Humanity is evil by nature and must atone for its sins. — frank

That’s a funny joke. Right? I mean, not so much “haha!” funny, but sort of “hmmm, I think he is kidding around” funny. It’s a form of mockery, if you will.

Because “evil” and maybe “by nature” and “atone for sins” are figments, right? Or am I the stupid one here?

Or are you the reincarnation of John the Baptist, if I may mix religious imagination (which I can’t see why you would mind that)?

Because humanity is not evil by nature. That’s just stupid. You’d have to explain how that is possible or what that means. Sounds dumb to me though, I’ll be honest.

You may need to see a psychiatrist. Because I never would have predicted such behavior as this post if you are serious. (I’m kidding of course. You’ll be fine.)

Or are you sane, and serious and you have really sinned…? In which case, I’m sorry for your loss, and you may be in big, big trouble…

:up: You can always look on the bright side of death… I hope.

It's a quote from a french movie called Pandemonium.

So I was right. :up:

Maybe. I don't know.

Well since you say things you don’t mean like “humanity is evil by nature” and then don’t explain why anyone needs to know that or how it might relate to you OP, I’ll let you you know, since you don’t know, I am right. You aren’t serious. Not so much “all is lost we are doomed” serious, but sort of “this is interesting” serious…which you are not. I was right.

:up:

I'm sorry, I'm just not going to able to say much of interest on that topic. But what do you think of Augustine's just war?

Interestingly enough, I tried my hand at developing what I called a "meta-religion" called Narrativism a while back. The gist of it was to essentially establish a permission structure between religions by offering the framework of Narrativism as an addition to their beliefs instead of as an alternative. The basic idea was that whether or not you believe other religions, the stories and wisdom that we share culturally can still be enlightening or individually helpful. Narrativism is about finding those stories in other religions/cultures and finding useful ways they can be applied to the self and others. I had some basic tenets and whatnot written up at one point but I'd have to dig them out.

Edit: Found them

The Principles of Narrativism

-We do not concern ourselves with the truth of a person’s religious beliefs.

-We understand that belief is a constructed narrative that we choose to accept as true about reality and our lives.

-We accept that while there is much overlap in belief between and among established religions, each person’s interpretation of reality, religious phenomena and/or dogma is deeply personal and unique to them as an expression of how they experience life.

-We understand that while someone may not be open to specific dogma or belief systems of other religions, certain narratives within most religions overlap in ways that an inspiration from one may help a practitioner of another.

-We will work to help ourselves and, with consent, others construct or modify personal beliefs for the benefit of the believer and others through promoting education, tolerance and open-mindness.

I believe humans, like all animals, are inherently mostly selfish. That is not the same as evil, but it often overlaps. I sometimes take solace in the fact that other animals, if in our position of global dominance, would likely handle it just as if not more poorly. That said, I do sympathize with that viewpoint. It's easy to look at the world and history and see only the tragedies.

I agree.

It comes out of the Doctrina Signorum, the understanding of signs laid out originally by Saint Augustine, which predominates across the Scholastic era and was the main inspiration for C.S. Peirce's semiotics and his essential categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

Basically, any relation that can mean anything at all involves three things:
-An object that is known (the Father)
-The sign vehicle by which it is known (the Word/Logos, Son)
-The interpretant who knows (the Holy Spirit)

And you can trace these to the two creation stories in Genesis, where the first is God's Word speaking things into existence (often taken as their forms, e.g., by Rashi), and a second where God shapes things out of dust and then breaths His Spirit into them. God the Father is, in a sense, always "what is known," since He is the First Principle, whereas all intelligibility comes through the Logos, and the sharing in God's Spirit is necessary for experience.

If this triadic structure is required for any meaning (or in terms of physics, any information) then there is a transcendental argument for the necessity of the triadic relationship for anything to mean anything at all (to anyone), and if "the same is for thinking as for being," this holds for being as well. Now, science often tries to view things a dyads, but it does this with simplifying assumptions and by attempting to abstract the observer out of the picture. There ends up being problems here for all sorts of things (e.g., entropy, information, etc.), but more to the point, true dyadic relationships don't seem to appear anywhere in nature. Everything is mediated. We can think of two billiard balls hitting each other as dyadic, but if we look close enough the description involves all sorts of mediation. When we get to the smallest scales, we get entanglement instead of dyadic interaction, which, according to some physicists, is inherently triadic (Rovelli likes to say "entanglement is a dance for three," the point being that quantum states are always relative to an observer or system).

