(September 9, 2020 at 8:36 pm)Grandizer Wrote:(September 9, 2020 at 7:25 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: If memory serves, Aquinas expressed it as God can't do anything that is against his nature. It was a pretty tidy position for Aquinas to take since, for the purposes of the argument, he defined what God's nature was.
If you make up the rules as you go, you can never lose the game.
Boru
Well, yeah, not sure if that's a deviation from saying that God cannot lie because God cannot deviate from the good (i.e., cannot do what is against its nature). For Aquinas, God's goodness and God's nature are intertwined.
By which Aquinas is presuming that all lies are necessarily evil, something I don’t find especially convincing (see Twain’s ‘Was It Heaven? Or Hell?’).
That’s really beside the point, which is that Aquinas, like most theologians, chooses to define God in terms suited to confirm his picture of God: I don’t want to believe that God lies, so I must believe that God is intrinsically good and that lies are intrinsically bad, therefore God is unable to lie (scriptural evidence to the contrary).
As I said, if you set up your parameters based on little more than your own biases, you can literally ‘prove’ anything.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
