Trinity Debate
11/14/19 08:51 AM Filed in: Christianity | Trinity
Last night a friend and I attended this debate between Dr. White and Dr. Ally at Georgia Tech. I was pleased to see the number of people who attended. Nevertheless, the debate didn't advance the state of the art of the issues. Neither Dr. White, nor Dr. Ally, presented any arguments or rebuttals that I haven't heard before.
One line of argument presented by Dr. Ally was that Jesus never referred to himself as YHWH. During the question and answer session after the debate, I had hoped to ask about the paper ‘Lord, LORD’: Jesus as YHWH in Matthew and Luke by Jason Staples which sets forth this thesis:
Despite numerous studies of the word κύριος (‘Lord’) in the New Testament, the significance of the double form κύριε κύριε occurring in Matthew and Luke has been overlooked, with most assuming the doubling merely communicates heightened emotion or special reverence. By contrast, this article argues that whereas a single κύριος might be ambiguous, the double κύριος formula outside the Gospels always serves as a distinctive way to represent the Tetragrammaton and that its use in Matthew and Luke is therefore best understood as a way to represent Jesus as applying the name of the God of Israel to himself.
There are three clear instances of this usage in the New Testament: Mt 7:21-22, Mt 25:11, and Lk 6:46 which says:
Why do you address me as κύριε κύριε and not do what I say?
Now, a Unitarian might say that Jesus really isn't applying YHWH to himself but is rather saying, in effect, "if you're going to call me YHWH (which, by the way, you shouldn't do), why do you disobey me?" After all, history is littered with people who disobey their God. Unfortunately, time ran out so I wasn't able to ask about this.
I was also disappointed by Dr. Ally's use of the red, green, and blue components of light as an analogy to the Trinity. All physical analogies to the Trinity are wrong, whether it is the components of light, or the triple-point of water where it is solid, liquid, and gas form. This is not what the doctrine of the Trinity teaches, even though I have heard the latter example from a Baptist pulpit by a Trinitarian pastor. While I expect better from both, I hold Dr. Ally to a higher standard. It's one thing to be a confused backwoods pastor, it's another to be a PhD who is trying to rebut the doctrine of the Trinity. You have to rebut the actual doctrine, not a straw man. But I also have to possibly fault Dr. White. He and Dr. Ally have been having these debates for years; one would have hoped that this would have been addressed and corrected.
I think Dr. White also hurt his cause with his stance on Sola Scripture. First, because he violated the principle by talking about Koranic statements on the Trinity. He attempted to show that the Koran didn't correctly address issues of this particular doctrine. I'm stating it badly. Nevertheless, first, Islam denies the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, so I'm not sure what value there is in trying to show a problem in the understanding of the Trinity in the Koran. One can show such misunderstandings solely from contemporary statements by Muslim, other Unitarian, and even some Christian sources, such as the "red, green, blue components of light" as an analogy to the Trinity.
Second, by emphasizing Scripture alone, Dr. White misses an opportunity to have a meta-discussion about the doctrine of the Trinity. A Unitarian might think the doctrine of the Trinity is incoherent because Jesus has a God, so if Jesus is God, then God has a God. Can't possibly be true, right? But God is a self-referential system, so God is His own God. Self-referential systems can often be paradoxical, but Sola Scripture prevents us from using this knowledge to our advantage.
Earlier I said that all physical analogies of the Trinity are wrong. They have to be, because God is immaterial. Nevertheless, both theologians and physicists face the same problem, namely, how to deal with things that are far outside our daily experience. How do we humans deal with data that leads to unintuitive conclusions? Do we discard, or "smooth," the data so that the conclusions are mentally palatable? Or do we accept things that are hard to understand? Do we embrace the mystery or try to de-mystify it?
This has been an amazing year for science. In April, astronomers released the first ever image of a black hole. While we can now "see" the exterior of a black hole, we have trouble describing them. The equations of General Relativity break down at the center of the black hole. We don't know what Nature is doing there, nor will we ever be able to measure it. Do we accept the discontinuity or do we hope to modify General Relativity, perhaps by String Theory, such that the discontinuity goes away? Will we be happy with this solution or will we forever wonder if what we would see inside the black hole might show our equations to be wrong? In the same way, is God a descriptive singularity or will we be able to smooth things out? How will we know given that we can't see inside what we're describing?
