CADRE Comments

This week, the United States will celebrate our annual Independence Day (July 4th -- the day in 1776 we declared, a bit preemptorily, our independence from Great Britain). Freedom and independence are words with great political and cultural meaning for us; and not only for us, but for the numerous nations who (more-or-less following our lead) also declared their independence from sovereign rulers whom they believed were oppressing them, both socially and not-infrequently religiously. Sad to say, Christianity was just-as-not-infrequently the religious oppression the people were revolting against. To some extent this is even true of the United States: even though our own national revolution was grounded on a mixture of orthodox Christianity and nominal deism (such as Franklin’s and Jefferson’s), the history of our country’s settlement in the centuries before the revolution was typically based on fleeing religious (as well as financial) oppression in Europe. And it can ha...

It's that time of year again, when I post a link to back to my 2008 Cadre article on the philosophically unique connection between trinitarian theism and freedom. 2009's repost picked up some interesting and polite discussion on the Resurrection of Jesus (between myself and counter-Christian apologist Spencer Lo), and those can be found here -- but they aren't comments about the article per se. God’s hope to all our readers, around the world, this holiday season!

I've been having an interesting discussion with Dr. Keith Parsons, an old friend, roommate and sparring partner of a friend of mine (Dr. Victor Reppert of Dangerous Idea ) over at the Secular Web channel of Patheos, specifically in the comments of Bradley Bowen's article "This Knee Won't Bow" . Because Disqus (the comment engine at Patheos) gets kind of screwy trying to keep track of the threads of a conversation, and doesn't always indicate when a comment has been properly posted (leading to inadvertent double-posts), I'm going to try to collect our side of the commentary discussion (there are several threads) here for further reference. (Although Blogger's comment system has an intrinsic wordcount limit now, so we probably won't be able to continue in our own comments below, even if Dr. P wants to.) This isn't my Easter "sermon" this year (I never really know if I'm going to do one of those beforehand), but a much more techn...

My yearly Independence Day link back to my 2008 Cadre article on the philosophically unique connection between trinitarian theism and freedom. God’s hope to all our readers, around the world, this holiday season!

My yearly Independence Day link back to my 2008 article on the philosophically unique connection between trinitarian theism and freedom. I'm posting it Friday this year for the beginning of the weekend. God’s hope to all our readers, around the world, this holiday season!

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, chapter 25, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes chapter 26, "God's Relationship To Nature".] Although I was unable (yet) to deductively remove from the option list the concept that what we call 'physical Nature' is God, I will remind you now that my own status as either a rebel (even if only occasional rebel) or as a deluded victim of illusion, indicates (even if nothing else did) that I am not fully divine in and of myself; and this indicates that at least two levels of reality, or two substantially different systems, exist: God and (in one way or another) not-God (namely myself). Therefore, although I could only give a conceptual strike (not deduction) against 'practical pantheism' in the previous chapter, I do think I have deductively argued that pantheism must technically be false: not everything is fully God, because--as far as it is possible for me to tell--I a...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, the start of chapter 23, can be found here. ] [This entry concludes Chapter 23, "The Unity".] Is it necessary that God must be Self-Begetting and Self-Begotten? Well, it is necessary that God (as the intentionally active, self-existent Independent Fact) must be self-generative; and it is necessary that what He self-generates must be fully and completely Himself. This might only mean, that as part of an increasing knowledge of God's aspects, we could treat this aspect of God (a Unity of Persons) as being something of a "useful legal fiction"; as we might consider a self-consistent equation to be two 'different' formulas, because the formulas (although they are ultimately the same) 'look' different. For certain purposes we might use the formula on the left side of the equal sign; while for other purposes, we might be better served by using the formula on the right. T...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, chapter 22, can be found here. ] [This entry begins Chapter 23, "The Unity".] Recently I have been talking about what it means for foundational reality to be self-existent. And for various reasons, I have concluded I ought to believe that the foundational reality, the one Independent Fact of all existence, must not be privatively self-existent, but instead positively self-sustaining--especially if (as I have also concluded) I ought to believe the IF is rationally active. If, therefore, God (the rationally active Independent Fact) is self-sustaining, then I conclude that the most fundamentally basic action of God is His own 'upkeep', so to speak. Without this action, no other actions of God would be possible. Because this action remains eternally successful, all other actions of God are possible. If God acts in any other fashions than this, then He can act in those fashions only because ...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, the last for chapter 21, and the last for Section Two, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 22, "The Aseity", and starts Section Three, "Creation and the Second Person".] I have discovered (if my argument holds water) that the fundamental ground of all reality is active and sentient, and thus is a Personality. He must, at the barest minimum, be sentient to the degree that I require my own active and sentient properties to be distinctively real. What more He may be, remains to be discovered, if possible. Let me look at a potential problem that many readers will now have. Where did God come from? In one sense, the answer can be deferred; for no matter what philosophy we espouse--atheism or pantheism or theism or anything else--we will fetch up eventually with a reality that just is . (Even if an infinite regression could be possible, it still would finally be an infinite...

I wasn't sure I'd be available Sunday to post up the essay this year, so I'm doing it a bit early for the weekend. No particular revisions again this year; so just a link to my annual Independence Day sermon that I like to put up every year. {g!} (The only substantial comments so far can be found at last year's entry here, by the way. Although the comments turn out not to be about the post at all. {wry g}) God’s hope to all our readers, around the world, on this day, and every day! Jason Pratt

This week, the United States will celebrate our annual Independence Day (July 4th--the day in 1776 we declared, a bit preemptorily, our independence from Great Britain). Freedom and independence are words with great political and cultural meaning for us; and not only for us, but for the numerous nations who (more-or-less following our lead) also declared their independence from sovereign rulers whom they believed were oppressing them, both socially and (not-infrequently) religiously. Sad to say, Christianity was just-as-not-infrequently the religious oppression the people were revolting against. To some extent this is even true of the United States: even though our own national revolution was grounded on a mixture of orthodox Christianity and nominal deism (such as Franklin’s and Jefferson’s), the history of our country’s settlement in the centuries before the revolution was typically based on fleeing religious (as well as financial) oppression in Europe. And it can hardly be argued th...

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous entry in this series of posts can be found here. The first entry can be found here. ] In the previous chapter (i.e. the previous few journal entries), I brought to the forefront a term I have already begun to use here and there in this book: the IF, the Independent-or-Interdependent Fact. Now I will discuss this concept directly, not only because I will be using it with increasing frequency as I continue, but because I think its existence must be accepted to avoid nonsensical positions. [Footnote: the acronym for Independent or Interdependent Fact happens to be the English word 'if'; but this is only coincidental.] I have just finished explaining why I reject the position that God must be an abstract generality (and thus can have no particular aspects, even in principle, to be discovered). My reply was that in my experience the abstract describes the real (or, more accurately, we use 'the abstract' to describe the re...