Maybe I should go into more detail about the first cause. Naturally, I know that there could still be other causes if God exists. So I granted that point when I wrote about the first cause. I told everyone that God is the cause who makes every other cause exist and enables it to produce its effect. Say I'm right. Then if there. was no God, there would be no causes since there wouldn't be anything at all.

Science can't explain why there's something instead of nothing since science assumes that there's something. That would make your argument circular if you argued scientifically to explain why there's something. Science is about causes and and how they produce their effects. Science doesn't explain what "causes causation."

Thomists believe in two general kinds of causal series, a linear causal series and a hierarchical one. Here's an example of a linear one.

I marry my girlfriend Elina. She gives birth to our children Marie and Timothy. Our daughter and our son start their own families and my grandchildren. Their children make my great grandchildren, and so forth. So, I could have infinitely many descendants because they can survive their parents. Like Elina and me, our descendants have built-in causal power that doesn't keep flowing from their ancestors. My children and their children aren't like a string of Christmas tree lights that must keep talking electricity from an outlet to keep each bulb lit. In the analogy, electricity represents existence and God's causal ability.

Now here's an example of a hierarchical causal series. You board an Amtrak train to ride from Albany, New York to Manhattan. When the engine pulls the first car, pulling power flows to every other car in the train. If the engine wouldn't work, the train would stand still.

Arrange 1,000 dominos on your floor. Then tap the first domino to topple it and knock the others down one by one. You started the series when you pushed the first domino. So you're like the train's locomotive and God since the series depends on you. You enabled each domino to except the last one thee power to tip the next one. Just as the train needed to engine to pull the train cars, the group of dominos relied ultimately on you.

But God is the cause who makes everyone else and everything else exist now. He's why there's something instead of nothing. If you ask what caused God, I'll remind you that he has no cause. Since his existence is built into him, he doesn't get it from another source.

He doesn't even cause himself to exist since "self-causation" implies a self-contradiction. For a cause to produce its effect, that cause must come before or be with its effect. On the other hand, for an object to make itself begin to exist, the cause and the effect must exist and not exist in the same respect at the same time.

In a hierarchical causal series, there must be cause that sustains every other cause and each effect. That's why the universe and each object in it depends on God. God explains why there's anything at all besides himself. His existence is built into him. He makes everyone else and everything else exist. He sustains it. He sustains the natural world, each natural process in it, and makes even merely possible events possible.

Science can't explain why there's something instead of nothing. Again, science presupposes that there's something.

In context, the first cause is the one that gives every other cause its causal ability. The first cause is the most fundamental one, the cause that each effect depends on. Every other cause needs God. So if he didn't exist, neither would anyone nor anything else.

Since I forgot the difference between a nature and an essence, I'll ask my friend Prof. Alexander Pruss to remind me of it. Then I'll tell you what he said.

An accident is a property that someone or something might gain or lose. He or it can survive with or without that nonessential property. You're essentially human. But having hair isn't an essential property. Your could shave your head. A sunburn is another inessential property. Your height is, too, because a surgeon could amputate your legs. If you lose an essential property, you'll die.

The essence of someone or something determines what he or it can do. Since you're human, you can reason. But you can't fly under your. own power. Water can hydrate you, put out some fires, drown, and animal, and more. It can't fuel a gasoline engine, turn into a cheesecake, or explode.

I'm still waiting for you to criticize my infinite regress argument against Dr. Craig's God concept.

First, Jesus is not an essence. Neither is a horse. An essence is a group of properties that causes, say, a dog to be a dog, a tree to be a tree, or Christ to be divine. A nature is not the person. place. or thing that has those properties. Doggyness is not a dog. it makes an animal a dog.

The difference between a person and his nature is a basic distinction from any Catholic catechism for adults. If you've studied a catechism, that distinction should be familiar to you.

When you make such obvious mistakes, it's hard to see how you could know whether Thomism leads to skepticism.

Then please criticize my vicious infinite regress argument. Tell us what fallacy or fallacies I committed in in it. What premises false?

What kind and of skepticism does it lead to, Phyronism? I have no idea why you think it would do anything like that. From what I can tell, you probably haven't studied Thomism. I begin to study it in about 1994.

