I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!

[Eilonnwy]

*sigh* I guess I'll dive into this one. *holds nose*

It is rather the human intellect which is only analogous to the divine intellect. The human intellect is a complex intellect, composed of two parts, the active and the potential intellect; just like we exist in a realm composed in complexity of potentiality and actuality. Whereas God is complete non-composite; completely simple - in a term, purely actuality, and God has only the purely active intellect, and is not informed by potential intellect as he is transcendent to time and is himself the apprehensive actualiser of all things. In other words, the human intellect falls completely short of the divine simplicity in the divine intellect, and isn't comparable beyond the remote analogy of intellect that allows us to realise this great differentiation. The human intellect has thus been developed in the universe in complexity and composition between potentiality and actuality, a teleological fact of generation (final causality/natural selection), which God has ordained, in creating humanity in his likeness, with intellect; that humanity might be as gods.

So you claim to have special knowledge about God's intellectual mind after you claim that he is transcendent, which essentially means you cannot know anything at all about god. Nice.

You can't have it both ways.

[LukeMC]

You can't have it both ways.

Oh yes he can O.o

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You would have to point out in which sense God is complex; because this doctrine of a "complex" God is categorically rejected by the orthodox Christian understanding of God

And no, God is not "a mind at the beginning of the universe". You still haven't understood transcendence. God exists, wholly transcendent to the temporal dimension, and to any temporal designation.

That God is of an intellectual nature does not make him complex. Intellection really means apprehension; and apprehension is an abstract actualisation of an either abstract or material object, however incomplete we actualise our apprehensions as human intellects. God, being pure actuality, is the apprehender and followingly actualiser of all things; his act of intellection is thus identified with his real actualisation (divine simplicity).

We must distinguish between the potential intellect, also called the passive intellect, and the active intellect, to further demonstrate and understand the differentiation between a simple (divine) and a composite/complex (human) intellect. The active intellect is that by which we apprehend the essence of something, however incompletely; when I see a dog and think, “That’s a dog,” it is the active intellect at work. The passive, also called the possible/potential intellect, is like the intellect’s memory. If I see a dog, and I’ve never seen or heard of a dog before, I apprehend it with the active intellect as some kind of animal I’ve never seen before. Gradually, as I learn about dogs, all of the things that go along with being a dog accumulate in the passive/potential intellect and become available to be apprehended by the active intellect. Then, when I see a dog I can move quickly from “this animal before me” to “Man’s best friend.” Now, Gods intellect is one which we call purely active intellect, because whatever he actively apprehends (abstractly actualises) the essence of, he does so in a manner which is itself defining for that essence; and thus, he does not need a potential intellect, like humans, to inform him with the intelligible forms achieved through sensory faculties and sensory knowledge of the already-actualised world, that he himself has actualised by apprehension.

We can see that, there could be no potential or possible intellect in him, exactly because there is nothing potential with which to inform him, apart from his own actualisation of it which thus informs it, the actuality of that essence or thing, rather than the other way around. No potential knowledge for humans isn't ultimately a result of Gods actualising apprehension. He is not a human mind; he is not intellectual in the same sense as a human is intellectual.

It is rather the human intellect which is only analogous to the divine intellect. The human intellect is a complex intellect, composed of two parts, the active and the potential intellect; just like we exist in a realm composed in complexity of potentiality and actuality. Whereas God is complete non-composite; completely simple - in a term, purely actuality, and God has only the purely active intellect, and is not informed by potential intellect as he is transcendent to time and is himself the apprehensive actualiser of all things. In other words, the human intellect falls completely short of the divine simplicity in the divine intellect, and isn't comparable beyond the remote analogy of intellect that allows us to realise this great differentiation. The human intellect has thus been developed in the universe in complexity and composition between potentiality and actuality, a teleological fact of generation (final causality/natural selection), which God has ordained, in creating humanity in his likeness, with intellect; that humanity might be as gods.

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Are "active" and "potential" intellect psychological concepts or philosophical wankery? It seems all of your actuality/potentially concepts are merely mental self-fondling which have no relation to anything anybody claims true about the universe. That things can potentially happen does not necessitate a being which transcends this rule and is the source of all logic and truth. On an interesting note of curiosity, I wonder why the world hasn't latched onto your flawless logical progression...

