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Tom
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| Posted 3/22/2012 1:23 PM (GMT -6) |   | D: But, MERELY for the sake of argument, even IF the uncreated trinitarian relationships could be conceived as NOT being necessary, Jeff WOULD say that those interpersonal relationships DID unceasingly exist prior to creation.
T: Well, I'm not sure. Aristotle argues (I think he's right, but who am I?) that whatever has always existed (i.e., whatever exists now without having come into existence) is 'necessary' and cannot NOT exist. So if the triune relations have obtained unceasingly without having 'begun to be', they're what we call 'necessary' and so cannot be otherwise. From my point of view, if the triune relations aren't necessary, they they must have come to be at some point in time (hello Arius).
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 3/23/2012 9:20 AM (GMT -6) | | Jeff:
Are you guys saying that God is not sympathetic/compassionate?
No. Of course, God is loving/compassionate and immediately present and responsive to our emotional states. What we are saying is that God's love/compassion comes from a FULLNESS of "love, joy, and peace". God doesn't have to MOPE, SOB or RAGE with us to be compassionately present and responsive to our trials, right?
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Jeff:
That plus the notion that God can't be a beneficiary of creation seems to contradict not only scripture, but any conceivable notion of a free being acting freely.
God is the beneficiary of creation insofar as Creation is a context to experience Godself "anew" and express the delight, joy, and love that God eternally experiences in giving created beings opportunity to participate in that delight, joy, and love. (See the Aesthetic Argument in T&P) God was FREE to create Creation (or NOT) because God didn't NEED Creation in any ways to achieve the delight, joy, and love God is. You don't want to say that God is "more satisfied" WITH Creation than WITHOUT it, do you?
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 3/23/2012 11:42 AM (GMT -6) | | | I still mean it...
| Posted By : One Love - 8/23/2011 3:34 PM |
| Combine...
-EO views of Grace, Essence/Energies, epiklesis, and asceticism
-Greg's trinitarian process metaphysics--including God as Summum Bonum
-John Piper's Christian hedonism
And you get a good ground for an EVANGELICALLY COMPATIBLE view of "apatheia" and "theosis"
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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Post Edited (One Love) : 8/23/2011 3:53:34 PM (GMT-5) | 
| Posted By : One Love - 8/24/2011 11:34 AM |
Piper was on to something here...
Dissatisfied Contentment
Now let's ask our earlier question in a concrete form: What should motivate a contented, joyful Christian to cross the street and help a man who has been beat up by robbers? The answer, I think, is something like this: When I see an injured man across the street, his hurt is like a magnet to my God-given joy, which has in it the compulsion to expand itself. My joy desires to increase by rejoicing in his restored joy. This prospect of greater joy in his joy is my motive for crossing the street and helping him. I feel drawn to go because when he enters my awareness, his injury and grief are like a low-pressure zone that my high-pressure zone of joy is approaching. There is an immediate draft of air created toward the low-pressure zone as my joy tends to expand to fill it. This draft of joy is called "love." As Paul says in II Corinthians 1:23-24, to love is to find our joy in the purest joy of another.
Does this, then, imply that a Christian will never weep or be grieved? No. When Paul says in Romans 12:15, "Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep," he shows that the contentment of the believer is not a static, Buddha-like serenity unmovable by the hurts of others. When Christian joy perceives grief, it becomes "dissatisfied contentment." It senses a lack and a need – the lack of sharing itself with the grieving, and the need to delight in the other person's happiness, which isn't there. Thus, Christian joy starts to expand in love to fill that lack by bringing about the holy joy of another person. The manifold process by which this is done embraces all forms of Christian ministry. But since there is usually a lapse of time between our perception of our neighbor's grief and our eventual rejoicing in his restored joy, there is a place for weeping in that interval. The weeping of compassion is the weeping of joy impeded in the extension of itself to another.
(Though he grossly misunderstands the Buddhist understanding of equanimity, it's the expansive view of joy that makes sense)
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From Jewish Kabbalah... Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction
"...we find ourselves longing for lasting pleasure and feel that somehow it must exist… but in order to feel that, first we need an unlimited, ever expanding desire that draws a boundless fulfillment. To do this we have to seek pleasure in the fulfillment of others. This desire to bestow is a spiritual desire, and one taste of it is greater than all the egoistic pleasure ever felt by all creatures over all time, because it’s a pleasure not felt in our little subjective needs but in everything. There’s no limit to that desire, and there’s no end to the pleasure derived from that need."When John Piper and Kabbalah agree like that...you gotta KNOW somethin's up.  |
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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Asher
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| Posted 3/23/2012 9:43 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: Are you guys saying that God is not sympathetic/compassionate? Because that's what I hear ya'll saying.
