Ask a Different Christian Philosopher a Question

durangodawood said:

Time travel would not "destroy" free will. It might reveal we never had it, though.
Similarly, if our path is already set through the course of a knowable future, that would certainly imply that no options are really on the table.

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You can get around free will issues by positing a god that sees everything as in the past - seeing what people freely chose.

ToddNotTodd said:

You can get around free will issues by positing a god that sees everything as in the past - seeing what people freely chose.

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That would mean God would not exist at the time the choice was made or before the choice was made.

durangodawood said:

Something prevents you from making a decision, if your path is ordained.

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That's a false statement. It would be true if the ordination took place prior to or apart from the agent's actions. Yet the ordination does not take place in such a way.

GrimKingGrim said:

Ooh so close. But not the same. All felonies do get imprisonment is correct but the time of imprisonment is different each.

Tell me how long do you stay dead for a minor sin since you wanna make this comparison?

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Either you're not trying very hard or you don't understand how analogies work. The analogy I was drawing was between quality and quantity.


So your syllogism remains faulty, and you ignored the distinction between mortal and non-mortal sins to boot.

zippy2006 said:

That's a false statement. It would be true if the ordination took place prior to or apart from the agent's actions. Yet the ordination does not take place in such a way.

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If you dont require the scenario to make sense, then you are correct. And I personally do NOT believe these things have to make sense, even though I argue as if they do.

durangodawood said:

If you dont require the scenario to make sense, then you are correct. And I personally do NOT believe these things have to make sense, even though I argue as if they do.

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I think it makes perfect sense, and you've provided no reason for me to think otherwise.

zippy2006 said:

That's a false statement. It would be true if the ordination took place prior to or apart from the agent's actions. Yet the ordination does not take place in such a way.



Either you're not trying very hard or you don't understand how analogies work. The analogy I was drawing was between quality and quantity.

Mortal Sin : Felony :: Hell : Imprisonment ; and
Mortal Sin : Felony :: Quality of Punishment/Hell : Quantity of Punishment/Imprisonment.​

So your syllogism remains faulty, and you ignored the distinction between mortal and non-mortal sins to boot.

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Wrong it's not a great analogy and he didn't answer I assume because my following question: "how long do you stay dead?"

Read it again since you have a hard time collecting the context.

"how long do you stay dead?"

Death is forever. So punishing someone with an infinite punishment for a small finite crime is absurd. That's what I was saying. You only get one punishment for sin, death. And apparently hell without repentance. Both are infinite. Felonies do not always get a life sentence. There is time to also change and reflect and eventually be released.

Death does not give the same opportunity. Hell does not give the same opportunity. Do you see the flaw? This is a bad analogy.

GrimKingGrim said:

Wrong it's not a great analogy and he didn't answer I assume because my following question: "how long do you stay dead?"

Read it again since you have a hard time collecting the context.

"how long do you stay dead?"

Death is forever. So punishing someone with an infinite punishment for a small finite crime is absurd. That's what I was saying. You only get one punishment for sin, death. And apparently hell without repentance. Both are infinite. Felonies do not always get a life sentence. There is time to also change and reflect and eventually be released.

Death does not give the same opportunity. Hell does not give the same opportunity. Do you see the flaw? This is a bad analogy.

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Again, you're stuck on quantity and are thus failing to see the point.

If you are going to compare two sins based on the punishment they merit, then you have to look at both the quantity and quality of punishment. Your whole argument requires that we concentrate on the quantity and completely ignore the quality.

GrimKingGrim said:

So punishing someone with an infinite punishment for a small finite crime is absurd.

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That's a different argument altogether. You asked if lust in thought and lust in action are considered to be the same thing in Christianity. They are not. I've explained why. If you want to start a new topic, feel free, but don't pretend that it's the same one.

zippy2006 said:

I think it makes perfect sense, and you've provided no reason for me to think otherwise.

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If I cant surprise an observer, then I dont have much agency.

durangodawood said:

If I cant surprise an observer, then I dont have much agency.

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Okay good, that's a reason.

But you really should have said, "If I can't surprise an omniscient observer, then I don't have much agency," right? Because we are talking about an omniscient observer. An observer that transcends time, transcends labels of past, present, and future. An observer that knows all things that have been, are, or will be.

When we are talking about this kind of an Observer, it isn't at all clear why your statement would be true.

zippy2006 said:

.....An observer that transcends time, transcends labels of past, present, and future.....

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We can say this, because it is grammatically correct. But that does not make it sensible in its content. We are beings in time, and our minds are utterly conditioned to it. The eternal may be 'true', but its not sensible to us.

durangodawood said:

We can say this, because it is grammatically correct. But that does not make it sensible in its content. We are beings in time, and our minds are utterly conditioned to it. The eternal may be 'true', but its not sensible to us.

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Therefore...? I am talking about God, not human beings. And I don't see any reason to believe that we are utterly temporal to the extent that talk of transcending time is unintelligible. I'd even say that there are multiple times in a person's life when they themselves are given a taste of the eternal. The Greeks even have two distinct words for time: chronos and kairos.

zippy2006 said:

Therefore...? I am talking about God, not human beings. And I don't see any reason to believe that we are utterly temporal to the extent that talk of transcending time is unintelligible. I'd even say that there are multiple times in a person's life when they themselves are given a taste of the eternal. The Greeks even have two distinct words for time: chronos and kairos.

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Those moments are notoriously hard to make 'sense' out of. Thats why they are always discussed in poetry or imagery, pointed at obliquely. Attempts to make firm statements about them that are logically useful fall flat.

durangodawood said:

Those moments are notoriously hard to make 'sense' out of. Thats why they are always discussed in poetry or imagery, pointed at obliquely. Attempts to make firm statements about them that are logically useful fall flat.

