RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
July 29, 2019 at 5:49 pm
(This post was last modified: July 29, 2019 at 5:53 pm by Belacqua.)
(July 29, 2019 at 2:41 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: 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.
Yeah, I've tried to be clear that sola scriptura literalists believe in something else. I'm not interested in that, and I think it goes without saying that it's not defensible in any logical way.
For a lot of Christians, and the atheists who love to oppose them, such a God seems to be the only one they care about. I certainly understand activism to oppose such people's influence on public policy decisions.
If the OP were asking "Is Ken Ham's God a logical contradiction?" the answer would be so obvious that I probably wouldn't even respond.
But there is a long and serious train of thought that is better than that, and I don't see why it's so obscure these days. Most of the objections to this tradition that I've seen are based on misunderstandings -- e.g. the endless trouble with what "cause" means in this context. There are fairly well-known authors writing about it. David Bentley Hart and Edward Feser, for example. (This is not an endorsement of every one of their ideas.) So there is some percentage of modern Christians who are aware of this and prefer it to the Ken Ham version. And if the OP is a general question about God, I think it makes sense to work on a tradition that isn't obviously stupid.
The fact that, in your view, the Thomist God doesn't qualify as a God is evidence to me that most of the fights here have a very particular kind of God in mind.
(July 29, 2019 at 3:48 pm)Tom Fearnley Wrote: Hehe.
When I think of God I think of Yahweh or Allah who is supposed to be male.
Yes, I think the literalist types think of God this way.
But again, the philosophical traditions are different. In fact, in Neoplatonic systems like that of Plotinus, gender is a distinction, a separation, that only occurs during the "fall" into materiality. To say that the One or God is one or the other gender wouldn't make sense to them.