Blue Petals Afloat

Blue Petals Afloat
Logic informs us the corollas are not afloat

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

If Trinity Were True, Then "God" Should Refer to No Person

If Trinity were true, then it would be absurd to hold that the collection of Trinity’s three God-persons (or God in three persons) is itself a person. If “God” were used in the Scriptures for reference to the collection of all (= three) God-persons—ergo the Trinity—, then “God” could have no reference to what is uniquely true of any particular God-person, but rather should have reference to what is true of all the God-persons (the Trinity). Moreover, per trinitarianism’s lights, God’s beingness is the totality of the collection ‘All God’s properties,’ and though the totality of the collection ‘All God’s properties’ is not a person, yet that totality is supposedly the ground of existence for differentiation of three persons. (Per class theory, the totality of the collection ‘All God’s properties’ is not a class.) We do not, however, have in the Scriptures any use of “God” that should require the Trinity for its referent.

We find in the Scriptures uses of the word “God” that are epistemologically and psychologically problematic vis-à-vis suggestion that those uses of “God” can have reference to a plurality of persons who are, all of them, equicompetent—equicompetent, by trinitarian lights, because each one of the supposed persons is, according to trinitarianism, an owner of the selfsame, unique collection of properties (infinitudes) necessarily informing the identity (beingness) of a Supreme Being. Ah, but how could the Supreme Being have the very properties that ground the existence of three separate selves (persons) in that Being and yet that Being is said by trinitarians to be not other than merely a collection of different persons? Indeed, if there is a Supreme Being that is the ground of existence of three distinctive persons in that Being, then that Being must own the totality of the collection of all properties essential to the existence of those persons. (And then Trinity is replaced by Quaternity.) Furthermore, it is that very basis (namely, an equality that is selfsameness of properties inasmuch as trinitarianism denies divisibility in the substance of God) for the alleged equicompetence that makes it absurd for one to hold that such a basis does not rob the putative persons of the Trinity from ability to have interpersonal relationships among themselves—to show themselves forth as each one a person in his own right, distinct from the other persons. Accordingly, we cannot believe that there is a plurality of equicompetent persons enjoying interpersonal relationships among themselves who, by definition, are all those persons alleged to be essentially and necessarily a collection classed as God, The One Supreme Being, the Trinity. Nor should we find that trinitarians would posit anything other than a contradiction for their definition of God given above as a class (a collection) should they allege that “God” has reference to the totality of the collection “All God’s properties,” for that cannot even be a class.
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See Noel Balzer, “What Is A Class?” The Journal of Value Inquiry 21 (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Pubishers, 1987) 111-130

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