Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | Email | RSS
At least, not in the way tried by Professor Richard Swinburne. I briefly argue against such attempts in this episode, drawing on my forthcoming paper “On the Possibility of a Single Perfect Person.”
The jist of his argument is that a divine self wouldn’t be perfect unless he eternally brought about two other equals.
I argue that this hasn’t been shown. To the contrary, it seems possible that there be just one perfect being, one self who is all-knowing, all-powerful, completely good, and so on. Being perfectly loving, being happy, being generous – I argue that no such perfection, as best we can tell, would compel a perfect self to bring about another, or two others.
In the second half of this episode, I reason about divine aseity, and how I believe this creates difficulties for Professor Swinburne’s Trinity theory. It strikes me that there’s some inconsistency in his views here. I’m assuming, because the claims don’t appear in his 2008 treatment, that he no longer holds that each person of the Trinity permissively causes the other two, as I explain about his 1994 book here. If he holds that, then I think it would follow that it was impossible for any being to exist a se! But I argue here that he should say that the Father has that property, and not the Trinity, which exists because of the Father and Son, in his view.
Links for this episode:
- Was Jesus God? (kindle) – Correction: in the episode I say that this came out in 2010 – but is was rather 2008.
- podcast episode 57 – Richard Swinburne on the Trinity
- previous trinities posts on a priori proofs of a three-self Trinity
- Christian Philosophy of Religion, ed. Colin Ruloff (The University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).
- (Penultimate draft of my chapter in this book, “On the Possibility of a Single Perfect Person.” Please don’t cite the draft, but only the book version.)
- Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity
@ Dale
A preliminary terminological comment (and a further invitation to reply my prevous comment).
«Subsequent to the arrangement of Aristotle’s works by scholars at Alexandria in the first century CE, a number of his treatises were referred to as ta meta ta physika, literally, “the [writings] after the Physics”. This is the origin of the title for collection of treatises now known as Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Some have interpreted the expression “ta meta ta physika” to imply that the subject of the work goes “beyond” that of Aristotle’s Physics or that it is metatheoretical in relation to the Physics. But others believe that “ta meta ta physika” referred simply to the work’s place in the canonical arrangement of Aristotle’s writings, which is at least as old as Andronicus of Rhodes [fl. c. 60 BC] or even Hermippus of Smyrna [third century BC]. Within the Aristotelian corpus itself, the metaphysical treatises are referred to as ta peri tês prôtes philosophias (literally, “the [writings] concerning first philosophy”); “first philosophy” was what Aristotle called the subjects of metaphysics. (He called the study of nature or natural philosophy “second philosophy” – Metaphysics 1037a15)» – [Wikipedia > Metaphysics (Aristotle)]
Now Kant, in particular in his work “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as [a] Science” (some sort of synthesis of his major work, “Critique of Pure Reason”) affirmed essentially that any metaphysics is merely speculative, incapable of providing us with conclusions about the “reality beyond the phenomena” that are, at the same time, rational and unquestionable …
… you may want to carry on from here, or, alternatively, dispute any of the above …
@ Dale
At podcast #57, you seem to share Swinburne’s claim that – at least according “analytic philosophers”, even agnostic and atheist, “by reason alone, we can show that it’s reasonable to believe that God exists”. In fact, Swinburne’s claim (at least according to one his two books of which you provided the image in your post) was much more prudent and modest:
“… there is a moderate probability that there is a God of the kind worshiped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims.” (Richard Swinburne, “Was Jesus God?”, OUP, 2008)
Here you tackle Swinburne’s a priori arguments for belief in the Trinity. Somewhere in the same book we read:
“All three members of the Trinity are metaphysically necessary persons, but the Father alone is ontologically necessary. And the whole Trinity is ontologically necessary because nothing else caused it to exist.”
Now, this is quite a formidable mouthful, but, apart from that, how about:
[FON] “the Father alone is ontologically necessary”
[TON] “the whole Trinity is ontologically necessary”
Maybe my analytical powers are not good enough, but it seems to me that FON and TON are not mutually compatible.
Can you help? Thank you in advance 🙂
Comments are closed.