So, this can be taken as the structure of the Trinity mirrored in creation. Likewise, in De Trinitate, Augustine charts the inherently triadic organization of mind in detail too. That's a hazy outline, but the basic idea. The idea that everything is mediated also goes along with the work of Dionysius the Areopagite. In Eastern terms, we might also speak of the Divine Essence, Its Uncreated Energies, and creation.

Saint Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum is sort of a summa here, explaining how God is known in and through created things, through our inner life (microcosm vs macrocosm), and finally by being directed directly upwards, and he ties this beautifully to the six wings of the Cherubim and the architecture of the Temple. The outer reality directs is inward, and inward we look upwards (the pattern of Saint Augustine).

Basically, any relation that can mean anything at all involves three things:
-An object that is known (the Father)
-The sign vehicle by which it is known (the Word/Logos, Son)
-The interpretant who knows (the Holy Spirit) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now, science often tries to view things a dyads, but it does this with simplifying assumptions and by attempting to abstract the observer out of the picture. There ends up being problems here for all sorts of things (e.g., entropy, information, etc.), but more to the point, true dyadic relationships don't seem to appear anywhere in nature. Everything is mediated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Love it.

I find this actually flows from Heraclitus:
1. Harmony/tension, flows from 2. this, and 3. Its opposite.
(And of course he acknowledged the logos that endeavors to mirror this, or to be held in tension with it.)

And Aristotle:
1. Matter/form, 2. Material informing agent, and 3. unifying final principle (where matter and form can first be intelligible as distinct from one another; the final cause is what allows the agent to see “not this matter, but that matter is necessary, to make this form, not that form,” so it is here that we can elaborate on number 1 being separated into two distinct causes - the first semiotic product of the ontologically real.)
Or for Aristotle:
1. A substance, is 2. an essence, 3. that comes to be.

Trinity is fabric. The triad is the One. (Can’t really be said logically, but is necessary ontologically before one might say anything at all.)

[

The analogical reasoning you employ - arguing that because two things are similar in some respects, they're likely similar in others - is not up to the task of providing a proof

I am not arguing that two things similar in one respect are similar in others: that’s not analogical either. An analogy is a similarity between things in some regard—even if they are dissimilar in every other regard.

You'll have heard the standard existential arguments for the existence of God at the response that existence is not a predicate?

Yes I have and I think this could be a valid objection to Thomistic metaphysics if one accepts that existence is not a predicate whatsoever. I think being is a predicate insofar as an apple has redness as property just like it has being as a property. Some properties presuppose others (e.g., the property of blackness of the chair is necessary for its property of heating up fast due to hyper-absorption of light from the sun). Beingness is just the first property presupposed and necessarily preliminarily for all other properties of a given object.

The issue with the kind of S5 modal logic argument for God’s existence (a priori) is that possibility is thought of in terms of possible worlds: that’s the real issue.

For this ontological arguments from great-making properties like this one:

For example, consider
• God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
• Therefore, He must exist.
• Therefore, He must exist necessarily.
• Therefore, He must be pure act, or simple.
At each step, a move is made that runs contrary to the inexpressibility of existence conditions. It's invalid.

I would say an Anselm-style argument is invalid not because existence is an invalid predicate but because it also hinges on the S5 axiom in modal logic. I was discussing this with someone a while ago and it was an interesting conversation; but in the end it also does the same trick that the standard argument from modal logic does but instead with greatness. It considers the possibility of greatness an entailment of the necessity of greatness: if something is possibly great, then it is great—and this argument only holds if we think that a great being in one possible world must then exist in all possible worlds. This isn’t how they usually argue it, but I think that’s the real issue: they don’t believe it is possible to speak of a hypothetically maximally great being.
I cannot stress enough that my arguments start a posteriori: not a priori.

Put simply, if your argument concludes “and therefore this thing exists,” but the existence of the referent is not already presupposed, then your inference is invalid.

How am I doing that in my argument though? I didn’t make an argument like Anselm’s.

Folk try to get around this by making use of an explicit first order predication, usually written as "∃!"

I’ve never heard of that: that’s interesting. I don’t think we have to presuppose that a thing we are quantifying over is real in order predicate properties to it: that would entail we can’t think hypothetically or in terms of possibility.

The second issue is not unrelate. Modal collapse will occur when necessity and possibility are rendered the same

Yeah, good objection: let’s break this down. As you know, we have to be careful to note when we are predicating, equating, and positing existential quantification.

