (by the Babylonians, I believe) whereas other civilizations may have first recognized as a number in its own right. Had the Romans caught on to that, they wouldn’t have been saddled with their ‘zeroless’ Roman numeral system. Try doing arithmetic in that sometime!

28

@Mervin_Bitikofer

Thank you for your response.

The question is not whether 0 exists, but what it is is. A similar question seems to be whether white and black are colors? Your are probably familiar with the answer that they are not. They are the presence or absence of color. White is the presence of color speaking about light, while it is the absence of color when talking about pigments. Black is the absence of color when talking about light and the presence of color when talking about pigments. Both are ‘real,’ but not color.

0 marks the boundary between positive and negative numbers. Certainly that is an important role in our mathematical system, but whether that makes it a natural number is something else.

Computer language and symbolic logic are important areas, but they are not what I am focusing on, which is the basic mathematical structure of reality.

@Christy wrote:
The negated existential quantifier, which is essentially the same as counting 0, plays an important role in formal semantics and logic._

With all due respect I could not verify this information on internet. The Wiki article did not refer to “the negated existential qualifier” nor could I find it with a search. The question is not the reality of the negative, but whether 0 is more than a boundary between the positive and the negative.

29

One is not a prime number.

30

Quantifier not qualifier. The wiki referred to the existential quantifier, ∃(x) “there exists an X,” which when negated, ¬∃(x), means “there is no X.”

All natural languages represent quantifiers with words. ‘No’ ‘Not any’ 'None" are representations of the negated existential quantifier in English. It denotes an empty set. The empty set is defined as “the unique set having no elements; its size or cardinality (count of elements in a set) is zero.” I just bring it up because you seemed to be saying that zero doesn’t play a role in counting in the natural world, when it clearly does in language and logic.

The empty set is a way of counting zero X: “While the empty set is a standard and widely accepted mathematical concept, it remains an ontological curiosity, whose meaning and usefulness are debated by philosophers and logicians. The empty set is not the same thing as nothing; rather, it is a set with nothing inside it and a set is always something. This issue can be overcome by viewing a set as a bag—an empty bag undoubtedly still exists. Darling (2004) explains that the empty set is not nothing, but rather “the set of all triangles with four sides, the set of all numbers that are bigger than nine but smaller than eight, and the set of all opening moves in chess that involve a king.”[4]” (From the linked wikipedia page above.)

31

Zero is not a natural number, Roger. “Natural numbers” (or “counting numbers”) are formally and conventionally designated to be the positive integers which begin with 1. (And as Steve noted, 1 is not prime. Primes are positive integers that have exactly two distinct factors.)

If you want an interesting discussion about numbers that are of questioned existence, look up things like “Dedekindian cuts”, which will bring you to a question like “What is the smallest positive number?”; now there is a number nobody can name except to refer to it with some designation like “infinitesimal”. Look into that and you can begin to appreciate how infinity isn’t just about “big” but also disappears down the logarithmic scale the other way into “small”.

32

Some authors define natural numbers as non-negative integers (0, 1, 2, 3, … ) and others as positive integers (1, 2, 3, …). Therefore, zero actually is a natural number under the first convention. See also the Wikipedia article on natural numbers

And here I was hoping that we had finally put the zero discussion to rest… Because I have zero interest in it :P.

33

@Merv

You need to read the discussion from the beginning to understand what I was saying. My statement about numbers was the same as yours, natural numbers begin with 1. Others claimed that it can begin with 0, which as far as I can tell is not true.

@glipsnort Now it seems that for some reason that 1 is not considered a prime number when it fits the definition of a prime number since it can be divided only by itself and one. Certainly it is not a composite number. Maybe it is super prime, which would not negate my point that these three numbers which begin our system, 1, 2, 3 are special and have unique roles and qualities.

34

Ahhh, Casper – that just ain’t natural! :fearful: Nevertheless, thanks for the heads-up! I wasn’t aware there was any kind of earlier convention on this question that proceeded the current one as taught in every textbook I’ve ever seen. I didn’t read the wikipedia article entirely, but it didn’t appear in its first paragraphs to give much back history on the “zero as a natural number” convention.

