CADRE Comments

Bill's topic from a few days ago is something that Christians (and other theists of all stripes) have been chewing over for thousands of years. It might seem like the answer is a simple yes or no; but there are concepts which supernaturalistic theists are (in principle) committed to, which introduce difficulties. I spent several hundred pages in Sword to the Heart ( which can be found for free in some different formats, including first here on the Cadre Journal ) slowly and carefully working up those concepts, but I'll summarize them below in a progressing topical order relevant to the question of God's responsibility. ( Click here on the jump to proceed. )

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!

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, starting Chapter 36, can be found here. ] [This entry concludes Chapter 36, "Discovered Rational Secular Ethics?"] [I ended the previous portion by writing, "It should be noted... that this [special secular humanistic ethical] proposition... emphasizes personal responsibilities and choices, while at least ideally minimizing (or even avoiding?) the problems involved with self-centered pragmatism. It also emphasizes rational discovery by rational entities, just like the second theory, while avoiding (completely?) the problem of non-rationality of the source of ethics under the second theory. And it coheres with our intuitions regarding interpersonal relationships being the basis of ethics, in a way that monotheistic ethical grounding simply fails to do. [...] I think any accounting that doesn’t recognize and appreciate the serious strengths of this notion, will be fundamentally crippled when i...

[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

And now for today's discussion in metaphysics. Consider the following claim (from this philosophy paper from Spencer Lo, provided for context--the original statement can be found in the second paragraph of Part IV, "Empty Resolution"): "The fact that all phenomena are dependently arisen, entails that all phenomena, without exception, come into being in dependence upon prior phenomena, remain in existence dependent upon prior phenomena, and cease to exist dependent upon prior phenomena.” A.) How cogent is this claim, as it stands? B.) Would it cohere well enough with an attempt to deny the existence of an independently existent reality with at least some intrinsically fixed, unalterable characteristics? C.) Would such a claim, if true, be any protection against, or any denial of, an attempt to claim that phenomena may come into and go out of existence completely uncaused? D.) Would any failure of (A), (B) and/or (C) be remedied by replacing the occurrences of the phr...

[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...

Slowly catching up on a very long list of things to do. {g} But I've been meaning to put this up for consideration, revision, etc., for a while. What I take to be a solid, archetypical naturalistic ontology argument (to be distinguished from, but not exclusive to, a claim of atheism) runs like this: 1.) agree that infinite regression is not only conceptually worthless and a practical impossibility for application, but that even trying to state it requires tacitly presuming a single-IF (Independent Fact) reality is true instead. 2.) agree that the proposition of multiple-limited IFs (e.g. God/Nature cosmological dualism, or the cosmological tritheism proposed by some Mormons) either tacitly presumes a single-IF reality as a common overarching factor (which, incidentally, is why other Mormons treat the three Gods as existing within an already existant reality, even if that reality is technically supernatural to our own--"as man is, so God was", etc.); or else the propositio...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: I am here appending in several parts some excerpts from an unpublished book of mine, originally composed late 99/early 2000, wherein I work out a progressive synthetic metaphysic. The current topic is ethical grounding, and an analysis of problems along the three general lines of ethical explanation. The previous entry, which introduced a promising variant of the first general ethical theory, can be found here. Technically I would have been starting chapter 32, "the solution to the question of ethics"; but as it happens, in this and my previous entry I am composing a whole new chapter, not written in my original text. I had given a variant of the first theory too short a shrift in my first text seven years ago; a problem I now am rectifying. .......[excerpt begins here] But, is this notion, of avowedly interpersonal human relationships, sufficient for objectively ethical grounding? It may be noticed that this secular, humanistic theory is ...