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If you want your own custom God…say your prayers like the rest of the world…now go do those dish’s:thumbsup:
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JDaniel
Guest
Kindness:
An important attribute belonging to God is that He is Infinite. Infinite does not mean, “really, really big,” and it does not mean “transfinite.” Both of the latter are still finite. But, God is “Infinite.” And, He is infinite in many ways, including infinite in extent. If God is infinite in extent then how can two of them exist side by side? How can an infinite God be displaced; do they just voluntarily (or involuntarily) reduce in extent (magnitude) so that the two can be comfortable in a side-by-side arrangement? That would be absurd. Moreover it would mean that God is subject to “change.” Our God is not subject to change, nor does He change. If that were to occur, it would prove that God is imperfect, i.e., not much different than we are - except bigger. It would mean that God has potency, which, as St. Thomas shows us, is impossible.
Or, perhaps the second God could be some brand new substance, a hitherto unheard of new sort of spiritual stuff, or new continuous space. Maybe this second God could just permeate our God (or vice-versa) as our God permeates us. If either of these were possible, infinity might not be self-limiting. But Catholics do not believe these to be possible.
“Infinity” is a tough subject to try to explain to a child. But, if you don’t start soon, your child may come to embrace an erroneous concept of “infinity.” The creation of another God would be a contradiction of absurd proportion.
God bless,
jd
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J_Peterson
Guest
I would say He can’t. I would ask if he thinks it possible for God to create another color white (ignore all the off-whites and whatnot).
Probably too much for a 6 year old but questions like this arise from thinking about God as a thing. If he was an adult I’d point out that God is closer to a verb than a noun and that there can only be one “Is”.
Probably too much for a 6 year old but questions like this arise from thinking about God as a thing. If he was an adult I’d point out that God is closer to a verb than a noun and that there can only be one “Is”.
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shoe
Guest
Since God has no beginning, and is eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, etc., by definition, I don’t see how God could create another god like Himself, since a created god invariably in the end would be contingent upon the One True, Self-existing God whose nature is not contingent upon anything. The newly created god would only be a finite creature in the end; that is to say, the created god would have a beginning and would lack the qualities of eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, etc. To quote Aquinas: “Whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility.”
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jochoa
Guest
Thank you very much for your response! The most simple way I can share that this concept is in alignment with Catholicism is the following:NO, the Holy Spirit is NOT made, because the Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit PROCEEDS from the Father and the Son[SIGN][/SIGN]. The Holy Spirit has ALWAYS existed.
Think about it from a logical perspective for a moment. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all one God. So how does it make sense for God to be “made” and “not made” at the same time-in other words, created and not created?
I believe that is a heresy.
CCC#460 states, "…“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
Given that “…we might become God,” and “…we are created…,” then the created might become God.
And to answer the question, “So how does it make sense for God to be “made” and “not made” at the same time?” The main means I know of making sense of this is by proposing an absolute definition of God and determining what are the necessary attributes of that definition.
Regarding proposing an absolute definition of God, please consider the following personal concepts:
God is The person who is always freely being and spreading the means to freely be perfectly patient, kind, and motivated with all the body, spirit, thoughts, and will equally towards others and the self for the experience of limitless happiness and unbreakable peace in all relationships, including within the self.
This person is Jesus Christ, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Only He was/is/will ALWAYS freely be…for the experience…
Recognize the purpose of this person requires three distinct co-existing persons of the exact same nature/definition.
The Father, as the first distinct person, sacrificially remains the all-knowing Judge to ensure the persons entering the Kingdom of Heaven are perfect at loving as He loves to ensure the ever-lasting peace and building of the limitless joy for all through the capability of observing the deepest intentions and length of dedication to the cause of each person.
The Son, as the second distinct person and only begotten from the Father, sacrifices all the knowledge and power of being Creator to participate as a friend in the eternal Kingdom of a limitless number of True Friends.
The Holy Spirit, as the third distinct person, reveals the fullness of God’s purpose and person to other free-willed creations by freely becoming one with the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ to complete the means to fulfill the purpose for Creation.
Recognize that since these are all attributes of the definition, they exist outside of time. Therefore none are made. And at the same time, to completely reveal the free-willing nature of God, as a single person, a free-willed creation must become one with the nature of God by proceeding from the Son and the Father and giving all glory to Jesus Christ: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore, a creation becomes God, and God can create another God, whom is also eternally existent!
