If a Man is One, and God is Infinity; then One divided-by Infinity is equal to zero.
For a Man to make a significant difference to divine creation, God must be finite - some unknown but finite proportion of times greater than Man - call it "n"; where n is a very, very, VERY large number... but not infinite.
Thus One divided-bt n is.... greater-than Zero.
That is; if God is finite; Man's potential contribution is some-thing; rather than no-thing (if God were infinite)
Some-thing is potentially significant; like the contribution of one Man in a world war. A single act of a single person may make a difference in war - whether locally (e.g. saving a life, or killing somebody); or on a large scale, where single decisions by a person may have vast consequences.
In conclusion; someone who insists on the infinitude of God is also implicitly asserting that a Man, or any number of Men, cannot have any role to play in divine creation: because the finite cannot add anything, nor subtract anything, from that which is infinite.
NOTE: The above formulation is, like any comprehensible statement of this mortal life, an abstracted model of reality; whose applicability is strictly unknowable. I put it forward as a way to understand why it is so vitally important that Christians do not (yet again, as So Many before) fall into the enticing trap of asserting and insisting that God the Creator is abstractly-infinite - e.g. that God is omniscient, omnipotent or any such. To do so always has anti-Christian implications that have historically (and here-and-now) made Christianity incoherent - thus needing theology to resort to mystery, authority-mongering, sheer power/ awe/ fear, word-hypnotism or the like.
29 comments:
there is another possibility --- that man is also infinite, and his contributions are infinite as well. then in comparison to god, he would not be infinitesimal!
@ma - Yes, well; as I say these models can't be pushed too far.
I'm not sure what happens when infinity is divided by infinity - presumably you get a "This. Does. Not. Compute." read-out, and then the robot explodes.
The actual state of affairs, for Men as well as God, is that both are always finite *and*, in potential, always unbounded.
Well said.
I once approached this from the perspective of man needing God, but of God also needing man. Boy, did that blow some gaskets!
Matters of incoherence aside, I have never understood the allure of a God who has absolutely no need of anything or anyone, to say nothing of those who vehemently defend the conceptualization.
There is also the possibility that God is infinite, but chooses to create man and his world so that man can contribute the the development of that world. (I user the term "world" to mean more than just the planet Earth.) As an infinite God, to describe or understand him is to limit him. If God is not infinite, he is not God, but some lesser god, but not THE God. This is a crazy concept, but by his very nature of being infinite, he is outside the realm and possibility of man to understand. I hope this makes sense.
@Frank -
"I have never understood the allure "
I think I can understand it in terms of God as an absolute ruler, who needs to be flattered and propitiated; who becomes angry and punishes/ kills anyone who disrespects or disobeys. Such a ruler would not brook anyone putting any limitations on his power and authority. Even discussing such matters would be regarded as subversive.
In this sense, the infinity of God is rather like the Calormines always saying "the Emperor... May He Live Forever! - the "The Horse and his Boy" (Narnia). Not meant to be regarded as a literal statement, but saying the Emperor should live anything less than "forever" is subversive talk that less may lead to trouble.
This is broadly the Old Testament conceptualization of God.
But this, I think, combined with the montheistic deism (rather than theism) of the most sophisticated Greek and Roman philosophers of Jesus's day and afterwards; who, when they became Christian, brought wit them this abstract conceptualization of the creator-deity.
The classical-orthodox-mainstream conceptualization of the Christian God therefore seems like a rather unstable (oscillating?) combination of the absolute monarch with an abstract deity - Hebrew and Greek, as has often been noticed.
God the creator - as Jesus talks about his Father in the Fourth Gospel especially - is (on the face of it) different from both of these; but, of course, we have had scores of generations of theologians reading a Hebrew-Greek God-deity *into* the Fourth Gospel, so the difference is not longer apparent; and the many confusions and contradictions that results are explained-away or ignored.
Even Mormons, who benefit from Joseph Smiths inspired re-reading of the Bible, as well as some of his other revelations; continue to demonstrate an almost superstitious adherence to the abstract-monarch God - despite that it is so strongly at odds with their theology.
For me, it was probably William Arkle who clarified the problems with the God concepts, and also how God would be from a more thoroughly Christian viewpoint.
