The Resurrection

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm going to remember that one the next time I'm late with a mortgage payment.

[arewethereyet]

Try this instead. Name for me three things that are simultaneously abstract and concrete.

House and home, dad and father, job and career

Try again.

Those absolutely do not fit as abstract and concrete.

You know that though.

[Belacqua]

Just saying that your man-god doesn't make sense to me.

So, an abstract concept like happiness and a concrete concept like male, stop making sense to you the moment a single entity possess both?

Yeah, I don't understand the problem with this. We can say that a person is a good man. "Good" being an attribute, a thing knowable through judgment and the mind. And "man" being a material object. They can go together.


It might be better in the long run, instead of using "abstract" and "concrete," to use the traditional terms "intelligible" and "sensible." (Intelligible meaning of course "known only through the mind" and sensible meaning "known through the senses.") So numbers, for example, are intellligible. We can extrapolate their existence from sensible objects (two people, two books) but we never perceive a number itself through the senses -- we never perceive "two" itself. 

Things like justice and kindness are intelligible. Goodness is intelligible. We can perceive examples of these things as embodied in the material world but never perceive them in themselves. 

Similarly, God cannot be known through the senses but only through the mind. Since the time of Plato, it has been said that God has no material existence but exists, like numbers, like goodness, as a purely intelligible thing. We can know something of what God is like by seeing goodness, justice, etc., in embodied cases, but never see the Good itself. God is goodness itself, not a good thing. 

Then there are two points that are necessary for the incarnation. The first is kenosis -- which says that Jesus, though the incarnation of God, is also a diminution of God's full nature. In his embodied form, God cannot be the Good itself, the Form of the Good, but only the best possible human. The second is that Jesus is said to be the best possible human in every way, since he embodied the goodness, justice, mercy, etc. -- the qualities of goodness of which God is the intelligible end and source -- more than any other person could. 

The framework in which this explanation holds is that everything in the world is an emanation of the Goodness of God, so all of us already embody God's qualities to some degree. Some more than others. Jesus is like a limit-case -- the extreme example of what it is like to embody God's goodness in the maximum possible form. This is what it means to be divine -- to embody God's nature in this way. But it is a difference in degree and not kind, since all of us (according to this theory) are emanated from God, and embody to some degree his goodness.

The usual objection to this type of theology is to point to literalist readings of the Bible, or different versions of theology that don't allow for this reading. But these objections are like a Gish Gallop, jumping from one system to another in order to offer objections that aren't relevant for the theory at hand.

[Alan V]

What you say may be true of philosophers, but it is not true of empiricists and materialists, who define knowledge more in terms of probabilities rather than certainties.

Empiricists and materialists are just types of philosophers. 

A generally-accepted perspective is that such approaches emerged from philosophy but have taken on a life of their own as they have been confirmed and expanded.  They are now best embodied in scholarship and the sciences, no longer in philosophy.

Philosophy has every reason to be proud of her children. She just doesn't control their lives anymore.

[Paleophyte]

Try this instead. Name for me three things that are simultaneously abstract and concrete.

House and home, dad and father, job and career

Nice try, but note how you needed two different words for each? You can do it with just one, but that's merely an example of language being bendy.

Home may describe either a physical building or the feelings that we attach to that location. It can be both in linguistic terms because typically you need the one to have the other. Dig a bit deeper and you find out which of those you can sell as realty.

Father may describe either a person or the relationships. Again, it isn't always the same individual. I've known a couple of people who preferred "sperm donor" for the biological entity and "father" for somebody with no genetic relationship. It's pretty clear that the word can be used to describe one or both.

Try again though. We're looking for something that is simultaneously both concrete and abstract without switching definitions.

[Paleophyte]

Empiricists and materialists are just types of philosophers.

Philosophers are just types of fish. If you find a philosopher on land please return it to a suitable body of water before it asphyxiates. Remember, these are wild animals and shouldn't be kept as pets.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Nice try, but note how you needed two different words for each? 

And?

[Paleophyte]

So, an abstract concept like happiness and a concrete concept like male, stop making sense to you the moment a single entity possess both?

Yeah, I don't understand the problem with this. We can say that a person is a good man. "Good" being an attribute, a thing knowable through judgment and the mind. And "man" being a material object. They can go together.

OK, I can forgive John not seeing this but you have a philosophy background. I know that you know the difference between a concrete and an abstract and the difference between a qualifier and an essential.

If we say that "Bob is a good man." we aren't claiming that Bob is made out of pure goodness. Bob can wake up on the wrong side of the bed, have a bad hair day, and still be Bob. If Bob wakes up no longer a (hu)man then he's probably not Bob anymore.

There are concretes like bricks, people, dogs, flowers, air, etc. and then there are abstracts like kindness, honesty, and numbers. I can bonk you on the noggin with a brick, but will never manage to smack you with pi. Trying to be both is a logical contradiction.

It might be better in the long run, instead of using "abstract" and "concrete," to use the traditional terms "intelligible" and "sensible." (Intelligible meaning of course "known only through the mind" and sensible meaning "known through the senses.")

Because both of those terms have been given other meanings that muddy the conversation. The definition's a good one though as it exposes the contradiction. How can something simultaneously be known only through the mind and known through the senses as well?

It's all a product of a long history of theology produced by making shit up and running with it and only thinking about the consequences after it's become canon. You'd expect that from the very organic processes that produce religions but not so much of a Divine Creator. It gets us a whole slew of contradictory absurdities typically bundled as "mysteries" including Three-in-One God trinitarian doctrine and the whole 'rent yourself to yourself cheap for the weekend to appease your own wrath' silliness that gets mistaken for a sacrifice. Pretty much on par for a pack of squabbling mortals but falling seriously short of anything divine.

[Paleophyte]

Nice try, but note how you needed two different words for each? 

And?

Just a tell that you're talking about two different things rather than one.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Just a tell that you're talking about two different things rather than one.

These words do not describe two different things. They describe the same thing in two different ways, one abstract and one concrete. What is your argument here? That a house cannot be a home?