RE: Your position on naturalism
November 25, 2016 at 7:16 am
(This post was last modified: November 25, 2016 at 7:20 am by Ignorant.)
(November 25, 2016 at 5:23 am)bennyboy Wrote: Are you defining God, or saying one of His aspects or properties? [1] It would seem strange for "being, itself" to manifest as a burning bush, or to play party tricks with jugs of water. [2] It would make much more sense for "a" being to do so. [3]
But "being" is a -ness that should be global-- any individual being, if it is separate, should not be "being, itself." [4] And since Jesus had place locality, and spoke as an individual entity rather than a global property, it would seem that Jesus must have been a man, somewhat like me, and cannot have been God in the sense that you are here defining it. [5]
1) Well, I don't think god is definable in a full sense. Like I've said elsewhere in the thread, the "closest" we get are things like, "being, itself", "goodness, itself", "truth, itself", "love, itself" etc. These are not aspects or properties. These are intended to say something about god's nature, but not everything. Saying everything about it is impossible.
2) YES! These are very strange things, indeed! There is a reason the Greco-Roman culture thought it was foolishness
! "But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor 1:23). But to say it is strange is not to say it is something being-itself can't do. Even so, those things involve Judeo-Christian revelation, and so they move beyond the purely philosophical description of nature and god. I am not sure that is where this thread intended to go.3) I'm not sure I follow you. What about a-being lends itself to doing strange things, over and against being-itself?
4) Yep. I agree.
5) Welcome to the central Christian mystery of the Incarnation: Being-itself united a human-nature to itself. Jesus is being-itself united to a human-being in a single person. It's the strangest of things. Being-itself lives, speaks, acts, IS... ALL as the man united to-itself as a single, divinely human person. Jesus is BOTH being-itself and a human-being, united in a person.
Had you encountered Jesus in 1st century Palestine, there would have been no purely rational way, in principle, to conclude that Jesus is being-itself in additition to being human. That would require faith. But the fact that such a movement requires faith would not therefore mean that "being, itself" doesn't exist.