JC - Well, it does Not make sense (to me) - but I know what you are getting at; because I have heard such explanations before!
I feel taht once once finds oneself embarked on such *tortured* (and humanly incomprehensible) explanations, it is time to step back and examine one's premises!
I guess technically you can say that an infinite god must be like Brahman, an impersonal god, the stuff everything else is made of. The distinction between God and creation, that he created from nothing, means there is a limit between him and creation.
The fact of 5 nowise vitiates the truth and reality of the infinity of the set of integers. Finity is not in conflict with or contradiction to infinity.
Analogously, that God is omniscient does not entail that creatures can't know anything; and that creatures can know things does not entail that God cannot be omniscient. We see this even amongst ourselves: that I understand calculus does not mean that my little grandson cannot understand addition.
Thus that God creates everything other than himself does not entail that creatures cannot do anything themselves.
If humans can perform divine creation, strictly speaking, humans are God. Humans are not God; all our experience teaches us that this is so. Humans are creatures of God. Ergo, humans don't perform divine creation. They rather perform creaturely creation.
‘ This [that each man makes a significant contribution to divine creation] is impossible if God is infinite.’
It is much for this reason that I recommended that you have a look at Hartshorne's dipolar theism, which shows why this is not impossible. Like you, Hartshorne believes that man is a free-willed co-creator of the world. Unlike you (and most philosophers and theologians), he believes that God is both infinite and finite, transcendent and immanent, immutable and mutable, impassible and passible, etc, in different respects: on the one hand, in existence and essence; and on the other, in actuality. Hence why there is no logical contradiction in predicating these seeming contradictories of God. Since God is that than which no greater can be conceived, it is rather to the point that in these respects he is not supreme or eminent in either/or but in both/and.
I don’t accept his overall metaphysics (process philosophy), but on this matter, he is insightful:
https://iep.utm.edu/hart-d-t/
If to be a Christian is to be an adopted child of God, is to be divinised, is for the 'finite' to be in a perfect communion with the infinite but one where a Christian doesn't become infinite God, then all a Christian's life, his works, his cares, his loves are mixed with/taken up into God's life, they then become of infinite value, so that God being infinite increases a Christian's value whereas if God was finite a Christian's value would be less.
I can't yet see how God being 'abstractly-infininite' is such bad news - I don't see this as entailing God doesn't need creation and others or that a man's value to God is zero?
Behind the pseudo-mathematics; my point is very simple. If the creator is posited to have created everything from nothing, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and needs nothing from Men - then there is no space left for Men to contribute anything of significance, Man or Men can add nothing necessary or uniquely valuable to creation.
There is also no space left for Jesus Christ to contribute anything *essential* (nor to be a God of equal stature of the Father/ creator - but that is another argument) - because all the complex business of his conception, birth, life, baptism, death, resurrection, ascension... *could have been* accomplished directly by an omnipotent creator.
This, I take it, is the core point made by Islam; which (I take it) is how Islam was able to grow from within the heartlands of Christendom and to become larger than Christianity. If omnipotent abstract monotheism is insisted-upon: then there it is; and without any need for complex and incomprehensible theological rationalizations.
Commonsense reasoning cannot be defeated by complex (and to my mind dubious) theology: it can only be overwhelmed by a unified and powerful external influence on Men with a susceptible consciousness, and when other views are excluded or demonized (see today's post).
To put matters briefly: either God is finite (albeit unbounded in scope); or Islam will unambiguously and lucidly provide what is demanded.
@ Deagolwulf: Hartshorne is a boss, and I learnt much from him early on. On top of his other virtues, he writes like an educated Englishman, too, which is a great pleasure (pellucid and precise yet plain unprepossessing prose, often gorgeous; probably on account of his regular early exposure to the BCP (JR Lucas is the same)). Bruce would particularly enjoy his Omnipotence & Other Theological Mistakes. He would not probably so much enjoy (although he could much profit from) Geach's article (in Providence & Evil) in which he distinguishes 4 possible denotations of "omnipotence," and argues that Xian orthodoxy opts for the only one that avoids proposing either ugliness, absurdity, or both: i.e., almightiness. Which distinction rescues the notion of omnipotence from the critiques of that notion by process philosophers (such as Hartshorne) & their near ilks in New Age metaphysics, liberal Xian theology, and the various polytheisms (which often err by attacking a notion of omnipotence not properly Xian, but rather latterly Muslim (post al Ghazali) – i.e., by attacking a heresy of Xianity, and so a misunderstanding thereof).
