Post Edited (TGB) : 10/15/2005 5:28:57 PM (GMT-5)

Cotton-pickin rackin-frackin jetlag! It’s 12:30 AM here and I’m wide awake, but tired, and have a full schedule tomorrow. Stink!

Jeff: If so, then from some new imagined possibility, the Father conceives a new way to LOVE the Son. I guess this really IS process thought, in it's own way. But the eternal omniscience view is one wherein I can't account for how God purposes things.

Tom: For Hartshorne at least, God is omniscient. He is the grounds for what it possible, and his knowledge of himself is intuitive and infallible, not inferential and partial. Just wanted to toss that in the mix. Process (the little I know of it through Hartshorne) wouldn’t agree with you that God can’t purpose something if he knows it’s possible that he purpose it and possible that he not purpose it. Try CH’s The Divine Relativity.

But I don’t wanna derail Mephi’s thread here, Jeff. So just ignore me for now!

Tom

It's like this...

God is a spring on top of a hill...and we are pools of water along the sides of the hill.  Water bubbles up from the spring, runs down the hill and fills us.  As eddys of water swirls in us, it spills over...creating NEW pools of water along the side.  We, the pools of water, are NOT to try to "reciprocally relate" to the spring...more than we are to RECEIVE and take PLEASURE/JOY in the water that is graciously given.

Hmmm...

Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/15/2005 5:41:04 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (jefscott) : 10/15/2005 5:47:09 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (selah) : 10/15/2005 5:52:21 PM (GMT-5)

Hey Meph,

I don't have a lot of time (and I probably won't be able to do much on this board for the next week), but here are my thoughts for now:

here are my questions: Is the meaningfulness of person x contingent to God's satisfaction with person x? (ie, does God have to be "satisfied" in order for us to be meaningful?)  That being said, is the relationship between satisfaction and meaningfulness really the issue here... or is there more to it?

I almost think we're getting into the Aristotilian notion that any action is either filling the glass or emptying the glass... but perhaps we ought to think of our worth in simply a state of being, not a state of feeling.  Did God have to create us? Clearly He didn't.  But the fact is, He did create us.

So this brings me to thinking of two related questions: 1) What makes our existence important, and 2) what makes our existence important in the eyes of God? (I think it's important to make this distinction here)

My answers: 1) The importance of our existence stems from the fact that we were created by God; that there is a link to God.  (That does mean that if we had not been created, our existence would not be important) 

Oooh, gotta go... I'll get to #2 later if I can unless someone answers it for me! 

Mephi: This is missing the point. I've never said that God's continual, increasingly intense ad intra experience comprises all possible value that God can experience. What I've said is that God's ad extra experience of value is seriously relativized unto meaninglessness by the intensity and supreme satisfaction found in the ad intra, perichoretic experience.

Tom: From where I stand, Mephi, you have to be saying that God’s ad intra experience comprises all possible value. That’s entailed in the claim that God’s ad intra experience is “SO” wonderful that it can’t be changed in terms of value experienced by God. The “so” quantifies over all value IF it’s true that it relativizes all ad extra experience to ‘meaninglessness’.

But if you agree that God’s experience of himself doesn’t amount to the actualization of all possible values, then how is it that experience can’t embrace new value, ‘real’ value?

Mephi: Using the pain analogy. It's NOT that the person's body with the excruciating 3rd degree burns cannot in some way sense the mosquito bite (if only barely). It's that the intensity of the painful burns is SO GREAT that the mosquito bite's painful affect is drastically relativized unto almost being non-existent to the person. The mosquito bite wouldn't significantly increase my perception of pain. Do ya get it?

Tom: Here’s where I think you’re missing it. You implicitly assuming that God’s capacity to experience value is finite (like ours). You’ve got this picture of God somehow ‘overwhelmed’ by himself, so blown away by his own bliss that he can’t find anything outside of himself ‘really’ wonderful and valuable. But if God as love possesses an infinite evaluative capacities, he doesn’t really have to conclude the relative meaninglessness of my existence with regard to himself.

Mephi: Maybe I need to clarify here. All I'm saying is that God can EXPRESS joy, insofar as the joy emerges from God's necessary, eternal, triune nature...however, nothing God experiences ad extra can either significantly TAKE AWAY FROM or ADD TO that that joy that God possesses ad intra.

Tom: That’s what I thought you were saying. So again, you’re saying God can only “enjoy” himself. Nothing contingent can be a source of joy for God, in God, as God. And THAT is fatal to OUR enjoyment of God, at least it seems so to me.