OK, maybe this will help Jeff...
Liberals especially...when dealing with those of us of a libertarian persuasion...refer to us as unsympathetic and having no compassion...now we know, that we can be just as sympathetic and compassionate as they are...but whereas they are all touchy/feely about their compassion...we are "apathetic" in our compassion. And they often times are drawn into bad decisions and emotional instability within themselves while helping those that are in desperate need...whereas, libertarians look for what objectively will have a positive effect in the lives of those in need...and oftentimes give recommendations that are 180% from what a liberal will recommend. They are literally "pathetic" (read pathos...or pathology) in their charity. Whereas, a libertarian, while being just as charitable, is "apathetic" (without pathos...without pathology) in their assistance. We are "untouched" by the pathos of those we assist, but still we assist...and why? Because we are sympathetic and compassionate.
God is the ultimate libertarian. | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/23/2012 10:48 PM (GMT -6) | | D: God is loving/compassionate and immediately present and responsive to our emotional states.
J: Compassion has to do with feeling. Responsiveness has to do with action. If God is compassionate, we CAUSE Him to feel differently.
As for creating freely, I think God had 2 conflicting impulses. One was to create FOR His Beloved and, therefore (since He's sympathetic), Himself. The other was to avoid the suffering of His Beloved and, therefore (because He's sympathetic), Himself. The only 2 kinds of needs there are, IMO, are needs for sustenance for corporeal beings and needs (conditions) for impulse/desire satisfaction. Satisfaction is at the level of particular impulses/desires. Had God not created He would have satisfied one impulse/desire and not the other. The same is the case since He created. But God is content/happy, or whatever else you want to call God's approval of His own SOFA's, with or without creation. Because God can't do what He will come to regret or what He disapproves of. If God acts teleologically (FREELY), He will not regret the suffering. If He acts a-teleologically (compatibilistically), He will approve of that too. In either case one or more impulses/desires are BEING SATISFIED.
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Asher
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| Posted 3/23/2012 11:05 PM (GMT -6) | | OK, maybe this will help...
Think of God's state's as a series of Russian nested dolls.
The outermost doll, that holds all the others, is untouchable from the standpoint of the inside dolls.
But the inside dolls, do not have that stand alone quality.
They are dependent upon other states. Don't carry the analogy too far, otherwise EACH doll is stand alone. The inner dolls are exactly that...inside other dolls. The outermost doll is ultimate.
It's that ultimate-ness that Tom and D are pointing to. And you keep pointing to inner dolls and disagreeing with them because of what is true of the inner dolls. Tom and D aren't denying that what you are saying is true...for the inner dolls...they're just saying there is a doll that sets the scene as it where for all the other dolls, and that doll is necessarily the way it is. | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/23/2012 11:12 PM (GMT -6) | | | Asher: Tom and D aren't denying that what you are saying is true...for the inner dolls...they're just saying there is a doll that sets the scene as it where for all the other dolls, and that doll is necessarily the way it is.
Jeff: I've never heard them agree, on the other hand. I agree that there's a doll at the level of HAPPINESS/CONTENTMENT for God just as there is for us. But they seem to be saying something different from that which supposedly accounts for divine aseity. Therefore, it can't apply to us. IOW, even when we've partaken of the divine nature, we'll still not partake of THAT aseity property.
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/24/2012 12:36 PM (GMT -6) | | D: I could say it like this: I can imagine a person having the 4 immeasurables...and undiminishable "happiness" and "contentment" from their experience of the 4 immeasurables WHILE being emotionally responsive to the joys and sufferings of others BECAUSE OF the 4 immeasurables. Surely, we can imagine this of God who IS love.