When you attack omnipotence improperly so called, you attack a straw man. The victory is easy, but empty.
Hartshorne is a boss, as I say. Yet, his dipolar theism turns out (in his heart he knew this would be so; this is why he bothered to make his arguments) to be implicit – and, often, explicit, and indeed basic – in orthodox Xian metaphysics (and liturgy, and devotion) from the beginning. Viz., the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation. But, even prior (logically) to the Incarnation, immanence, e.g., is entailed by transcendence, properly understood. Likewise, omniscience entails knowledge and evaluation of all human acts and experiences, and thus complete compassion – and, indeed, patience (albeit, not temporal patience, but rather *eternal* patience). Then to cap & end all, in the Incarnation the immortal infinite is in Jesus the sweaty carpenter of Nazareth completely expressed and manifest temporally in a finite human body that can be killed (and that can tunnel through walls, disappear, levitate, and so forth). In Jesus, God is both mutable – he can be cut open, for heaven's sake, and bleeds, so that he dies – and immutable.
He is in time, and time is in him. Or – to make this explicit – time is in him, and so he can be in time. Indeed, because time is entirely in him, he is throughout time. This is how his transcendence entails his immanence.
It is because time is in Jesus that Jesus can first incarnate and then resurrect himself in time. That time is in Jesus means that life and death are in Jesus. Life is subject to Jesus; and death is an aspect of life. So death is subject to Jesus. So then is in him our resurrection to everlasting life.
In Jesus, the author of all things steps on to the stage of his play as actor (who from time to time even (as in scripture, and in the lives and writings of the saints) turns to the audience to narrate, explain or comment upon the action) and character. Where's the contradiction?
As for the difficulty that this is all difficult to understand: why under Heaven should we suppose that the heavens of the heavens and their author should be easy for us puny stupid creatures here below to understand? That’s like expecting the floorboards of the stage – not even of the Globe, but of some high school theater in Minneapolis – to understand Shakespeare’s plan in writing and producing Hamlet, forsooth.
I don't understand QM (OK, OK, I think I might, but I reckon well that I might be way off base, so …). Hell, I don't understand *myself* (I find myself much harder to understand than anything else). Why should I expect to understand *God,* for God’s sake? And yet, I find that I more and more do; or seem to do, anyway; by way of Jesus.
Jesus is the key, that unlocks all doors.
Jesus is the key, that unlocks all doors.
Just focus on that. As he said, our understanding is not in the end dispositive, but rather our faith. John 20:29. By its nature, faith seeks understanding (for, faith loves, and to understand is to love better) – but, as a confrontation of a finite intellect with an infinite intellect, it cannot hope to reach satisfaction and rest. Understanding *cannot* adequate to the object of faith – which is to say, to the object of experience as such.
This is implicit in Gödelian Incompleteness.
On Gödel, finite understanding cannot encompass *anything.* This, despite the feeling that the mind has understood. The feeling that the mind has understood is the feeling of participation in the divine understanding, which as infinite is not subject to Gödelian limits.
This is why there is mysticism, and devotion; piety, and worship. These are the heart of the faith, and celebrated within the Temple, and indeed within the Holy of Holies. Little children can do them, as well as or even better than the wise. Matthew 19:14.
Philosophy and theology on the other hand are practiced out in the Court of the Gentiles, where the boy Jesus taught the priests and prophets of Israel – the mystics, i.e., trying to figure out what had happened to them in the Temple and in the deserts (all priests and prophets – aye, and philosophers too, despite themselves – are mystics, more or less (one cannot be interested in concepts except in virtue of a prior love of the Platonic Good)) who practiced dialectic there, as did their counterparts upon the Areopagus.
We’ll have lots of time to come to understand the metaphysics of it all when we get to the Beatific Vision, forever. Nothing then ever shall be veiled to our sight. Until then, almost everything will be to us at bottom hidden and obscure, a peace in each thing and so among all things, a concord and harmony – of all notions, all thoughts, all experiences, all facts, all reals – that for now passes all our understanding.
