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SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 4 PART 3 – BURKE
In round 4, Burke urges that his views about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit provide a simpler explanation of the texts. Whereas trinitarians must argue from implications of the text, By contrast, I...
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SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 5 – BOWMAN – PART 2
I still mean to comment on Bowman’s 5th round, but my inner logic nerd was drawn in by some action from round 5 here, comment 19: [Burke:] “This week I hope Rob will show Biblical evidence for the...
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SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 5 – BURKE – Part 1
Burke’s fifth round opens some interesting cans of worms. First, he reiterates that the Bible doesn’t explicitly talk of any triple-personed god, but instead calls the God of the Jews the Father. His...
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SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 6 Part 2 – Bowman
In his sixth and final installment of the debate, Bowman turns in his finest performance, making a number of interesting moves, and getting some glove on Burke. First, he tweaks his formula (here’s the...
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You’re Foolin’ Yourself and You Don’t Believe It – Part 2
Last time, I mentioned a well done book by evangelical philosopher Gregg Ten Elshoff on the topic of self-deception and the Christian life. He noted that one may easily have a false belief about what...
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A clear portrait of the Trinity in action?
As I mentioned some time ago, the ESV Study Bible has a really bad entry on the Trinity, part of its appendix, “Biblical Doctrine: An Overview”. Today, I note that it repeats something I’ve often seen...
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Christmas Amazement
Sam Storms, in a post at Parchment and Pen: Conception: God became a fertilized egg! An embryo. A fetus. God kicked Mary from within her womb! Birth: God entered the world as a baby, amid the stench...
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The Standard Opening Move
Is the Trinity contradictory? In reply to such a charge or query, there’s a standard opening move employed by trinitarians who have some training in logic, be they theologian, philosopher, or...
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Linkage: Dialogue at Triablogue
I’ve been commenting at Triablogue, in typical long-winded fashion, on posts by Steve Hays. Here, and here. There’s some heat in addition to light, but it gets better as it goes on, and the inimitable...
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Daniel Waterland on “The Father is the only God” texts – Part 1
Daniel Waterland (1683-1740) was by all accounts the most important disputant of Samuel Clarke about the Trinity. Waterland spent his career at Cambridge, where he rose through the ranks, eventually...
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DANIEL WATERLAND ON “THE FATHER IS THE ONLY GOD” TEXTS – PART 2
The Clarke-Waterland duel went on for many, many pages in several books, getting increasingly snippy. Last time I said that I thought Waterland was a social-mysterian-trinitarian. But I’m not so sure...
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On Numerical Sameness / Identity / “Absolute” Identity
I’ve been reading some stuff about identity and relative identity lately, in the process of writing something on relative identity versions of trinitarianism. This post is to share some good finds. In...
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A formulation of Leibniz’s Law / the Indiscernibility of Identicals
In discussing the Trinity or Incarnation, I often have an exchange which goes like this: someone: Jesus is God. me: You mean, Jesus is God himself? someone: Yeah. me: Don’t you think something is true...
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On an alleged counterexample to Leibniz’s Law – Part 1
In a recent post I put forward my own preferred version of “Leibniz’s Law,” or more accurately, the Indiscernibility of Identicals. It’s a bit complicated, so as to get around what are some apparent...
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On an alleged counterexample to Leibniz’s Law – Part 2 (Dale)
(click for image credit) In his comment on my previous post, Brandon points out that he doesn’t assert the case described there to be a counterexample. Rather, he was wondering why it isn’t a...
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Linkage: Did God the Son change in becoming incarnate?
“Classic” (i.e. mainstream catholic, Platonic) Christian theism holds that God is timeless, and so incapable of any change whatever. And they add: the Word is God, and the Word became flesh. Sounds...
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A few thoughts on generation and time (Dale)
A reader emailed to ask me what I thought about the classic patristic doctrine of “eternal begetting.” When this reader objected to someone that any process of begetting must be temporal, with a...
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Comment on a Poll – an inconsistent triad
The poll below is an interesting one. (The bogus one to the left is only fun, but not interesting.) As I write this post, it is still current, and is available for voting at the upper right of the main...
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Identity and necessity
This week I have been pondering the question of whether the God of the Philosophers (a being who is omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent etc.) is the same being as the God of the scriptures (Eleanor...
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Venus was her name
The Maverick philosopher has a comment on my earlier question about the necessity of identity. Can we get from ‘a=b’ to ‘necessarily a=b’ in a simple step? He thinks we can. Now if ‘H’ and ‘P’...
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