RE: I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!
August 8, 2009 at 3:06 pm
(This post was last modified: August 8, 2009 at 3:07 pm by Jon Paul.)
(August 8, 2009 at 2:51 pm)Ace Wrote: Oops! you've just tripped over something there. Can any of my fellow atheists spot it?
You suggested that my arguments suggest the existence of the Easter Bunny equally as much as they do the existence of what I call God. The problem is, I only call God exactly what my argument concludes.
This is the straw man of the "god of arbitrary predication". If I had commited this fallacy, then indeed my God would be epistemically equivalent to the easter bunny.
But the God of my theology is not a God of arbitrary predication. It's a God who is approached gradually, and not called God until the transcendent existence is properly defined and it's necessity explained.
The easter bunny, in this context, is a contingent and non-rational (sentient) being, who is itself a potentiality, which is actualised by the actualising agency of an order of pure actuality, which can contain nothing of potentiality (otherwise it would be impure actuality, not pure actuality), and therefore contains nothing of the spatiotemporal and material realm of existence (e.g. the easter bunny/FSM).
The opposite of arbitrary predication is divine simplicity. For divine simplicity only raises the attributes which are necessary emanants from the very fact of transcendence. If God is an easter bunny, then he does not transcend the spatiotemporal and material realm, and then we are not talking about God, but an actualised potentiality, which is itself contingent upon God.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
-G. K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton