I don't want to hear myself talk, partly because I doubt I've found much wisdom. Although I love philosophy, I hate uncertainty. In his Skeptical Essays, Benson Mates seems to think truth is elusive enough that we usually. must settle for falsifying philosophical theories instead of seeing which ones are true.

I understand, but what about Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms from his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Kuhn talks about normal science, a time when scientists form plausible hypotheses, confirm them, and when their work goes smoothly. Then, a crisis happens. The current paradigm becomes useless.

Each paradigm lands in what you might call a metaphorical vault that no one can open. Nobody can understand its jargon anymore. Its theories don't work. . . However, Kuhn still uses outdated jargon to describe supposedly unintelligible models. His postmodern antirealist theory sounds like a kind of relativism you described.

Scientist X may say that atoms exist. Scientist Y might assure you that they don't exist. X believes that atoms exist, logically consistent with Y believing atoms don't exist. But ignore the parts about X and Y to get contradictories. When you tell me that some statement is true in some context, it may mean it's only a supposition. However, that supposition may be false and inconsistent with other context statements. When you suppose the first premise in a reductio ad absurdum argument, you do that to derive a contradiction from it.

Wherever it comes from, it's teleological.

Thank you for correcting my mistake.

So, although the conceptual relations don't cause natural events, they describe them? I won't say that they entail them since you can break a law of nature. For example, the law of gravity explains why a ball will fall when I drop it, but it'll stop falling when you catch it.

"Narcissism" and "arrogance" were probably poorly chosen words. So, I can see why they confused you, and I should think more carefully. But there's still a significant problem with relativism about truth. If relativists believe it's always true everywhere, their belief is self-contradictory. They believe in absolute relativism.

My perspective has changed significantly because I suffer from two painful mental illnesses: severe clinical depression and emotional deprivation disorder. My field, computer science, made everything seem black and white because conclusive answers were easy to. find. I still believe true statements must match reality. Otherwise, they're false.

I reject moral relativism and relativism about truth. But my emotional pain makes me long to think like a cultural anthropologist who must learn how to study a society from the native's perspective and empathize with him.

You know what Christian fundamentalists usually do. They study the Bible from a 21st-century perspective and read contemporary ideas into it. They misinterpret Sacred Scripture because they ignore ancient historical and cultural context. Many atheists do that, too, when they caricature theism. They may not know they're doing that. But perceptive theists notice the distortion and oversimplification. I don't see things your way when I'm biased against it.

Some unsophisticated people believe relativists are kind and tolerant. They forget that truth is hard to find. Relativism about truth makes people like arrogant narcissists who are too proud to learn from others. They might say, "I'm a scientist. You're a gullible moron because you believe in the invisible sky daddy. Learn science and reject religious superstition."

Hear Dawkin's dismissive "What if you're wrong?" speech and hear his fans cheer mindlessly when he humiliates a since questioner by committing an obvious example of the genetic fallacy. How can he expect theists to listen carefully to him when he dimisses what they believe and ignores how his arrogance might make them feel. He's an excellent scientist and a gifted writer. Unfortunately, I loathe how he treated his questioner in this video.

What if you're wrong?

I could reply with another example of the same fallacy by saying something like this. Prof. Dawkins, you believe in contemporary Western science because you grew up in the West. In Ancient Greece, you would have believed in Ancient Greek science and atomism. You would have believed in Ancient Chinese science during the Ming Dynasty. What if you're you're wrong about Ancient Greek science? What if your wrong about contempory Western science?"

Dawkins's audience was like a screaming crowd a a Justin Bieber concert because they didn't reflect on what they heard. Dawkin's is no elderly substitute for a teen heartthrob.

Some say laws of nature describe regularities, but descriptions rarely cause what they describe. Instead, we describe events because we discover them. The events predate the descriptions.

My question Is metaphysical, not linguistic. I want to know what a law of nature consists of. A regularity needs a cause, so I wonder whether that cause is a law of nature. Speed limit signs stand on roads because laws determine speed limits. Driver behavior isn't a law. A law governs it. Scientists are rarely metaphysicians. No, many of them reject metaphysics.

Thank you. I wish I wrote much better than I do, partly because I proofread scholarly Catholic books for Preserving Christian Publicans, Inc.

When I attended graduate school at the State University of New York at Albany, my philosophy professors were physicalists. They probably still are. But physicalism is probably self-defeating, like something Freud believed. For him, subconscious brain events caused each belief.. Sadly, that falsifies his opinion because it implies that those subconscious processes also caused it. If thoughts consist of deterministic brain events, how can I know I'm not like Hilary Putnam's imaginary brain in a vat while a mad scientist uses electrodes to make me hallucinate? Am I trapped in Star Trek's holo-deck, where I've lived from birth? The computer could simulate a door to convince me I could leave that machine. If physicalism and determinism are true, rational thought seems impossible.

My undergraduate advisor was an atheist who taught me Medieval Philosophy, so he was open to religious thought. But some other scholars were hostile to it. That was all right because I needed them to challenge my beliefs. I couldn't argue for them in an echo chamber.

I don't want to debate anything, but here's Google's definition of a category mistake. It's "the error of assigning to something a quality or action that can properly be assigned to things only of another category, for example, treating abstract concepts as though they had a physical location." If you call God "God" and Zeus a "god," you need to equivocate on that word.

Maybe I sound like Hart, but I've never read his books. I'm a Thomist and an Aristotelian, and Hart's isn't either.

I hope you know much more philosophy than Dawkins does. Sadly, it would embarrass me if I thought up his atheistic argument from complexity. He devoted about five pages to Aquinas's Five Ways in The God Delusion when he should have known that St. Thomas thought God had no parts. Thomas believed that anything with parts needed a cause to combine them. He believed God would prevent a vicious infinite regress of causes. For him, God explains why there's natural causality.

Oops, Grammarly must have replaced "contents" with "costs."

I specialized in logic while earning my philosophy degree, so I reflect on inference rules, the nature of induction, and more. That's partly why I mentioned induction. When using classical Aristotelian logic, you think about argument patterns like modus ponens, modus ponens, disjunctive syllogism, constructive dilemmas, and more. But those inference rules rarely apply to inductive arguments.

The significant difference between deductive and inductive arguments is that deductive ones can be conclusive, and inductive ones are always inconclusive when they confirm their conclusions. There's only one way to make an inductive argument conclusive: You must find a counterexample to its conclusion. So, scientists may know much less than they think they do.

I mentioned Berkeley's theory because most natural scientists are physicalists. Physicalists believe there's no God and nothing like God. For them, there's only the natural world and its costs. But physicalism may still be false, even if atheism is true. Physicalism is false if there's even one nonphysical object, a number, for example. If Berekeky's theory is true, everyone may still believe in physicalism, even if it's false. Scientific absolute certainty is too rare for me to believe that natural science is the best source of knowledge. No, scientism is self-refuting. It says science is our only source of knowledge. But since that's a belief about the nature of knowledge, it's not a scientific statement.

You said "gods" instead of "God." What's wrong with that? You might make a category midtake. You might lump God together with Zeus, Thor, Hera, Kali, and others when those pagan deities aren't deities in the biblical sense. If they exist, they're created, which means God makes them exist. God explains why there's anything at all. Zeus doesn't do that.

If you want scientific evidence for classical theism, read about combinatorics. It'll show you that natural selection would need to try too many possibilities to produce an animal body plan. Darwin's theory is false. But doesn't mean that I'm a young-earth creationist. You may know that many biologists believe it's time to replace Darwin's theory with one with more explanatory power. If there is one, that's fine with me. Suppose classical theism is true. Then, if atheism were true, there would be nothing at all. If the classical theist's God exists and if Darwin is right, evolution presupposes theism because God must sustain each object and every natural event.

So, I allude to a law of logic when I say a baseball usually falls when I drop it? "Usually" suggests induction.

I hope I won't reason circularly when I say God causes people, places, and things by giving them existence, even if they've always existed. If I'm correct, he must cause primary and secondary causality in the world. He's the cause of everyone else, and everything else depends on him for existence and causal power. Since I'm a Catholic Thomist, I've studied Thomas's arguments for God's existence, but I don't understand causation.