Let’s break down your version of the argument:

☐(Father = god)
☐(Son = god)
And so
☐(Father = Son)

But the assertion is, instead,
~☐(Father = Son)

First off, why did you use modality though? I was expecting the transitivity version of this (:

This falls prey to assuming we are equating when we say things like “The Father is God”; but that’s not the standard view (nor mine).

The statement “The Father is God” != “Father = God” because the former is predication and the latter is equivalency. This is the properly translated parody:

☐(Father = God as the knower)
☐(Son = God as the known)

And so
☐(Father != Son)

When we say “The Father is God”, we are saying “The Father has the nature of God”; and when we say “The Father and the Son are both God and not separate Gods”, we are saying “The Father and the Son have the same exact nature of God”.

:up:

At the end of the day, I was just trying to convey to @Banno that I was agreeing with them in that God's Justice is about restoring the property ordering of things but that this sometimes legitimately includes punishment.

I'm not that familiar with it, but it seems pretty good. The only quibble I might have with it is the idea that it has to be sanctioned by a government. That would seem to imply that rebellions can never be just.

:up:

I guess the bigger question is, is Christianity pacifistic? Or are you not interested in Christian doctrine?

I don't think it is pacifistic. When Jesus is talking about loving your enemies, he is not intending that you should not stop them from doing evil. He is, rather, noting that you should stop them AND still will the good for them even though they don't deserve it. It is the difference between stopping an active shooter and then beating them viciously; and stopping the active shooter and then trying to rehabilitate them with love.

The point concerning analogically reasoning is that it is invalid - one is not obligated to accept the conclusion of an analogical argument, in the way presumed in a deductive argument.

S1 through S5 are syntactic systems, not interpretations. S5 is the semantics that allows nesting of modal operators. The modal collapse that ensues from Anselm is a result of the syntax, not the interpretation. It's got nothing to do with possible worlds.

Basically, the Anselm's proof wants to move from god's being possible to god being necessary. But any system in which ◇□p →□p is true collapses possibility into necessity - everything would be necessary.

I was expecting the transitivity version of this — Bob Ross

That is transitivity. Just drop the modal operator if that helps you.

The overarching point remains - you have your conclusion and are looking for a logic that supports it. To that end you might indeed be better served by the pseudo-logic of Peirce's semiotics. However Peirce's semiotics (sign-object-interpretant) was developed in a completely different intellectual context from Trinitarian theology. Retrofitting it to "explain" the Trinity is exactly the kind of post-hoc rationalisation I've been criticising. Peirce's triadic structure is about how signs function in communication and cognition, not about the metaphysical structure of divine being - finding three-ness in both doesn't establish any meaningful connection. Even if you accept the semiotic framework, there's no logical bridge from "signs work triadically" to "God exists as three persons in one substance." It's the same invalid leap I been pointing out in your modal arguments. This kind of move - taking a fashionable 19th/20th century theoretical framework and using it to rehabilitate ancient doctrines - has become common in certain theological circles, but it's more about appearing sophisticated than actual logical rigour.

But of course, that's what I would say. So go and do as you will.

is the difference between stopping an active shooter and then beating them viciously; and stopping the active shooter and then trying to rehabilitate them with love. — Bob Ross

What about respecting their decision as a free agent and not trying to impose upon their will by modifying it through rehabilitation, but instead giving them their just dessert? One ought be rewarded for bad behavior and good.

As C.S. Lewis says, "To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ought to have known better, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image."

I don't see how my argument is pseudo-logic because it uses analogical reasoning. Can you provide any part of my argument that cannot be translated formally into classical logic?

With respect to S5, possibility collapses into necessity because they are using the possible world theory. If something is possible IFF it exists in at least one possible world and necessity is to exist in all possible worlds, then it logically follows that a possibly necessary being must exist.

However Peirce's semiotics (sign-object-interpretant) was developed in a completely different intellectual context from Trinitarian theology.

This is factually incorrect. Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs is based explicitly on his study of scholastic theories of signs that were developed originally by Saint Augustine. The basic triadic structure is not new to Peirce, but is first put forth in De Dialectica, one of Augustine's early works. He explicitly relates it to the Trinity in later works, e.g. De Doctrina and De Trinitate. Peirce considered himself a "Scholastic-realist," although how well that term applies to his later thought is a topic of debate.