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The four immeasurables are:
Loving-kindness (Pāli: metta, Sanskrit: maitri) towards all: the hope that a person will be well; "the wish that all sentient beings, without any exception, be happy."[11]
Compassion (Pāli and Sanskrit: karuṇā): the hope that a person's sufferings will diminish; "the wish for all sentient beings to be free from suffering."[11]
Empathetic joy (Pāli and Sanskrit: mudita): joy in the accomplishments of a person—oneself or another; sympathetic joy; "the wholesome attitude of rejoicing in the happiness and virtues of all sentient beings."[11]
Equanimity (Pāli: upekkhā, Sanskrit: upekṣā): learning to accept loss and gain, praise and blame, and success and failure, all with detachment, equally, for oneself and for others. Equanimity is "not to distinguish between friend, enemy or stranger, but regard every sentient being as equal. It is a clear-minded tranquil state of mind—not being overpowered by delusions, mental dullness or agitation."[12]
Jeff: Notice that the only way you can have God being emotionally responsive to suffering is if God, per the definition of equinamity above, learns to accept loss "with detachment." But you're saying, if I understand you, that God doesn't learn any such thing. Thus, God is UTTERLY detached and, therefore, is not EMOTIONALLY responsive to suffering. He may be responsive to suffering, per your view, but I don't see how He can be emotionally responsive to suffering. And that means creation involves no divine risk. And that means there's no way I can conceive of God creating freely in any sense of free-will that I can conceive of. And once God is not emotionally responsive to our suffering, He is also not compassionate to suffering, by definition.
I think one of the differences that I have with this approach is that you and Tom see to agree with those philosophers that think Copenhagen QT is a causal theory. I agree with those philosophers who say Copenhagen QT is merely a desciptive theory. It doesn't explain anything. And in that sense, it predicts nothing. Predictions are deductions from causal hypotheses. Copenhagen QT can document that the probabilities work AFTER THE FACT. But they don't predict ANY event whatsoever. In other words, you're REAL explanation of events for material particles is CREATION CONTINA. That's not the Copenhagen view.
In short, human reason, as I understand it, posits precisely 2 kinds of causes for the created order -- natural causality (means), and final causes (free-will). I'm not seeing how to conceive of a difference between our free-will and God's free-will. And our free-will seems, to me, to ALWAYS involve the SOFA of at least ONE impulse being UNsatisfied--i.e., uninstantiated. And an unsatisfied impulse causes, at least in humans, a corresponding sentient quality that we also call DISsatisfaction. Now, we can say God never has this sentient DISsatisfaction, but what would ground that belief? What does it explain? That's what I'm not seeing. I see no point in making exegesis harder when I don't know what the heck I'm even solving. Tom tells me I should consider the EO's arguments. What's their argument? I've never heard it, and I don't know how to find it. I looked in Greg's book about the aesthetic argument, and all it did was talk about Hartshorne's view, which is clearly NON-trinitarian in the first place. So that section was no help at all.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 3/24/2012 12:46:13 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 3/24/2012 12:56 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Cool analogy Asher.
I'm posting this without having read Jeff's last post...
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I agree, Jeff, that God feels the world. Given Greg’s (revised) process metaphysic, I’m not sure there’s any other way for God to experience the world. If you’re reading T&P, you’ll see that “aesthetic value” (or aesthetic valuation) is an a priori mode of experience per se.
But God experiences Godself as well (as F, S, and SP for us trinitarians, but not for Hartshorne) and this experience also has to generate an aesthetic appreciation sans creation (here “sans” refers both to temporal and logical priority; i.e., God’s triune self-relations have to have an aesthetic value that is perceived and experienced by God before the world comes into existence and also irrespective of the world once the world comes into existence). This is Greg’s whole thesis basically. But WHY this experience of aesthetic value must be irrespective of the world even after the world is created is what we seem to be disagreeing over.
So let’s ask ourselves, Does God possess any aesthetic value? In other words, is God valuable? For Greg and Hartshorne this is identical to asking: Is God beautiful? Well, HOW beautiful is God? By “how” I mean, what kind of experience would the perceiving of God's beauty be or generate? What KIND of pleasure or enjoyment would it be? I think the answer has to be ‘infinite’. God is infinitely beautiful, infinitely (inexhaustibly) valuable; yes, undimishably beautiful. God IS the highest good, the summum bonum. Not only can God's beauty not be diminished, it also cannot be exhausted (i.e., there are an infinite number of angels from which to observe it; God never has to repeat himself to himself so to speak, unless such reminders have a value to God "as" reminders). So the question is, wouldn’t this mean God’s aesthetic pleasure sans creation—i.e., the felt quality of experience that his self-contemplation constitutes—is immeasurable and undiminishable? Somebody actually said God would be kinda like an unending cosmic orgasm that never peters out (no pun intended). I didn’t wanna go there, but yeah. Kinda like that.
