Blue Petals Afloat

Blue Petals Afloat
Logic informs us the corollas are not afloat

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Incoherence in Trinitarians' Concept of God

I post the following two paragraphs as an introduction to excerpts of a debate I had with some trinitarians, which follow after the introduction.

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 putative God-persons (the Trinity). Moreover, per trinitarianism’s lights, God’s beingness is ‘All properties essential to God's identity as God’; however, the totality of the collection ‘All God’s properties’ is not a person--not an ontological reality.  Still, that totality is supposedly and somehow 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.) Happily, then, we do not have in the Scriptures any use of “God” that should require an incoherent Trinity for its referent.

We find trinitarianism's uses of the word “God” to be mercurial as to definition; they are epistemologically and psychologically problematic vis-à-vis suggestion that any of trinitarians' 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 defining a certain identity, the Supreme Being ("God"). 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 another Person, but merely a certain collection/group of just three persons? On the other hand, if there were a Supreme Being (an ontological Reality) that could be the ground of existence of three distinctive persons in that Being, then that concrete Being should have to own within Himself the collection of all properties essential to a distinguishable existence for each of three other persons (the Trinity).  (And then Trinity is replaced by Quaternity.) Furthermore, it is that alleged basis (namely, equal ownership of the selfsame properties inasmuch as trinitarianism denies divisibility in the essential 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 of 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 have several reasons for why we cannot believe that there is a plurality of equicompetent persons enjoying interpersonal relationships among themselves who, by definition, are a Trinity (= just three persons alleged to be necessarily supreme Persons, 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 certain collection) should they allege that “God” has reference to the totality of the collection “All God’s properties,” for that totality cannot even be a class. (See below for a reference to an article for discussion of class theory.)
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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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Hos Martys
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 8
05-29-2004, 07:47 AM
Re: How Do You Define Trinity?

Aseity stated: Though the term Trinity is not found in the Bible, the concept is clearly there.

I do not find the concept there at all, but rather blatant contradiction of the concept.

Aseity stated: Subsistence is a difference within the scope of being, not a separate being or essence. All persons in the Godhead have all the attributes of deity.

But the terms of trinitarianism are self-contradictory. To have a difference that allows for "a difference within the scope of being" means that the being is hierarchically structured, and that could mean a differentiation in the being for three different persons (minds) to be grounded in the fractured mind of that being. (An a priori for the existence of different persons is that each person uniquely has his own will, store of memories/knowledge, and self-awareness.) But trinitarianism denies divisibility in the substance of the Supreme Being. Any talk of real differences in the Substance (the Being) effectually devolves into tritheism--the existence of three co-eval and equal Gods. That is unscriptural, and anti-Scriptural.

And where would reside the interface for inter-relationships of Persons in this Being? It is absurd to hold that it could reside wholly in any one of the Persons of the Trinity. It should have to be extra-Trinity. And then you have Quaternity.
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Hos Martys
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 8
05-29-2004, 11:25 AM
Re: How Do You Define Trinity?

Pilgrim stated: There really is no problem with the concept of multiple ontology in and of itself. In fact, such a thing occurs in nature already and has been mathematically quantified.

Might you favor us with a real-world example that fits your description of something that has "multiple ontology in and of itself . . . in nature . . . [and that] has been mathematically quantified"?

Hos
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Hos Martys
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 8
05-29-2004, 07:41 PM
Re: How Do You Define Trinity?

Pilgrim stated: Sure...light. Light is both wave and particle simultaneously. Science can not explain it but it has been mathmatically shown to trave as both things at once. Not one sometime and another at a different, but it is both at the same time.

Afraid not. All you have given us is proof that you are a victim of a popular version for explaining the so-called Copenhagen Paradox. Consider the following quote as correction to what you proffered, and then let us know what you think.

Originally posted by a writer referring to Wallace on the Copenhagen Paradox:

Wallace spends a good bit of time on the so-called measurement problem – the idea that the measurement somehow determines the nature of reality. As a first example, he uses Richard Feynman’s thought experiment about electrons passing through a barrier with two slits in it. When a beam of electrons passes through the barrier, a detector (such as a piece of photographic paper) will show an alternating band of stripes, known as an interference pattern. Only waves produce interference patterns, so electrons must have wave-like properties. Now let’s change the experiment so that only one electron goes through at a time – amazingly, after many electrons pass through, one at a time, we still get the interference pattern. This can only mean that each electron acts like a wave, passing through both slits, and each electron interferes with itself in a wave-like manner before reaching the detector. This may be surprising, but it doesn’t cause a paradox. Enter Feynman – suppose we put a detector behind one of the two slits. What will we see? It turns out that 50% of the time we’ll see an interaction, and 50% of the time we won’t – doesn’t that mean that each electron is a particle passing through one or the other of the slits? Now we have a paradox. If we don’t stick a detector behind one of the slits, the electrons act like waves, but if we do they act like particles, and the question is, how do they know? Haven’t we just determined reality by the kind of experiment we did?