I don't see how that works, though. Augustine explains in De Trinitate, that the sum of the Son and the Father is not greater than the Holy Spirit. In other words, it's one thing with three faces. In semiotics, the sign, object, and interpretant are clearly distinct things. We aren't supposed to imagine them as one. So it's not really the same thing, is it?

I don't see how my argument is pseudo-logic because it uses analogical reasoning. — Bob Ross

I didn't say your argument was pseudo-logic. I said Peirce's was a pseudo-logic. But analogically reasoning cannot be put into deductive form without ceasing to be analogical.

With respect to S5, possibility collapses into necessity because they are using the possible world theory. — Bob Ross

This is not so. I explained why. Any system in which ◇□p →□ will no longer be able to differentiate between possibility and necessity. Collapse occurs at the syntactic level, not at the semantic level of possible worlds.

If something is possible IFF it exists in at least one possible world and necessity is to exist in all possible worlds, then it logically follows that a possibly necessary being must exist. — Bob Ross

Only if you presume S5. Which is of course to beg the question. And there's no need for the possible world interpretation, since you conclusion is presumed.

So what. Even if you are correct, it would not help. Augustine's Trinity involves a metaphysically mysterious unity-in-distinction that explicitly defies normal logical categories. Peirce's semiotics involves functionally distinct elements in a process. These are categorically different kinds of "three-ness." nails the core issue.

Bob Ross is still trying to deduce the Trinity through invalid modal reasoning that leads to modal collapse. Tim's historical scholarship might be interesting for intellectual history, but it's irrelevant to the logical critique provided.

We'd have to clarify that. "One thing with three faces" (or masks) is a common formulation of the modalist heresy. Granted that the distinction from one ousia three hypostases is subtle. It might not really be that relevant here though because the idea isn't that the sign relation, nor any of the other triads, are perfect models of the Trinity. In the case of being/knowing/willing it is also the case that each are distinct (and indeed, the persons of the Trinity are distinct, the Father is not the Son; denying this leads to the patripassianism hersey.)




Augustine is more interested in different triads in his later work, such as the being/knowing/willing of the Confessions, or lover/beloved/love (he has many). Saint Bonaventure also looks at a plurality of triads—being and mind are refracted through analogy like a kaleidoscope, in many different ways.

Anyhow, as John Deely never gets tried of repeating, the sign relation is "irreducibly triadic." It is defined relationally, just as the Trinity is. A sign isn't an assemblage of parts, since each component only is what it is in virtue of its relation to the whole. The sign and the Trinity aren't perfect images of each other, the idea is rather that all of creation reflects the Creator, and thus the triadic similarity shows up even in the deepest structures, yet no finite relations can capture the Trinity.

It might not really be that relevant here though because the idea isn't that the sign relation, nor any of the other triads, are perfect models of the Trinity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They aren't models of the Trinity period. It may be that Pierce read Augustine, but the notion that his philosophy should be understood in the context of Christian theology is incorrect.

may be that Pierce read Augustine, but the notion that his philosophy should be understood in the context of Christian theology is incorrect.

To be clear, I haven't suggested anything of the sort. What I said is that there is a long history of theologians looking at the cosmos as a revelation of the divine nature (the "book of nature;" Romans 1:20) and that this can be extended to Pierce's discovery of the triadic nature of relations. If a triadic structure is taken to be essential for a meaningful cosmos, this can be used for a transcendental argument vis-á-vis the threeness of God.

. If a triadic structure is taken to be essential for a meaningful cosmos, this can be used for a transcendental argument vis-á-vis the threeness of God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe. Likewise, the four gospels correspond to the four elements. Matthew is earth, Mark is fire, Luke is air, and John is water. This, multiplied by the three states: mutable, fixed, and cardinal, equals the number of apostles, the number of the tribes of Israel, and of course, months of the year. There are numbers all over the place, such as the birthmark on my scalp: 666. :grin:

There are numbers all over the place — frank

Like in order to have a single open and honest discussion, we have to first have half of such a discussion, and before that, half of that half…until we realize this goes on infinitely and a single open and honest discussion was impossible from the start. Too many numbers…

Anyhow, as John Deely never gets tried of repeating, the sign relation is "irreducibly triadic." It is defined relationally, just as the Trinity is. A sign isn't an assemblage of parts, since each component only is what it is in virtue of its relation to the whole. The sign and the Trinity aren't perfect images of each other, the idea is rather that all of creation reflects the Creator, and thus the triadic similarity shows up even in the deepest structures, yet no finite relations can capture the Trinity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: :fire: