Why not? Why is this perfection? You haven’t really answered this. Why can God not be infinite and become incarnate as man at the same time?
This seems to conflate two different questions. When you ask why this is “perfection” i assume you are asking “why is it a perfection to be not-self-contradictory”. I answered this in #149 among other places…
“God cannot contradict God’s own Being. This is not a limitation, but a perfection. If God could change and be something that God is not, then God would not be the Absolute and the One, and we would not, in reality, be talking about God at all. If, on the other hand, God, who is the One, is eternally something that God is not (a blatant contradiction), then, not only does the idea of God become meaningless, but one is also denying God.”
The second question is…once we have agreed that God is not self-contradictory…“Why can God not be infinite and Incarnate”. I have answered this as well, as early as the first post in response to your question, #88. I referred you back to them in #105 and even linked back to them in #119.
This is like arguing one cannot have a glass of water and an ocean at the same time…Is it not a contradiction for you to say God is omnipotent, but at the same time saying God cannot be incarnate as man?
No, in fact I have argued, several times over…and pointed you back to it several times over (see above)…that it, in fact, involves contradiction to say that God can become Incarnate.
Now, granted, IF the Incarnation is NOT a contradiction, then, yes I am wrong; and yes it would then a be contradiction to say that God cannot become Incarnate. But you have never addressed the set of issues that I listed with respect to the Incarnation. Again see #88.
All I am saying is we cannot know God beyond what he has revealed to us
Unless you are equating revelation and creation here, which I assume you are not doing, I don’t know how you would even recognize and judge that the revelation was, truly, coming from God. We always exist in God who is the ground of all that is, the Being of beings. God is Truth; apart from God there would be no truth at all. We only have any knowledge at all because that knowledge participates in God.
Moreover, if you actually believe that is true, why are you even arguing with a Muslim to start with? Do I even have any knowledge of God to argue over? Even if you think you are proclaiming the Gospel to me or something, how would I recognize it as being from God using, merely, human standards (whatever those are).
and while some of this is paradoxical (An infinite being becoming man while continuing to be an infinite being), a closer look shows it is not .
Now, I’m confused again. I thought you were defending the idea that the Incarnation was not really contradictory, and instead that it is merely paradoxical. Now you are saying it isn’t paradoxical either?
You have insisted on arguing with pathos that a paradox is really a contradiction and therefore cannot exist, yet you continue to ignore what has been said about naturally occuring paradoxes.
NO. I have NOWHERE said that paradoxes are the same things as contradictions. Quite the opposite. I have repeatedly said that I am not making objections against the idea of paradox. You are only one who brings up paradoxes.
I have also made very clear what I meant by contradiction (you cannot both affirm and deny something
in the same respect). I have said that you cannot predicate contradictions to God. You have yet to show that paradox is a helpful category in helping us understand the Incarnation, but I have asked you to do so on more than once in this thread.
I have ignored your repeated appeals to the wave-particle duality, because they are not relevant. (I’ll say it again: )No one was denying paradox. If you would like to actually talk about the topic and analyze the doctrine of the Incarnation and show that your appeal to paradox (which, according to you, both here and above, involves only an apparent, and not an actual, contradiction) somehow unravels what I have argued are contradictions in the doctrine of the Incarnation, you should do that now. But you are going to have to actually talk about the doctrine of the Incarnation in order to do that.
because you insist on sticking with the language of Islam, but refusing to apply your arguments back on it.
You mean the idea that one cannot predicate or attribute contradiction to God? And that this is an affirmation of God’s perfection? I am not aware how that position is uniquely Islamic in either language or idea.
