Because Father said that Jesus is his Son, yet Jesus said he is son of “a man”.
That makes God composite much more than Trinity would…
He was a Messiah, yet John the Baptist was greatest of those who have come from woman. That means either of two things;
Completely incorrect. Trinitarianism was a common belief in the early Church, and the council was called because of a struggle between the heretic Arius and his bishop, St. Alexander of Alexandria. St. Athanasius was a prominent figure, yes, but the Trinitarians were lead by St. Alexander himself. There was no politics involved here, nobody stood to gain by putting their theological opponents down. In the end, the Nicene Creed was ratified by a massive majority of those in attendance. Oh, and one last thing? Christianity was not the state religion of Rome under Constantine. That’s an old misunderstanding. One your falsehoods rely on to sound reasonable.
The unique contribution of Saint Thomas Aquinas was separation of the two notions of form and act. Also universal hylomorphism provides a way to distinguish the simplicity of God from simplicity of angelic or intellectual beings since God is pure form, whereas angelic or intellectual beings are composed of spiritual matter and form.
Yes.
??? This isn’t true. Act and form were concepts that Aquinas got from Aristotle.
I’m guessing you take Bonaventure’s view that angels have “spiritual matter.” For the Thomist, this is absurd because immateriality means to lack matter. So, in Aquinas’ view, Angels are pure form, but in Angels there is still a distinction between essence and existence, and thus between act and potency, whereas in God that is not distinct.
Yes. Wow. It is not false that there are married bachelors. It’s only that you don’t understand. clap clap clap
What do you mean by this?
All of this is, once again, presupposing that what you take to be the Divine Revelation is true, which is what I’m arguing against
I agree that God is personal, and I agree that Gods Simple Existence is the Person(s). I don’t agree that there can’t be several Persons because I don’t think a Personhood is its own entity. What I mean by that is that I think the Entity is God, and the Personhood derives its existence from that and it is that Entity. To put it vulgarly, the Personhood is the personification of Gods Essence. If one such Personification can exist, then so can three; provided they are perfectly the same. But if there is three, then they cannot be perfectly equal; since a person always forms relationships to other persons they are in contact with, and so we have three perfectly united Persons of the same Essence differentiated by their relationships to each other.
Which comes first, the person or the rational nature? If the Intellect and Will is first and drives us to define their combination as a Person it is perfectly possible to define another Person from the same rational nature. These Persons would initially only be distinguished logically, but once the logical distinction is made by one of the involved Persons a real relationship ensues between them and the distinction is now real.
My supports your post that there is no composite of act and potency in God. There is an earlier post I made that you did not comment on that addresses another concern of yours with composition.
The second sentence is not from Aquinas who did not adopt universal hylomorphism – which is a Neoplatonic idea (Avicebron), but also Bonaventure favored it. Saint Augustine also speaks of spiritual matter (Confessions XII.17.25).
Real distinction is not the same as real difference. Saint Thomas Aquinas uses Aristotle’s idea of relation. It does not import composition. Relation doe not need to denote a property allaying different substances, but can refer to distinctions that are internal to a substance.
Ed Feser saying it’s so doesn’t an incoherence make (although I am, admittedly, a fan of his). He’s just towing the Thomistic line here, but I can’t blame him. I tow a lot of Thomistic lines too… It is very likely that an insistence on a “real” distinction between the divine Persons lends itself to such troublesome issues as the ones you’ve enumerated here.
So far, so good. But, if we think deeply about being a human, we arrive quite naturally at the conclusion that everyone exists as a person in relation to others. As John Donne accurately put it, “no man is an island.” At the very, very beginning of your life, your “self” (identity, mind, etc) is wrapped up in (at a minimum) that of your “mother.” The mother-child relation is the vehicle through which you develop at all, and your two selves become entangled and co-identified, in point of fact. Since humans uniquely among the animals are born with so very little instinct, infants are utterly dependent on the mother for, not merely survival, but for everything, to include coming to know the world around them. And this entire child-rearing process initiates a sustained relationhood-of-persons that never ceases to be. Your mother quite literally and indelibly forms your “self” (and you do the same to her)… Anyway, I have written about this in sustained detail in an older thread. If you’re curious, I direct you there.
I read somewhere that Newton was a Unitarian or at least had those beliefs. But still he is entombed in Westminster Abbey Church.
Great! But see how you’ve already contradicted @Theban who removed the “being” requirement from personhood in order to avoid the contradiction @TheDefaultMan pointed out?
So if you want to stick with the “a person is a being” requirement let me know and we can go from there!
As I said, Theban is the one who removed the being requirement, in order to avoid a contradiction. I suggest reviewing the context in which he removed it to see the contradiction he was avoiding. But if you want to stick with “A being” that’s fine.