On October 23, Google demonstrated quantum supremacy which is an application of quantum mechanics to computing. Here is what a Nobel-prize winning physicist has to say about quantum mechanics. In his hour long lecture "The Character of Physical Law - Part 6 Probability and Uncertainty", Richard Feynman begins by saying that the more that we observe Nature, the less reasonable our explanations of Nature become. "Intuitively far from obvious" is one phrase he uses. Within the first ten minutes of the lecture he says things like:
We see things that are far from what we would guess. We see things that are very far from what we could have imagined and so our imagination is stretched to the utmost … just to comprehend the things that are there. [Nature behaves] in a way like nothing you have ever seen before. … But how can it be like that? Which really is a reflection of an uncontrolled but I say utterly vain desire to see it in terms of some analogy with something familiar… I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics… Nobody knows how it can be like that.
Substitute "the Trinity" for "Quantum Mechanics" and "God" for Nature and his statement is just as applicable. Let his words, "an utterly vain desire to see it in terms of some analogy with something familiar" sink deeply in. The physicist and the theologian have the same problem. How to accurately communicate, and how to accept, something utterly foreign. If it's hard to wrap our heads around Nature, how much more God?
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Miles Gilbert
11/05/19 02:48 PM Filed in: Family
2:48pm, 6 lbs, 13 oz. He's not listening to hot tunes in the second picture; it's a hearing test, which he passed. They didn't do that with our kids twenty seven plus years ago...
World Philosophy in Summary Form: Preface
09/24/19 06:27 PM Filed in: Philosophy | Christianity
I borrowed Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form, by Frank N. Magill and staff, from our church's library. I will post snippets that I find interesting.
From the Preface:
One wonders exactly how these ideas are tested and shown to be true. Even though there is a "replication crisis" in science, and disagreements about the interpretation of quantum mechanics (e.g. here, here and here), at least, science has Nature to test their ideas against.
From the Preface:
As seekers after truth, perhaps philosophers have given closer attention to the works of their predecessors and contemporaries than any other group. A new book of serious standing on the subject of philosophy is quickly dissected by experts, critics who are relentless in their pursuit of error and who stand ready to demolish forthwith any false idea advanced. So, painstakingly, has the thread of truth been kept intact—tested, altered, its flaws mended as it passed from one hand to the next down through the centuries.
One wonders exactly how these ideas are tested and shown to be true. Even though there is a "replication crisis" in science, and disagreements about the interpretation of quantum mechanics (e.g. here, here and here), at least, science has Nature to test their ideas against.
Trinity: Full Circle
For just a little over two years I have been discussing the doctrine of the Trinity with a friend who has misgivings about it. One of the issues that we've gone back and forth on is whether or not the writers of Scripture should have had the same understanding of the Trinity that we do today. He thinks the answer has to be "yes", since they were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write what they did about Jesus. I think the answer is "no", for two reasons. First, the writers of Scripture wrote over a period of years. What one author wrote might not have been available to another author, and the doctrine of the Trinity comes out of the entirety of statements about Christ. Second, in some ways, God and Nature are alike. Both appear to have an unchangeable core (for Nature, as far as we can currently ascertain, physical law and physical constants haven't changed). But while Nature has always presented the same "face" to us, we are still learning about it. The 20th century saw two great revolutions in our understanding: General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. How we understand the world today is very different from that of Einstein (while he developed Relativity, he didn't like Quantum Mechanics), Newton, Copernicus, and Aristotle. We remain puzzled over dark matter and dark energy, so our understanding tomorrow will be different. Yet Nature hasn't changed. Nature has always revealed what Nature is. God, on the other hand, progressively revealed Himself to us, culminating in the revelation of His Son. Yet, as with Nature, it has still taken us time to digest what has been said. One of the biggest impediments to understanding Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and the Trinity, is our intuition. All three are counter-intuitive and we have trouble accepting that. That's a story for another time.