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It perhaps comes as no surprise that I disagree, and you've yet again provided me with no rationale to disagree with--just a conclusion/assertion. Yet your statement belies a superficiality present in modern science--a truncation of the human being and his experience based on a number of (ultimately arbitrary) criteria. For example, "logical usefulness" (whatever that might mean).

zippy2006 said:

It perhaps comes as no surprise that I disagree, and you've yet again provided me with no rationale to disagree with--just a conclusion/assertion. Yet your statement belies a superficiality present in modern science--a truncation of the human being and his experience based on a number of (ultimately arbitrary) criteria. For example, "logical usefulness" (whatever that might mean).

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Say what? In no way did I deny the validity of the experience of the eternal.... Did I?
I'm saying that not all true things/experiences are reducible to logical usefulness.

durangodawood said:

Say what? In no way did I deny the validity of the experience of the eternal.... Did I?
I'm saying that not all true things/experiences are reducible to logical usefulness.

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Yes, but you also seem to be compartmentalizing anything which is not "logically useful" into a category that is apart from systematic thinking, rationality, and communication/language. You admit that these things exist, but you deny they can be usefully employed in language or philosophy, no? Then in what sphere would they reside? A "spiritual" sphere disconnected from reason and the common life of human beings?

zippy2006 said:

Yes, but you also seem to be compartmentalizing anything which is not "logically useful" into a category that is apart from systematic thinking, rationality, and communication/language. You admit that these things exist, but you deny they can be usefully employed in language or philosophy, no? Then in what sphere would they reside? A "spiritual" sphere disconnected from reason and the common life of human beings?

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Didnt I just say they they are communicated through poetry??? (to which I would add some of the other arts.) And poetry IS useful for communicating experiences and intuitions (as opposed to communicating logical statements). But, yes, I do believe that there are true things that cannot be captured rationally nor logically. The relationship between the eternal and the temporal seems to be one of these.

durangodawood said:

Didnt I just say they they are communicated through poetry??? (to which I would add some of the other arts.) And poetry IS useful for communicating experiences and intuitions (as opposed to communicating logical statements).

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Okay, perhaps I mistook you then. Yet there does seem to be a very strong bifurcation in your worldview. What is a logical statement?

zippy2006 said:

Okay, perhaps I mistook you then. Yet there does seem to be a very strong bifurcation in your worldview. What is a logical statement?

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Basically, a logic statement is one you can reason with.
As for the bifurcation in my worldview.... perhaps. But rather than black/white, I suspect there may be more of a continuum. Our minds (and so our reasoning) are highly conditioned to life as animals on earth, per our ancient ancestry. Back then, what use was the eternal? None but a deadly distraction. Or it may have been the opposite, that the eternal was the un-noticed water in which we swam. Either way, it was not a suitable subject for reasoning, which does seem time-dependent.

durangodawood said:

.....reasoning, which does seem time-dependent.

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BTW, I think I'm going to start a thread on this.

durangodawood said:

Basically, a logic statement is one you can reason with.

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Suppose I read a beautiful piece of poetry and am taken out of myself in such a way that a desire is awoken which is not directed toward anything I know or apparently anything I have ever encountered in my earthly life. What prevents me from reasoning with this? What prevents me from reasoning about the nature of the human being, the sorts of experience open to us, the possibility of the desire being fulfilled, etc.?

Indeed both the atheist scientist and the Catholic contemplative (or scientist, for that matter) seek to "make sense" of such an experience of poetry. They both reason with it.

As for the bifurcation in my worldview.... perhaps. But rather than black/white, I suspect there may be more of a continuum. Our minds (and so our reasoning) are highly conditioned to life as animals on earth, per our ancient ancestry. Back then, what use was the eternal? None but a deadly distraction. Or it may have been the opposite, that the eternal was the un-noticed water in which we swam. Either way, it was not a suitable subject for reasoning, which does seem time-dependent.

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I guess I would say that we are highly conditioned to life as animals, that the eternal is as much use today as it was then, and that it was as much a subject of reasoning then as it is now.

You say reasoning seems time-dependent and you also have a post on "ultimate proofs." You seem very focused on syllogistic, temporal reasoning. But pre-syllogistic reasoning--whether found in modern epistemology or ancient philosophers--has a very strong transcendent, contemplative quality. For example, what is "a triangle"? You could show a monkey a million different triangles and they would still have no idea what it means to be "a triangle." They would not understand the underlying principles that universally define triangularity, apart from all material and concrete manifestations. Yet we do. We come to an act of understanding by which we understand what triangularity is, and it is far more than a matching and picking with a large memory bank (although, as Aristotle points out, experience with material manifestations is very helpful in making that "jump" to the abstract, universal concept).

Similarly with language, parents speak to infants all the time, and it is pure nonsense to them. They are just stimulus-response machines. Until one day, suddenly, mysteriously, they understand. They see that meaning and language is abstract, meaningful apart from stimulus, response, desires, etc. And so they run around pointing at things, asking for their names. They want to know what it is called, what it means. Science itself, in its healthy form, is a maturation of this sense of wonder and desire for knowledge. The syllogisms, the logic, are just tools, they are just means to an end. The illuminations, realizations, understanding that such things help effect are the real goal, and they are really not "logical statements" at all. The act of understanding by which we appropriate what something is--its nature, the way it behaves, its characteristics, its mode of being--is not really a temporal or "logical" act at all. It is given in an eternal moment, not unlike that which is given to the child whose eyes are opened and who sees, at last and at once, that "mama" is not just a button you push when you want something, but is actually a subsistent being/object apart from itself with its own mysterious norms for movement and life, part of which include caring for the child itself.