Now let me backtrack a bit to the related topic of implicit faith. I’m wondering if your saw this blog post by Alexander Pruss about two months back: http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2008/06/orthodoxy-and-ordinary-believer.html … I’m glad that he asks, “What about the ordinary believer?” – because, that’s where I’m at. I’m hoping to hear even more about the ordinary believer here at the Trinities blog. I mean, what is a parent supposed to tell their child about the Trinity? That’s my million dollar question. Thanks again for this blog series, keep it going.

Another “paradox”?

Not all intuitions are created equal. If I find one wavering, coming and going, changing, then it’s a pretty weak one, and will give me at best a weak reason for concluding things are how it seems (in that intuition), i.e. that doctrine D really is contradictory. I agree that the concept of a moon is somewhat vague.

The thing is, in philosophy we have no choice but to trust our (firm, steady, clear) intuitions, all the while admitting that we could be mistaken. I’ll be interested to hear where you come down when I distinguish positive from negative mysterianism (yes, it’s an ugly term!) – hopefully within the next few days.

I think his book is well-written, and it is compartmentalized enough that you don’t need to read it straight through. In the later chapters, he pushed the dialectic between him and me a little further. Also interesting are his comments on why he rejects various of (what I call) rational reconstructions of the Trinity. So don’t be afraid to dip in!

Hi Dale,

I also take the line of rejecting (C). But I’m not crazy about the ‘mysterian’ appellation. The reason to reject (C) in my view is that many of our intuitions are not especially well-informed, even intuitions concerning common concepts. To borrow an example from Roy Sorensen, take your concept of ‘being a moon’. Pretty common. But it is not difficult to show that we don’t have a clear concept of ‘being a moon’. Suppose Jupiter’s moon, Io, itself acquired a moon. Would the moon of Io be a moon of Jupiter? Who knows? I’ve never considered whether ‘being a moon’ is transitive. But the concept of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence are much more complicated than the concpet of being a moon. We just have not considered all of the hypothetical contexts which might illuminate these concepts for us. So I’d deny that we know enough about the content of these concepts to trust the deliverances of ‘careful reflection’.