RE: Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency
November 11, 2017 at 10:00 pm
(This post was last modified: November 11, 2017 at 10:06 pm by datc.)
(November 11, 2017 at 9:10 pm)Whateverist Wrote: So God is the totality of Plato's ideal forms, or is He kind of like a watch maker except he just turns out the ideal forms and those then give rise to the rest?
God as Father is an intellect, a subject knowing, whose (ideal) thought as Holy Spirit comprehends Himself as (real) Son, the object known. There is an identity between these three, as well as between them and God's act of self-understanding.
All created things pre-exist in God as ideas that God knows through His own essence. Every possible creature is God shrunk in some precise way into finitude. Since God knows His own perfection, He also knows how it can be participated in by creatures in some sort of likeness of God.
God's essence is supremely knowable in itself but mysterious to us, and abstracta like possible worlds and propositions that humans can grasp in their natural state (as opposed to state of glory while staring at God in heaven directly) hardly exhaust Him.
(November 11, 2017 at 9:51 pm)bennyboy Wrote: datc, is God a coherent idea at all? Or are you going to look for something mysterious or wonderful, and dub it "God"?
For sure, it's a pretty big mystery why anything exists at all. If you call the philosophical quantity that allows for existence "God," then that's fine. But if you are going to argue that it is sentient, has goals, and watches disapprovingly while Catholic teens masturbate in the shower, then you've gone astray.
My methodology is that I build up the idea of God slowly and step by step, one proof after another. At the beginning, there are no assumptions as to what God is at all; in other words, prior to the proofs, the term "God" for me has no meaning.
(November 11, 2017 at 9:54 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: It's not a philosophical doctrine. Have god show up, in my presence, in a manor convincing enough (providing tangible evidence) for me to believe it exists in reality. Not, this must represent god, or that can only be because of god, or here is a proof for god.
Perhaps God is so different from creatures that it would be unbecoming for him to just "show up."
In addition, of course, Christ did show up. You are very demanding.
