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Aloysium
Guest
Humility fosters understanding by opening one’s mind and heart.
I’m not interested in arguing, but I have been reminded of these verses; let’s rejoice:
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I’m not interested in arguing, but I have been reminded of these verses; let’s rejoice:
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glendab
Guest
Hello JapaneseKappa.
As for the author I suggested, she is anything but a teenaged “conversion” story. Both her and her hubby were affirmed atheists and very intelligent and highly educated. They were successful in their respective fields. That is why I suggested it. Her blogging isn’t anything like you’d said, a random blogosphere. She is a well respected author and much of her stuff is used on a regular basis. By comparison to the gal whose self-professed “scholarship” was a pieced together collection of doubts from less then scholarly sources, mostly gleaned form the works of others via the internet and put them all together in a book she wants to be accepted as bona fide scholarship, well they are in totally different leagues. You really cannot compare the two. I’d go so far as to say one is authentic, the other bogus. But alas, that is simply my opinion and worth about as much as you just spent to get it. There ya go.
Please be at peace.
Glenda
Thank you for you reply. I have no God-theory. You’re mistaken to see it that way. We believe without seeing any evidence and then we see what we believe. If we required evidence, then we would be lacking in faith. Jesus said “Blessed are they who haven’t seen yet believe.” This I am most definutely and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t thank God for the gift of faith. I didn’t have any for the first half of my life. I really don’t know how I got along with out it.
As for the author I suggested, she is anything but a teenaged “conversion” story. Both her and her hubby were affirmed atheists and very intelligent and highly educated. They were successful in their respective fields. That is why I suggested it. Her blogging isn’t anything like you’d said, a random blogosphere. She is a well respected author and much of her stuff is used on a regular basis. By comparison to the gal whose self-professed “scholarship” was a pieced together collection of doubts from less then scholarly sources, mostly gleaned form the works of others via the internet and put them all together in a book she wants to be accepted as bona fide scholarship, well they are in totally different leagues. You really cannot compare the two. I’d go so far as to say one is authentic, the other bogus. But alas, that is simply my opinion and worth about as much as you just spent to get it. There ya go.
Please be at peace.
Glenda
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glendab
Guest
P.S. JapaneseKappa, if I am correct you are turned off by our God because of the blood shed found in the Bible and the god you’d prefer would never harm a person. Life without death isn’t life, no matter how it happens. But it will happen. Death and taxes you can bet on both and with God is much better than without God. Man is a bloody mess with God and without God. It isn’t about them at all anyway. It really is between you and God and no body else and that is the all of it all.
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jimmy
Guest
Is it rational to say that God doesn’t exist? I exist, and to assert that I am just a random product of the universe is the most laughable thing I have ever heard. There are two options; either I am the logical end of the universe, or God exists. Either way science misses the whole question because it completely neglects the subjective existence of individual people. The only argument that is possible is based on subjective experience, and the only way an objective argument will make any sense is if it utilizes a persons subjective experience. Otherwise it remains apart from a person.
It is easy to say that it was chance that life evolved on some random planet in a random corner of the galaxy. It is a little harder to recognize that it is random when you realize that you are part of the process. You didn’t exist, and soon you will no longer exist. It is a short life, and you realize it. The destruction of the self is a contradiction.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Let’s face it. Science is a force for good or evil. It covers a lot of ground. Contrary to the illusions of some people, it does not nearly cover all the ground. Music, art, literature, mathematics, philosophy, religion (natural and revealed), politics, ethics, sports, will never go away; and for most people these things are what really matter the most. Indeed, science could go underground and disappear and all these things would be left to keep us going and bring joy into our lives. But if all these things went underground and disappeared, and only the sciences remained, I sincerely believe we would experience the sufferings of the damned.
:bigyikes:
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Tomdstone
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Can you explain what it means to say that God is the Unmoved Mover? Would it be possible for God to move phenomenologically and yet still be Unmoved?
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Peter_Plato
Guest
Perhaps one way of explaining this is to say that God is, in Aquinas’ words, ”Actus Purus;” the fulfillment of all possible actuality. There is no “more” that can be actualized in God - he cannot change because there is nothing more that he can “become.” There is no potential left unfulfilled in God so there is nothing for him to change to.
Creative acts, then, flow from God, from his essence as the fullness of all potentialities. In a sense, everything that could be exists in God, in the mind of God - to borrow from Plato - as “perfect forms” of what could be. There is no “change” required of God to bring about any creative act, although “moving” towards the fulfillment of potentialities might be an aspect of created things, which move towards their “final" cause, their purpose or reason for being.
Applied to the universe, this would mean that the entirety of material creation is in a state of potency directed towards its final end by a kind of internal impetus which is its inner driving force integral to its very nature which drives it towards the teleological end - its final, eternal form in God.
The universe, then, is changing by its very nature which impels and directs it towards its final state. God, however, is unchanging. There is nothing for him to change to since he is the effulgence or fullness of existence itself.
