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Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 11/1/2005 5:10 PM (GMT -6) |   | Meph: But I do NOT see how any painful or pleasureful experiences God has with human beings ultimately AFFECTS God's essential state of joy, delight, and happiness.
Jeff: Wouldn't that depend on what you mean by "essential?" I mean, if Christ was suffering excruciating agony on the cross, it seems quite natural to suppose that the INTENSITY and/or QUALITY of EVERY other subjective pleasure he was experiencing was affected. Unless, of course, the psychology of Christ, even during his kenosis, was utterly different than other human beings. But I don't see how philosopy or scripture requires such a supposition.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 11/1/2005 8:49:11 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Violin for God
Luke, I am your father. --Nooooooooo!!!!!
Date Joined Dec 2004
Total Posts : 690
| Posted 11/2/2005 1:33 AM (GMT -6) | |
TGB said...
VFG: I held this idea too, that God's knowledge "grows" until I talked with Alan about it (a week ago)... and what he said made sense: (sump'n' like) God's knowledge doesn't "grow" but the *content* of His knowledge changes. His knowledge is always 100%, but that "stuff" WITHIN that 100% changes. (Hopefully I got that out right)
Tom: Yeah, Vi, that’s Mephi’s view too. He said God’s knowledge “grows” but what he meant is “changes” as the world changes and so the content of truths to be known changes. “Grow” is bad word perhaps. It suggests movement from ignorance to knowledge, which Mephi agrees never happens with God (though Jeff does believe this is always the case with God--i.e., there are always SOME truths God is ignorant of; God is constantly moving from ignorance to knowledge! aha ha ha ha ha Jeff! ;o) "Grow" also can lead one into thinking in terms of "less" and "more" (which, mentally, I can't fit that into the concept of "infinite") "larger" and "smaller" etc., whereas we all recognize that God's knowledge is just as complete today as it was yesterday- His knowledge is just different in as far as content.
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Violin for God
Luke, I am your father. --Nooooooooo!!!!!
Date Joined Dec 2004
Total Posts : 690
| Posted 11/2/2005 8:17 PM (GMT -6) | |
jefscott said...
Jeff: It would, indeed, mean He is not omniscient. I just don't know how to prove God IS omniscient. That's why I'm open-minded about it. Because I don't see how the Anselmian approach is warranted, philosophically.
Hmm... I don't know anything about Anselm so I don't know what his approach would be. I guess I'll have to do more catch-up reading on the "Wrapping thread" thread.
The only way I really make sense of it is that truth is defined as thought corresponding with reality. If God's thought of reality fully corresponds to all of reality itself, then He's omniscient... kinda like God has no epistemic barriers (though we do in our comprehesion of reality). But I'll try catching up on that thread to try to understand where you're coming from.
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Violin for God
Luke, I am your father. --Nooooooooo!!!!!
Date Joined Dec 2004
Total Posts : 690
| Posted 11/2/2005 8:41 PM (GMT -6) | | I was also thinking last night in terms of how the content of God's knowledge changes, and I was thinking of this possibility: what if the "content" of God's love changes but the amount of His love does not (because it's infinite)?
We understand that God knows the past and immediate future not in terms of might and might not, but in terms of did or did not. But the future, epistemically speaking, somewhat IS in terms of might and might nots - in terms of possibilities. What if God's love is in terms of potentials that shifts to actuals? Could God have loved us before creation qua potential beings? (and whatever love we 'actualize' by choice DOES increase God's (and our) EXPERIENCE of loving relationality?)... or in order for love to desire the good of its object, does the object have to be an actual living being?
That would be hard for us because it would be like saying "I loved my kids before they were actually conceived," but perhaps that's just because we have that epistemic barrier of all possibilities in the future. We don't have kids yet, but in a sense, I'd say I do have a love for the idea of what that relationship would be like. If I didn't desire that relationship, I wouldn't desire having kids, would I? 