Also, did God have a choice in creating the universe and did he mean for it to be the way that it is? If so, the way you altered the definition of "intellect" to suit your purpose was fallacious, as God would have to be intellectual in the sense that he can reason, plan, solve problems, handle abstract concepts, etc. If God already know everything he needed to know because he is "pure actuality" then why did he choose to make us? Boredom? For God to have made us either requires that God has desires or God had/has no choice. If it is that God has desires then you'll have to reason me this. If it is that God had no choice, this is not the murderous God of the OT who revealed himself to people and answers prayers and all the rest- he is a deistic God, basically the universe.

[Tiberius]

I'm gonna leave this thread now. I've said my bit, shown how TAG is just ludicrous (sorry JP, I don't buy the "it's not a circular argument" when 2 seconds later you showed how it was!).

You claim TAG has confirmed the Christian worldview and falsified the atheist one; it has done neither. The best I can say about TAG is that it is such a confusing muddle of philosophical terms that it tries to hide the fact that it presupposes Christianity in order to try and prove Christianity. If you want to prove something, start from no presupposition and present your evidence. If you can't do that, you have a worthless argument.

If you want to prove the laws of gravity, you don't presuppose they exist. You define clearly what they are, and do tests that the claims apply to. The result of the tests (the evidence) should either confirm or reject the claim.

[Dopethrone]

Allrigth. Here's one for you, maybe it has been asked before but I can't be bothered to read 38 pages of text on a flickering computer screen. Do you think it's right to scare children into believing in some sort of mythical being through storys such as the one about Sodom and Gomorra? To teach them that if they follow strict rules and guidelines taken from stories wich were after being passed on orally from generation to generation and then compiled in a book wich may be incomplete or biassed by the views of the human who wrote it all down they won't burn in hell?
Do you believe that your religion is the only right one? And if so? What happens to the people who believe differently, let's say: Muslims, Atheists, Jews and Hindu?
Do you believe that we as mankind are created by god to worship him? Or did he intend us to live our lives to the fullest and be the best we can be?

In short, what do you (J.P) believe?

[Jon Paul]

Like I say there's a definition but as far as I know there is no law despite your claim that it exists

Theres no law? The law of contradiction is just imagination, isn't true? In that case, there is a law of contradiction, because saying that there isn't is invoking it by positing a contradiction between there not being a law of contradiction and there being one.

If you deny the existence of the law of contradiction, also, you won't have a problem that I burn and beat you, because being burnt and beaten is obviously the same as not being burnt and beaten, unless there is a contradiction, a mutual exclusion between two exclusive things, in which case the law of contradiction holds true.

Again, do you deny the basic experience that tells us the truth of the law of contradiction - that I exist, and cannot both exist in the same sense and the same time, and not exist in the same sense and the same time? If you deny this, then you are the one being rhetorical and wasting time on definitions and semantics, to deny the obvious fact that of this law.

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If it is that God had no choice, this is not the murderous God of the OT who revealed himself to people and answers prayers and all the rest-

Whether he "desires", that depends, like so many other things we say of God, on how you are using this word, you can surely use it symbolically of God as you can of creatures. But as with many such accomodative symbolisms, they are anthropomorphic, and don't apply if we are to be technical. If you are to be technical, then God does not desire; him, being subsistent pure actuality, has no need to desire, because he needs nothing outside of himself, and anything outside of himself exists only as a free charity of his actualisation. The most relevant sense that it's true to say he desires, is in the sense that he wills that other intellectual agents follow his will and come into communion with his being insofar as he has actualised/created intellectual agents that realise that he is the highest being, pure actuality and therefore pure good and pure perfection, for whom this communion is a possibility; but he does not need it, and so does not desire it in the anthropomorphic sense of a survival necessity.

For God to have made us either requires that God has desires or God had/has no choice.

