{"id":2280,"date":"2010-07-31T09:11:28","date_gmt":"2010-07-31T13:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=2280"},"modified":"2013-11-24T23:23:07","modified_gmt":"2013-11-25T04:23:07","slug":"is-god-a-self-part-2-flint-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/is-god-a-self-part-2-flint-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"Is God a Self? Part 2 – Flint"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Tom Flint<\/strong><\/a> is an excellent philosopher and a winsome human being. He’s teaches Philosophy at Notre Dame, and is the current editor of Faith & Philosophy<\/a><\/em> – arguably the most important philosophy of religion journal.<\/p>\n

The interviewer suggests, and Flint agrees, that it is a “strange” question<\/strong> whether or not God is a person. Why? They don’t say – but I would guess that people may wonder if it is being asked if God is a human person<\/em> – a dude or a lady. But what’s being asked is not that, but whether or not God is a self – this is a more abstract concept, which would be satisfied by an angel, an intelligent alien, a human, a god, etc.<\/p>\n

Watch the interview here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Flint smartly beats a strategic retreat<\/strong> on the Trinity issue. \ud83d\ude42 He wants to talk instead about the generic, philosophical concepts of a person\/self, and of God – the idea of God one encounters in philosophical arguments for God’s existence.<\/p>\n

Elaborating on the classic definition of Boethius, he says that a person\/self is<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. a substance\/individual\/entity (ultimate bearer of properties & not similarly in anything else), and<\/li>\n
  2. a mind – a knower, a thing which thinks, and<\/li>\n
  3. a willer \/ chooser – someone able to perform free, intentional actions.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    God, though, a self, wouldn’t be a self just like us. For one, he’s perfect. Also, Flint points out that God has no extension (spatial extent), parts, matter.<\/p>\n

    They get sidetracked onto the means of God’s knowledge<\/strong> – Flint sketches the medieval view of God as not any sort of perceiver, but rather he knows all things through himself<\/em> – through his own representations, perhaps, of what he’ll create (and if Flint is right, from knowing what any creature will freely do in any possible circumstance – in a nutshell, that’s the theory called Molinism<\/a>. (Flint, by the way, has written one of the best books defending that theory.)<\/p>\n

    Towards the end, the interview asks: What does it make you feel<\/em> <\/strong>when you think of God as a person?<\/p>\n

    Flint thinks of God as loving, involved, responsive – available<\/strong> for a personal relationship with us.
    \nAnything less, he says, would be inadequate on a religious or spiritual level.<\/p>\n

    This was interesting. I’m with Flint<\/strong> on all of this (except the Molinism). I wondered if he was going to take a more medieval line<\/strong>, and say that God was really not a being at all, but rather “Being itself”, and only analogically a “person”, or something which *we can think of as* a person.<\/p>\n

    I’m curious about how he understands the Trinity<\/strong> doctrine, and whether it is compatible with what he says here. On most “social” theories, God is not a self. On some others, I think – in particular modalist construals of the orthodox formulas, God is a (single) self. I know he has highly developed, traditional Catholic views on the Incarnation, but I don’t know his thoughts on the Trinity.<\/p>\n

    But in any case, I give two big thumbs up<\/strong> to what he says here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Tom Flint is an excellent philosopher and a winsome human being. He’s teaches Philosophy at Notre Dame, and is the current editor of Faith & Philosophy – arguably the most important philosophy of religion journal. The interviewer suggests, and Flint agrees, that it is a “strange” question whether or not God is a person. Why?… Read More »Is God a Self? Part 2 – Flint<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,38,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linkage","category-modalism","category-monotheism","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5442,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions\/5442"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}