So, just thinking through it…
1) Does God exist sans creation? Answer: Yes, there is no necessary God-World relation.
2) Is God valuable/beautiful sans creation? Answer: Yes.
3) How valuable/beautiful is God? Answer: Infinitely valuable/beautiful.
4) How are we to conceive of the self-perceiving of this value/beauty? That is, How is ‘value’ or ‘beauty’ perceived and experienced? Answer: Aesthetically (as aesthetic satisfaction; delight, joy, a sense of well-being, etc.).
5) What kind of aesthetic pleasure would the perception of an infinite beauty produce? Answer: An unsurpassable and undiminishable pleasure.
The BIG question (our question) becomes:
Can a God enraptured by himself, beholden to his own beauty also “feel” a despairing, suffering world? If so, HOW? If all experience is (a priori, as Greg argues) an experience of aesthetic perception, then wouldn’t God’s experience of the world’s suffering deplete or diminish (however slightly) God’s sense of well-being, his ‘felt quality of experience’? Jeff wants to say yes, it would have to be diminished. That just seems to follow.
But there are good reasons not to rush into that answer. The short reason to suspect this answer is that if the world’s suffering has nothing to do with constituting God’s own triune existence (and we’ve agreed that it cannot), then the world can have nothing to do with constituting the value/beauty OF God. And if God perfectly self-contemplates, then God would always be perfectly and infinitely pleased and delighted with what he perceives, and the world’s suffering could not generate a moment of negation within this self-contemplation, not if the God-World relation is unnecessary to God.
So we have two seemingly conflicting maths:
Math 1 says:
Divine aseity (the freedom of God’s triune existence from the world)
+
Aesthetic value (the infinite beauty and value of God perceived by God)
__________
= Unsurpassable and undiminishable aesthetic satisfaction.
The world can neither exact withdrawal or make a deposit to this sum. The world would be meaningless to God in this sense alone (i.e., in the sense of having a share in constituting God’s existence as experienced personal-loving fullness).
Before we get to Math 2, let me say that I think this meaninglessness is VERY difficult for us to accept. Our whole existence is driven by an undeniable quest FOR meaning and permanence (put there by God!). And theologians (especially open theists, who tend to begin and end their theology exclusively in terms of Math 2 below) feel threatened by a God who doesn’t need them. We may be prepared to let God be happy without us when it comes to temporal priority, but we’re not prepared for the existentially gut-wrenching realization that God is equally happy AFTER he creates irrespective of our suffering, because if THAT’S true, then we are meaningless to the very person (God) we say grounds our very MEANING.
So God grounds both our MEANING and our MEANINGLESSNESS? Yes. That's what this whole thing is about. And it is the sheer genius of the Orthodox doctrine of impassibility or apatheia (rashly tossed into the bin by the patriarchs of open theism) to have perceived that if we are not meaningless to God in this important sense, God cannot be the ground and fulfillment of our true meaning.
We’ll never enjoy our fullest meaning apart from plunging ourselves headlong into the darkness of our own meaninglessness (on the other side of which we find our meaning) and there DIE. If we insist that the meaning of our existence (our joys and sufferings) must in turn determine the meaning of God’s existence (i.e., preclude the fullness of God’s experience irrespective of our suffering), we end up committing soteriological suicide, for that would in turn mean God either is not infinitely beautiful and valuable and knows it, i.e., God knows he’s not the summum bonum, OR he is infinitely beautiful and valuable but doesn’t know it. We’re screwed either way.
Math 2 says:
The irreducible aesthetic value of experience per se.
+
God’s experience of the world.
___________
= God experiences the world by feeling it, i.e., in terms of perceiving the world’s relative beauty/aesthetic value, a perception which is an experience of relative aesthetic satisfaction (given the world's failure to actualize its potential for aesthetic value).
