Consider this thesis, which both Augustine and Aquinas would accept:
- Value supervenes on being (VSB): How valuable reality is is determined by what entities exist.
However:
- It is good to have a true belief and bad to have a false belief.
We now have an argument against presentism (only present things exist) and growing block (only present and past things exist). Among our beliefs, we have beliefs about contingent future events. Some of these beliefs are contingently true and others are contingently false. (I am assuming a bivalent temporal logic.) The value of these beliefs is determined by what entities exist. But present and past entities are insufficient to determine whether the beliefs are true, and hence what the value of the beliefs is. Thus, contrary to presentism and growing block, there must be future things.
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I feel like a presentist could push back by saying the contingent true and false future propositions are just potentials that haven't been actualized and so there is no need to see them as having a reference beyond the possible causal future of some present object and that they become true or false when the time arrives. Interested in what your thoughts are Dr. Pruss.
Yeah, but that would require them to accept open future views. That's going to be incompatible with classical theism, for instance.
Dear Dr. Pruss,
I hope you are doing well.
I have been deeply troubled by a few issues that have led me to postpone my baptism, and I would be immensely grateful for your thoughts.
First, I find myself persuaded, both by Jerome Gellman's arguments and by considerations of theoretical simplicity (such as Occam's Razor), that monotheism is best understood as involving a single divine person. It seems to me that the hypothesis of one divine person is, at least prima facie, simpler than that of three divine persons. Because of this, I struggle even to exercise what you describe in Natural Theology as "faith" in the Trinity. From a philosophical standpoint, affirming something that I do not believe the evidence sufficiently supports feels intellectually dishonest, and I do not know how to reconcile this with genuine faith.
Second, I continue to be troubled by the biblical accounts in which God commands the destruction of entire peoples, as well as the fact that Scripture does not seem to explicitly repudiate or abolish slavery. Independently of Scripture, philosophical reasoning has led me to conclude that God is perfectly good. Yet these passages appear, at least prima facie, to stand in tension with that conclusion, and I have not found a satisfactory way of resolving that tension.
These two issues have been the primary reason I have delayed my baptism. Since I have not been able to arrive at satisfying answers, I would be extremely grateful for any guidance or insight you might be willing to offer.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Vivaswan.
Dear Vivaswan,
Although I'm not Dr.Pruss, I figured if it helps you would appreciate it anyway.
There are good reasons that the biblical descriptions and commands of genocide are best understood as "exaggarated warfare rhetoric", an ancient literary tool. For example, at places Scripture descripes how entire people were eradicated, then not much later the very same nation is mentioned as existing...
We also have evidence of this style of describing war-events being used in near-eastern archeological findings.
I'd recommend this video, you can also read the transcript:
https://www.catholic.com/audio/sp/did-god-command-genocide-in-the-old-testament
Scripture does not explicitly denounce or abolish many things, but the principles about the dignity of the human person made in the image and likeness of God and of our requirements for love are clearly revealed. Of course, it can take time even for the Church to recognize the full consequences of these principles.
The Trinity is a mystery of the faith. This does not mean that it is illogical, it means that this is something that we cannot prove or fully grasp by the light of natural reason. We can only know it because God has revealed it. And indeed, God has revelad that He is a Trinity. Simplicity and Occam's razor might provide _prima facie_ evidence for God being a single divine person, but this is easily defeasible if we have other evidence for the contrary, that is more concrete than what one can get from a principle such as Occam's razor.
To bring a paralell from science: it is true that we should prefer simpler theories, but only among those that fit the experimental data. I can make up a nice mathematical framework that looks nice and is a lot simpler than others, but if I have evidence that contradicts it, I shouldn't accept it.
In this case, the evidence that contradicts the 'one-person God' hypothesis is God's revelation.
Additionally: God is Love. Love is inherently relational. Etc. This is not a proof for the Trinity, but helps to enlighten the concept once the Trinity is already revealed.
Faith is believing something on the authority of testimony. This can be a really strongly supported knowledge, even in the human cases. For example, I have faith in the testimony of mathematicians that XYZ high-level theorem is true, even though I could never actually understand it's proof myself, because I judged them to be credible in these matters.
Divine faith is believing on the authority of God revealing. In this sense, it is the surest form of knowledge: Whatever God reveals is necessarily true :) So the question should be whether you judge the motives of credibility high enough for the claims that God exists, revealed himself by becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, resurrected, and established His Church to be His universal sacrament of salvation for all people, and to transmit and guard this revelation. If so, then you can believe what God reveals, and what the Church proposes to be held as divinely revealed, even if you don't fully understand it, or cannot personally solve all the problems or counter-arguments against it by others, because your reasons for trusting the authority proposing these things to you override all those things.
Also, one's reasons for trusting the claims of Jesus need not necessarily be fully accessible to others, like 'I trust Him for walking out of His grave' would be. It can even be something like the internal testimony and experience of the Holy Spirit :)
If God is a single person, then the highest form of love in reality is God's self-love. But the highest form of *human* love is not self-love, but love of another person. This means that if God is a single person, then our ethical theory has to be more complex: in some contexts self-love is higher than other-love and in others other-love is higher than self-love. For similar reasons, the theory of how it is that we are in the image and likeness of God becomes more complex if a teleology towards interpersonal relationships is not essential to God but is (clearly) essential to humans.
As for the divinely commanded destruction of peoples, I do not think it is objectively much more troubling than the general problem of death: everyone dies, and dies when God chooses for them to die. God gives life and God takes away life. When God takes away life, he often chooses non-intelligent instruments of for his will--bacteria, hardening of arteries, sharks, etc. It doesn't seem wrong for him to choose intelligent instruments of it. I would also add that it seems better to die than to live in grave sin, and God might foresee that some cultures lead their members to live in grave sin. This is never a judgment *we* are permitted to make, but it seems to be within God's prerogative to make.
I just made a post inspired by your comment.
Thank you Dr. Pruss.
Thank you David.
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