Fr. Norris Clark wrote a book arguing for a Thomistic metaphysics. He says we know something exists when we perceive it with our senses. Although I agree with him, a significant problem perplexes me. Dr. William Lane Craig thinks we're justified in believing there's an external world if we don't find a defeater for that belief. But if Berkeley is right, nobody can do that, since objects will still seem to be in an external world when there is none. That suggests that a sound deductive argument would be the only way to prove him wrong.

Thank you. I equivocated by mistake. I want to consider logical laws, but it's hard for me to know why we say "laws of nature" if those laws are non-causal, uncaused, or both. I believe David Lewis thought causality was counterfactual dependence. If he's right, I wonder whether the dependence has a cause.

Maybe we need ro know what a law of nature is in itself to find out why those laws exist. One of my philosophy professors didn't understand the question when I asked whether laws ofnature were regularities or their causes. I wondered about that because civil laws affect what we do. For example, you may need to speed up or slow down when you read a speed limit sign.

Feudalism was imperfect, and I reject Hitler's brand of it. Still, I admire Christendom in 13th-century Europe. So, please read The Thirteenth: Greatest of Centuries if you wonder why. Since when does any brand of liberalism promote subsidiarity, solidarity, and close relationships between relatives, friends, and neighbors? After my political science professor friend knew how much I admired Medieval Christendom, he said people there enjoyed too little liberty. But they wouldn't have wanted it in John Stewart Mill's sense. Neither would Confucius and his disciples.

I probably sound utopian, though I reject utopianism, egalitarianism, postmodernism, and every kind of liberalism. Though my field is computer science, I am thoroughly anti-modern. Since I'm a North American High Tory, too, I won't join any American political party.

Maybe feudalism has some good points. For example, a feudal lord lived with people in a community and could explain their needs and concerns to the king. The lord wasn't some politician who held an occasional town meeting to listen to constituents. He knew them because his mom was in their neighborhood. So, he wasn't a power-hungry politician.

I'm not sure what the Wikipedia article means by "patriarchy." However, a sovereign should be an apolitical, nonpartisan father or mother to his or her subjects. If I'm right, I have no problem with patriarchy and matriarchy of that kind.

Can you name an American politician who ran for the Presidency because he felt obligated to promote and preserve the common good? I don't know of one. Like Sir Charles Coulombe, I want a Godly sovereign who strives to rule well partly because he knows God will judge him for how he ruled.

Pope St. Pius X, my favorite pope, wrote: "In addressing you for the first time from the Chair of the supreme apostolate to which We have, by the inscrutable disposition of God, been elevated, it is not necessary to remind you with what tears and warm instance We exerted Ourselves to ward off this formidable burden of the Pontificate. Unequal in merit though We be with St. Anselm, it seems to us that We may with truth make Our own the words in which he lamented when he was constrained against his will and in spite of his struggles to receive the honor of the episcopate. For to show with what dispositions of mind and will We subjected Ourselves to the most serious charge of feeding the flock of Christ, We can well adduce those same proofs of grief which he invokes in his own behalf. "My tears are witnesses," he wrote, "and the sounds and moanings issuing from the anguish of my heart, such as I never remember before to have come from me for any sorrow, before that day on which there seemed to fall upon me that great misfortune of the archbishop of Canterbury. And those who fixed their gaze on my face that day could not fail to see it . . . I, in color more like a dead than a living man, was pale for amazement and alarm. Hitherto I have resisted as far as I could, speaking the truth, my election or rather the violence done me. But now I am constrained to confess, whether I will or no, that the judgments of God oppose greater and greater resistance to my efforts, so that I see no way of escaping them. Wherefore vanquished as I am by the violence not so much of men as of God, against which there is no providing, I realize that nothing is left for me, after having prayed as much as I could and striven that this chalice should if possible pass from me without my drinking it, but to set aside my feeling and my will and resign myself entirely to the design and the will of God."

