Resources on the "argument from motion"

[Luke_S]

philosophical details aside, i think you may be trying to get the concept of “person” to do more work than is needed…

proving god is “personal” is not so much a matter of demonstrating that he can accurately be placed in some forensically precise phiosophical category - “person” - so much as it is a matter of being able simply to distinguish the First Cause/Prime Mover/Pure Act of natural theology from a mindless, deistic force…

look, i’m not fussed if you want to say that we can’t know that god is a person via the light of natural reason; what we do know is that god has (propositional) knowledge and is so far forth in some sense rational, and he has free choice. whether or not we call the thing that possesses those properties, a “person” is secondary. don’t you think?

what matters is that we can know that god is a thinker and a chooser.

Good points all, I will agree with you that other aspects of God (way of knowing things and free choice) are sufficient to seperate him from “mindless deistic forces,” which is a strong truth, whether his personhood is knowable by reason or not. Way to bring the question into focus. I don’t think whether God’s personhood is knowable by reason alone or not is an altogether empty question, but your point is clear; the concept of personhood shouldn’t be thought of as necessary for establishing many other important truths about God.

 

[punkforchrist]

Hey guys,

Luke, I was going to write a response, but after reading through everything on the last page, it seems like nearly everything has been worked out! I can tell there was a lot of brainstorming.

In any case, I will try to summarize what seems to be an important point.

Luke:

1. personhood is identical with knowledge (assumed premise)
2. there is no distinction of knowledge in F, S and HS, since each person has omniscience, which isn’t distinct from omniscience.
3. Therefore, F, S and HS are all one person

One way to re-formalize this argument is by using modal logic. Let P = personhood; K = knowledge; and T = the Trinity. Essentially, we have:

1. P = K
2. T = K
3. T = P

This argument is actually formally invalid. A counter-argument might be:

1. Dogs are animals.
2. Cats are animals.
3. Therefore, dogs are cats.

In the former case, while both P and T entail K, it is an invalid syllogism to construct in such a way that P and T are identical.

With that said, your observation does help to confirm what you and others have said–namely, that the persons of the Trinity share one substance. Since their omniscient knowledge is identical, their knowledge must be of one and the same substance. The difficulty, as is always the case with Trinitarian concepts, is that it is to my knowledge impossible to demonstrate via reason alone that three persons can be of one substance. What Thomas does, and I believe quite brilliantly, is demonstrate that Trinitarianism is above, but not contrary to, reason. So in other words, we cannot prove that there is one God in three Persons, but neither is it irrational to come to that conclusion; in fact, once Scripture is taken as authoritative, it becomes the only tenable position, at least according to the Church.

Blessings