(July 14, 2011 at 5:01 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: I think you're mixing apples with oranges here. Either you're addressing Divine Simplicity or you're including a wider expression of human belief.
Now I'm CERTAIN that you don't understand what you claim to believe, but I'd love to see you prove me wrong, so;
In your own words, describe the concept of divine simplicity, in detail.
fr0d0 Wrote:Divine Simplicity isn't a doctrine as far as I'm aware. It's a proposition.
It's both... All doctrines are propositions, necessarily. Aquinas was the one who devised the term as far as I know, and he referred to it as the 'doctrine of divine simplicity'. Seeing as you specifically raised Aquinas as representing your views you should accept his label, no? In either case it's not important whether or not you want to call it a doctrine.
Quote:I simply don't think that you're addressing the subject accurately. Your summations don't relate to any known hypothesis, apart from your own. I am powerless to comment on an argument of your own making.
The majority of my summations were taken directly from resources on the matter, as I demonstrated when I presented you quote after quote showing that what you descibed as DDS was EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what DDS is intended to convey.
Like I asked above, define the concept yourself and I will address that, I'm genuinely not concerned about whether or not your concept is the same as the general idea. Define it yourself and then we can see whether or not your conception of DDS is in any way a refutation of my initial claim, that the nature of information contradicts the notion and if God has a plan he is necessarily not 'simple'.
fr0d0 Wrote:I was attempting to widen the scope away from DS.
Which is completely off topic. Can you please stick to addressing the argument at hand?
Quote:If God is 1st cause, then he can't be composed of more than one part. He is the first part. He's dependant on nothing. God is uncaused, so nothing could cause anything to unite.
white = red = yellow = blue = green
~or~
white = all colours together?
White is a composite by definition, you do not have white without the merger of quantifiable and independent wavelengths - In order to see white you must be looking at a surface that reflects all other colours in roughly equal amounts - Analogy fail, I'm afraid.
By 1st cause I assume you are referring to the first state-of-affairs to exist? To say he 'can't be composed of more than one part' is I believe easily demonstrated to be false - That is the entire purpose of my argument addressing information - You are still back where you were at the beginning of this discussion, Asserting divine simplicity without addressing the refutation presented - You need to show not only that it is logically possible for information to be reduced to a singular but also that this singular is identical to God (to avoid making him composite).
Take one of the ideas in the bible you believe was communicated by God such as John 3:16, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life' , given his omniscience he necessarily had this idea in the first state-of-affairs - If you can demonstrate that this information, which I maintain necessarily has parts, can be reduced to a singular 'entity' and this singular is identical to God then you have refuted my argument.
fr0d0 Wrote:Not in my understanding. I may be wrong. But that's how I understand it.
So God does not communicate ideas? BRILLIANT
you've just destroyed your entire worldview! If God does not communicate ideas then the Bible contains no information coming from God, it is simply a book of what people claimed to know - You must therefore concede that you believe in all this Christian nonsense simply because it is in a book written by people who claimed to know something. It also means that any ideas that Jesus communicated were just words by a man, after all if God didn't communicate any ideas then nothing Jesus said came from God - So you essentially worship a man who claimed to know something, you believe in eternal life because some dude claimed to know something - None of it at all came from a God because he doesn't communicate ideas.If you accept that God communicates ideas then your God cannot be simple because he has a plan that takes a great deal of information to describe, the amount of information needed to describe an object/entity or state of affairs is a direct representation of it's complexity meaning the chances of the first state-of-affairs being a God is extremely low relative to the alternative hypotheses!
Either way, you're fucked.
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