Herr Professor Strikes Back: atheist Deacon Duncan takes issue with my arguments

Posted by Anthony on December 18, 2008

I noticed the other day that someone had taken the time to respond at length to my post discussing trancendence, immanence, logic and superlogic.  Then I woke up this morning to find out he had posted again on it!  Herr Professor, this is just too much!   Herr Professor, now going by Deacon Duncan, knows that I prefer to have extended discussions on my discussion forum but he has sufficiently stroked my ego that I think a post or two is warranted.  It is not every day that I am described as smart and sophisticated and that my arguments are clever.  However, since the Professor already is two posts ahead of me he will have to be patient as I catch up.  Below is part one.  Please read this to the very end, or not at all.

For this entry I am responding mainly to his first article, ‘Can God do Nonsense?’

From the start, I’d like to point out that H. Professor admitted one of my contentions as reasonable.  I had argued that an evaluation of God’s ‘omni’ nature doesn’t require that he performs nonsensical demands, like making a rock he cannot lift.  I said that even atheists can accept this, and H. Professor did.

So it makes sense that God would not be able to do things that are nonsense. The only trouble is, Christianity teaches a number of doctrines which are “non-sense” in precisely the same way as God making a stone so heavy that He Himself cannot lift it.

It was, and is, a disappointment that he here begins to list some examples that I actually raised, such as the incarnation, but does not deal at all with the fact that I raised them in light of the arguments I was making.  That this was going to be the approach was clear from the beginning of the post:

It presents itself as a discussion of immanence vs. transcendence, but the bulk of the discussion focuses on the topic of understanding what God can and cannot do.

H. Professor’s failure to see how these two fundamental claims about the nature of the thing under discussion connect to the rest of the argumentation I made is the underlying mistake of both of his posts.  That we are talking about an entity that is both transcendent and immanent is absolutely critical to the rest of the argumentation.  In fact, H. Professor makes complaints that I already answered- but because he fails to see the relation between these attributes and the rest I said, he fails to recognize them.  As a case in point, he notes that my example about Flatland fails to be analogous because it is talking about mathematics:

From his second post:

The next problem with Horvath’s argument is a category error: the relationship between 2D geometry and 3D geometry is a mathematical relationship, yet he applies it to entirely unrelated areas like “the nature of incarnation” and “the problem of free will.”… By arguing that “naturalistic” reasoning is inappropriate, he shows that his analogy is not really analogous:

The problem is that I already anticipated the limitation to the analogy, pointing out in my post:

Are the triangles and squares face to face with a logical contradiction?  Not at all.  Rather, the logical rules that apply to the 3D world incorporate and transcend the logical rules of the 2D world. Given the truth of Christian theism, I propose that we are in precisely the same sort of situation, with a few important differences- ie, God is not merely an entity occupying a higher degree of existence- he is that AND he essentially permeates all degrees of existence as it is.

This is the transcendence/immanence distinction writ large, but Herr Professor utterly misses it.  It is clear that he utterly misses it because he fails- in both of his posts- to address the model that I explicitly set forward as being able better handle the type of relationship we’re talking about.  Ie, that of an author’s relationship to the characters he creates and sustains within his mind.

The purpose of the Flatland example was not to say that this was how we relate to God, but rather to show how the rules of logic can appear to be violated in one case but when taken from a ‘higher’ plane can be perceived as nonetheless sound.  I said that in Flatland, the three dimensional sphere breaks into the two dimensional space but of course the two dimensional entities nonetheless are only able to perceive the two dimensional ‘slice’ of the sphere.  They will perceive that this is a contradiction of their logic.  Well, technically, only the ones who hear about it later will view it as a contradiction of their logic.  The ones that actually see it will simply have to come to terms with the fact that what appeared to be impossible actually happened.

However, we are not in a mathematical relation to the characters we create in our mind.  If you ‘break’ into the ‘dimension’ of your imagined world, it is not the same sort of thing.  The author model has the advantage, though, of considering how a transcendent and immanent entity relates to its creation, for this is in fact precisely our relation to our own imagined creatures- and thought itself.  Another advantage of the author model is that one can predict that an atheist (if he decided to address it, which H. Professor did not) could object that we have no experience with this kind of relationship, ie, a transcendent and immanent entity relating to its creation, but the author model shows that in fact we do.  Hence sub-logic.

Now, H. Professor’s post lays out a number of things that he declares without much support are inconsistent and illogical.  For example, he is confident that the Trinity and the incarnation and free will are such examples.  He says:

Such inconsistencies and contradictions are our only means of detecting falsehoods, whether they are deliberate lies, honest misperceptions, erroneous reasoning, or just plain fiction.

Now, I agree with H. Professor that identifying inconsistencies and contradictions are useful for sorting out falsehoods, but don’t agree that they are the only means.  Rather than defend that, we need to address his argument that the examples he gave are ‘inconsistencies and contradictions.’

The whole point of the Flatland example was that what might seem to be inconsistent and contradictory may not in fact be so.  One can imagine the 2D witnesses to the 3D sphere’s visit telling H. Professor about it and H. Professor declaring:  “Inconsistent and contradictory!”  And the 2D witnesses saying, “Ah, well, but there it was.” Read the rest of the entry… »

Transcendence and Immanence, Logic and Superlogic- and Sublogic

Posted by Anthony on December 15, 2008

Orthodox Christianity holds that God is both a transcendent entity and immanent.  If you understand what Christians propose to be true about God, you understand why both attributes follow necessarily.  All religions boil down to some expression of one of these two attributes, usually to the exclusion of one to the other.   Deism, for example, emphasizes transcendence and despises immanence.  Various forms of paganism emphasize immanence, that is they identify ‘God’ with the universe and reject that there is a God ‘outside’ it.  Even atheism takes a position here:  naturalism is just another variation on immanence and ‘God’ is just another label for the ‘universe.’

Christianity insists that God is both transcendent and immanent.

At any rate, there are some implications of this and I think it would be helpful to understand some arguments regarding Christian theism.   I can begin with by trotting out the old ‘Can God create a rock that he cannot lift or move?’ line.  The contention is that if God is all powerful he should be able to do this but in doing so he would simultaneously undermine his own omnipotence.  Most of the time this is answered by pointing out that some statements are just nonsense and God’s omni-characteristics do not require him to be able to achieve the nonsensical.  To understand how this is nonsensical we might take on the next line in this attack, “Can God make a round square?”  We see in this case that what is involved is simply definitional.  If round is properly and consistently defined and asked to apply to a square, also properly and consistently defined, then the request is nonsensical.  Something doesn’t become reasonable just because you insert ‘Can God’ in front of it.

Most people accept this explanation and I’ve found that even nonbelievers come around to accepting it.  (Not all of them do, which is why 17 year olds with Google can still find the question to ask it)

There is another way of looking at it, too.  Here let me submit the story about Flatland to help illustrate the situation.

In Flatland, the characters exist in a two dimensional world and have their geometry- and logic- all worked out.  Until, that is, a sphere breaks into their world.  Now, a sphere is a three dimensional object, so naturally the 2D entities have great difficulty perceiving what they are seeing.  A sphere, breaking through a plane, appears first as a single point and then a varying sized circle depending on how far the sphere comes in.   Are the triangles and squares face to face with a logical contradiction?  Not at all.  Rather, the logical rules that apply to the 3D world incorporate and transcend the logical rules of the 2D world.

Given the truth of Christian theism, I propose that we are in precisely the same sort of situation, with a few important differences- ie, God is not merely an entity occupying a higher degree of existence- he is that AND he essentially permeates all degrees of existence as it is.   This poses interesting epistemological problems if God wants to reveal himself and make himself known to the occupants of our ‘degree of existence.’  But I’m not here talking about that.

The point here is that if this is true, a number of the difficult to comprehend ‘contradictions’ in Christian theism are viewed as paradoxes that (plausibly might) entirely ‘make sense’ from the point of view of the super-natural perspective.  How can Jesus be both God and Man without diminishing either?  It can be a mindbender- especially if you insist in viewing it only in ’2D’ terms (eg, in only ‘naturalistic’ terms).

It so happens we can use an analogy to help us understand it.  If God is 3D, and we are 2D, then our own creations are 1D.  What creations do I mean?  Those which we are simultaneously transcendent and immanent to- that is, the worlds we create within our minds and sustain by our powerful words.  Can we create a story in our mind and then a rock within that story within our mind that we cannot lift?  No.  We see precisely how that is nonsensical after we understand the nature of relationship between the creator/author and creation/character.

Likewise, we can, if we want, very easily make ourselves a character within that creation.  In doing so, we can perceive as we are doing it that we do not become any less than we were before, yet that character- You- is really both You and Character.  This is using sub-logic to understand super-logic.  If what I have said is the case regarding the stories we make inside our heads and threatens no logical incoherency or contradiction then we see that the same will be the case when contemplating our relationship to the Christian God.

I gave the example of the incarnation as an illustration of this but in my mind the real example is free will.  Naturally, we cannot create characters with real free will, but just as cube ‘loses’ something when rendered as a square, we too impart lesser attributes to our own creations.  Something is always ‘lost in translation.’

However, God can create ‘characters’ (us) who have real free will.  He can be both utterly sovereign AND give us real autonomy able to make real choices. This seems logically ridiculous from our frame of reference.  Indeed, I will perhaps admit that it is logically ridiculous.  But I don’t see why I must confine myself to explaining everything from my own frame of reference.  In my opinion, there are enough clues as to how this might play out from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ dimensions that from the perspective of the sphere, ie, superlogic, the supernatural, the conundrum reconciles perfectly.

In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.  We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.  This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.  The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerened.  The spiritual man makes judgements about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment:

For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?

But we have the mind of Christ. 1 Cor. 2:11b-16