Since you are probably using "desire" in a technical and narrow sense (rather than a symbolical sense, in which case it would be sufficient), then you are wrong. God does not need to desire to create, because nothing restrains God from creating, since nothing exists outside of himself except that which he wills into existence - that which he actualises. That he has given everything outside of himself it's existence -actualised it- means that God is the only agent with a say; the only agent with a choice, the only entity which could have a choice, because any other entity is itself the result of his actualisation of it. So no, you are wrong; God is not restrained by something outside of himself, because he is pure actuality - transcendent-; and therefore he does not need to desire anything because he needs nothing, and he is the only entity that has a choice as to whether anything outside of him shall come into existence.

he is a deistic God, basically the universe.

First of all, "deistic" comes from "Deus", which is simply the Latin form of Greek "Theos", from which theism comes from; boht terms mean God, and nothing else. The God of pure actuality is certainly not the universe, for the universe is impure actuality.

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You claim TAG has confirmed the Christian worldview and falsified the atheist one; it has done neither. The best I can say about TAG is that it is such a confusing muddle of philosophical terms that it tries to hide the fact that it presupposes Christianity in order to try and prove Christianity.

It doesn't presuppose Christianity anymore than it presupposes atheism, before it has realised that the epistemic structure of atheism is irrational. And if you grant this conclusion, then you are obviously saying that atheism is wrong, and so you would never grant it to begin with. Again, that is not circularity, it's a conclusion which didn't exist before the argument had weighed the options.

If you want to prove the laws of gravity, you don't presuppose they exist. You define clearly what they are, and do tests that the claims apply to. The result of the tests (the evidence) should either confirm or reject the claim.

If you want to prove the laws of gravity, you do presuppose that they exist in order to make predictions about the universe from the premise of them, that can then be tested, like is done with so many other theories. But gravity has nothing to do with the epistemology of the TAG, so please, stop dodging it.

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So you claim to have special knowledge about God's intellectual mind after you claim that he is transcendent,

No. We know that God has active intellect because he is pure actuality; active intellect consists exactly of his ontologically informative actualisation, or apprehension, as in the abstract actualisation that intellection consists of, rather than a potential intellect abstractly actualising things informed by already-existing ontological entities, which is not possible for pure actuality, since pure actuality is the informer of the existence of those things, rather than being even partially the informed one, like human intellects.

You cannot get past your belief in God with this answer. This answer is draped in hypo-thesis. It is based in the mythology of God and not one iota of factual evidence.
You argue your case for God from your left brain, chopping and sorting your case into seperate bits, while defending your arguement from your Global minded right brain. This is highly narcissistic and why you are being told your arguement is circular and going nowhere. It's equivalent to playing Dodgeball with someone who has one set of rules for when I throw the ball and a different set of rules that favor you for when you throw the ball.

Again, worthless answers, since the only argument which someone accused of being circular was the orthodox TAG (which is not circular, unless it's conclusion is true; namely that Christianity is a necessary presupposition; and if that's true, then the atheist wrong, so obviously no atheist will grant that to be true to begin with).

What would it mean to you to convince me that God as you know "him" exists?
If you could convince every atheist and agnostic on the planet would that be enough?

I can't blame you for haven't read the entire thread, but I have repeatedly said that I didn't come here to convert you or "convince" you, as you say, that I am right. As I told EvF, that depends on will; if one wills to be convinced, then it might at least be possible to be convinced. However, I am not here to change your will. If I was, I would have brought an army, but that was never my mission here. My mission was just to see if I could get some intellectual challenge, and/or see what kind of ways atheists would argue in. And even if my arguments have not been refuted, there is always things to learn from experience in debating, arguing, et.c.

If everyone on Earth saw God exactly like you do would you feel complete then?
Would you feel seen?

No. That people do not believe in God is primarily a problem between themselves and God; not because I don't believe it's a problem in this world, but because there's nothing I can or will do about it (unless people ask me for a spiritual discussion; I am open, then), but because I belive the problem is rather when people pass from this world, and will not reside in peace eternally.

Would you have inner peace?

What do you think? That I came here to find inner peace? No, I came here for intellectual challenges. And that is not intellectual peace, either, but an active mind.

What if you didn't need to prove God to anyone?

I don't need to prove God to anyone. Most Christians (the ones that I know, at least) are not going to go to atheists and try to prove Gods existence, nor is that what I am doing; because I cannot prove anything without the consent of the person who I am "proving" anything to, and I didn't come with an amibition to change peoples minds.