Given this math, if God experiences the world’s sufferings (say, in terms of compassion), then he must suffer that experience, i.e., God must be overall less happy as he experiences the increasing misery of the world (or more happy as he experiences the overall improving state of the world) since sacrificing some measure of the felt quality of his experience would be HOW God perceives and experiences the world’s suffering. This would seem to imply that God must have been near an emotional breakdown so to speak in Gen. 6 when all the world was corrupt and he destroyed it all. (I say “near emotional breakdown” were it not for that “competency” Jeff speaks of; but God would have to retain this competency independently of his emotional well-being, and that seems problematic to me because WE certainly have no analogy for a competency of volition independent of emotional well-being; that is, for us volitional competency decreases as emotional well-being decreases—but never mind that.)
What do we do with these apparently conflicting maths? Given Math 1 God’s acumen for aesthetic satisfaction is unsurpassable AND undiminishable given the infinite beauty and value of God’s existence perfectly perceived and contemplated by F, S, and SP. But given Math 2 this same irreducibly aesthetic mode of experience seems to entail and constantly fluctuating sense of well-being once God creates the world and experiences/feels its aesthetic value (or failure of aesthetic value). Given Math 2, God’s aesthetic enjoyment (his overall felt quality of experience) AFTER creation falters would be decidedly less. But Math 1 forbids its being less.
I’ll leave it there for now. Back later!
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg BoydPost Edited (Tom) : 3/24/2012 1:56:17 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 3/24/2012 1:03 PM (GMT -6) | | Maybe we can clear the table of a few emotions we all agree would be inconceivable for God to experience. Here are some: Losing one’s temper in rage or fit of anger, jealously, fear, anxiety, apprehension, and others.
It seems to be other legitimate, even admirable emotions, that we’re having difficulty with, like compassion or sympathy. Even the way the words are constructed suggests a certain sacrifice of well-being. When we experience compassion or sympathy, our sense of well-being is diminished because the suffering of the other (the other’s loss of his/her sense of well-being) is experience by us. So we lose some of our own sense of well-being. We actually suffer ourselves when we are compassionate.
Does your understanding of compassion/sympathy INCLUDE this, Jeff?
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/24/2012 1:53 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: Does your understanding of compassion/sympathy INCLUDE this, Jeff?
Jeff: Include losing one's temper or consciously experienced suffering? I'm not sure which you're asking. My answer about God would "no" to the former and "yes" to the latter. The following explains why I don't think you've helped me yet:
Tom1: I agree, Jeff, that God feels the world. Given Greg’s (revised) process metaphysic, I’m not sure there’s any other way for God to experience the world.
Tom2: Can a God enraptured by himself, beholden to his own beauty also “feel” a despairing, suffering world? If so, HOW?
Tom3: What do we do with these apparently conflicting maths?
Jeff: I'm trying to avoid "apparently conflicting maths" because I don't think logical contradictions are meaningful. And therefore, they explain nothing. The problems I see in your approach are these:
Even if God has attributes that would be perceived to be infinitely beautiful by a being that has the capacity to perceive infinite beauty, it doesn't follow that there IS a being that ever perceives infinite beauty. Maybe the Father doesn't because He isn't introspective that way. Maybe His Beloved doesn't because he doesn't have the capacity to consciously experience infinite beauty. Finally, maybe there's no such thing as a conceivable essential attribute that is both infinite and apprehendable AS infinite. To conceive is to delimit. This means we can meaningfully distinguish between an infinite essential attribute and a finite one. But I have no idea how to distinguish conceptually between the most beautiful thing I can experience and an infinitely beautiful thing.
Again, this gets back to my basic question, "what are we trying to explain about our experience that positing such actually explains?" To my mind, my experience is logically consistent with there being no being that ever perceives INFINITE beauty. Thus, it's not even a problem for me to solve yet. I'm not seeing how God's competence and benevolence logically depends upon such a positing.
You contend that the Father's Beloved must be identically omniscient, etc as the Father sans creation. I don't see how that explains creation, my experience or one verse of scripture. That's our disconnect. And that's why I'm not going to posit "apparently conflicting math." I haven't seen yet what it explains about my experience.
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Tom
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| Posted 3/24/2012 2:13 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Jeff: Include losing one's temper or consciously experienced suffering? I'm not sure which you're asking.
Tom: I’m asking if you understand sympathy in terms of a diminished sense of well-being. That’s is, do you assume that sympathy and compassion are only explainable in terms of a loss of some measure of one’s sense of well-being, a loss which alone (on your view) explains the motivation for exercising compassion.
