(November 28, 2019 at 7:08 am)Grandizer Wrote: Would you consider theistic personalism to be an educated stance on the matter of God? Because that's a major difference in stance among educated Christians.
Ah, good question.
I confess I've never been inspired to read anything by William Lane Craig. Maybe because I associate him with the Kalam argument, which I don't like.
Nor do I know much about personalism. (And I'm not in a position to watch the video right now.) As I understand it, that view doesn't hold to complete simplicity or impassibility. But it also doesn't argue that God is a physical thing with a brain somewhere. Does that sound like a fair description to you?
So I guess I don't know enough to judge. I don't know how they can make the arguments they do. My first reaction is just that they are stretching the definition of "person" farther than it should go. To me, a person has [is] a body.
But I shouldn't be too narrow -- there are educated views of God which aren't strictly classical, either Thomist or Neoplatonic. Anybody who reads Blake, as I do, (or Hegel) has to work on Jacob Boehme also, and he is wildly different from the classics. Yet his description of God as a spirit which develops through the minds and actions of people is a beautiful idea. In this case, God not only has a physical brain but he has a lot of them -- but they happen to be all the brains of all the people.