In the meantime, if we should be tempted to think that we’ve got a pretty good way to understand the metaphysics so that it makes plain common sense and requires no vast incomprehensible and hard conceptual leaps, we shall be fooling ourselves. We shall in that case be barking up the wrong tree; some worldly tree, or other. So doing, shall we be misled.
Bottom line: if you think you have begun to understand God, you can be sure that you have not yet even begun to understand what it is that you would in him try to understand. All religion, properly so called – as opposed to pride, and so to irreligion – follows from this basic apprehension; thus, the first Commandment.
Islam is not larger than Christianity. Islam has not won, despite the fact that it conquered the heart and the majority of Christendom more than 1,000 years ago. The battle is not yet over. Much less, the war. Start with facts.
If the creator is posited to have created everything from nothing, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and needs nothing from Men – then there is no space left for Men to contribute anything of significance, Man or Men can add nothing necessary or uniquely valuable to creation.
This conflates contributions to God with contributions to his created order. Men cannot contribute anything to God, on account of the fact that he has already from all eternity reckoned all their contributions to reality. This does not entail that men contribute nothing to reality.
When I drink my coffee of a summer’s morning, I contribute to reality. So, I contribute to God. But my contribution to God is not temporally bound by the summer’s morning. It is reckoned by God from before and after and throughout the foundation of the world and of the world’s end. So, when I enjoyed my coffee this morning, God was not changed at or by that moment. Rather, from all eternity he now reckons my enjoyment of my coffee this morning.
It's hard, I agree. *All good or important things are hard.* What is easy to understand is trivial, and of little use or importance. And when you get right down to it, nothing is truly easy to understand.
"There is also no space left for Jesus Christ to contribute anything *essential* (nor to be a God of equal stature of the Father/creator – but that is another argument) – because all the complex business of his conception, birth, life, baptism, death, resurrection, ascension ... *could have been* accomplished directly by an omnipotent creator."
It *is* accomplished directly by an omnipotent creator, in just that way. He might have done it some other way, but he chooses not to. Whatever way he chose to do it, he would have accomplished it directly. Fiat lux, ergo lux, no? All he has to do is say the Word, and it is so. He says the Word, and it is so in Christ Jesus. Where’s the difficulty?
Jesus is not a God of equal stature with the Father and Creator, he *just is* the same being – the same God – as the Father and Creator. Honestly, this is so basic; it’s right there in the Credo. You can disagree with the Credo about this, but then if you do, you are no longer talking about Jesus who is God. You are, rather, talking about Jesus who is something less than his Father, like the Arians of all ages do. So, then, you are talking about Jesus who is a mere creature, like you. And like Lucifer.
May God forbid that you should go there.
Jesus doesn’t contribute something to salvation history that is other than what God the Father – or the Holy Ghost – contributes to salvation history, because Jesus and God – and the Holy Ghost – are One. They are one being.
'If the creator is posited to have created everything from nothing, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and needs nothing from Men - then there is no space left for Men to contribute anything of significance, Man or Men can add nothing necessary or uniquely valuable to creation.'
True. If all goodness or value had its source in God alone, and thus none stemmed from his creatures but dwelt in them only derivatively, i.e., if they had no creativity of their own, then it would simply make no sense for God to be a creator and hence no sense for there to be a universe at all, for the sum-total of all goodness or value would remain the same whether his creatures or the universe existed or not. Since God does nothing in vain, and seeks no lower goodness or value, it follows that his creation increases the sum-total of goodness or value, and it could do so only if at least some of his creatures, for instance, us humans, have creative and not merely derivative power.
'For Aquinas, God is called omnipotent because everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms is within God’s power to accomplish (ST I, Q 25, a. 3). Hartshorne rejects this claim and holds instead that any state of affairs in which more than one agent makes decisions cannot be conceived as the product of one agent, even if that agent is God.
[...]