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Jeff: I'm trying to avoid "apparently conflicting maths" because I don't think logical contradictions are meaningful.
Tom: “Apparently conflicting” doesn’t equal “actually conflicting.” I want to avoid affirming actual contradictions. I call these apparently conflicting just for the moment ‘cause I’m trying to let the tension generate some creative thinking.
Jeff: And therefore, they explain nothing.
Tom: I presented them as needing explanation.
Jeff: Even if God has attributes that would be perceived to be infinitely beautiful by a being that has the capacity to perceive infinite beauty, it doesn't follow that there IS a being that ever perceives infinite beauty. Maybe the Father doesn't because He isn't introspective that way. Maybe His Beloved doesn't because he doesn't have the capacity to consciously experience infinite beauty.
Tom: We’re pretty disconnected then.
Jeff: To my mind, my experience is logically consistent with there being no being that never perceives INFINITE beauty.
Tom: Is your experience consistent with its first-cause/ground being a valueless being sans creation? If yes, then our disconnect is unbridgeable because aesthetic value is not an a priori for you. If no, then I’d be interested in seeing if we can get you from agreeing that “God is valuable” (or “God possesses value”) to agreeing that God’s value is infinite and undiminishable.
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg BoydPost Edited (Tom) : 3/24/2012 4:07:21 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/24/2012 2:29 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: I’m asking if you understand sympathy in terms of a diminished sense of well-being. That’s is, do you assume that sympathy and compassion are only explainable in terms of a loss of some measure of one’s sense of well-being, a loss which alone (on your view) explains the motivation for exercising compassion.
Jeff: As I see it, sympathy is NATURAL for humans. As such, sympathy is the motivatOR of certain actions. We can't be motivated directly to BE sympathetic. We can only be motivated to do things that, as a side effect, increase our NATURAL sympathy. But sympathy per se is not a directly attainable object of any conceivable human choice/action that I'm aware of.
Tom: I presented them as needing explanation.
Jeff: The apparently conflicting math needs to be resolved. But you have not yet told me what, in your experience, is ONLY explicable by positing a divine or non-divine experience of infinite aesthetic pleasure. As far as I can yet tell, nothing in my experience is inexplicable unless some infinite aesthetic experience has occurred or is occurring. So what you would need to show, I think, is that if all aesthetic pleasure is finite (even God's) then my experience could not be as I perceive it. How does that argument work?
Jeff: To my mind, my experience is logically consistent with there being no being that never perceives INFINITE beauty.
Tom: Is your experience consistent with its first-cause/ground being a valueless being sans creation? If yes, then our disconnect is unbridgeable because aesthetic value is not an a priori for you. If no, then we I’d be interested in seeing if we can get you from agreeing that “God is valuable” (or “God possesses value”) to agreeing that God’s value is infinite and undiminishable.
Jeff: Of course the persons of the godhead are valuable to one another. I can't explain divine free-will any other way. It's just that, for now, I can't explain divine free-will apart from positing at least ONE uninstantiated divine impulse and its corresponding unsatisfactory divine feeling, either. For to do so would be to reject analogy arbitrarily, since I don't see what it explains TO reject it. So move to part two.
As I see it, Tom, it's precisely the plurality of the godhead that generates more logical possibilities than does absolute mono-person-theism. But you reject some of those logical possibilities. I just don't understand what you're criteria for rejection is yet, other than mere personal preference. I have no problem with that criteria, mind you. I just don't think it warrants judgment of any one else, on the other hand. So long as you say Greg is fine being a pastor, etc., I'm fine with diversity of opinion. But once we start questioning the validity of those kinds of SOFA's, I want to know what the grounds for those judgments are. As brothers, we owe each other that. I.e., speaking the truth (as we see it, at least) in love.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 3/24/2012 2:37:51 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 3/24/2012 4:13 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: The apparently conflicting math needs to be resolved. But you have not yet told me what...
Tom: I wasn't done. I just wanted to lay out the apparent conflict first.
Jeff: What do you perceive to be the case about your experience which requires as a necessary and sufficient condition for its possible occurrence, per your epistemology, the occurrence of an infinite, divine, aesthetic pleasure derived from divine introspection.
