{"id":3074,"date":"2011-08-19T13:50:13","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T17:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=3074"},"modified":"2013-11-23T20:19:34","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T01:19:34","slug":"comment-on-a-poll-an-inconsistent-triad-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/comment-on-a-poll-an-inconsistent-triad-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment on a Poll &#8211; an inconsistent triad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3075\" style=\"border-width: 15px; border-color: white; border-style: solid;\" title=\"public-opinion\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/public-opinion-300x211.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"211\" \/>The <a title=\"polls archive\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/pollsarchive\" target=\"_blank\">poll<\/a> below is an interesting one. (The bogus one to the left is only fun, but not interesting.) As I write this post, it is still current, and is available for voting at the upper right of the <a title=\"trinities.org\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/\" target=\"_blank\">main blog page<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Which of these is false?<\/em><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>The Christian God is a self.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Christian God is the Trinity.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Trinity is not a self.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>One option is to vote <strong>that none are false<\/strong>, since all are true. As I write this, 27% have picked this option. But this is a poor pick. This &#8220;is&#8221; here is the &#8220;is&#8221; of numerical identity throughout. Given this, it is impossible that all three be true; they are demonstrably inconsistent. (The logical form is: 1. g=s, 2. g=t, 3. -(t=s).)\u00a0 At least one must be false.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If 1 &amp; 2, then not-3. If this God is a self, and is the Trinity, and it must be false that the Trinity is <em>not<\/em> a self.<\/li>\n<li>If 1 &amp; 3 then not-2. If God&#8217;s a self, and the Trinity isn&#8217;t, then it must be false that God just is the Trinity.<\/li>\n<li>If 2 &amp; 3 then not-1. If God&#8217;s the Trinity, but is not a self, then it is false that the Christian God is a self.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Why then do 27% opt for inconsistency (affirming all three)?\u00a0<\/strong>I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It could simply be desire for orthodoxy being stronger than the desire to avoid believing falsehoods.<\/li>\n<li>Or perhaps some imagine that &#8220;human logic&#8221; can be ignored; inconsistent claims may each be true, at least about God.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe it&#8217;s clinging to the mysterian hope that this must be a <em>merely apparent<\/em> contradiction, though no one can make that appearance recede.<\/li>\n<li>Or perhaps they&#8217;re misreading 1, as if it said only that the Christian God is <em>personal <\/em>&#8211; not a self, but somehow self-like or closely related to at least one self. (Compare: being a king vs. being kingly.) If this is the case, then when tutored on how &#8220;is&#8221; is meant here, such folk should probably pick another option. To avoid this confusion, we could rephrase the inconsistent triad thusly:\n<ol>\n<li><em>The Christian God is a certain self.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Christian God is the Trinity.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Trinity is not any self.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>This triad has a different logical form (1. Ex (x=g &amp; Sx)\u00a0 2. g = t, 3. -Ex(x=t &amp; Sx)), but the three are still demonstrably inconsistent. It&#8217;s just that the proof is harder. I think this is actually <strong>a better way to formulate<\/strong> the inconsistent triad. (Reading the logic I just gave: 1.\u00a0 There exists some x which just is God and which is a self. 2. God just is the Trinity. 3. It&#8217;s not the case that there exists some x such that it just is the Trinity and it&#8217;s a self.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let&#8217;s run through the <strong>other options<\/strong> briefly. I list the poll percentages as of the writing of this post.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you deny 1 (29%), you&#8217;re probably some sort of <strong>&#8220;social&#8221; trinitarian<\/strong>. You think God is a group, a community, communion, a quasi-family, consisting of three divine selves.<\/li>\n<li>If you deny 3 (11%), you&#8217;re probably some sort of <strong>modalist<\/strong>. You think that God, that is, the Trinity, has a first-person point of view. He&#8217;s a self all right, though he operates in three different ways, as Father, Son, and Spirit, or maybe Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. He&#8217;s group-like perhaps, but is not literally a group. He&#8217;s a god, and the only god.<\/li>\n<li>If you deny 2 (33%), you&#8217;re probably some sort of <strong>unitarian<\/strong>. You think the one god is the Father, and that the Trinity isn&#8217;t a god, but is rather God, God&#8217;s Son, and God&#8217;s Spirit.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And since one can <em>always<\/em> tell what is true by consulting simple, tiny-sample internet polls, this shows that unitarianism is true&#8230; today. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The poll below is an interesting one. (The bogus one to the left is only fun, but not interesting.) As I write this post, it is still current, and is available for voting at the upper right of the main blog page. Which of these is false? The Christian God is a self. The Christian&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/comment-on-a-poll-an-inconsistent-triad-dale\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Comment on a Poll &#8211; an inconsistent triad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3075,"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":[37,10,5,20,9,12,3,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-logic","category-modalism","category-mystery","category-philosophy","category-polls","category-theories","category-unitarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3074","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=3074"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5362,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3074\/revisions\/5362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}