I mean, when I was bouncing these ideas off Alan last night (I LOVE how he takes my ideas seriously  ) and toying with this idea got us thinking of the metaphysics of loving good and hating evil. How could we hate evil if evil is simply a deficit, an empty vacuum? If it's possible to hate something that metaphysically-speaking doesn't exist, then (if you think something has to ACTUALLY exist in order to be lovable) why does something have to physically exist in order for God to love it? Hopefully this makes some sense... I was getting a headache thinking about this stuff last night. Meph, Jeff, Tom, Corey, Selah, John, what do you all think about this... the metaphysics of good/evil/loving/hating??? Does something have to actually exist in order for you to love it, or can you love something that has the potential for existing?
If you're going to be skeptical, be fair and be skeptical of skepticism.Post Edited (Violin for God) : 11/2/2005 7:47:25 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 11/3/2005 4:28 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Trying to catch up…
Tom: Then we still agree.
Mephi: No, it seems obvious that we don't totally agree. It seems that you want to say that God experiencing grief, pain, etc, in effect DOES bring down God's "existential high" as it were, such that God feels pain from us that effects 100% of who God is. That we TOTALLY affect God's emotional state...
Tom: That’s not what I’m saying (though I guess a good Lutheran would say that!). No, what I want to say is that because God’s emotional capacities are infinite, God is able to truly feel grief and/or joy relative to us without that grief or joy defining 100% of God’s emotional state. It clearly cannot define all that God is emotionally speaking, since God is presumably equally emotionally engaged in other ways. See? I don’t want to say what God feels in relation to the world is ALL that God feels. I want to say that God remains sufficiently satisfied trinitarianly. The grief he feels with respect to me doesn’t drag on that satisfaction.
Mephi: ...whereas I'm saying that God's experience of grief, pain, etc, though genuinely felt, is relativized by God's existential high. So much so, in fact, that God's qualitative experience of God's contingent expression is rendered meaningless when relativized to God's necessary essential existence.
Tom: In my view this just reduces down to God’s not really experiencing grief or pain at all. If it’s “genuinely felt” but yet relativized “so much that it’s rendered meaningless,” then just what does it mean to say it’s “really felt”? I don’t understand that. What would the difference be between this and God’s not really feeling such and such an emotion with respect to us? I can, however, understand how a God who is infinitely emotionally intelligent is able to really feel both grief and joy.
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Mephi: My view: A person is living in a continual experience of the highest qualitative state of pleasure possible. This person is stung by a mosquito. The person's entire body perceives the "pain" of the sting, such that the person's is fully aware of 1) the mosquito sting and 2) its aesthetic content. The pain from the mosquito sting is genuinely felt by the person, but it is relativized by the unsurpassably intense pleasurable experience unto veritable meaninglessness. The person doesn't even inwardly say "Ouch". However, the person has freely chosen to view the mosquito's anti-pleasure activity as "significant" such that the person frowns up, says "Ouch" and swats the mosquito.
Tom: Sounds like my view. Hmm. I see God emotionally engaging with us as a “choice” he makes, a choice to measure his emotional response given the nature of the finite creatures (us) affecting him. So God doesn’t have to bring every contingent contribution back to the unsurpassable measuring stick and say, “Gee, the joy Tom provides me doesn’t even register in comparison to the joy that Spirit gives me; so I’m constitutionally incapable of really feeling joy with respect to Tom.” The picture I’ve got in my head is of God taking us into account and measuring our contribution and his response to it according to the limitations and possibilities of our own finite constitutions. Given who WE are, God can appreciate our contribution as grievous or joyful. He certainly has the emotional capacity to do so. He really can be unsurpassably satisfied AND genuinely grieve. I don’t find this logically contradictory.
Mephi: Tom's view: A person is living in a continual experience of the highest qualitative state of pleasure possible. This person is stung by a mosquito. The person's entire body perceives the "pain" of the sting, such that the person is fully aware of 1) the mosquito sting and 2) its aesthetic content. The pain from the mosquito sting is genuinely felt by the person, and is NOT relativized by the unsurpassably intense pleasurable experience. The person experiences the mosquito bite to such an extent that the mosquito bite superimposes very intense pain upon the intense pleasurable experience. Because of the sting, the person's "peak experience" of pleasure is affected negatively and diminished, if only for a very, very brief moment.