Mephi: You remember the song...All I'm saying is that this is REALLY TRUE for God.

Tom: If that’s all you’re saying, then there’s no issue. But you seem to be saying more. Sure, nothing can impinge upon God’s own enjoyment of God. We didn’t give it to him and can’t take it away. But God’s experience now encompasses a contingent world, and God really does experience that world. The contingent world can’t of course constitute what’s absolute and necessary about God and so can’t infringe on whatever absolute and necessarily ceaseless joy God might have in himself. But though that joy is unfathomably profound, and we are but drops in a sea, we are real drops nonetheless, drops that matter. I honestly don’t see the logic that requires the meaninglessness of our existence and contribution to God’s experience based on the supreme value of God in God’s own view.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 10/15/2005 6:13:23 PM (GMT-5)

(I'll never get through this)

Mephi: THIS, dear sir, is why I'm now inclined to think that Piper (and Edwards) have been right all along. The main idea is NOT to get off on the fact that we "make a difference" to God. The idea is to see God as the SUPREME END and MEANS of all joy and fulfillment. Finding our source, happiness, and joy IN GOD. Piper was right. Wow.

Tom: Why must God’s being the ‘supreme end’ of my joy entail my “not making a difference” to God, a ‘meaningful’ difference to God?

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

Tom: And to say that is to say God's experience of his own intrinsic value, apart from us, is not supreme in the sense that it constitutes the unsurpassable actualization of all possible values.

Mephi: Make sense to me how God can be essentially SUPREMELY SATISFIED in the intensity of God's necessary ad intra aesthetic experience...while at the same time being essentially DISsatisfied internally by a contingent expression of God's necessary existence (ie Creation).

Tom: So long as what’s enjoyed and what’s mourned are not the same thing, there is no problem. God can’t be satisfied and dissatisfied in the same thing. There’s no problem with God’s delighting, supremely so, in his own unspeakable existence, AND God’s being profoundly dissatisfied with something else.

You’re confusing categories too it seems. I mean, what God is “essentially” can’t depend upon “contingencies.” So to suppose God can be “essentially dissatisfied by a contingent expression of God’s necessary existence (e.g., creation)” is pretty meaningless. At least I don’t know what it means. God’s contingent experience of the world doesn’t determine what God is necessarily. But it can determine what God is contingently. And there’s no a priori reason why God can’t find real pleasure or pain, real value or grief, in what he contingently experiences.

Dude, are you OK? ;o)

Tom

Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/15/2005 6:26:57 PM (GMT-5)

Mephi: See, THIS is why Piper and Edwards say what they say: God is the ultimate Source for all joy who serves us...who ISN'T to be "served" back, but ENJOYED. God isn't trying to get us to "matter to him" or be "valuable" to him as much as God is trying to get us to acknowledge God as what God truly is: the source of all joy, life, love and contentment.

Tom: And why should God try to get us to acknowledg God for what he truly is, the source of joy, if we don't in fact matter to him? If we don't matter to God, then our acknowledging him doesn't matter to God. Assuming God is trying to get us to acknowledge anything about him, does God's trying to do this matter to him? How's it matter without OUR mattering to him? Sheesh.

Mephi: Trying to do things that "matter to God" is utterly missing the point, religiously speaking!

Tom: Now see, you’ve made it something else. Now you’re talking about our “trying to do things that matter to God” and that (at least to me) paints a different picture and isn’t what I’m arguing FOR. We don’t do things “to matter to God.” God determines that we matter to him. How we matter is determined by us. You know all this Mephi, which is why, somehow, I think you’ve already concluded and moved on. No?

Mephi: Wow...Piper was really right...It's like this...God is a spring on top of a hill...and we are pools of water along the sides of the hill. Water bubbles up from the spring, runs down the hill and fills us. As eddys of water swirls in us, it spills over...creating NEW pools of water along the side. We, the pools of water, are NOT to try to "reciprocally relate" to the spring...more than we are to RECEIVE and take PLEASURE/JOY in the water that is graciously given.

Tom: This misses what’s MOST important about God and us, namely, the bidirectional, mutually interpersonal nature of the God-world relationship. Your analogy has to ASSUME this is not the nature of our relationship to God. Assume we’re in a personal relationship and your analogy is all wet. You’ve got God doing all the giving and us doing all the receiving, a perfectly deterministic analogy. Do this for me; demonstrate this using persons in relationship.

Tom