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.

Vicarious atonment is an immoral doctrine and is central to Christianity. No one can do your repentence for you. — Gregory

The real problem for all Christianities is the whole eternal damnation business -- "If you don't get it right this time around and don't pick the right Christian denomination, you'll burn forever."

It's not clear why the Supreme Being would bring about such a creation a significant portion of which will suffer forever, while he watches on, apparently happily, as they failed to pick the right religion.

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.

If that is for me, I don't see an answer to my question.

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.

You have to interpret scripture in order to establish the catholic authority. Is that not private interpretation. As for Vatican I and simplicity, why what that means philosophically be understood as Aquinas would have? It's open to many interpretations. There is hardly anything if not nothing in Catholic dogma that doesnt have many interpretations. Thomist interpretation has been broken for almost a hundred years.

Nevertheless, couldn't one maintain that God is "in" the world in a non-spatial sense in addition to having a causal or sustenance role? I do not see how that would be problematic or even controversial for most theists.

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

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

So does your tongue touch Jesus when you eat him? Where? Like is your tongue glidding over his chin or ass? Is it really in the realm of possibility that your house is really a lady bug? Your church teaches nonsense and nonsense such that it's hard to know what it's even teaching anymore. Is pope Francis's teaching on capital punishment infallible? Nobody knows. Are the briefs and bulls from the middle ages ex cathedra or ordinary magisterium? Nobody knows. The system completely breaks down upon examination.

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.

You can profane a sacramental, right? And i didnt insult you. I respect you but not your religion. Seriously, does Jesus feel your tongue when you chew him? This is why Aquinas is a waste of time! He defends nonsense with alleged philosophy. He's not a philosopher. He was a big fat doodo bird. As for the "miracle", do you have any idea how rich your church is and how much they can invest in convincing people to sit in a pew with Jesus in their stomach because they HAVE to? Dont be so guillable. Finally, Frances says IN the Catechism that now the Church "TEACHES, in light of the GOSPEL, that the death penalty is an ATTACK on the DIGNITY of the human person...ect". The ect part is the pastoral part. What i quoted is the doctrinal part. Yet this contradicts the Catechism of Trent and many other Popes. So case closed, the Church is wrong and you were fooled by a piece of decaying flesh

Craig's view is incoherent except perhaps if God enters time by accident. But if God willngly enters time, He is the necessary and sufficient condition of time, so time has to be co-eternal with Him, IOW, He does not enter time.
the same is in fact true, for the Thomist God because He is said to be completely immutable hence, He is the sufficient conditiion of everything apart for Him.On Thomism, the universe has to be beginningless.

Craig's view is incoherent... — Walter

You weren't expecting me to argue against that, were you? :wink:

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. — BillMcEnaney

Craig agrees that omnipotence entails the ability to do anything that is logically possible. It is not a limitation to be unable to do the logically impossible.

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. — BillMcEnaney

Which implies that some people in the early 2nd century believed in transubstantiation.

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

They believe scripture is the inspired word of God. The writing of the Apostolic fathers is not scripture.

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.

God's nature establishes some truths that can't be contradicted. It still boils down to the logically possible.

BTW, I found a transcript wherein Craig discusses Ignatius, transubstantiation, and the Lutheran alternative of co-substantuation:


https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-1/s1-the-doctrine-of-the-church/the-doctrine-of-the-church-part-7

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-1/s1-the-doctrine-of-the-church/the-doctrine-of-the-church-part-8

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?

No, but iI think it shows why both theidtic personalism and Thomism are dead ends.

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.

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.

Maybe Ignatius believed in Thomism but translations of religious texts are open to innumerable variation. And again, is it possible that God put the essense of a lady bug in your phone so that it's not at all what it looks like. That would be called an illusion. Thomist try to hairsplit between illusion (the word Descartes used for the Eucharest) and normal reality. But God works in mysterious ways. Is the sun a hamburger?

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.

Why cant God take the substance out of the sun and replace it with whatever pleases him?

If Jesus's "body blood soul and divinity" are acting as the substance of the matterial piece of bread, then the body and blood are accidents acting as substance. How does that make sense?

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.

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.

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

Take the smallest piece of bread possible. Divide it any further and it's no longer bread. Now where is Jesus in there? His body and blood are spatial so why cant we say "maybe his arm is here, ect." It becomes ridiculous upon examination. Why would you want to eat someone anyway? You're trying to defend the slavery you put yourself into. Does the bread have no substance or is Jesus the substance? Now you can see why Thomism is joke. The distinctions become too fine to make sense! Descartes position made more sense but he was condemned. Earlier in his life he rejected Thomism because scholasticism in general contained far too many subtleties answerable in many ways. He uponed to door in Europe for true philosophy. Thomism is dead to those who are free

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?