I’m trying to describe an experience, Jeff, not just crunch propositions. I’m sure you see yourself doing the same, but perhaps since we’ve got different experiences we're trying to make sense of we end up disagreeing.

If we met an Eskimo or a person from a region of the world whose diet, say, was absolutely void of all ‘sweet’ foods, it would be the case that this Eskimo wouldn’t know what it was to experience sweetness. He's got no word for it in his language and no experience of it. Though he has the capacity to do so, nothing in the world has yet awoken those particular taste buds. Let’s assume his diet includes the other three (of our four) basic tastes—salty, sour, & bitter. You tell him about sweetness. He doesn’t get it. There are no arguments or propositions you can offer that would help him make sense of what you’re talking about. You just say, “It’s LIKE bitter and salty—in that it’s a taste—but it’s not any of those tastes, it’s UNLIKE anything you’ve ever tasted.” He shakes his head. The conversation is over, because it’s not about the law of non-contradiction or excluded middle or logical consistency. You BOTH agree on teleology for goodness sake. It’s about perception, a FEELING.

The closest I can get to a propositional exchange with you is just to say that as far as I can see, ‘competency’ is a function of ‘aesthetic pleasure’, a measure of the felt quality of God’s experience. The more depressed and anxious we are, the less competent we are. The more God would actually suffer the corruption and denigration of the felt quality of his experience, the less competent a chooser he would be. As I see it, the felt quality of one’s experience (i.e., the intensity of one’s aesthetic satisfaction) determines how competently the will is exercised toward the achieving of loving purposes. That goes for divine teleology as well. Divine teleology is just a measure of the resolute faithfulness of God’s will with respect to pursuing his purposes. But God's will is only as predictably resolute in pursuing loving purposes for us as is his experience aesthetically satisfied. It’s Hartshorne/Boyd all the way for me when it comes to the a priori/categorical status of ‘experience’ (panexperientialism) and the essentially ‘aesthetic nature’ of all experience. I think this is a serious difference between us and I don’t see any way to resolve it or bring us any closer.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/26/2012 5:26:59 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Similitude) : 4/26/2012 8:32:46 PM (GMT-5)

Did not I weep for him whose day was hard? Was not my soul grieved for the needy?

Basically, it is seen by many to be a VIRTUE for a person to empathically "suffer" with those who are suffering.  It is seen as self-giving to empathetically "disturb" one's own peace of mind in relationship to the suffering that others perceived are feeling.  And the person who is the most virtuous (I guess) is the one who perfectly empathically suffers will all sentient creatures...but it simply strong in joy to bear the empathetic suffering.

I betcha money this is the issue.

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/27/2012 10:05:21 AM (GMT-5)

"Jesus wept."

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/27/2012 10:20:56 AM (GMT-5)

----------------------------

Repost...

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)

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/27/2012 10:29:53 AM (GMT-5)

If you end up saying that, for said being, NO "quantity of pain" experienced could actually overwhelm and/or diminish a) it's willingness and ability to volitionally act for the loving, good, and right and b) it's ability to enjoy it's own experience of love, joy, and peace AS "soul satisfying"...

then you are pretty dang close to describing something like apatheia, dude.

Said another way, when the Jesus is the "center of my joy", then I have an immutable "heart of my contentment" that is IRRESPECTIVE of any "quantity of pain" the world has to offer. 

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/27/2012 1:51:53 PM (GMT-5)

If you end up saying that, for said being, NO "quantity of pain" experienced could actually overwhelm and/or diminish a) it's willingness and ability to volitionally act for the loving, good, and right and b) it's ability to enjoy it's own experience of love, joy, and peace AS "soul satisfying"...

then you are pretty dang close to describing something like apatheia, dude.

Said another way, when the Jesus is the "center of my joy", then I have an immutable "heart of my contentment" that is IRRESPECTIVE of any "quantity of pain" the world has to offer.

J: I'll try to go back further when I get time. But let's deal with this bit. What Tom has said is that God can't consciously suffer BECAUSE no finite amount of pain could even register in a distinguishable way in the consciousness of a person experiencing infinite joy. I have no problem with that claim. What I have problem with is assuming that the divine persons DO experience infinite joy (indeed, I'm not sure we can even conceive of what that means POSITIVELY, as opposed to merely what it does NOT mean), thereby creating exegetical problems--and for no warranted philosphical reason I can conceive of.

As for how joy works with endurance of pain, scripture tells us that BOTH joy AND self-control are FRUITS of the Spirit. This means that BOTH grow in us as we grow. This is why scripture can consistently claim that God will not allow us to be tested above what we are able. Because it is not the case that merely HAVING the Spirit means we have matured, fruit-wise, into the fulness of the love of God. Thus, there are limits to what we can handle that correspond, at least in part, to the extent to which our joy has grown IN us.