"https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_04101903_e-supremi.html

What about liberty? Moral liberty is the ability to do what you should do. It's not a legal right to do anything I want to do that won't harm other people.

Tom, I believe in North American High Toryism, a Canadian. North American High Tories are monarchists who treasure history, tradition, wisdom from the past, and morality. They also believe a government should preserve and protect the common good. Those people want close relationships between families, friends, and neighbors. So, they disagree with extreme individualism in America. Colleges and universities should transmit a cultural inheritance, not mere job-related skills.

Some North American High Tories support socialism, but I reject it. I want to live in a highly decentralized, stratified kingdom where the sovereign rules for life. Thirteenth-century monarchs worked directly with their courts.

They also applied the principle of subsidiarity, which states that problems should be solved as locally as possible. Say you need help with something. Ask a family member for help. If he can't give it, go to a friend, a neighbor, a charity, and so on until your problem gets solved. It's immoral for a government to do what people ought to do instead. Now you know why I disagree with American leftists who want socialism, socialized medicine, and public schools. People like that hope the government will take care of everyone.

American conservatives, i.e., classical liberals, love the U.S. Constitution. They love small government, free market capitalism, liberal democratic elections, and more. They also talk endlessly about that constitution.

I descended from Irish people and was born in the United States. I haven't emigrated to or from any country.

Consider "African Americans." That phrase usually denotes dark-skinned Americans of African descent, but some naturalized Americans are South African whites. That makes "African American" vague and ambiguous. Why not call dark-skinned Africans "Afro-Americans" to distinguish them from caucasian African Americans?

North American High Toryism is Canadian conservatism. You should read the Manifesto in Prof. Ron Dart's book The North American High Tory Tradition to learn more about it. North American High Tories believe morality matters more than economics does. They think a country should adopt an official religion, too. They also support a strong, possibly big government when it would promote and sustain the common good. Some North American High Tories believe in socialism, too, but I reject it and communism. Those Tories treasure history, tradition, the traditional family, customs, and other such things.

From what I can tell, American conservatism is Locke's classical liberalism. American conservatives prefer small government, capitalism, and the Republican, constitutional kind of government. They also believe firmly in the U.S. Constitution and religious liberty.

An article from the Mises Institute

I asked about causality because I doubt that there are brute facts. A brute fact is a state of affairs that can't be explained, even in principle. So, there would be no way to identify a brute fact since the ability to identify one would presuppose an explanation that by definition, no brute fact can have.

Would someone please tell me why there's causality when naturalism presupposes that causality exists? If I argue scientifically for something that science presupposes, my argument will be circular.

Luther and the other Protestant revolutionaries fought against some awful abuses, simony, for example. In fact, Luther didn't expect to cause the splintering. He even said something like, "I wanted to depose a pope but created 100 popes." During a lecture I attended, a seminary professor, Fr. Peter Strvinskas, told us that Luther paid a daily Rosary until he died. I feel empathy for him, too, because he was mentally ill.

I don't expect to convince anyone become Catholic because anything I write. Naturally, the do get something from what they believe. I do, too. That's why I should thank them when they prove me wrong.

I'm not theologian. I'm a computer science tutor with a philosophy degree. That's why I need you folks to look into what your hear from me. If I misinterpret Thomas or Catholicism, I want someone or something to correct me.

The older I grow, the more I long to know everlasting truths because knowledge is good in itself. I want to be an amateur scholar who writes about computer science, philosophy, theology, opera, and high culture. That's why I couldn't care less about most popular culture. Since have cerebral palsy, I want my intellect to make up for what my body can't do. Who knows how long that'll take.

The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria

Maybe insomnia is affecting me brain since didn't understand the joke.

Year ago, after I vowed to be a lifelong virgin, I boarded a bus with another member of the gym I belonged to in 2007. She said, "There's a guy in there. You know him very well. I've had my eye on him for months." Seeing that I didn't know who she meant, she asked whether I needed to get hit in the head with a brick.

We went to dinner at a restaurant where a morbidly obese man danced to Who Let the Dogs Out. That wasn't fun, especially when I knew that the woman had almost nothing in common with me. She frightened me by inviting me to a Christmas party. So I skipped it. Then the first woman I asked for a date preferred women.