Imagine that you aren't your ego-that you don't have to cling to an identity as a believer in order to feel good about being you.

Then you are not feeling good about being you, but perhaps feeling bad about being another guy next-door who has not found what you might call spiritual peace.

But we Christians, don't cling to our ego; we don't cling to the destruction of our ego, either; we simply cling to God, and pray bring us nearer to God, (and longer away from our fallen, spiritually sick and unharmonious selves, and come back into harmony, soundness, and immortalization) to become like God, not by nature, but by grace.

Imagine when someone dies too damned soon that you don't have to repress your anger in a cloak of shame because God needed them in heaven.

It has never been orthodox or correct Christianity to say anything about who gets damned. Ultimately, it's up to people themselves to choose their path; and except for themselves, deep inside, only God knows if they became lost.

Imagine that you don't have to justify your existence on a myth based on an Egyptian Sun God from 5000 B.C.,

Feel free to take the most convenient views for your worldview, concerning the origins of the bible. But the origins is missing the point; and if you do not see the truth in the mythic, the parabolic, then you are missing the way of communication of truth of the greatest teachers in human and divine history; and too, missing the truest teachings, written by all of humanity in myths.

[Eilonnwy]

No. We know that God has active intellect because he is pure actuality;

Evidence please. Not your own assertions.

active intellect consists exactly of his ontologically informative actualisation, or apprehension, as in the abstract actualisation that intellection consists of, rather than a potential intellect abstractly actualising things informed by already-existing ontological entities, which is not possible for pure actuality, since pure actuality is the informer of the existence of those things, rather than being even partially the informed one, like human intellects.

Oh joy, psychobabble and you don't even know how to spell actualization. You do realize that your fancy language impresses no one, that we can understand what you're saying which eventually amounts to a whole lot of nothing. Circular reasoning at it's finest.

You can insist all you want that an intelligent mind of God has all the properties you claim it does, but that doesn't make it true until you provide empirical evidence.

[LukeMC]

Oh joy, psychobabble and you don't even know how to spell actualization. You do realize that your fancy language impresses no one, that we can understand what you're saying which eventually amounts to a whole lot of nothing. Circular reasoning at it's finest.

You can insist all you want that an intelligent mind of God has all the properties you claim it does, but that doesn't make it true until you provide empirical evidence.

In his defence (OH MY NOODLES I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS), in countries other than America, the correct way to spell words ending in "ized" is with an "s". In england we say realised, vapourised, actualised, etc. *hides*

On a lighter note, I'm also unimpressed with the fancy language.

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Whether he "desires", that depends, like so many other things we say of God, on how you are using this word, you can surely use it symbolically of God as you can of creatures. But as with many such accomodative symbolisms, they are anthropomorphic, and don't apply if we are to be technical. If you are to be technical, then God does not desire; him, being subsistent pure actuality, has no need to desire, because he needs nothing outside of himself, and anything outside of himself exists only as a free charity of his actualisation. The most relevant sense that it's true to say he desires, is in the sense that he wills that other intellectual agents follow his will and come into communion with his being insofar as he has actualised/created intellectual agents that realise that he is the highest being, pure actuality and therefore pure good and pure perfection, for whom this communion is a possibility; but he does not need it, and so does not desire it in the anthropomorphic sense of a survival necessity.

You just spent a whole bunch of garbling sentences explaing why we cannot use "desired" in an anthropomorphised way, and then went on to say "he wills" in an utterly synonomous way to "desires". You might as well have said "yeah he pretty much did it because he wanted to and it was somethign he wished to happen ie god wants things". Again, you'll have to show me how you could attain such knowledge.

Since you are probably using "desire" in a technical and narrow sense (rather than a symbolical sense, in which case it would be sufficient), then you are wrong. God does not need to desire to create, because nothing restrains God from creating, since nothing exists outside of himself except that which he wills into existence - that which he actualises. That he has given everything outside of himself it's existence -actualised it- means that God is the only agent with a say; the only agent with a choice, the only entity which could have a choice, because any other entity is itself the result of his actualisation of it. So no, you are wrong; God is not restrained by something outside of himself, because he is pure actuality - transcendent-; and therefore he does not need to desire anything because he needs nothing, and he is the only entity that has a choice as to whether anything outside of him shall come into existence.