Tom: Naw. This isn’t me. I don’t think we impose ourselves upon God’s estimate of Godself or the unchanging satisfaction that constitutes what’s necessary about God and whatever satisfaction that entails. The peak experience cannot be touched. But peak experience isn’t all that may constitute God emotionally. If he has necessary and contingent poles, then his emotional life is located on both ends. There’s a necessary peak satisfaction which we cannot access. But there’s also a contingent satisfaction we can affect.
Would God be able to relate the two to each other? Sure. What would God conclude when comparing my contribution to the necessary end of the spectrum of God’s emotional life? I’m sure God would know that my minuscule contribution doesn’t even register on the scale. It’s worthless and meaningless from that point of view. But, Mephi, that’s not God’s only point of view. Why wouldn’t God be able to feel vis-à-vis the world on a measurement/scale appropriate to the world? Taking us and our finite constitutions into account (which God wouldn’t have to do but which in grace he does do), God could say, “You know, given what Tom is made of, his finite constitution, the struggles he’s overcome, the obedience he’s maintaining really is wonderful to see.” When God locates me on the necessary unsurpassable pole, God knows I’m meaningless. I can’t affect anything in that respect. But God can choose to locate me on the contingent pole and there find my contributions a true joy, because God’s joy is a joy over what someone of MY constitution has achieved by grace, not joy over what someone of God’s constitution essentially is. Noting THIS difference, God may approprately feel with respect to each.
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Mephi: The issue: Most relational theists REALLY care about the latter idea. God's experience of love REALLY IS significantly affected by what we do…
Tom: God’s experience of OUR love is significantly affected by what we do. You want to refuse God the freedom to base appropriate yet genuinely felt emotional mutuality with the world upon THE WORLD. You seem to think God may only feel at all that which is LEFT OVER after measuring all the contributing factors to God’s own inner Trinitarian satisfaction. I’m saying there’s no reason to suppose God has to do this; or to suppose that God cannot do both—realize the relative meaningLESSness of our existence vis-à-vis the nature of God’s own necessarily full existence AND realize the relative meaningFULness of our existence vis-à-vis the nature of OUR own contingent and frail existence.
Mephi: …Hence, the disdain for the idea of impassibility. We can grieve God "to His heart" or give God "great joy." HOWEVER, it doesn't seem like the full ramifications of God's self-sufficiency are being taken into account. If it is true that God reaches a "peak experience" of beauty via loving sociality all by Godself...AND this experience is unchangeable as it follows from God's necessary essential existence...how can it ever be the case that a human being enduring eternal destruction in anti-love could ever affect God's "peak experience"??
Tom: Such a sufferer wouldn’t affect God’s necessary peak experience. But that’s not to rule
out her affecting God’s experience genuinely at the other end of the pole.
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Mephi: I can see how God could freely choose to view this as "significant" because of God's specific purposes.
Tom: Yes.
Mephi: I can see how God can experience every iota of pain that an all-loving being would experience from a beloved one living in anti-love.
Tom: Yes.
Mephi: I can see how God responds to such painful experience with a reaction that expresses God's unsurpassably intense love ad intra.
Tom: Yes. So long as you’re able to make sense of the expression being a “painful experience,” which much of what you go on to say seems not to allow.
Mephi: But I do NOT see how any painful or pleasurful experiences God has with human beings ultimately AFFECTS God's essential state of joy, delight, and happiness.
Tom: Of course it doesn’t affect THAT. But, Mephi, you’re still calling it painful and pleasurable experience for God, so you’ve got to locate it in God somewhere. And if God only has one emoter, one emotional flux capacitor, then we have one God doing all the feeling—the joy, the anger, the grief, the disappointment, the rejoicing, etc. I can’t imagine any human being being able to handle all this. But I can imagine an infinitely emotional being being able to handle it.
