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Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 15th, 2010, 8:35 pm
by postodave

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 17th, 2010, 2:58 pm
by Nerd42
My point has not been that we can know everything about God but that those things that we do not know cannot contradict whatever true things that we do know. Certainly religious language uses analogy and so it often isn't strictly true in the literal sense, but if the law of noncontradiction doesn't apply to God then there is no such thing as a statement about God's nature that is really true, analogous or not. If there is no such thing as a positive statement about God's nature that is really true, there is nothing to analogize about.

The point you made about the debit card is a trick of language. I'm a computer science major so I don't really think of the money on the debit card as "imaginary," merely as "virtual" or "digital" or whatever the buzzword is this week. An economist might think of it as "imaginary" I suppose, but I'm sure it has to come back to some kind of real trad-able value at some point, otherwise there's an economic collapse. But from my perspective, a string of ones and zeroes is not any more imaginary than the physical dollar bill. You can use the debit card that has the "quality of existence" if there is such a thing, (a point on which I base no argument but was asking about in order to try to understand yours) and can't use a debit card that doesn't exist

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 17th, 2010, 4:11 pm
by cyranorox

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 18th, 2010, 3:13 am
by Nerd42

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 18th, 2010, 7:31 pm
by cyranorox
Alas, there are. God will keep all his promises, and all shall be well; justice will be executed and all tears will be wiped away. Hard not to see a paradox there.

or questions of Christ's inner consciousness, his knowledge as God and Man.

or God's knowledge, which can look like foreknowledge, in the context of human freedom

or the Womb that was wider than the heavens

or Three that are One.

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 18th, 2010, 11:12 pm
by Nerd42

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 19th, 2010, 9:03 am
by postodave

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 19th, 2010, 5:05 pm
by Nerd42

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 20th, 2010, 9:01 am
by postodave
Hi Nerd

I agree that what we know about God does not stand in a contradictory relation with what we do not know. However you say this because you hold the view that what we know about God must therefore stand in a non-contradictory relationship with what we do not know. While I agree that this applies to those aspects of God's revealed nature that are covenentally hidden, what would traditionally be called Deus Absconditus, I do not think it applies to the relationship between God's essence and his revealed nature which I would not see as being subject to logical laws which I regard as an aspect of creation and of God only in so far as he has assumed such laws in his relationship with creation. Does that make any sense at all to you?

If it does I'll pick up the rest later.

Dave

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 20th, 2010, 4:01 pm
by Nerd42
Deus Absconditus? But tells us that God is not, in fact, hidden. In Acts, Paul told the Athenians they were superstitious for worshiping the unknown god. ()

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 20th, 2010, 4:08 pm
by Theophilus
God has revealed himself to us through his creation and through his word but he hasn't revealed everything about himself. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever."

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 20th, 2010, 6:49 pm
by postodave

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 25th, 2010, 5:05 pm
by Nerd42
Actually Numbers 29:29 says, "And on the sixth day eight bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the first year without blemish:" I think you'er referring to Deuteronomy 29:29. Your position would seem to be that the secret things are real and the revealed things are an illusion, where I would claim that both are definitely real and are parts of the same whole, and especially that each must be absolutely consistent with the other. The secret things of God are not a nature entirely foreign to the revealed things, but are merely things that we don't know about.

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 26th, 2010, 8:31 pm
by cyranorox
P-dave, not a correction but a comment. God for us is seen primarily through Christ, but the Thomists seem to start with an abstraction, or the Father, of whom we know very little: His Paternity, and His Word as shown in the personality, teaching, deeds and person of Christ. Since the Tetragramatron is Christ, not the Father, all the OT knowledge, certainly all the stories of encounter & epiphany, tells of Christ and not directly of the Father. So a lot of the Thomist language looks odd if predicated of Christ, or of the Trinity-and-Incarnation. And of course, we do not agree that God is Pure Act, and a lot follows from that for the T's. We really cannot know the Essence, but we also cannot know the essence of anyone else; it's not an objett of the kind of knowledge of which we are capable.

@Nerd- the womb of the Theotokos was wider than the heavens since it contained That which the heavens cannot span, the Second Person. There is a series of poetic paradoxes in the Akathist [praises] to her, and also on G&H Friday, eg: Today He who hung the earth is hung on the tree; today the creator of life is placed in the tomb.

Re: Time and Truth

PostPosted: May 30th, 2010, 8:54 pm
by postodave