RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
July 29, 2019 at 2:41 pm
(This post was last modified: July 29, 2019 at 2:56 pm by LadyForCamus.)
(July 29, 2019 at 3:06 am)Belaqua Wrote: Good questions! I like working on this kind of thing.
One problem that usually comes up when we discuss things like this: there are different conceptions of God among the different monotheisms, and even among Christians. In particular, the Christians at your local church down the street are unlikely to have worked on questions like this one. They are more interested in fellowship and how to behave and those good things. The important Christian thinkers who have tried to answer have reached conclusions that generally sound unfamiliar to the rank and file.
This means that when I try to describe what the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition says, or the Neoplatonic Christians say, people are quick to tell me that no Christian they have ever talked to agrees with those guys. Still, unless we want to say that Augustine and Aquinas aren't real Christians, this is something we can look at.
Well, the reason for this push back is because the Christian god of the Bible is demonstrably not the god of Thomism. The biblical god is a thinking, considering, conscious, active, person-like being who has desires, emotions, a specific plan for every human’s mortal life, and the ability to communicate its thoughts and wishes to us. These qualities seem entirely antithetical to the Thomist “god”, which doesn’t seem to be able to do or be anything. I’m not even sure in what way it qualifies as a god at all.
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.