Recognize that the Holy Spirit is in every person, all we have to do is become one with the Holy Spirit inside of us by embracing the cross daily to perfect living in unity with the Greatest Commandments of Jesus Christ through the Sacraments of the Catholic Church!
Thank you very much for the wonderful food for thought! I thoroughly enjoyed pondering the question! I look forward to further discussion!
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Marc_Anthony
Guest
We might become God is not to be taken literally, because that is impossible. We are to become LIKE God. Once in Heaven, if we make it there, we will spend eternity becoming more and more like God and learning more about Him. But God is infinite. We can never actually become God. And God is not a created being. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit always were and always will be.
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greylorn
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I prefer commonsense logic. And like most Catholics here, I’m working from the stuff that I was taught in Catholic schools and Churches, not in a seminary’s advanced theology class.
I was taught that the human soul is eternal, just like God, because God created it to be that way. You can bandy definitions about if you wish; I’m okay with that and have a dictionary. It clearly defines eternal (In definition 1) as without beginning or end.
So what is the word that defines soul? It is said to have a beginning (although I do not accept that belief) but no end.
In school my teachers referred to both God and soul with the same words, “eternal,” and “immortal.” I was not too stupid to have made these distinctions back then, but was at the mercy of teachers who were intolerant of serious questions.
So for you, this question: There is clearly a difference between having neither beginning nor end, and having a beginning but no end. What word would you use to differentiate these concepts?
Dealing with this on my own a half-century ago, I came to the conclusion that I formally explore elsewhere, that both God and human souls had beginnings, of a sort, in the real big bang, which was simply a collision between dark energy and the stuff from which God and souls are composed.
This conclusion has the advantage of needing no fancy definitions to describe what happens, just a few common sense notions and some simple knowledge from 6th grade physics.
I read the Aquinas link material, and as is usual when reading illogical conclusions derived from arbitrary definitions and unsupported premises, my poor little mind glazed over after a few minutes.
I prefer commonsense logic. And like most Catholics here, I’m working from the stuff that I was taught in Catholic schools and Churches, not in a seminary’s advanced theology class.
I was taught that the human soul is eternal, just like God, because God created it to be that way. You can bandy definitions about if you wish; I’m okay with that and have a dictionary. It clearly defines eternal (In definition 1) as without beginning or end.
So what is the word that defines soul? It is said to have a beginning (although I do not accept that belief) but no end.
In school my teachers referred to both God and soul with the same words, “eternal,” and “immortal.” I was not too stupid to have made these distinctions back then, but was at the mercy of teachers who were intolerant of serious questions.
So for you, this question: There is clearly a difference between having neither beginning nor end, and having a beginning but no end. What word would you use to differentiate these concepts?
Dealing with this on my own a half-century ago, I came to the conclusion that I formally explore elsewhere, that both God and human souls had beginnings, of a sort, in the real big bang, which was simply a collision between dark energy and the stuff from which God and souls are composed.
This conclusion has the advantage of needing no fancy definitions to describe what happens, just a few common sense notions and some simple knowledge from 6th grade physics.
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J_Peterson
Guest
How would you explain the existence of the stuff that existed before the big bang (primordial energy fields or whatever they call it)? What you are descibing is not the God of Jacob and Abraham but you’re own invention, hence it would be god not God.
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Marc_Anthony
Guest
Do you know what, exactly, your issues with Aquinas are?
As you have correctly pointed out learning the language he uses is a big part of understanding Aquinas. He uses simple, immortal, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and even soul in very specific, nuanced ways. If you read it without a working knowledge of what he means when he says these things, then what he says will indeed sound totally ridiculous.
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empther
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Aquinas wrote for theologians such as himself. His intended audience immediately understood what he was saying.
He never dreamed that his books would someday be published for the masses. Gutenburg hadn’t even been born yet. ( Gutenburg invented the movable type printing press, for the benefit of the atheists.
)It should not be surprising that people who are not theologians or soundly grounded in such subjects are confused by Aquinas.
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JimG
Guest
The words are immortal vs eternal. They are not synonyms. Immortal means that a being will not die. Immortal refers to human souls and to angels, because they are spiritual beings having no parts, and cannot decompose, and will have no ending.
“Eternal,” strictly speaking can only refer to God. It means not just having no beginning or end, but not existing in a temporal plane at all, having no “before” or “after” in conjunction with existence. An eternal being has no extension in time (or space.)
So a human soul is immortal but not eternal.