'Indeed, the argument just given that some states of affairs require multiple decision makers is itself an argument against ex nihilo creation, at least in its classic form. God was said to create the universe, which includes the decisions that creatures make, in one non-temporal and unilateral act. Hartshorne’s argument entails that no universe with multiple decision makers can be created in its entirety by God alone. Aquinas notwithstanding, the making of decisions is a paradigm of creative activity, for something is brought into existence if only the decision itself. For this reason, Hartshorne’s example of multiple decision makers is also an example of multiple creators. Hartshorne saw in Jules Lequyer’s statement that “God created me creator of myself” an anticipation of his own views on divine creativity. A hallmark of Hartshorne’s neoclassical theism is that the universe is a joint creative product of (a) the lesser creators that are the creatures, localized in space and time, and (b) the eminent creator which is God whose influence extends to every creature that ever has or that ever will exist.'
https://iep.utm.edu/hart-d-t/
A broader point on two all-too-human errors of relative perspective: one does not raise the status of God by lowering the status of man, and one does not raise the status of man by lowering the status of God.
Grovelling self-abasement is as unholy as exalting self-aggrandisement.
Kristor,
Yes, Hartshorne is a boss, and he came as a great surprise to me. For some reason, I had expected him to be quite awful. JR Lucas, on the other hand, I have long admired.
‘When you attack omnipotence improperly so called, you attack a straw man. The victory is easy, but empty.’
I presume the you is non-personal! I do not attack it per se, but there are, as you note, some very erroneous notions of it that depend on prior conceptions, or rather, misconceptions. As an aside, I find it amusing that Aquinas was lumbered with the word omnipotentia, for it (not the idea) suggests an antithesis to his conception of God.
‘his dipolar theism turns out (in his heart he knew this would be so; this is why he bothered to make his arguments) to be implicit – and, often, explicit, and indeed basic – in orthodox Xian metaphysics (and liturgy, and devotion) from the beginning.’
It was already there in Platonism (including so-called Neoplatonism). But I think that the conception of God that arose largely from the wayward Platonist called Aristotle did much damage to its appreciation in later ages.
‘As for the difficulty that this is all difficult to understand: why under Heaven should we suppose that the heavens of the heavens and their author should be easy for us puny stupid creatures here below to understand?’
‘if you think you have begun to understand God, you can be sure that you have not yet even begun to understand what it is that you would in him try to understand.’
Agreed. We can barely conceive of God, which, considering the object of our conception, is rather a fine achievement.
I think this business of the un-understandability of God is a false path for Christians - another emphasis which points toward Islam. Christians claim that God is a person, Good and loving.
And, after all, we Christians have Jesus Christ to show and tell us of his Father.
Furthermore, the accusation of claiming to understand that which cannot be understood comes in the midst of a discussion about different understandings of God.
It is a contradiction of sorts to accuse 'the other person' of claiming to understand the un-understandable, while arguing that they are wrong in their understanding.
I would go so far in the opposite direction as to say that it is one of the duties of a Christian today to reach a sufficient *experiential* understanding of God and what God wants from us; that the modern Christian and discern and choose (for and from himself) between the innumerable and quantitatively-overwhelming errors and false teachings with which he will be confronted.
We can understand God by analogy to a child's understanding of his parents - That is, we do not see God as strange or as a stranger, but from a shared basis of parent-child relationship, and from the element of divine within each Man.
Inadvertently we may be equivocating between three senses of understanding. It can mean ‘grasping fully’ (i.e., comprehending), ‘grasping sufficiently’ (i.e., enough to get some idea of the full significance and implications of), and ‘judgement, outlook, opinion, belief’ (e.g., ‘in my understanding, it is …’). Naturally, it is possible and very common to have an understanding of God in this third sense. But I believe it is impossible to understand God in the first sense, and I very much doubt that we can understand God in the second sense. (Our grasp, even if great and profound, or childlike, is still insufficient, yet it is likely here, in the second sense, where mythos and mysticism play their greatest roles.) But from the above, it does not follow that I believe that we cannot know or understand anything about God, what he must be or cannot be, etc, in order to count as God, or that we cannot understand (grasp fully or sufficiently) our ideas (or understandings in the third sense) of God, whether they are sound or unsound, coherent or incoherent, reasonable or unreasonable, blasphemous or pious.
