Can you see that these two sentences are self-contradictory? If God does not “think” (in your definition), then how can it be true that “God has already thought of everything”?
As expressed in this thread-snippet you are correct: The isolated material which you quoted is indeed self-contradictory.
This is part of the price paid for an extended conversation engaged in fits, starts, and snippets.
I made the error of beginning the “Can God Think” thread without suitable qualifications. Later, thanks to the insights of participants, I amended the idea of “thinking” to “spontaneous creation of information,” or something similar, proposing this as only one aspect of the process which we know of and commonly refer to as “thought.”
The self-contradictory statement which you isolated was intended to be part of the complete conversation, including my elaborations on the concept of thought. (To repeat: that which we know of as thought involves many separate and integrated processes. These include the ability to pick one’s nose while reading Aristotle; the ability to throw a football 50 yards downfield to a moving target while running away from large, fast people; and the ability to think of something which has never been thought of before, by yourself or any other human being. The last noted aspect of human thought is that which I’ve singled out and labeled, “spontaneous creation of information.”
Maybe I called it something else last week, but you probably get the idea. If not, I’ll clarify. For the rest of this conversation, let’s call it SCI. Thank you for keeping me honest.
While SCI is an aspect of human thought which most of us have experienced, the question is, is SCI a generalizable process?
I believe that it is, and that the concept of SCI can be generalized to the Creator, who I (alone, apparently) believe is a thinking being.
Maybe what we’re grappling with here is the scholastic distinction between act and potential. Aristotle and Aquinas refer to God as “Active Intellect,” because everything known by God has to be known by God all the time, actively. Humans, on the other hand, have potential–in the language you are using, we can “discover” truths new to us, or have “creative” thoughts.
While I appreciate that Aristotle and Aquinas were fairly bright guys, let us note that both of them believed that the earth was flat.
Aristotle devised a complex system of physics which turned out to be entirely incorrect. It is worth noting that the Church threatened Galileo with the Inquisition (its favorite method of dealing with anyone who thought) because his ideas contradicted those of Aristotle’s.
You will understand why I am not impressed by anything Aristotle wrote.
Reality has a way of catching up with theory. Back in the days of the Viet Nam war, our intellectual secretary of war, Robert McNamara, decided how rifles should be built. Lots of our soldiers died trying to get those incompetently designed rifles to fire.
Do you really want to remain attached to ideas invented long ago by intellectuals who thought that the earth was flat?
Aristotle, however bright he may have been, was dead wrong on the subject of physics. The Catholic Church gave this turkey its imprimatur. In my opinion, Aquinas has done the church no better.
While I appreciate that these were smart guys who could probably do a Sudoku puzzle lots faster than I, neither of them were engineers. Engineers, the guys who translate ideas into reality, keep theoreticians as honest as they can be kept.
But this isn’t a limitation on God’s ability, but on OUR ability. You seem to be saying that to have potential for improvement (like us, in our potential to discover new knowledge) is a better state of affairs than to have no potential for improvement (like God, in His complete knowledge). Your “ability to think new thoughts” (our position) is not a better state of affairs than to think all knowledge completely and simultaneously (God’s position). Which is better, the potential thought or the actual thought?
I didn’t use the word, “improvement.” Why would you introduce a word which I did not use into an argument I did not make? I said nothing about a creative thought being better, or an improvement. Gee whizz! How to people make up things like this?
Look… Picasso is clearly a creative artist. In my opinion, his work is not an improvement over the art of Rembrandt. Were I to find a genuine Picasso in a dumpster, I would sell it and use the money to promote ideas.
A new idea, creative thought, SCI or whatever you want to call it, need not be correct or useful. It only needs to be something which has not previously been thought of.
Why am I having such grief with an argument which I initially thought was simple and straightforward? There must be something for me to learn here…
Thank you for the opportunity to do so!
As cpayne points out, the passage clearly indicates that God’s thoughts and ways are not like ours. Applying an anthropomorphism is not warranted every time God seeks to explain something about himself to his creatures through human language as contained in the Scriptures.