Tom was talking as if the mere possession of the Spirit is enough to guarantee that we could strategically allocate our consciousness such that we could feel zero suffering due to its being relativized into oblivion by our volitionally-oriented perspective. Scripture claims no such thing. We are always at some point in our growth. That "point" corresponds to our capacity to experience certain degrees of endurance/longsuffering/self-control as well as joy. And the degree of joy is a necessary condition of the former.

And this is the key point. Scripture never claims that our present sufferings aren't worthy to be compared with our present joy. It claims that our present sufferings aren't worthy to be compared with the AGE-ABIDING GLORY WE WILL RECEIVE IN THE FUTURE. Indeed, 1 Cor. 15 (not to mention other verses--like Hebrews on the disciplining of "sons" being grievous, but working out worthwhile FUTURE fruit) makes no sense at all, logically, otherwise.

It simply is the case, as far as I can tell, that this same logic could apply to God (and seemingly does, per straightforward readings of scripture) and satisfy everything we need to posit to account for a sufficient benevolent/competent theism capable of grounding the coherence and intelligibility of the created order and scriptural revelation. Thus, I see no point in denying the possibility that God could suffer, so long as it is a small enough quantity that the pleasure derived from creation is still worth that suffering to Him. It buys me nothing to make the denial, and it creates new problems to solve that I don't know how to solve.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 4/27/2012 5:42:33 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/27/2012 7:30:03 PM (GMT-5)

Jeff: What you need to show, to show that a non-finite attribute of God exists, is to show that if it were not so, something we claim to know could not be true. That's what Greg realized, but failed to accomplish, if he was saying what you're saying. But he claimed to be solving a paradox with a human analogy. So I think Greg just might be confused if he was actually arguing for your position in T&P.

Tom: I’m having a hard time taking you seriously, Jeff. Have you even read T&P thoroughly? Greg doesn’t claim to set out to solve any paradoxes at all. He doesn’t think there are any. What he set out to accomplish, and felt he succeeded at, was demonstrating the a priori status of God’s essential, unsurpassable aesthetic satisfaction as internally related sans creation, an aesthetic satisfaction he argues grounds God’s freedom from the world (and the gratuitous status of creation). You can disagree with some specific argument he makes in favor of this conclusion (his a priori truths are very specifically defined and defended), but to just call him confused is hard to take serious.

Tom

I just looked back over vii.2.2 and vii.2.3 on pages 379-382. There, Greg is arguing as I do. He's saying nothing about a non-finite attribute of God that I can see. But you claim he was implying an infinite attribute since you further claim he meant to imply that his words were consistent with a traditional view that entails such a non-finite attribute. I'm not convinced that saying an attribute is non-finite is not merely denying something of it rather than saying something positive about it--at least in the sense that there may be nothing positive that we could use in a meaningful deduction.

The point is, Greg's words there don't allude to tradition at all. They don't say WHAT you're saying. So if he meant them to say WHAT you're saying, he didn't do a good job. Unsurpassable does NOT mean NON-finite. It can mean that. But it doesn't, PER SE, mean that.

So, yes, I have no problem with Greg's main point on those pages. I don't see how he can argue that my view of the relationality of the godhead does not explain what needs to be explained. Nevertheless, Greg uses human analogy to make his point, just as I do. As such, he is not arguing your view.

As for the paradoxical aspect I mentioned, read the very first paragraph in the section vii.2.2. It starts off asking rhetorical questions he anticipates his opponents asking. His goal in that section is to put that apparent paradox to rest.

You, on the other hand, have never put the apparent paradox to rest except when you rhetorically ask, "So how can the divine perspective suffer?" For there, you aren't trying, as Greg was, to show that the Father can suffer. You're arguing the exact opposite. And you do this BECAUSE you posit an infinite, rather than unsurpassable, sentient attribute for the persons of the godhead. This is what I don't do. I see no point in it.

First, it seems merely negative in meaning rather than positive in meaning. Second, it renders divine freedom non-analogical to human freedom (which is very problematic). Third, it explains precisely nothing. Fourth, it compels us to posit difficulties with synthesizing a conception of Jesus of Nazareth (as I've explained multiple times without any proposed solution). Fifth, it creates exegetical problems, like trying to explain why Jesus said "ONLY the Father" knows certain things.

It does precisely one thing to posit this non-finite attribute--it puts you in agreement with a handful of professing Christians that voted in some historic council--a vote unconfirmed by signs and wonders or any other evidential confirmation. I'm not seeing that as a valuable trade-off.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 4/29/2012 8:06:25 AM (GMT-5)

A creator that requires where He hasn't given is NOT benevolent. If the LNC is valid, there are two possibilities:

1) I can expect God to approve of my believing that which seems most plausible/rational,

OR

2) None of us have any rational reason to suppose God is benevolent at all.

I know, D, you have said you're fine with a God that arbitrarily torments people, but I know that such a God can not ground the intelligibility of warranted belief. Thus, per that view, beliefs are not knowingly relevant to anything normative (if, i.e., normativity exists at all in such a SOFA).

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/29/2012 5:52:44 PM (GMT-5)