There are some things textbooks do that we have good reasons to reject for the sake of consistency (such as my own, otherwise-good geometry text which inexplicably settles for the foolish and inconsistent convention that parallelograms are not special cases of trapezoids). So far be it from me to think that popular convention, even when reinforced by evolving dictionaries, stands as the only or final word on something.

In that vein of thought, Roger, there is a good reason why one cannot be a prime number, (and why I carefully noted that every prime must have precisely two distinct factors --which one does not). And that is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic which essentially notes that every positive integer > 1 has its own unique signature of prime factors, and that there is a one-to-one correspondence with each of these unique sets of primes and the number they multiply to. But if 1 was considered prime, it could be added willy-nilly to any of these signatures. I.e. it is meaningful to say that eight is two cubed, but not as meaningful or useful to add that it is also two cubed times 1 or two cubed times 1 squared. The one adds nothing useful to that prime factorization list, and this is why the modern convention has (in this case) wisely settled the matter correctly.

1 Like
35

@Relates

Regarding the specialness or uniqueness of 1, 2, or 3 – of course every number has unique properties. 217 has the unique property of being the only integer that immediately follows 216. Every number will have “bragging rights” unique to itself, and some numbers (like 1, 2, or 3) may even have a few more than the others. But don’t look to mathematics (or its not-always inspired popular conventions) to be by itself the foundation of any theology.

1 Like
36

Not a worry, however God speaks to us in many ways through nature as well as through the Bible. We need to make the most of all these ways of learning Who God is, rather than reflexively dismissing them.

37

@Christy

What I said and what articles say is that people begin counting with 1 and not with 0, and therefore 0 is not a natural number, that is, it is not the starting place for counting, while 1 is.

This does not mean that 0 does not have any meaning or plays no role in math, just that it is not the first positive integer. What others are saying is that some conventions do begin with 0 and thus this means that 0 is a natural number under these conventions. What that means, I do not know.

My position is clear, that 0 marks the boundary between + and - numbers. One, two, and three are special numbers that that begin our mathematical system.

38

Hi Roger,
I have been ruminating on your ideas, but I still think that the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit cannot in any way be comparable to any triunity that may or may not exist between body, mind, and spirit. As far as I can see, the differences are crucial. To say that the supposed unity of body-mind-spirit is meant as an image of the Trinity would do violence to the doctrine of the Trinity, in my understanding.

The Persons of the Trinity are co-existing and co-eternal in perfect unity, yet distinct from each other. Such equality is not found in mind-body-spirit. My current body is temporary but my spirit is eternal. My body is not me, my mind is not me, my spirit is me.

39

@Casper_Hesp

Sorry to disappoint you, but the Apostle’s Creed which most Christians accept says. I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body, meaning that the Body (as well as the mind) is eternal also.

On the other hand the NT never uses the phrase “eternal soul” or “eternal spirit” if that is what you are referring to. We receive eternal life as a gift from God, not a spirit or soul that is eternal by nature. Then too we receive eternal life when we are saved, so eternal life does not begin in heaven, but on earth when we are body, mind, and spirit. We are all temporary by nature, only God makes us ete4rnal through God the Father’s Spirit of Love for us through God the Son. .

The Greek mind was predisposed to see the material as inferior. For that reason some Greeks thought that the Father/Creator inferior to the Son/Logos, and the body inferior to the spirit/mind/soul. They questioned the resurrection of Jesus. When Paul defended the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of the body, he was defending the body as equal to the mind and spirit.

The Jewish mind was predisposed to discount the spiritual and emphasize the moral, actions over words,.

40

This does not disappoint me at all :). Our resurrected bodies will be eternal, like Jesus’ body after the Resurrection. But our current bodies are mortal…

2 Corinthians 5:

1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, 3 because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4 For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

How can you say that the spirit is not eternal? Earlier, you said:

So if you have received eternal life and you think that your spirit is life itself, then your spirit must be eternal according to your ideas. This does not hold for the current “physical framework” or body, which can be destroyed until the Second Coming of Christ.