But I digress. Our church is considering hiring an assistant pastor who went to Wheaton. In 2015, Wheaton initiated termination proceedings against tenured professor Larycia Hawkins. I blogged about it here. Since I'm a troublemaker, I plan on asking the candidate his opinion on the whole matter and whether or not he agrees with Wheaton's position. I hope he doesn't, because I think Wheaton is very much wrong. In reviewing my post, I decided to bring some (but not all) stale links up to date. One of the links was to her response to Wheaton. Since that link, to Scribd, now requires a subscription to view fully, I managed to find it elsewhere. In it, she wrote:
Dr. Hawkins supports my position that our understanding of Christ has been progressive. I texted this to my friend. His response was that my post on Dr. Hawkins was the first link I ever sent him.
But I digress. Our church is considering hiring an assistant pastor who went to Wheaton. In 2015, Wheaton initiated termination proceedings against tenured professor Larycia Hawkins. I blogged about it here. Since I'm a troublemaker, I plan on asking the candidate his opinion on the whole matter and whether or not he agrees with Wheaton's position. I hope he doesn't, because I think Wheaton is very much wrong. In reviewing my post, I decided to bring some (but not all) stale links up to date. One of the links was to her response to Wheaton. Since that link, to Scribd, now requires a subscription to view fully, I managed to find it elsewhere. In it, she wrote:
On the "yes" side, both Christians and Muslims (as well as Jews) confess that God is One (Deut. 6:4). So, yes, Christians and Muslims (and Jews) affirm fully that "that God is the Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" but –borrowing from Stackhouse--"if we insist, as many are insisting in this furore, that God must be understood in terms of the Trinity, with a focus especially on Jesus, or else one really doesn't know God, I respectfully want to ask such Bible believers what they make of Abraham (who is held up as a paradigm of faith in the New Testament) and the list of Old Testament saints (who are held up as paradigms of faith to Christians in Hebrews 11), precisely none of whom can be seriously understood as holding trinitarian views and some proleptic vision of the identity and career of Jesus Christ."
Dr. Hawkins supports my position that our understanding of Christ has been progressive. I texted this to my friend. His response was that my post on Dr. Hawkins was the first link I ever sent him.
Wright Runs Away -- Then Came Back
09/14/19 01:25 PM Filed in: Philosophy | Bad Arguments
Update 9/17 @ 11:15am: This morning I looked to see if there had been any more comments on the below referenced post and I saw that my comment, which had been deleted, was now present. So I retract the statement that Wright ran away. Still, if he would only attempt to show me where I'm wrong in my argument...
Over the years I've had several fruitless, yet generally polite, arguments[1] with author, philosopher, and theist John Wright. Fruitless, because neither of us is swayed by the other's arguments. I remain fully convinced that some of his arguments are wrong, even if some of his conclusions happen to be right. Polite, because we stick to the arguments.
But, yesterday, in Wright's Parable of the Adding Machine, he deleted a response that I made to him.
My initial response. His response. Here is the reply he deleted:
It isn't clear to me why Wright deleted this response. He's certainly free to do whatever he wants with his blog, but I didn't violate any of his conditions for posting. My guess is that this left him with a challenge he couldn't rebut. Wright very much wants to prove that immaterial things exist. That's easy. But he also wants to prove that they exist apart from material things. That's hard. It may be impossible to prove either way. What my response showed is that arithmetic is based on simple physical operations. Add a rock to a pail. Remove a rock from a pail. Determine if a pail is empty. Do something if a pail is empty otherwise do something else. These actions give you addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation over the non-negative integers. Attach labels to these actions and you have elementary arithmetic. Attach labels to collections of labels and you have shortcuts that hide a tremendous amount of physical activity. Wright doesn't know how to sever the ideas of math (which are basically just "potential actions," not unlike a high jumper who looks where he's going to make each step on his approach to jumping over the bar before he actually does it). This argument supports the idea that math is "matter in motion in certain patterns," which Wright very much does not want to be true.