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Tomdstone
Guest
It doesn’t seem right because about 2000 years ago, God came down from heaven and became man.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare
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Peter_Plato
Guest
I am not sure that “change into” would be an apt description of what occurred at the Incarnation. Jesus is fully God who took on human nature without changing his nature as God. I am not sure we have the wherewithal to comprehend that. Jesus, himself, makes that much clear:
This was not a fabrication of some flesh and blood human, it was a claim by Jesus himself - or at least implicit in his claim to be God: “Before Abraham ever was I AM.” Obviously, the only one who could possibly understand how that could be true would be God - Jesus himself. We are in no position to claim it couldn’t happen. How would we know that?
The only grounds we have for accepting HIS claim is his life, death and resurrection and its place in history. We have a choice of accepting the claim as a credible one without knowing how such a thing is possible, or we can dismiss the claim as impossible - but on what basis would we have warrant for doing so? Based on our judgement that God could not do such a thing? What do we KNOW for certain that would give us warrant to insist HIS claim - a claim by God, if true - could not be true? I can’t think of anything - except for pure skepticism.
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Tomdstone
Guest
In ordinary terminology, when someone takes on something, it denotes a movement of some sort.
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Peter_Plato
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Yes but “movements” do not necessarily essentially change the “someone.” For example, a change in position, doesn’t change the essential nature of whatever moves from one place to another.
So “taking on” human nature without changing his nature as God may have been something like a change of location, but in more than one dimension.
Aquinas might make a case that if God is the fullness of being - the actualization of all potentials - then he would, in a sense, have human nature as an actualized aspect of his being from eternity so he didn’t “become” human in the sense of changing into a human where he was only potentially one before, but simply “acting out” an existing actuality. Living out the “human” aspect of his nature in time and location rather than in eternity. Again, like a change in location, but in multi-dimensions, with no essential change.
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Tomdstone
Guest
According to your philosophy, God is unMoved. He does not move. However, at the time of the Consecration of the Bread and Wine, He comes down from heaven and the Bread and Wine becomes God. Before the Consecration, the Bread and Wine was not God. Does not the Consecration indicate a movement of God from Heaven to the Sacred Species?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Again:
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare
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Peter_Plato
Guest
No, he does not change - big difference. There is nothing for him to change into. He is the perfect realization of all actuality - Actus Purus - who effects all change but remains unchanged.
Aristotle and Scholastic philosophy after him, viewed motion - movement - in somewhat the sense we understand the word “change” today.
Unchanged Changer would be a less troublesome and more apt term.
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RGCheek
Guest
OK, the Creator is eternal and timeless, and yet He must interact with things that exist within the flow of time, so doesn’t this require some aspect of God to interface with or extend into the flow of time? I think the Greek Emanationists thought of this as the logos in the moment prior to creation. Is that model usable in this situation?
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RGCheek
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It is confusing to think of a changer not in itself changing in some respect in order to cause change. The batter has to wing his arms to change the baseball’s trajectory.
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Peter_Plato
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I think this is a bit confused. The idea of an Unchanged Changer is that the Changer is Unchanged by anything outside of itself. All other changed entities MUST rely on something else to effect change in them - to that extent they are dependent or contingent and do not, in themselves, explain changes that occur to them or have any “power” within themselves to effect change. They rely on other entities for their power to effect any changes. They are changed changers, and effect change on others BECAUSE they themselves are changed. Thus the batter’s arms rely on signals from the brain which rely on energy from the digestive system, which relies on food coming into the system, which relies on energy exchange in nature, etc. etc. until, as Aquinas pointed out, we end up, logically, at the Source of all change.
The point is that God, AKA the Unchanged Changer, can effect all change without reliance on anything else - i.e., Unchanged by anything outside the nature of God who is, by definition the fullness of all existence, the source of all that exists. In vernacular speak: Being where all the bucks stop and start, if you have the wherewithal to follow the bucks to their origin and destination. It is God alone, ipsum esse subsistens, that explains his own existence and the existence of everything else.
The idea of an Unchanged Changer is that all change is sourced within the essential nature of the Unchanged Changer - which is the completeness or fullness of all actuality and CANNOT become or change into something else purely and logically because there is no lack, no potentiality, nothing unactualized in the Unchanged Changer - who is self-sufficient, which is to say omnipotent. Nothing can change because there is nothing left to change, nothing left unactualized - Aquinas’ definition of Actus Purus: Fullness or effulgence of Being, from which all change derives.
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Tomdstone
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There is a change which comes about when a Roman Catholic priest says the Mass. This change occurs as a result of someone saying a prayer to God. God was not present in the Eucharist before the prayer, but is present after the prayer is said. And it appears that you might be redefining unMoved Mover, since now you say it does not involve movement of any kind.
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stewstew03
Guest
Here’s a good place for you to start: plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/
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