{"id":254,"date":"2019-11-16T04:36:56","date_gmt":"2019-11-16T10:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/254"},"modified":"2019-11-16T23:14:36","modified_gmt":"2019-11-17T05:14:36","slug":"playing-with-daviss-playful-proof-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/playing-with-daviss-playful-proof-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing with Davis’s Playful Proof"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Stephen T. Davis<\/a><\/strong> is a much-admired veteran Christian philosopher. (For more about him, check out this podcast<\/a> and this podcast<\/a>.) Many have read his Logic and the Nature of God<\/a><\/em>. I also particularly enjoyed his Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection<\/span><\/em><\/a>, his recent Christian Philosophical Theology<\/a><\/em>, and his personal Christian testimony here<\/a>. I have fond memories of his exciting Philosophy of Religion class that I took when I was a Master’s student at the Claremont Graduate University<\/a> back in 1994. He’s a very kind and helpful man, and he’s been a help and an encouragement to me several times since then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to his work: his writing has an attractive clarity, forthrightness, independence, and brevity – not unlike his one-time colleague John Hick, but he’s more sober and irenic than Hick. Some things that, to me, make him stand out<\/strong> among analytic Christian philosophers are his thoughtful engagements with the Bible, with biblical scholarship, and with academic theologians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Davis has his own take on the Trinity, which he calls “Perichoretic Monotheism”<\/strong>. He considers it a form of Social Trinitarianism, and I believe he first developed it after reading Brian Leftow<\/a>‘s aggressive attack on all “social” Trinity theories in his 1999 article, “Anti Social Trinitarianism”, in  this book<\/a> (co-edited by Davis). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here I want to consider Davis’s argument for social trinitarianism<\/strong>. He doesn’t claim to be super-original here – he acknowledges similar reflections by Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, Richard Swinburne, and C.J.F. Williams. But he can claim to have put this train of thought into an admirably clear (and thus evaluable) form. He first tentatively put out a simpler version of this argument in “A Somewhat Playful Proof<\/strong> of the Social Trinity in Five Easy Steps,” Philosophia Christi<\/em><\/a> 2:1, 1999, 103-5. In Christian Philosophical Theology<\/a><\/em> he offers it as a straight-up proof. I guess it’s no longer playful<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, then, is the argument<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Necessarily, God is perfect, and perfect in love.<\/li>
  2. Necessarily, if God does not experience love of another, God is imperfect.<\/li>
  3. Therefore, necessarily, God experiences love of another. (1,2)<\/li>
  4. Necessarily, it is possible that only God exists (i.e. that God does not create).<\/li>
  5. Necessarily, if ST [social trinitarianism] is false, there is no ‘other’ in the Godhead.<\/li>
  6. Necessarily, if God alone exists, and if ST is false, then God does not experience love of another, and thus is not perfect. (2,4,5)<\/li>
  7. Therefore, necessarily, ST is true. (4,6) (Christian Philosophical Theology<\/a><\/em>, page 65) <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    This argument is more modest than some other attempts – he aims to prove not that there must be exactly three divine persons, but only for<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    “divine plurality or robust differentiation (‘otherness’) among the Persons… to the effect that God is something like a community.”<\/p>(page 66)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    The argument seems valid<\/a> to me. Still, I don’t think this is a successful proof<\/strong>, even of that limited conclusion. Some critical points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n