This explains why, in a previous discussion, Wright was so opposed to the following observation about Euclidean geometry, by Marvin Jay Greenberg, from Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries:
This challenged his assertion that Euclidean geometry was purely non-physical.
Am I right as to why he deleted my post? I may never know, because he avoided the challenge.
A partial catalog of discussions with Wright:
Over the years I've had several fruitless, yet generally polite, arguments[1] with author, philosopher, and theist John Wright. Fruitless, because neither of us is swayed by the other's arguments. I remain fully convinced that some of his arguments are wrong, even if some of his conclusions happen to be right. Polite, because we stick to the arguments.
But, yesterday, in Wright's Parable of the Adding Machine, he deleted a response that I made to him.
My initial response. His response. Here is the reply he deleted:
A stopsign written in Chinese only means STOP to someone who reads Chinese.Drop me in the middle of China and I'll tell you which sign means "stop" after watching how the Chinese behave around them.
[The symbols] must follow arithmetic rules.Sure. But the rules are labels for behaviors. Show me the behaviors and I'll tell you what the symbols mean.
The behavior of the gear train is a thoughtless therefore blind and meaningless motion of bit of matter in reaction to a clerk pressing a lever.The behavior follows a pattern, a pattern which is the same as that performed with stones and pails. Since we've given labels to the latter behaviors, because the behavior of the machine matches that pattern, we can use the same labels.
... because the form of both the clerks calculation and the gears' motion share the same formSo you agree with the first sentence of the prior blockquote. Do you disagree with the second sentence? If so, why?
But the machine cannot count.It implements the successor function for a finite set of numbers. The behavior is what matters.
It is not alive.Define "alive". Is a virus alive?
The same symbols written in a different order on another part of the machine, or on a piece of paper, would have no meaning at allSure, if they can't be associated with behavior. But, just like watching Chinese behavior around a Chinese stop sign to learn what 停 means, if I could watch the behavior of whatever made the marks, I might be able to learn what they mean. Or find a Rosetta stone, which is just a shortcut for the same thing.
It isn't clear to me why Wright deleted this response. He's certainly free to do whatever he wants with his blog, but I didn't violate any of his conditions for posting. My guess is that this left him with a challenge he couldn't rebut. Wright very much wants to prove that immaterial things exist. That's easy. But he also wants to prove that they exist apart from material things. That's hard. It may be impossible to prove either way. What my response showed is that arithmetic is based on simple physical operations. Add a rock to a pail. Remove a rock from a pail. Determine if a pail is empty. Do something if a pail is empty otherwise do something else. These actions give you addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation over the non-negative integers. Attach labels to these actions and you have elementary arithmetic. Attach labels to collections of labels and you have shortcuts that hide a tremendous amount of physical activity. Wright doesn't know how to sever the ideas of math (which are basically just "potential actions," not unlike a high jumper who looks where he's going to make each step on his approach to jumping over the bar before he actually does it). This argument supports the idea that math is "matter in motion in certain patterns," which Wright very much does not want to be true.
This explains why, in a previous discussion, Wright was so opposed to the following observation about Euclidean geometry, by Marvin Jay Greenberg, from Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries:
Ancient geometry was actually a collection of rule-of-thumb procedures arrived at through experimentation, observation of analogies, guessing, and occasional flashes of intuition. In short, it was an empirical subject in which approximate answers were usually sufficient for practical purposes.
This challenged his assertion that Euclidean geometry was purely non-physical.
Am I right as to why he deleted my post? I may never know, because he avoided the challenge.
A partial catalog of discussions with Wright:
Date Title 9/8/2010 Dialog With An Adding Machine 1/26/2011 Materialism, Theism, and Information 3/24/2011 Taking Ideas Seriously 4/16/2011 Bad Arguments Against Materialism 5/8/2012 My Instinct is to say the Morality is not Instinctive 4/29/2014 The Cosmic Chessboard, or, ONCE MORE FOR OLD TIMES SAKE! 12/15/2014 When Wright Is Wrong 5/17/2015 The Notorious Meat Robot Letters – Expanded! 5/16/2015 Man Is The Animal... 5/8/2019 No Metaphysics, No Physics