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Mephi: Classical Impassibility makes it impossible for God to "grow" in knowledge or experience. God as "actus purus." My take allows for God to have a necessary and CONTINGENT pole such that God can "grow" in God's BODY of knowledge and experience. God NOT as "actus purus."
Tom: I hear you say this, but I don’t see where you’re making room for the changing body of emotional experience God has. You keep saying it’s vaporized into meaninglessness but God in grace chooses to find it meaningful. Ooookaaay, I’m saying “Yes,” to the graciousness of God’s opening Godself up to us, and I’m saying “Yes,” to the relative meaninglessness of our lives. We can only be relatively meaningless, Mephi. We can’t be necessarily or absolutely meaningless because that would mean God could not in grace find us meaningful. If God can choose to find us emotionally meaningful, then it has to be the case that our meaninglessness is only relative, relative to some necessarily inaccessible divinity (whatever that is). But once grace opens up and says, “I choose to create you and find you meaningful,” then we have to, I think, say God really does feel, hurt, and experience pain and joy relative to the world but not relative to what’s necessary about God.
See, we can’t claim God is emotionally maxed-out on the one hand and also deny impassibility on the other. You seem to be doing this. You want to admit that God’s NOT impassible (God does feel and grieve and rejoice contingently) but at the same time you effectively have God emotionally maxed out (and necessarily so) in peak satisfaction. This amount to impassability unless you find a way to posit some flexibility in God emotionally-speaking so that God really can be emotionally self-sufficient and peaked out but also open to new contingent emotional experiences—pleasurable and painful.
More later. Gotta go.
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 11/3/2005 4:57:44 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/3/2005 8:17 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
See, we can’t claim God is emotionally maxed-out on the one hand and also deny impassibility on the other. You seem to be doing this. You want to admit that God’s NOT impassible (God does feel and grieve and rejoice contingently) but at the same time you effectively have God emotionally maxed out (and necessarily so) in peak satisfaction. This amount to impassability unless you find a way to posit some flexibility in God emotionally-speaking so that God really can be emotionally self-sufficient and peaked out but also open to new contingent emotional experiences—pleasurable and painful.
Tom, we are NOT disagreeing in most of the stuff you say in your post at all. 98% of it I completely agree with. I would AGREE that we are "relatively meaningless" for the reasons that you say. But I think I see the problem...
You say:
The peak experience cannot be touched. But peak experience isn’t all that may constitute God emotionally. If he has necessary and contingent poles, then his emotional life is located on both ends. There’s a necessary peak satisfaction which we cannot access. But there’s also a contingent satisfaction we can affect.
Would God be able to relate the two to each other? Sure. What would God conclude when comparing my contribution to the necessary end of the spectrum of God’s emotional life? I’m sure God would know that my minuscule contribution doesn’t even register on the scale. It’s worthless and meaningless from that point of view. But, Mephi, that’s not God’s only point of view. Why wouldn’t God be able to feel vis-à-vis the world on a measurement/scale appropriate to the world? Taking us and our finite constitutions into account (which God wouldn’t have to do but which in grace he does do), God could say, “You know, given what Tom is made of, his finite constitution, the struggles he’s overcome, the obedience he’s maintaining really is wonderful to see.” When God locates me on the necessary unsurpassable pole, God knows I’m meaningless. I can’t affect anything in that respect. But God can choose to locate me on the contingent pole and there find my contributions a true joy, because God’s joy is a joy over what someone of MY constitution has achieved by grace, not joy over what someone of God’s constitution essentially is. Noting THIS difference, God may approprately feel with respect to each.
I agree with all of this. I'm NOT saying that God is "emotionally maxed-out" on Godself such that God cannot experience any other emotion. I'm saying that God's ad intra has MORE WEIGHT, emotionally speaking, than God's ad extra experience.
Example. Let's say that I win 200 million dollars. Dude, I am HAPPY!!!!! Whoohoo! Now let's say at the same time, I find out that my car has been stolen. Damn, that's not cool. Now, it's theoretically possible that I can both feel GENUINELY EXTREMELY HAPPY and VERY BAD at the same time. However, we could say that ONE of these emotions may be more core to my emotional experience, given HOW I WEIGH THE THINGS INVOLVED. If I value the million dollars more, than OVERALL I'm going to be happy. Almost to the point I don't even really care about the car after a while. If I value the car more than the 200 million dollars (maybe it was a heirloom), than OVERALL, I'm going to be sad as hell, possibly such that the 200 million dollars doesn't matter.
SO, I'm saying that I believe that God places MORE WEIGHT on God's experience of Godself than on God's experience of Creation. Why? Because God's experience of Godself is the CONTENT that brings God to the "peak experience" of beauty. It's MORE CENTRAL to God than anything garnered from ad extra activity.
What I hear YOU saying, Tom, is that God grants the SAME WEIGHT to both God's ad intra experience and God's ad extra experience. (Hence my thinking of superimposing emotional states) This would be like saying that the person weighs the 200 million dollars as being JUST AS IMPORTANT AS the car being stolen. But there's no reason AT ALL to think that God views Creation with the SAME IMPORTANT and AESTHETIC WEIGHT as God views Godself. We have much more reason to say that God views God's ad intra experience of beauty to such a degree that God's ad extra experience of beauty is relativized according to it. Since it God's ad intra experience that 1) is core to Godself and 2) satifies God's dispositional desires fundamentally, it just makes SENSE to say that God's experience of loving relationality has a HIGHER WEIGHT to God than just the excess.
Another example. If my goal is to fill a 10 ounce glass of water, and I have 12 ounces of water, the first 10 ounces of the 12 poured in are going to be MORE IMPORTANT to me because they help me to reach my goal.
See the issue?
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
Post Edited (MephEternal) : 11/3/2005 7:22:51 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/4/2005 5:06 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Mephi, your last post looks good to me. I don't want to say that what's contingent about God's experience of the world is as 'weighty' or 'important' as that which is necessary to defining God as God. Certainly God is more important, valuable, worthy, weighty, etc., than anything about the contingent world, even if the contingent world contributes to God's experience is some sense.
Ok. So, I guess this means we're done, right? We both believe that...
1) Creation is relatively meaningless to God, because of God's necessary, unchangable ad intra essential existence and the existential WEIGHT that God places upon that in contrast to God's contingent experience. Thus, in some real sense, God is always full of unsurpassable delight, joy, and peace...regardless of anything that happens in contingent reality.
2) Even though #1 is true, God still graciously finds us meaningful as God relates to us from God's unsurpassably intense loving sociality ad intra essential existence. Thus, in some real sense, we do contribute, either positively (joy, delight) or negatively (pain, sorrow), to God's total experience of love in unique ways because of our individual uniqueness and God authentically interacts with us from the context of those contributions.
3) Divine aseity AND divine grace are intact.
If we agree on all this, then thus ends the great theological saga!
NOW, we can party! 
*********************** Tom: But that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, died? Duuuuuuuude! We gotta take that man out to lunch! He said he wanted to join us some day at C's for a bite.Yo, I hear ya. But I don't believe we're gonna change his mind. He's Lutheran to the core. But, hey, we can try...
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
Post Edited (MephEternal) : 11/4/2005 5:23:57 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 11/5/2005 11:50 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 11/5/2005 1:51 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff1: But it would seem to me that to posit that the infant Jesus did NOT experience "unsurpassably loving relationality" while the so-called logos DID would require either two states of consciousness for the second person of the Trinity or a postulation about the second person that is a bona-fide mystery, which Meph supposedly wants to avoid.
How do we adjudicate between the two options in your opinion? Or how am I misunderstanding the situation?
Tom: Mephi's concerned about heresy?
Jeff2: Thanks for clearing me up there, Tom!!
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