A childlike ‘understanding’ of God (i.e., acceptance of, trust in, outlook on God, as a child looks upon his parents in innocent and unquestioning love) may well be the best there is. But children are blessed in a way that we are not. Loss of innocence is an awful thing, but we have suffered it, and suffer it we must. We can and should be childlike in many things, and I don’t think we should not seek childlikeness, but we cannot be children again … at least not in this lifetime.
Yes, this is more likely. We can demonstrate experimentally that the entropy source powering quantum measurements has infinite complexity -- this follows from empirical validation of Bell's Theorem.
My suspicion is that God is offering to share his infinite creative ability with us, but only if we agree to become Good(TM). Note that infinity is a funny thing: God could break off "half" of his infinite capability and give it to us while remaining undiminished!
It would not be Good(TM) for God to give non-good beings infinite creative ability because they could then use that to create a limitless Hell to trap people in. Finite creative ability (and thus finite lifespan) is a safety feature, but one that will be removed when we are ready.
The Orthodox characterization of God is different from the common Western notion of God as analogous to a absolute human ruler: check out Kalomiros's "The River of Fire" for more details. Kalomiros agrees that significant contamination of Christian philosophy from Greco-Roman pagan sources has occurred, leading to the characterization of God the Father as being power-hungry and vengeful like a typical human king -- fundamentally a human projection / demonic deception.
Instead, God the Father is an actual benevolent parent who wants only good for all of His children -- His gifts to us are solely constrained by our free will to receive them or not. Even as bad people we receive a large benefit from His ongoing active efforts to sustain the physical Universe -- clockwork deistic models are in fact disproven by physics since we can observe that information is being constantly pumped in from Outside.
Yes, this is the Orthodox teaching: purification to get rid of the noise as much as possible, then theosis to get to the direct *experience* of God, after which sorting out the philosophy / theology isn't that problematic -- trying to do this in the wrong order causes problems. The father-son relationship in the Prodigal Son parable contains the essence of the *personal* relationship, which is as you have described it.
A Presbytera I know explained that if all copies of the Bible were destroyed, all theological writings lost, and all of our minds wiped, this would be a minor inconvenience: all the necessary knowledge would be imparted through divine revelation to the pure of *heart* aka saints.
'Kalomiros agrees that significant contamination of Christian philosophy from Greco-Roman pagan sources has occurred, leading to the characterization of God the Father as being power-hungry and vengeful like a typical human king -- fundamentally a human projection / demonic deception.'
Have you forgotten Yahweh? No such demonic misconception of God existed amongst the Greco-Roman pagans, and it is quite staggering that you project it upon them from your own sources. But this slander of ‘pagans’ (i.e., non-Abrahamics) and the demonisation of the divine is a long-ingrained tradition amongst Christians, seen long ago by Isidore of Alexandria as ‘incurably polluted’.*
*Damascius, The Philosophical History, tr. P. Athanassiadi (Athens, Greece: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), II.20, p. 99. (‘He utterly rejected them as being incurably polluted, and nothing whatever would compel him to accept their company ...’)
From the fact that the creator has created all creatures ex nihilo, and that he is omniscient, omnipotent – so that everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms is within his power to accomplish – and perfect, so that he needs nothing, it does not follow that there is no way for men to contribute anything of significance.
In the first place, that God *can* effect anything that any of his creatures can effect does not entail either that he *does* so, or that his creatures cannot effect anything. Creatures *can* generate effects; there is no other way they could be actual, than to act. Thus one of the things that God can do – which creatures cannot – is create creatures that can and do act.
In the second place, it is an aspect of God’s perfection and omniscience that he suffers eternally all the goods, and likewise all the agonies, that his creatures ever actualize and suffer, at every moment in the histories of their worlds. He suffers them, not *before* they act or suffer, NB – for, sub specie aeternitatis, every creaturely moment is now, so that there is in God’s life no such thing as before or after – but rather, *as* they act and suffer.