No, I'm to treating it as a dogma partly because no pope and no council can turn it into one. But about 62 Popes have endorsed Thomism and transubstantiation seems to presuppose Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics. These reasons probably won't convince you to be a Thomist. Why would you since you've rejected Catholicism?

I specialized in logic when earned my philosophy degree.

Again, "substance" means "essence." So what do you mean by "inside" when I'm not talking bout spatial relationships. I'm doing metaphysics instead of science.

Here's a startling article by Dr. Craig. I say "startling" because he believes the monothelite heresy is plausible when Matthew 26:39 contradicts it. Monothelites believe that Christ's divine will is is only will. But in that verse, he distinguishes between his will and his Father's will. That's why said that Christ would have contradicted himself if he said "Not my wink but mine be done."

Craig on Monothelitism

Matthew 26:39 says, "And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" in the KJV.

Slavery? Maybe I can see why you'd believe that. But the Catholic Church teaches that Christ is fully present in even the tiniest fragment of a consecrated host.

There different kinds of presence, too. That's why St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that a consecrated host in a tabernacle doesn't have Christ's "dimensive qualities." For example, if he's six feet tall, he doesn't shrink to fit into a tabernacle. He doesn't clone himself to live in each tabernacle in the world either.

Again. Catholics distinguish between the substance, i.e., the natures of Christ's body and his blood and the walking, talking divine person. Suppose you remove a microscopic crumb from a loaf of bread. It'll still be a piece of bread, though you'll need to microscope to show it to you. What would you do to extract each ingredient a baker poured into s bowl while making the dough?

I suggest you try to think more deeply if you want to understand what I'm trying to say. You told us that you were a Catholic. So would you please tell us whether you studied, say, The Catechism of St. Pius X or another catechism?

I'm sorry, everyone. I didn't comment on what Dr. Craig wrote about whether St. Augustine believed about transubstantiation. Please read this article because the author quotes St. Augustin to show that he, Augustine, believes that the natures of bread and wine become those of Christ's body and his blood. Dr. Craig made a mistake.

An article by Mr. David Armstrong, professional Catholic apologist

God can annihilate the sun if he wants to do that. If he removes an essential property away from it, the sun will stop existing.

When Catholics say that even if an object has always existed and always will exist, it still needs God to sustain it. We don't assume that a created thing needs to have begun to exist.

We don't believe that Christ's body, blood, soul and divinity are acting as a piece of bread. St. Thomas Aquinas believes that the properties that bread and wine survive when they're no longer properties that anything has. That's a strange thing to say, partly because properties of wine can still get you drunk. But since I'm not an expert in sacramental theology, I'll see what I can find out for you. Since I may have made a mistake, please don't assume that I know that sacramental theologians agree with me. I'm only a theologically self-taught layman.

Two reasons make that post strange. First, St. Thomas lived in the 13th century and St. Thomas lived in the second one. Second, there's no way to put a ladybug's essence into a phone. A phone has an essence. That's because an essence differs from a description of it. But a description of a ladybug's essence isn't an essence.

An essence is the set of properties that distinguishes a person, a place, or a thing from everything else there is. For example, each dog has the properties that make him a dog. Every even number gives you a remainder equal to zero when you divide that number by two. A chemical is water if and only if it consists of H2O. If you dissolve table sugar in it, you make solution. But water is always H2O.

If someone or something loses an essential property, he or it will stop existing. When I die, my body will become a corpse because a body is a part of a living creature when we're not talking about a car's body, say.

Relativist, thank you for the two fine articles by Dr. Craig where his excellent prose puts me to shame. I proofread for Preserving Christian Publications, Inc., and some people think writing is my forte. But my prose needs plenty of work.

No, I'm sure Jesus doesn't feel my tongue when I receive Holy Communion. Catholics say "transubstantiate" because "substance" means essence or nature when St. Thomas uses that word. When we tell you that bread or wine transubstantiate, we mean that the nature of bread or wine gets replaced by another thing's nature.

That's why we distinguish between a substance and its accidents. In that sense of "substance," a substance has properties. But it's not a property. Bread can be square, round, white, brown, soft, crunchy and more. Those properties are essential to bread You wouldn't say, "Bill, that can't be a slice of bread. It's not square."

