Why does Pure Actuality necessitate no potentiality?
God is love. Love is creative…genitive. Thus, God creates. What wasn’t now is. Because God generates potential.
God is self-sufficient. That doesn’t mean that God cannot realize potential.
Here’s a potentially heretical thought—we assume, because of the influence of Greek philosophy, that God cannot change. What if Greek philosophy’s influence is a distortion? We change in encounter with others. God created humanity for relationship. Not because he was lonely, but because he is Love.
This is not pseudo-relationship. As humans we realize identity and potential existentially in encounter with others. With other people. We realize ultimate identity and potential in encounter with the Person, God himself.
God created us as other. He is not a narcissist. He truly loves and love is extended to other. Is it not possible for God to realize potential over time in encounter with his own creation? To say “no” is to deny that true relationship is occurring.
Pure actuality means complete in being - there is nothing missing and nothing can ve added.
The original question asked for an argument for monotheism by a philosophical position not a biblical position.
The question seems to be Christianity vs. atheism in the context of the One and the Many. In that context atheism is Many, while Christianity is One, the the Father, And, the Holy Spirit ,and the Many, the Son. God is One, but God is more than One. God is also And and Many.
What atheism is repudiating is the One, which leaves it with nothing, chaos.
I don’t think Christians believe God is one and there is one God because they have reasoned to that position from philosophical or natural arguments. They believe that is who God has revealed himself to be.
Yes. I don’t think any Christians should feel obligated to defend conclusions that arose from certain premises about epistemology and sources of truth according to other people’s totally different premises about epistemology and sources of truth. People don’t get argued into Christian faith. They encounter God personally and recognize him as the God the Bible reveals and respond in faith and become Christians. Those who never encounter God or who encounter God in a way they think is incompatible with the testimony of the Christian Bible don’t.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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My assumption of it has nothing to do with Greek philosophy. It’s pure common sense in the face of the greatest fact of all: Eternity.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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How does this follow from reality being coterminous with divinity?
If reality is coterminous with reality, then either good and evil do not exist as such or God is both good and evil.
More complicated. Some would argue that Christianity is panentheist…or, at least, aiming towards panentheism. If the latter, than the “evil problem” will be completely dealt with before that target is achieved.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Well reality is coterminous with reality, so either good and evil do not exist as such or God is both good and evil. By what logic I don’t know.
I’m not at all arguing from the starting point that God is coterminous with reality. God created…his creation is “outside of himself.”
That is a contradiction of pantheism. Pantheism presumes that God is coterminous with reality—which creates the problem of either “no good or evil” or God being “both good and evil.”
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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