NO! says Wallace. All we have done is interacted with the electron and changed its state. After all, what is a measurement? Is it the conscious receipt of information in the human mind, as some Gurus would have us believe? Not at all. It is simply an interaction between various different objects. Perhaps we are bouncing photons off our electrons, or perhaps we’re interposing some kind of atoms between them and the photographic paper, or inserting a magnetic field. In any case, we are interacting with the electron, and it is the interaction that causes the change in behavior. The significance of measurement is that we can only do it by interacting with what we’re trying to measure, and the very act of interaction changes the state of whatever we’re trying to measure.

Hos
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Hos Martys
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 8
Yesterday, 07:48 AM
Re: How Do You Define Trinity?

Related reading matter may be obtained in the publication On the Frontiers of Physics, Fernando Goni Arregui (Arregui: Pamplona, Spain; 1989) 45-47. I may post pertinent snippets and a synopsis as inquiries may require and as time may permit.

Hos
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Hos Martys
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 8
Yesterday, 03:07 PM
Re: How Do You Define Trinity?

Pilgrim stated: How main stream is the above understanding?

Very.

Please read on as respects Philip R. Wallace, author of several works on physics.

http://www.phil-books.com/Paradox_Lost_Images_of_the_Quantum_0387946594.html

Free your mind from Copenhagen prison

The human mind has been in a mental prison for about 70 years. People have lost their relation to objective reality and live in a state of intellectual schizophrenia. People who don’t understand a bit of Quantum mechanics are speculating on the nonsense of "role of observer" the "loss of objective reality" etc. Physics-students whose brains are already conditioned by established interpretation (Copenhagen interpretation) don’t realize the contradictions inherent to it and accept the nonsense as the "new way of thinking".

Some who have not lost their minds try to take refuge in Bohms theory or Everetts/David Deutschs Many world interpretations that are both unfortunately dead ends.

This book is an important step to free the minds from this mental prison. I agree with almost everything that is written in it. The only reservations I have about the book are about the quantum nonlocality. He is correct that the two photons emitted in EPR type experiment in opposite directions overlap throughout the space because "both" are spherical waves. But this alone doesn’t explain how a change in wave function that occurs in a measurement at some point can influence a change of the wave function at a very far point almost instantaneously as the experimental evidence indicates. Thus I suspect nonlocality is a fact we cannot circumvent. The only possible reconciliation of an EPR event with special relativity may be that there are no superluminal quantum mechanical currents associated with an EPR event. However this is a minor technical disagreement.

I recommend the book strongly to anyone who is interested in quantum mechanics and especially
to professionals working in the field of physics.

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http://www.rbookshop.com/science/q/...of_the_Quantum_0387946594.htm

Book Description:

""Medical scientists use the word 'iatrogenic' to refer to disabilities that are the consequence of medical treatment. We believe that some such word might be coined to refer to philosophical difficulties for which philosophers themselves are responsible." --- Sir Peter Medawar.

"Arguing that quantum theory as it stands is perhaps the most comprehensive, well-verified, and successful theory in the history of science, the author clears away the impression shared by physicists and laymen alike that it is incomplete, philosophically flawed, or self-contradictory. In simple terms accessible to anyone with a little prior knowledge of science, Wallace examines many of the "paradoxes" and "difficulties" claimed for quantum mechanics and shows that they are due to excesses of interpretation that have been imposed on the theory."
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Now, I should like to add something further as respects Wallace's spherical- waveform theory of light. It is commensurate with material in the publication I referred to in an earlier post, namely, a work by Fernando Goni Arregui, On the Frontiers of Physics; published in Pamplona, Spain, 1989; translated by M. Dean Johnson.  Wallace writes:

"There is nothing "Zen like" about debunking the Copenhagen Paradox. Arregui states the following: "[The Heisenberg uncertainty principle] is inherent in the very observation of the phenomena. That is, the means used in observation produce a modification of the phenomena being observed.... In a bundle of corpuscles [particles!] travelling with a discontinuous motion, the probability of finding those particles in certain places . . . can be perfectly described with a function for waves propagated at a given group speed, which, for a single corpuscle, can be the phase speed of its associated wave." " (pages 45-46)

Hos
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Hos Martys
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 8
Today, 09:15 AM
Re: How Do You Define Trinity?

Jude3b stated: As for me and my house, we will trust the Lord and believe His Word! Amen

Which are precisely the first reasons why I came to reject the Trinity.

Hos