Catholics say that the color, texture, aroma, weight, and so forth are a host's accidents because an accident is a property that's not a part of a thing's essence or its nature. He even argued that after bread and wine transubstantiate, the accidents survive when they've stopped being properties of the bread or wine that had them.

I didn't say you insulted me. I wrote that your comment was potentially insulting.

Whatever you believe about transubstantiation, St. Ignatius of Antioch clearly thought bread and wine became Our Lord's body and blood. So, if you think Christ uses a metaphor when he says "This is my body," St. Ignatius disagrees with you. I remind you of that because if Christ spoke literally, bread and wine become more than mere symbols. That's why I posted the two-part article about the Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano, Italy.

Thank you for the links to videos I'll watch eagerly. It's always fun to hear Dr. Craig. He's a brilliant scholar. So I'm sorry to say that I still believe that his theistic personalism is clearly false. He believes in the Holy Trinity. But. his belief about what God is like is inconsistent with what ecumenical councils taught before the Protestant Reformation, which I call "a revolt."

Dr. Craig is a monothelite. That means that he believes Christ has only noe will, his divine one. He knows that a council condemned monothelitism. But that doesn't worry him when he takes each doctrine "to the bar of Scripture." It's as though he believes the Bible is a thinker that can say, "Dr. Craig. here's why Diothelites are wrong."

But think about how Sacred Scripture seems to falsify monothelitism when we read passages like Matthew 26:39. In the Revised Standard Version, he says, "
And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

How can Christ have only one will when he distinguishes explicitly between his will and God the Father's will? Our Lord didn't contradict himself. He didn't pray, "Not my will but mine be done."

I'm staying on topic. So I need to reflect on what to tell you about consubstantiation. For now, my point is that Dr. Craig's monothelitism is unbiblical. So is consubstantiation, in my opinion. But I'll need to think harder about it before I'll know what to tell you about it.

Meanwhile, I suspect that Lutherans seem confused when they tell us that bread and wine with Christ's body and his blood. If a Lutheran minister says "This is my body" when consecrates bread during a Lutheran liturgy," other people may need to wonder briefly to tell what "this" stands for. Christ didn't say "This is my body along with the bread." He didn't describe a sandwich where he was "the meat."

Sometimes Christians act like rationalists. That means that they'll believe only what they think they understand. Still, as I discovered this morning, sometimes a Bible passage will seem perfectly clear. But we need much more background information to see what that passage takes for granted.

Protestants will exclaim that during their services, the Holy Ghost moves in their church building. But what does it mean to say that he goes from here to there when he doesn't take up space? How does a nonphysical person relate spatially to anyone or anything?

The logically possible action must be compatible with God's nature. For example, a created human person can kill himself. But God can't commit suicide since he's timeless and eternal.

Did you read the article about the Eucharistic Miracle in Lanciano, Italy before your wrote your potentially insulting note?

1 Corinthians 11:27 says, "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord." How do you profane something that isn't there?

How do you interpret John 6:52-53?

How do I profane something that isn't there?

No, Francis didn't teach infallibility about the death penalty. The Church still supports it despite his politically progressive opinion. That's all it is, his opinion.

Sure, there are many interpretations of various interpretations of various Bible passages and of many doctrines. But in the end, it's for the Magisterium to settle disputes when it must. Protestants have no Magisterium.

Consider the dogma that during Holy Mass, bread and wine become Christ's body and his blood. Protestants usually think Our Lord speaks metaphorically about that change in John 6. They'll tell us that we're idolators who "worship wafers."

That's partly because they believe Luther's novel "sola scriptura" doctrine. It's novel because he invented it. You won't find it in any document from the Early Church. But if you read St. Ignatius of Antioch's 2nd-century letter to the Smyrnaeans where he warned them to avoid anyone who denied that bread changed into Christ's body and blood.

He wrote:

"Chapter 6. Unbelievers in the blood of Christ shall be condemned

Let no man deceive himself. Both the things which are in heaven, and the glorious angels, and rulers, both visible and invisible, if they believe not in the blood of Christ, shall, in consequence, incur condemnation. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Matthew 19:12 Let not [high] place puff any one up: for that which is worth all is faith and love, to which nothing is to be preferred. But consider those who are of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which has come unto us, how opposed they are to the will of God. They have no regard for love; no care for the widow, or the orphan, or the oppressed; of the bond, or of the free; of the hungry, or of the thirsty.