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greylorn
Guest
I cannot explain the existence of primordial “stuff,” whether of my invention or yours. You cannot explain the existence of God, either.
However, I can apply specific physical and mathematical properties to my versions of the stuff. These are limiting properties, meaning that the stuff can be detected and measured, and interactions within it can be defined and tested empirically.
In the course of trying to explain a cause-effect universe such as ours, philosophers and cosmologists alike have found themselves stuck with some kind of Primordial Miracle, that which cannot be explained, period. (Not even your God could explain why He exists.)
The Church hypothesizes that the universe was made by an unknowable, omnipotent, omniscient entity. Cosmologists (or is is cosmetologists?) assume a physical singularity. These two concepts are functionally identical, and IMO, logically impossible.
You are correct that I am not describing the god of Abraham. If you study up on theological history, you’ll find that Abraham’s god is not the God of Christianity. And I’m not describing that God either.
I actually believe that the mind, whatever its origin, is best exercised by critical thinking, and poorly served by dogma. It is rendered useless by cognitive dissonance.
IMO all god-concepts yet invented are cognitively dissonant. Likewise the micro-pea or singularity invented by pseudo-scientists who cannot think competently.
Rather than simply whine about their beliefs, I invented a creator-concept which is perfectly consistent with the arguments for intelligent design as well as with all established scientific facts and credible theories.
The Catholic/Christian/Muslim definition of God is not one that I accept. Creators must have properties that are consistent with logic and physical reality. Rather than co-opt an established word, I named the creators “Geon.”
BTW, before getting more deeply involved with arcane subjects like theology and metaphysics, you might want to learn to pay attention to the excellent CAF spelling checker, then open up your grammar book and learn the difference between “you’re” and “your.” Or, you might not. It helps with credibility under some circumstances.
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greylorn
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Thank you. Yet I find these understandings less than satisfactory.
For example, what does having parts or not have to do with immortality? It seems logical that if God can create a soul, He can also eradicate a soul. That makes the soul “immortal” only if God chooses to keep it around.
You claim that God does not exist in a “temporal plane.” In all my physics studies and subsequent readings, the term temporal plane has yet to appear. So I don’t know what a temporal plane is, and I’ll bet that you have no better notion of it than I do.
In the course of learning a little about spaces and dimensions, I relearned what I was taught in high school geometry, that a “plane” is a two dimensional mathematical object.
So what exactly is this temporal plane in which God does not exist?
Clearly we do not exist within a 2-dimensional space, or plane. How is it relevant that God does not either?
Moving on, Catholics are taught to believe in a personal God, an entity who interacts with them at some level and sometimes grants prayers and wishes. We are all temporal beings living in a 4-dimensional space (or more likely, in a space-time manifold), and our prayers are subsets of the limited but finite time in which we live. How, then, is God to interact with us as a personal God Who is attentive to our daily ongoing trivia, unless He exists within our limited space?
By analogy, since the season is upon us, the way to change the outcome of a football game is to be suited up and on the field, or usefully engaged on the sidelines or as an official. The fans might affect things by hollering loudly enough to drown out play calls, and the stadium’s organ monkey can keep playing annoying ditties, but ultimately, players make the plays.
Now I can escape into la-la land for three hours every Sunday and believe that the imprecations I holler at the TV set (which has no microphone capable of translating them) can affect the outcome of a game. But I know better.
Yet, at least I can observe the game in real, temporal time. I can observe the sequence of plays and the player movements within a play, because I live in the same space-time framework as the guys on the field.
What if I cannot watch the game, and can only record it on DVD? Watching it next day, I cannot bring myself to holler at the officials and coaches because I know that it is too late.
Moreover, next day I can put the DVD player on 70x speed and collapse the entire game into a few minutes of temporal time, eliminating my ability to resolve details.
What about God’s perspective on, let’s say, this Sunday’s Packer/49ers game? He cannot change it, no matter how many players have bent their knees after touchdowns or prayed for his help in the locker room. Why not? He’s already seen it!
Knowing past, present, and future, God has already watched the game that to me, is still coming. Like observing a quantum physics experiment “collapses the wave function,” God has already collapsed the football game. Of an infinite number of events that will transpire during the course of a temporal interval of three hours, two days hence, there is only one possible/actual sequence of events because God has already watched the game.
Thus, if God is indeed outside the 4-dimensional space-time framework, God cannot change the game, your life, or the flip of a nickel.
Unacceptable conclusions are the inevitable consequence of illogical hypotheses. Look at the fuss that a “mere” 6 year old kid managed to stir up.
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greylorn
Guest
There is no need to be fatuous. Of course I know my issues with Aquinas. A few years back I elucidated the more obvious of them right here on CAF. Repeating that useless exercise would be futile. My focus is on building new, effective ideas, and I do not have a lot of interest in analyzing notions invented in pre-medieval times by someone with absolutely no knowledge of physics, who believed that the universe revolved around the earth.
A clue to the problems with T.A. lies within your own words. You wrote:
“*He uses simple, immortal, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and even soul in very specific, nuanced ways. *”
I write for a living. I’ve written technical papers, astronomy papers, five unpublished philosophical books, one best-selling novel, and finally, a published explanation of the beginnings of things. I know the difference between specifics and nuances.
Specifics are the stuff of formal papers and stuffy book-level analyses of a subject that you want others to take seriously. Nuances are the stuff of stories and novels, off-color jokes, and political speeches.
Specifics have but one, limited interpretation. Nuances can be interpreted pretty much however one chooses. Why should any intelligent human being looking for honest answers expect to find them in “nuanced” writings?
It is not possible to be “specific” and “nuanced” simultaneously. Nuanced words are written by confused people for the benefit of those who wallow in cognitive dissonance. Specific terms are used by people who understand whatof they write and are doing their best to convey it, clearly. I insist upon specifics. Life is too short to waste any of it trying to analyze someone’s nuanced meaning or sort between the interpretations that others have given to it.
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greylorn
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A great part of religious lore comes not from dogma handed down from the high-up mucky-mucks, but from the lore invented by those who believe the dogma, adding their fictitious, but personal support, like sports fans devoted to a particular team or rednecks explaining why they keep on buying the same brand of truck.Aquinas wrote for theologians such as himself. His intended audience immediately understood what he was saying.
He never dreamed that his books would someday be published for the masses. Gutenburg hadn’t even been born yet. ( Gutenburg invented the movable type printing press, for the benefit of the atheists.
It should not be surprising that people who are not theologians or soundly grounded in such subjects are confused by Aquinas.
If the theologians for whom T.A. was writing “immediately” understood him, why did these perceptive geniuses initially reject his ideas and accuse him of heresy?
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Marc_Anthony
Guest
Hm, the irony here here is that through all of this you’re making a careful distinction between specific and nuanced!
But that’s fair enough. Aquinas’s words mean something very specific. They’re not used to mean the same things that we see in a common modern day dictionary. They were meant to be read as a summary for other theologians thousands of years ago.
I don’t know what to say except that I find his arguments rock solid.
This actually doesn’t invalidate your theories at all. They may all very well be right, and Saint Thomas may be completely right. Your two views aren’t incompatible. The idea of a Creator is not the same as the Classical Theist God.
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Marc_Anthony
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Because they were blinded by dogma, as you pointed out, and Saint Thomas went against the grain.
Also, there isn’t universal agreement that he’s correct, nor was there then. People simply disagreed with him. That’s to be expected.
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herbalist_micke
Guest
I don’t know, I think if God wanted to find a way, he could. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition I could imagine such superposition of a square and circle.
Why can’t we use this to answer “yes” to the original question? God could create another God, similarly to how God created Jesus. The very moment God creates another God, that other instance has always been, because God is omnipotent, and human time constraints do not apply. Heck, I can refer to objects in C++ which only exist because I refer to them, without having to define them somewhere, and by referring to them they have existed through the lifetime of my program, because the lifetime of my program was something determined at compile time, a period which has omnipotent influences and control over the program’s lifetime. But more concretely, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_slit_experiment. By observing a particle, we force a particle to exist in the first place. Otherwise the energy would have existed in waveform. Perhaps God has similar but fancier tricks up his sleeves?
This thread reminds me of people debating a paradoxes’ resolution. Because the question is constructed under contradictory terms, the only valid answer would contradict itself and therefore not be valid, hence contradicting itself again. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes#Self-reference. By defining God as omnipotent, but at the same time placing constraints on God, omnipotence is contradicted, and paradoxes will ensue.
So, my most expertly advice would be to explain what paradoxes are, perhaps share a few of the paradoxes on the wiki page, it would be fun.
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ReapReason
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:crying: God please help us!!Yes He could, but He chose not to. God bless:thumbsup:
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