CADRE Comments

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, concluding Chapter 40, can be found here. ] [This entry starts Chapter 41, "The Consequences of Sin".] In the previous chapter, I began to discuss the concept of evil--not in the abstract, nor for potential special-cases (such as particular individuals who may honestly not recognize any responsibility they have to actual reality)--but in the most concrete and personal way I could find. I began examining the concept of evil, by examining myself. The person who thinks ethics are something we humans have created, says that good and evil are what we personally define them to be. I have noticed that such a person rarely, if ever, admits, "What I have done is evil". Usually, the gist of this sort of person is that we define 'good' as whatever we ourselves want to do, and 'evil' as whatever someone else wants to do (or wants us to do) that threatens our desires. Or he may perh...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, starting Chapter 40, can be found here. ] [This entry concludes Chapter 40, "An Introduction to the Concept of Sin".] I have inferred that it is possible for God to enact one kind of death, and indeed that He does enact this: the submission of the Son to the Father (while maintaining the distinctive existence of the Person of the Son) in order to complete the circuit of the Unity and thus actively maintain self-existence. I have further deduced from this that it is technically possible for God to partly kill Himself in other ways, so that true creation of not-God entities and systems may be instituted; after all, here I am, a not-God entity. It is therefore not in principle impossible for God to subject Himself to several sorts of death. I conclude, in extension of this principle, that it must be possible that God could take actions that would result in the breaking of the Unity and His consequ...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, concluding Chapter 39, can be found here. ] [This entry starts Chapter 40, "An Introduction to the Concept of Sin".] One especially important part of a discussion about ethics involves the question of 'evil'. If ethics are only a human invention, or if ethics are only a perceptual illusion based on irrational response to our environment (micro or macro), or if ethics are only some combination of those two general explanations, then any discussion of 'evil' is rendered somewhat moot. 'Evil' would mean only what you and I have been automatically conditioned to treat as 'evil', and/or only what you and I happen to reject (whether for self-practical purposes or aesthetically). Learning ‘what is evil’ would mean learning what we have been automatically conditioned to treat as evil, and/or learning what other people have opportunistically chosen to treat as evil. We coul...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, starting Chapter 39, can be found here. ] [This entry concludes Chapter 39, "The Role of the Third Person of God".] [Repeating where the prior entry left off:] Moving along then: what kind of communication can we expect from the Holy Spirit to anyone at all, in any time and place? It might be suspected that this would mean all people at any time and place would hear God talking directly to them in an unambiguously clear and constant manner. However, this obviously does not happen. Why this does not happen is certainly worth consideration eventually, because it would seem to be one of the most effective means of communication--perhaps not useful for every contingency, but useful enough to be a common occurrence. So we know from experience there are evidently some limitations to His communication with us, even at the most fundamental level of communication (through the Holy Spirit). Setting aside ...

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous entry in this series of posts can be found here. The first entry can be found here. ] I am "sorry to say" this [i.e. that an intentional fostering of contradiction for purposes of religious piety has happened in many religions--including in Christianity], because contradictions deny reality. A theist who turns to contradictions to generate feelings of awe about God, or (worse) proposes that God and contradictions must necessarily go hand in hand (perhaps because he is working with the requirement of a faith/reason disparity), implicitly denies God's reality. Sceptics just love this! Who can blame them? It plays right into their hands! I am certain some sceptics have become unbelievers precisely because they perceived this problem, and were subsequently told (by otherwise well-meaning theists) that this was the way it had to be. These particular sceptics (in another vicious irony, and no fault to them) learned their lesson...

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous entry in this series of posts can be found here. The first entry can be found here. ] I have explained why I reject a flat presumption of our inability to reach true and useful conclusions about the existence and character of God through reasoning: in essence, I reject the presumption because it involves (one way or another) self-contradiction. I have also explained why I reject much (though not all) of circular Presuppositionalism theories: in essence, I reject some of their claims because they are also self-contradictive. I do recognize some real usefulness in such procedures, (although I do not consider such methods to be the best tools for the goal of my book). But at the same time, I allow such methods have some real usefulness precisely because there are certain (limited) goals of such methods, which are not self-contradictive! I am willing to consider the feasibility of the parts which do not gut themselves; but I reject the pa...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: I am here appending in several parts some excerpts from an unpublished book of mine (not CoJ incidentally), originally composed late 99/early 2000, wherein I work out a progressive synthetic metaphysic. The topic of this Section of chapters is ethical grounding; and in the first several entries I analyzed crippling problems along the three general lines of ethical explanation, including general theism. After this though, I returned to the argument I had already been developing for several hundred (currently unpublished) pages, and used those developed positions to begin solving the philosophical dilemmas I had covered in previous entries. Along the way, I ran into a potential problem last seen back in my (unpublished) Section Three; but slotting that problem into my developing argument allowed me to discover that I should believe that a 3rd Person of God exists. Having covered some introductory inferences regarding the 3rd Person's relationship...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: I am here appending in several parts some excerpts from an unpublished book of mine (not CoJ incidentally), originally composed late 99/early 2000, wherein I work out a progressive synthetic metaphysic. The topic of this Section of chapters is ethical grounding; and in the first several entries I analyzed crippling problems along the three general lines of ethical explanation, including general theism. After this though, I returned to the argument I had already been developing for several hundred (currently unpublished) pages, and used those developed positions to begin solving the philosophical dilemmas I had covered in previous entries. Along the way, I ran into a potential problem last seen back in my (unpublished) Section Three; but slotting that problem into my developing argument allowed me to discover that I should believe that a 3rd Person of God exists. Having covered some introductory inferences regarding the 3rd Person's relationship ...