You might say that my romantic life was a joke.

Folks, please let me tell you a true story because it relates to sola scriptura helps explain why Protestants often disagree with Catholics.

Years ago, I stumbled on a website where an acquaintance wrote about Genesis 1-3. After a serious motorcycle-accident, he convinced himself that only he interpreted Genesis accurately. He said the strangest things, too. For example, he told me that God gave Adam and Eve material bodies to punish the because they fell from grace "in the spiritual realm." That sounds Gnostic, eh? He even believed that "In the beginning" was a title for Christ rather than a phrase describing a time when something happened.

The man revised his will to ensure that after his death, other people would spread his theological theory. A Protestant pastor asked my acquaintance to publish that theory to help him, the pastor, teach it to his congregation. Is it any wonder that Protestant services and Protestant youth group meetings convinced me to stay in the Catholic Church?

By the way, acquaintance's name is "Kenneth G. Redden" if you want to Google for his writings. I can't find them online anymore.

Wow, thank you for clarifying "being qua being."

Relativist, maybe I believe some things uncritically. But I believe what the Catholic Church teaches, partly because I study documents from the Early Church. If you read them, I think you'll know that they confirm Catholicism instead of Protestantism.

Thanks to sola scriptura, Protestants have splintered into about 47,000 sects. So it seems anyone can invent a new Christian religion and interpret the Last Supper metaphorically. Episcopalians don't believe bread and wine transubstantiate. Some Protestants believe Catholics are idolators who worship bread. If those Protestants rode a Time Machine to the second century to visit St. Ignatius of Antioch's diocese, the Catholics there would have avoided them because they didn't believe in transubstantiation.

St. Ignatius writes:

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 of Antioch's letter to the Smyrnaeans


From what I can tell, an essence is always a nonphysical property. Aristotle defines man as rational animal because all human beings have rational animality in common. Your five senses help you perceive another person. But you can't see, touch, taste, hear, or smell rational animality.

In 431, the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorianism. Then, in 451, the Council of Chalcedon taught that: "So, following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed it down to us."

The Council of Chalcedon

What does Dr. Craig think a nature is in itself? I've never heard him define it. Whatever he believes a nature consists of, you've just supported my belief that his theology is heretical by quoting a document where he says he believes that God has three minds. one for each divine person. His belief is understandable because he rejects absolute divine simplicity. But his point about three minds might suggest polytheism.

In my opinion, if Dr. Craig absolute divine simplicity, he would know why Catholics disagree with his interpretation of Matthew 26:39. Catholics believe that since God is absolutely simple, each divine person has the same divine will and the same divine intellect.

Relativist, the Catholic Church doesn't require Catholics to be Thomists. So, if a Catholic disagrees with St. Thomas on some point, maybe that means that Thomas is mistaken on it. About 62 opes have endorsed his philosophy and his theology, knowing that infallibility didn't protect what he wrote. Many believe. that he's the greatest theologian the Catholic Church has ever produced. I agree. Still, I'm free to disagree with him on subjects where the Church lets me do that.

On the other hand, Catholics must believe that the essences of bread and wine became the essences of his body and blood. If they deny that belief, they become heretics. If they're impenitent for that heresy, they're no longer Catholics, even when they still believe they are. That means that they must revert to Catholicism if they still want to practice Catholicism.

Pope St. Pius X writes: "45. In the first place, with regard to studies, We will and ordain that scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences. It goes without saying that if anything is met with among the scholastic doctors which may be regarded as an excess of subtlety, or which is altogether destitute of probability, We have no desire whatever to propose it for the imitation of present generations (Leo XIII. Enc. Aeterni Patris). And let it be clearly understood above all things that the scholastic philosophy We prescribe is that which the Angelic Doctor has bequeathed to us, and We, therefore, declare that all the ordinances of Our Predecessor on this subject continue fully in force, and, as far as may be necessary, We do decree anew, and confirm, and ordain that they be by all strictly observed. In seminaries where they may have been neglected let the Bishops impose them and require their observance, and let this apply also to the Superiors of religious institutions. Further let Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment."

Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord's Flock)

The Eastern Orthodox Christians believe that bread and wine transubstantiate. But they don't describe the change in an Aristotelian-Thomistic way. Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox can agree that bread and wine change, even when the disagree on the metaphysics behind the dogma.

Anyhow, I believe I've shown that Dr. Craig's theology is logically inconsistent with the Bible. So maybe you didn't find enough time to read the post where I argue that his theology is inconsistent. My point about the vicious infinite regress presupposes that Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and the PSR are true. So, if someone falsifies them, that will show that I argued unsoundly.

Then again, my point inconsistency doesn't depend on Aristotlelian-Thomistic metaphysics. It relies instead on two things. First, Dr. Craig believes Monothelitism, though the Third Council of Constantinople condemned it in the seventh century. Second, my argument relies on Matthew 26:39.

In Matthew 26:39 in the RSV, Our Lord prays, "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.”

Monothelites believe that Christ's only will his the divine will, and the will his the faculty a person chooses with. Can God the Father have a human. will when he hasn't adopted a human nature? No, he can't. That means that the divine will God the Father uses must be distinct from Christ's human one. Our Savior asks his Father to take Our Savior's suffering away if God the Father chooses to do that. But Jesus distinguishes between his will and the Father's will. So, if Christ's only will is the divine one, his prayer is self-contradictory. It's absurd to say "Not my will but mine be done."

If I've found a self-contradiction in Dr. Craig's theology, that inconsistency makes his whole theology inconsistent. After all, propositions are mutually consistent if and only if they can be true together.

Hyper-pluralism explains why Dr. Allan Fimister and I think sola scriptura makes the idea of divine revelation seem absurd to secularists. When I recall that Protestants have splintered into about 47,000 sects, I don't blame agnostics, atheists, and others for rejecting Christianity. Why would they think they should believe the Bible when most Christians don't understand it?

Gregory, St. Thomas was an Aristotelian. So please tell us what Thomistic metaphysical theories he would revise or reject.

Maybe I'm biased. But you've just used "substance" in another sense. In the relevant Thomistic sense, "substance" means "essence." Since an essence isn't a container. you can't put anything into it.

When someone bilocates, he's somehow how in two places at once. So, Our Lord doesn't bilobate when to every Catholic Church in my neighborhood, let alone to each Catholic Church in the world.

Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano, Italy, PART 1

Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano, Italy, Part 2

I'm not obsessed with anything. But I began this discussion because I believe that I've found some flaws in his theology.

What about heresy? For a Catholic, a heretic is any baptized person who denies a dogma or doubts it stubbornly. We believe that each Protestant is a heretic. So is every Eastern Orthodox Christian and any baptized Messianic Jew.

But we distinguish among three kinds of heretic. A material heretic believes a heresy when he doesn't know it's heretical. A formal heretic knows that he believes a heresy. A subjective formal heretic believes a heresy and deserves blame because he believes. It can be mortally sinful to be a subjective formal heretic. Martin Luther was a formal heretic excommunicated for his heresy. But since the Catholic Church won't judge the dead, she doesn't know whether he went to hell. Neither do I.

I forgot to make an important point about Dr. Craig's Monothelitism. So I'll summarize it with a question. "Dr. Craig, how can Christ have a complete human nature if he has no human will? Every other human being has a human will. Does that suggest that in that respect, Our divine Lord is inferior to his human creatures?"

Dr. Craig says he takes theological disputes to the "bar of Scripture." But it seems that the "judge" hasn't ruled on Monothelitism. If the judge, the Bible, did rule on it, the good professor may have misinterpreted the decision. No offense. But now you know partly why Catholics reject sola scriptura in each sense of that vague phrase.

I've watched many videos with Prof. Craig in them, though I haven't heard him list the properties that each human nature must include to be a human nature. He hasn't filled in the blank in "For any x, x is a human nature if an only if x has these properties____."