I never said he is restrained. If he willed for us to be created then it was a desire he possessed. Something that he wanted and chose to do. Regardless of any nonexistent boundaries, he still willed for it to be done and so it was. This means that for some unknown reason he wanted this universe to be created in this precise way. From here, you must demonstrate how you can come to know that god possesses desires (or if you're feeling horny, how god possesses "a will to actualise the pontentials necessary for the eventual actualisation of the potentiality of humanity").

First of all, "deistic" comes from "Deus", which is simply the Latin form of Greek "Theos", from which theism comes from; boht terms mean God, and nothing else. The God of pure actuality is certainly not the universe, for the universe is impure actuality.

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My bad. I meant pantheistic.

[Jon Paul]

Do you think it's right to scare children into believing in some sort of mythical being through storys such as the one about Sodom and Gomorra?

No, I don't believe it's right to scare children into believing in God, if that's what you mean.

And that is not what the stories in the Old Testament serve to do, for the populations of the destroyed cities had long histories of grievous sins (Gen 15:16, Dt 25:17-19), which often included sacrificing their children to false gods (Dt 12:29-31).

Now, children would surely be more safe with the God who destroyed some peoples who sacrificed children to false gods to avoid them corrupting the Israelities, than with those false gods who wanted child sacrifices. God destroyed those peoples, because the innocent among them had no better destiny on earth, than being abused, even sacrificed, and filled with sin, possibly leading them to eternal damnation if they took up the practices of the rest of their societies; and surely the innocent among them he could grant eternal life and peace resting in Him, if he acted before they became corrupted, too. What he made sure by doing so, was that those wicked peoples did not get to corrupt the people of Israel away from the way of the one true God and into pagan, sinful practices. And that was what God was trying to avoid all along, as is evident from these and other verses:

Deuteronomy 18:9-12: When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire...Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD, and because of these detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you.

Deuteronomy 12:31: You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.

Kings 16:3: He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel and even sacrificed his son in the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.

Psalm 106:38: They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood.

Jeremiah 19:4-5: For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned sacrifices in it to gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal - something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.

In the case of Abrahams sacrifice, we see that God shows us, the reason why he does not want child sacrifices is not that he doesn't want sacrifices, but that what matters is the trust in Gods goodness, and so the willingness to make sacrifices to follow Gods commandment in trusting that God commands what he does for a reason, not the sacrifice itself; for no thing that a human can give God, he doesn't have already, and so, God does not really want to take Isaacs life, but wants to test the faith of Abraham:

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death. (Hebrews 11:17-19)

"Do not lay a hand on the boy," God said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

Do you believe that your religion is the only right one? And if so? What happens to the people who believe differently, let's say: Muslims, Atheists, Jews and Hindu?

That depends what you mean with the only right one. The only one that contains any truth? No, not at all. I believe it's the fullness of the truth necessary for eternal life and resting in the Creator; but I don't believe that other religions don't have any of the truth.

As to what will happen to those people, or what will happen to Christians even, that's up to God. No one is sure of their salvation until they have passed, and we, humans, know nothing of who is damned. All we can do is look into our own hearts and souls and focus on our own salvation.

Surely the True Church is the Church of all the good, humble, righteous, truthful people all over the world, even if some of them are in ignorance of the True God, then if they act in goodness and truth, they draw themselves nearer to God indirectly, because God is himself goodness and truth.

Do you believe that we as mankind are created by god to worship him? Or did he intend us to live our lives to the fullest and be the best we can be?

The answer to both questions is yes. The way we live to the fullest is by coming into accord with the will and being of God, for him to pour his graces down upon us and give us deep satisfication, peace and happiness without ceasing.

[Eilonnwy]

In his defence (OH MY NOODLES I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS), in countries other than America, the correct way to spell words ending in "ized" is with an "s". In england we say realised, vapourised, actualised, etc. *hides*

On a lighter note, I'm also unimpressed with the fancy language.

My firefox disagrees with you, therefore you are wrong.

[leo-rcc]

Wow, argumentum ad firefoxum?