Then God needs nothing from us in two ways: first, even had creatures never been, he’d be perfectly blissful; and second, given that we creatures are, his knowledge of our free acts is an aspect of his perfection. Whitehead distinguished between these two ways by drawing a distinction between the Primordial Nature of God – God as he is in himself, which is already an occasion of infinite bliss – and the Consequent Nature of God, which is God as knowing all that there is to know about his creatures and their acts. Both these Natures are eternal, and thus aspects of the Divine Now. The Primordial Nature then is prior to the Consequent Nature, not temporally, but logically. Again, the Consequent Nature follows the Primordial Nature not temporally, but logically. The Primordial and Consequent Natures are aspects of the single simple Divine act of being.
"Since God does nothing in vain, and seeks no lower goodness or value, it follows that his creation increases the sum-total of goodness or value, and it could do so only if at least some of his creatures, for instance, us humans, have creative and not merely derivative power."
Exactly. What is more: as himself maximally good, God seeks maximal good, ergo creation that increases the sum total of realized good is as it were baked into God’s Primordial Nature. Thus the Consequent Nature is implicit in the Primordial Nature.
"I presume the you is non-personal!"
Yes, throughout.
"… the conception of God that arose largely from the wayward Platonist called Aristotle did much damage to its appreciation in later ages."
Both Aristotle and Plato are often, perhaps even usually, misunderstood. Augustine reconciled them tidily, and to my satisfaction.
"… we may be equivocating between three senses of understanding."
Exactly. We can’t hope to comprehend God through and through. Indeed, on Gödel, we can’t hope to comprehend *anything.* But that doesn’t mean we can understand nothing at all about God (or any lesser thing). One of the things we can understand about God is that we can’t comprehend him. We can also understand a lot about what a God would have to be like in order to meet the criteria of inclusion in the set of the Ultimate; likewise, we can understand a lot about our concepts of what the Ultimate would have to be like, in order to be construed properly as Ultimate.
"… the characterization of God the Father as being power-hungry and vengeful like a typical human king – fundamentally a human projection / demonic deception.
Instead, God the Father is an actual benevolent parent who wants only good for all of His children …"
Language about God’s anger is not the sole province of Western Christians such as Savonarola or Jonathan Edwards. God was himself to all human appearances pretty pissed off when he withered the tree and drove the money changers from the Temple. His wrath is all over the OT, too: Angel of Death, genocide of the Amalekites, and so forth. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.” Etc.
Bearing properly in mind all the usual caveats about religious language and ancient customary forms of Semitic expression, that scripture is shot through with talk of divine wrath from beginning to end should disincline us to discount it altogether. It behooves us rather to understand how it could make sense to people ancient or modern to think of God as wrathful, and how we might reconcile that apprehension with the basic dogma that God is loving.
Typical human kings are much more like loving fathers than vengeful power hungry tyrants. You get vengefulness and hunger for power when the institutions of society are set up so as to render the office of sovereign insecure. God is not a tyrant, for he is not insecure. He is the King of the Universe: a loving Father. So much so, that he rules not by diktat, but by the persuasive allure of beauty, truth, goodness, order, and life.
How to reconcile the benevolent Lord with the wrathful YHWH? Good fathers are not pushovers. They are stern disciplinarians. We look to them to embody the rules.
"We speak, indeed, of the “wrath” of God. We do not, however, assert that it indicates any “passion” on His part, but that it is something which is assumed in order to discipline by stern means those sinners who have committed many and grievous sins. For that which is called God’s “wrath,” and “anger,” is a means of discipline; and that such a view is agreeable to Scripture, is evident from what is said in the Psalms 6, “O LORD, rebuke me not in Thine anger, neither chasten me in Thy hot displeasure;” and also in Jeremiah. “O LORD, correct me, but with judgment: not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing.” Any one, moreover, who reads in the second book of Kings of the “wrath” of God, inducing David to number the people, and finds from the first book of Chronicles that it was the devil who suggested this measure, will, on comparing together the two statements, easily see for what purpose the “wrath” is mentioned, of which “wrath,” as the Apostle Paul declares, all men are children: “We were by nature children of wrath, even as others.” Moreover, … “wrath” is no passion on the part of God, but [rather] each one brings it upon himself by his sins …" Origen, Contra Celsus 472
Only a wayward disobedient child has anything to fear from a just and sane father. As a father cares for his children, so does the LORD care for those who fear him. Psalm 103:13. NB: *for those who fear him.* The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. Proverbs 9:10. Wisdom is to discern how to keep God’s commandments. Ecclesiastes 8:5. And to keep his commandments is to love him. John 14:15. As Rudolph Otto famously observed, love does not drive out fear: indeed, at their apotheoses, they unite in numinous dread of the mysterium tremens.
@Bruce- Sorry for these very long posts. I tried to put down how I see omniscience, omnipotence, agency, the problem of evil, in, what seems to me at the moment, into a coherent whole. Be grateful for any thoughts.
God is not good by a 'God-given' nature, it is more like God wills to be and is good. It is more like God chose to be good. This is why we have agency. We too have to make this choice.
Satan chose to be and will evil. If for Satan, an angel, this was an irreversible, total conclusive choice to be and will evil, then we can think that God too made an irreversible, total conclusive choice to be and will good.
Our time on earth, in one reason for it, is a testing of what we choose, it is to face the same decision God made and see if we make the same choice.
How we derive agency then is much the same as how parents beget children? Parents create their child and we do not ask how the child has agency. Agency is part of being human, and it is part of the nature of humanity and it is generated in others by procreation.
Likewise, God begot a Son. And so the Son is of the same Being as the Father, there is a transference of substance, of patrimony, just like in the procreation of humans.
How God made humans was in exactly the same way God the Father begot the Son. I say in exactly the same way, because it more or less was, except that with humanity this was done via a different way. It was 'begetting' but it was done by a different way, a variant of begetting called 'adoption'.
'Adoption' is the word we use to describe the different begetting of men to the begetting of the Son. The two are very, very similar. So when we think of adoption we can think of the same generative act of procreation, the same transference of patrimony and being. It's just different. Adoption is the form of begetting of exact likenesses which are also different in some attribute. In the case of men 'adoption' is the begetting of offspring that are not God or divine. Yet we can speak of men as images of God, and images also mean a magnification in a more obvious form (such as the physical) -as God is spirit- of the essence of God.
So that in men we learn that the most important attributes of God, and considered as essential by God, were passed on by the begetting called adoption. Therefore the truest essence of God is imparted to men so that they are genuinely like God but not God hence adoption.
God did not make men out of nothing. God made the substance of creation and men from Himself, out of His very substance, although it is different to God but also like Him.
God's creating of creation and men was a direct and necessary consequence of God's very life.
Creation and men were as necessary as God the Son.
If God the Son was eternally begotten, then we can speak of creation and men as being eternally made. And in the sense that creation existed eternally with God - it was made from His substance- then yes, the realm of creation of matter and spirit is made from eternal substance, and also the height of creation which is the height of adoption (as there are degrees of adoption) that is the mingling of the divine and creation we call divinisation, is also a union of creation with the eternal substance of God.
So that if Jesus is God, and God is eternal, then yes 'weird-Time' is a necessary consequence and one that veils and reveals the vast importance -and eternalised character- of creation and men.
The question of evil and omniscience is that we all have genuine agency like God as we are His offspring via adoption.
If God the Son is necessary, and creation and men are as necessary and consequential as God the Son. Therefore God's omniscience is one attribute, like omnipotence, that dwells in God with other attributes such as free agency, creative, God of Love, a Father, a Father who begets a Son......and therefore it is an error to think of one attribute in isolation to the others. In other terms, God has omniscience up to the point that it does not contravene another attribute. For example, God's omnipotence can't make Him be four persons if He is three, or lie and murder if He is truth and life, or not be creative if He is creator, or not beget a Son if He is Father.
Therefore, if creation and men are absolutely necessary, as necessary as begetting God the Son (who, by the way, also has agency), then men with free agency are as necessary to God as God begetting the Son. God's omniscience exists up to the point it doesn't contravene God's other attributes of God-the-Father-who-begets-a Son, and God-the-Father-who begets-by-adoption-non-God-men or little gods.
If you have all the even numbers, {2, 4, 6, ...}, that's infinite. But any odd number, like 3 or 5, adds something genuinely new.
And so concepts like omniscience and omnipotence are even bigger than infinite. They don't mean merely infinite, but *all*. And one thing that makes them particularly difficult is that we're saying all, but we don't know more than a minute fraction of what that all is.
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