I agree with you, Wayfarer. Maybe you've read some blogposts where Prof. Edward Feser answers Dr. Craig's objections to divine simplicity. Feser argues in God there's something like what we call knowledge along with something like what we call goodness, something like what we call power. . . But each of those words stands for God. Since we need to reason analytically, we must use those words as though they signified distinct properties that God has.

"In" sounds strange when people use it to talk about God's "properties" since that word suggests composition.

Now that I've heard Dr. Craig reply to Bishop Barron, I'm confused. Dr. Craig reminds us that councils teach that God is absolutely simple. But they don't teach what St. Thomas tells us about God's simplicity. On the other hand, Dr. Craig never explains what it means to say that an absolutely simple God can have inseparable parts.

An absolutely simple God has no parts of any kind. That's why "an absolutely simple God with inseparable parts" is self-contradictory. It implies that God is absolutely simple and not absolutely simple.

From a Thomistic perspective, theistic personalism is absurd because theistic personalists treat God as someone like Superman. They reflect on their human power, human, knowledge human goodness, etc., and think God has much more power, much more knowledge, and much more goodness than any human person does.

The theistic personalist's God is too creaturely. If theistic personalism is true, its God isn't the Biblical one. If the absolutely simple God and the theistic personalist's God exist, the theistic personalist's God is a creature. But then he's like Zeus if that Ancient Greek god exists. After all, Zeus has human-like parents.

I don't beg the question by merely inviting you to entertain something to see what follows from it. So, after work, I'll argue against Dr. Craig's notion of divine simplicity after rereading what St. Themas wrote about divine simplicity in my copy of the Summa Theologiae and read what he says about it in Summa Contra Gentiles.

No Catholic expects the Catholic dogma about God's absolute simplicity to convince non-Catholics merely because it's a dogma. But suppose that dogma is true. Then Dr. Craig's belief in relative divine simplicity is still false. That's because it implies that God has parts. Since any composed object needs a cause, Dr. Craig's "God" concept still produces a vicious infinite regress of causes but no composed effects.

Relativist, Dr. Craig believes that God is simple. But he rejects the absolute divine simplicity that Catholics must believe in. For us, the doctrine about absolute divine simplicity is a dogma. So, by Catholic standards, any baptized person is at least a material heretic if he denies that doctrine, That's because a material heretic believes a heresy when he doesn't know it's heretical.

For Catholics, Dr. Craig would still be at least a material heretic, even if he believed the dogma about absolute divine simplicity. That's because he still believes Monothelitism when he knows that the Third Council of Constantinople condemned it between 680 and 681 A.D.

An article about Monothelitism

In my opinion, if Monothelitism were true, Christ's human nature would be partial. That's because Catholics believe that a human nature includes a human will.But Dr. Craig thinks that Christ is fully human and fully divine. That suggests that the professor's Christology is logically inconsistent if being fully divine and fully human implies having a divine will and a human one.

Dr. Craig is a brilliant Christian scholar and a fine debater who knows more than I'll ever know. But no one can be an orthodox Catholic and believe Monothelitism. Catholics believe some doctrines that we need to deduce from the Bible because they follow from some Bible passages. Still, I suggest that Sacred Scripture flatly contradicts Craig's monthelitism in Matthew 26:39, the verse where Our Savior prays, '9 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.

How can Christ have only one will, his divine one, when he distinguishes between his will and God the Father's will? After all, God the Son is the only divine person with a human nature. Dr. Craig contradicts himself if he says that though Christ is full divine and fully human, his human nature is only partial.

Dr. Craig rejects Nestorianism, the heresy Council of Ephesus condemned in 431 A.D. Catholics believe that Christ, God's only-begotten Son, is a divine person with two natures. He's not one person composed of two persons. Nestorius believed that two persons, a divine person and a human one, shared Jesus's body. On the other hand, if Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, has only the divine will, who spoke to God the Father in Matthew 26:39? If the speaker had only a human will, it's hard to see how he could have been God the Son. After all, a mere human being can't save us from sin when he's a sinner.

The Historical Introduction to the Council of Ephesus that confirms the Catholic Church's belief that a council can teach infallibly