Chapter 7. Let us stand aloof from such heretics

They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again. It is fitting, therefore, that you should keep aloof from such persons, and not to speak of them either in private or in public, but to give heed to the prophets, and above all, to the Gospel, in which the passion [of Christ] has been revealed to us, and the resurrection has been fully proved. But avoid all divisions, as the beginning of evils."

St. Ignatius's letter to the Smyrnaeans

If Dr. Craig rode a Time Machine to St. Ignatius's diocese, people there wouldn't have thought he was a Christian. Instead, they would have believed he was a heretic.

Eucharistic Miracle in Lanciano, Italy

Eucharistic Miracle in Lanciano, Italy

Catholics pay attention to what the Early Church believed. But many Protestants ignore it because they believe sola scriptura.

Years ago, I emailed with a Seventh-Day Adventist about "soul sleep." I quoted St. Justin Marty's 2nd-century First Apology to show that he believed that disembodied souls stayed awake. So, the Adventist replied, "That doesn't matter. We have the Bible."

Justin's First Apology

In my previous reply, I agreed with what you said just now.

Please don't expect me to explain the incarnation when I know too little about Christology. Anyhow, I suggest that when we say that God in the world, we mean that he sustains it and makes events happen in it. If I'm right, we need to use the word "in" in a non-spatial sense.

No, Dr. Ott isn't the Magisterium. But the doctrine about absolute divine simplicity is a dogma. So, each Catholic has a duty to believe it. If he denies it, he's a heretic. Catholics believe that a heretic will go to hell if he's to blame for his heresy when he dies.

Some Protestants, especially Calvinists, believe that after they accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, they'll still go to heaven, no matter what terrible sins they commit after that. That doctrine seems immoral because it promotes license. It also contradicts Mark 16:16, where Our Lord says, "He who believes and is baptized will be saved. But he who does not believe will be damned," See that verse in the KJV. If Calvinists are right, I can stop believing and still reach heaven. But then Our Lord was mistaken, he lied, or at least one falsehood got into Sacred Scripture.

I don't mean to insult anyone. But it would be absurd for me to become a Protestant. Protestants tell you that Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired, error-free, and infallible. Sadly, though, interdenominational disagreements have splintered Protestants into about 40,000 sects. That makes the idea of divine inspiration seem absurd to secularists, How do inerrancy, divine inspiration, and so forth make Christianity believable if no one knows what the Bible means? That's why Protestant private judgment makes divinely revealed truth hard to discover.

I meet Protestants who believe they understand the Bible because they can quote it from memory. But to interpret a passage accurately, you must know what the divinely inspired writer meant by it. When I merely repeat a memorized passage, I'm like a talking parrot who merely repeats what he hears when he has no idea what it means.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hollow." I enjoy reflecting on abstract ideas, the problem of universals, numbers, data structures I computer science, and more. Maybe that's because I prefer theory to practice. But I still strive to interpret the dogma about divine simplicity, too. And it's always a joy to think about Our Blessed incarnated Lord.

For me, it's important to ponder the divine nature, immortal souls and the divine nature to avoid theological mistakes, For example, Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, believe that God the Father has a material body. I've even heard that for them, each saved human person will live on his own plant where everyone else will worship him.

I'm a big fan of the Intelligent Design movement, too, because it show that God is probably real. Science fascinates me, too, especially microbiology. Since I don't know enough math to understand physics, I usually ignore most of it. But I'm eager to learn as much of it as possible.

Maybe you've read parts of St. Alphonse's de Ligouri's collected works. I'm reading then now because I proofread for a publisher that's republishing those works. I'm too emotional too often. So I don't enjoy the effusive parts of that saint's books. He'll write page after page telling God how much he loves him. Then after five or six mushy pages in a row, I long to study the abstractions again. In fact, I love computer science partly because I can reflect serenely on it without feeling too much emotion.

Here you go.
God is timeless without. creation.

I don't know whether you're a a Catholic, Gregory. But by Catholic standards, your comment is heretical. Ludwig Ott writes: "That is simple which is not composed, and on that account also not divisible" (Ott 31).