Tom: Excellent question. My answer can be found on T&P, pages 1 to 404 (Hartshorne's six a prioris with Greg's revisions in light of trinitarian theism). I'd hate for you to have spent the money to get his book and not fought your way through it! ;o)
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg BoydPost Edited (Tom) : 3/24/2012 4:16:08 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 3/24/2012 4:30 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: Of course the persons of the godhead are valuable to one another. I can't explain divine free-will any other way. It's just that, for now, I can't explain divine free-will apart from positing at least ONE uninstantiated divine impulse and its corresponding unsatisfactory divine feeling, either.
Tom: It sounds like you’re left having to conclude that God is of finite value to himself since adding the experience of a finite world to his experience of himself adds to his perceived value. For "added value" seems to be the only way you can make sense of choice, i.e., as motivated by the desire to secure a value which God does not possess apart from the world. And this in turn means that for God “God + the world” is of greater value than “God sans the world” (which for me means God needed to world to increase his value, and that in turn, for me, means God--assuming he's as wise and competent as we think--was not free to say no to creating). That’s what I’m hearing.
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg BoydPost Edited (Tom) : 3/24/2012 4:36:26 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 3/24/2012 4:47 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Tom: I'd hate for you to have spent the money to get his book and not fought your way through it! ;o)
Jeff: I looked at the section D mentioned. It wasn't there. I've read every part that seems to talk about aesthetics. I wasn't there. I'm not saying it's not there. But I'm beginning to wonder. Especially since it wouldn't have helped Greg a bit to posit "apparently conflicting math."
Tom: It sounds like you’re left having to conclude that God is of finite measurable value to himself (since adding the experience of a world to his experience adds to his perceived value). So the choice to create was motivated by the desire to secure a value which God does not possess apart from the world, which in turn means that for God “God + the world” is of greater value than “God sans the world.” That’s what I’m hearing.
Jeff: Not at all. I don't even need to posit that God values Himself to explain my experience or scripture. It could be that God's value (like our own) is value to others, not to Himself. It could be that what is valuable to God is pleasurable experience, just as it is for us. Your value to God is ultimately due to the fact that God is sympathetic. If He were not, I can't imagine what value you would have to Him. Likewise, I could posit that sans creation, what gave God pleasure is His own aesthetic pleasure from His own creative imaginings AND the aesthetic pleasure derived from teh beauty of His Beloved AND sympathetic pleasure derived from His Beloved's pleasure. And the Beloved's pleasure was his own aesthetic pleasure from his own creative imaginings AND the aesthetic pleasure derived from the beauty of God AND sympathetic pleasure derived from God's pleasure. We could add, for both, the aesthetic pleasure derived from the beauty of the harmonious relationality they experienced with one another.
How is Christianity false if what I just said is the sum of God's and His Beloved's sans creation pleasure? Not saying it IS the sum of it. But I'm not seeing why Christianity requires positing more. What Christian dogma derived from scripture requires more?
Post Edited (Similitude) : 3/24/2012 4:53:57 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/24/2012 5:09 PM (GMT -6) | | Math 2 says:
The irreducible aesthetic value of experience per se.
+
God’s experience of the world.
__________
= God experiences the world by feeling it, i.e., in terms of perceiving the world’s relative beauty/aesthetic value, a perception which is an experience of relative aesthetic satisfaction (given the world's failure to actualize its potential for aesthetic value).
Given this math, if God experiences the world’s sufferings (say, in terms of compassion), then he must suffer that experience, i.e., God must be overall less happy as he experiences the increasing misery of the world (or more happy as he experiences the overall improving state of the world) since sacrificing some measure of the felt quality of his experience would be HOW God perceives and experiences the world’s suffering.
Jeff: This depends on what we mean by "happiness." No satisfaction of any one impulse creates happiness. But the unsatisfaction of any impulse generates sentient dissatisfaction at that level. Thus, happiness can exist WITH sentient DISsatisfaction. Otherwise, NO ONE would be happy in this world. So we have to apply that same line of reasoning to God. And since God's long suffering is incredibly greater than ours, He can endure much more than we can and still BE happy. And that's why Asher's analogy DOES work. It really is analogous, not just apparently.
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/24/2012 7:49 PM (GMT -6) | | I'm confused:
Jeff1: Of course the persons of the godhead are valuable to one another. I can't explain divine free-will any other way.
Jeff2: I don't even need to posit that God values Himself to explain my experience or scripture. It could be that God's value (like our own) is value to others, not to Himself.
Jeff: By God, I don't mean the collective of persons. I mean that person we call the Father. By the Beloved, I mean that person we call the Son. These have their own personal pleasure, IMO. Thus, the Beloved doesn't need to value himself to experience pleasure.
Tom: Value essentially just IS pleasurable experience. That's what Hartshorne and Greg argue. Hartshorne just denies this obtains in God's own self-relations (i.e., triune relations) sans creation, so God needs some 'other' to constitute fulfill the relational requirements of pleasurable experience (value). Greg sees it obtaining in God trintarianly sans creation.
Jeff: I don't see how divine pleasure occurs at the level of the collective. IMO, the divine persons experience their OWN pleasure. But I can then say that the socially-derived pleasures that account for creation do indeed obtain because of the relation of those very divine persons rather than a necessary god-world relationship. What you add on is the requirement that the experience of pleasure can't be intentionally foregone for a finite period of time for the purpose of obtaining a future teleological pleasure. I don't see what warrants this requirement. So long as the Father remains "in control," nothing is at stake teleologically or theologically best I can tell. I know of no verse that precludes such a possiblility. So long as every state instantiated for each divine person is causal of the pleasure of another divine person and is known to be such, that causal relationality is all the social relationality we need to account for God's motivation to create AND a motivation to become temporarily unconscious if necessary, teleologically. By analogy, a person could VOLUNTARILY choose to become unconscious for a surgery to extend his life to help more people. As such, that unconscious state is a MEAN to a social END. And as such, that unconscious state is a loving state.
So does creation increase, mathematically, God's pleasure? I don't know. But I also don't know whether novelty increases mathematically human pleasure unless the alternative was boredom. But I don't see how the enjoyment of novelty is only conditioned by antecedent boredom either. What is important to me is not figuring out mathematical quantities of pleasure, but conceivable pleasure-oriented motivations. Otherwise, I'm not aware of how creation is a free act at all. Plus, I don't have to resolve an "apparent conflicting math."
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Tom
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| Posted 3/24/2012 8:06 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: By God, I don't mean the collective of persons. I mean that person we call the Father. By the Beloved, I mean that person we call the Son. These have their own personal pleasure, IMO. Thus, the Beloved doesn't need to value himself to experience pleasure.
Tom: I'm finding it increasingly difficult to understand your view as monotheisitc IF you view F, S, and SP as all equally divine. It's looking increasingly like polytheism to me, Jeff. You might be more unitarian though if you view the Son and Spirit as ontologically subordinate to the Father. Not sure.
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But as far as Greg's critique of CH goes and Greg's basic argument for divine self-sufficiency as unsurpassable aesthetic satisfaction, first check out p. 81 (ii.1.1, where Aesthetic Value as the Sixth A Priori Truth begins) to the middle of p. 84; then pp. 86 to the middle of p. 88. That’ll summarize CH’s basic a priori of aesthetic value. Note the last sentence on p. 87: “The intensity of God’s enjoyment will be greatest because God synthesizes the entire world just past.” That’s all CH. Not having a Trinity of internal relatedness to explain divine aesthetic satisfaction sans creation, CH achieves this by grounding God’s aesthetic enjoyment in his ability to synthesize (viz., experience) the entire world process. So for CH, divine aesthetic enjoyment is a product of “diversity” of experience and the world provides that diversity. Increasing diversity means increasing aesthetic pleasure. So the world is just the stage (God’s “body” actually) where God achieves aesthetic enjoyment.
Then digest Greg’s critique of important features of this by locating the essential a priori features of God’s existence (experience, sociality, creative synthesis and aesthetic value) within the triune relations. If we don’t locate these features in God’s own triune self-relatedness, we have to locate them in God’s experience of the world, and when we do that we destroy God’s freedom as an experiencing subject (with all the a priori features such experience) FROM the world. Portions of this are: pp. 168 to the middle of 176; then The Possibility of a Triune Conception of God at iv.5.1 from pp. 226 to the middle of p. 228; and then vii.1, The Necessary Relationality of God, from pp. 328 to the middle of p. 332, and then lastly pp. 364 to 382. There’s a LOT more going on, but those passages should outline it.
Tom
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