That's an unusual question. The Big Bang produced space-time. With or without time, God the Father is still the first person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son is still the second one, and the Holy Ghost is still the third one. You use "before" in a timeless sense when you remind me that 2 comes before 3 in the set of positive integers.

In Fundamentals of Catholic Dogama, Dr. Ludwig Ott writes, "Eternity is duration without beginning and without end, without sooner and without later, a 'permanent now'. . . The essence of eternity is the absolute lack of succession" (Ott 36).

That's why medieval philosophers say there's a difference between an eternal thing an everlasting one. We say Gd is eternal partly because he never changes, An everlasting thing lasts forever after it begins to exist. For example, God created your immortal soul when your dad's sperm fertilized your mom's egg. So that soul will aways survive.

Ott, Ludwig. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Ed. James Canon Bastible, D.D. Trans. Patrick Lynch, Ph.D. Charlotte: TAN Books, 1974.

I'm familiar with some things Sungenis said about that. Try my friend Eleanor Stump's book The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers. It's a tiny 103-page book and she's an Aquinas scholar who explains how our divinely simple God can talk with Jonah, say. Eleanore is philosophy professor at St. Louis University.

She also wrote Aquinas, a brilliant book including a brilliant chapter about divine simplicity. I know God can speak. The question is how he does that when he's absolutely simple. Catholics must believe the doctrine about divine simplicity because it's a dogma.

The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers

Wayfarer, thanks for quoting Feser, an excellent Thomist. I spent hours writing a post that earned excellent grades from ProWritingAid. But the document got too long.

Let me sum up my point about a vicious infinite regress. In a YouTube video, Dr. Craig says that without creation, God is timeless and temporal after it. On the other hand, classical theists believe that God is absolutely simple with no parts of any kind. And potentials are metaphysical parts. So, if God is purely actual, there's no potential in him. But Dr. Craig implies that God is metaphysical parts when he, Craig, says that God went from being possibly in time to being actually in it. Any object with potential is a composed object. And each composed object needs cause to put the parts together. So you end up with infinitely many composers but no composed object.

Naturally, I'm taking the PSR for granted. Although Prof. Paul Draper rejects it, he agrees with me that Craig's theistic personalism implies a vicious infinite degree if Thomistic metaphysics is true.

I'm still waiting for Dr. Craig's reply because I emailed him my argument.

Everyone,

I'm sorry about. the delay because my argument is turning into a description. So I'll post it when I can.

Thank you, Arne. I hope that reply will be easy to comprehend. Some people believe writing is my forte. But I'll let you philosophers decide. I've always admired Ayer, Quine and Russell for their prose styles. So those talented writers give me something to aspire to. Quine was a wordsmith or maybe even a word maven. If my prose begins to sound like Heidegger's, please suspect severe brain damage. :wink:

You're the first one to tell me that, Wayfarer. So I don't see how it can be true when St. Thomas believes that God's nonexistence is at least metaphysically impossible. That's why they'll say that God can't fail to exist.To explain why I agree with Aquinas I'll describe what he teaches about both what's possible and about what's actual. That's because he doesn't use "possible" and "actual" in the modal logician's senses.

When you know what it is Thomas possibility and actuality, you'll also see why he thinks there can be only one God and why you need to use "god" in another sense to describe Zeus, Aphrodite, Kali, Thor, and the other pagan deities.

Besides, we need to reflect on the difference between a a primary cause and a secondary one to know what may be wrong with Craig's theistic personalism.

Yes, I'm a heavy one. So here's what I say about that.

Donald Fraser's Amen

Now you know I'm an opera buff.

Arne, I'll try to write simple prose. Then blame me if it confuses you. Either way, I'll answer what you asked about God and heavy lifting when I doubt that it'll help me falsify Craig's kind of theism.

Can an all-powerful God make a rock that he can't lift? No, he can't do that. The question implies that though he can do anything, there's something he. can't do.. It implies a self-contradiction. But that's alright because classical theists believe that God can do any logically possible thing that his nature allows.

Hi, wonderer1,

I've been well, thanks. But we'll see how I'll feel after you guys criticize my argument. :smile:

Thank you, Wayfarer. It's good to meet you. After I've slept long enough, I'll write in detail. Meanwhile, please forgive this night owl for making you and the other experts wait. Darn, there's no yawning emoji. :smile: