Concrete beings

Once again, apostate Dale Tuggy saddles up Rocinante, in a jousting match with windmills:

As I (and many) use the term, “abstract” beings are by definition causally inert – they can’t be causes. Hays holds that each of these intentionally act, purposefully cause, so they must be “concrete” and not abstract. And for him, certainly, they are individual beings, not mere properties, events, states of affairs, numbers, sets, concepts, etc. 

i) Dale is confusing abstractness with Platonic realism, which is but one version of abstractness. By contrast, I'm using abstractness in the sense of what is timeless, spaceless, and multiply-instantiable. And it's easy for me to document that usage. 

In my view, God is timeless and spaceless. Moreover, some divine attributes (communicable attributes) are multiply-instantiable. 

ii) "Abstract" and "concrete" are mutually defining, as antonyms. Here's how one noted metaphysician defines concrete particulars:

They are all things that cannot be exemplified, but they all have or exemplify many attributes. Furthermore, they are things with temporally bounded careers: they come into existence at a time, they exist for a certain stretch of time, and then they pass out of existence at a time. Accordingly, they are all contingent beings, things that exist, but whose nonexistence is possible. They are also things whose temporal careers involve alteration or change: at different times in their careers they have different and incompatible attributes. They are also things that have, at each moment in their careers, a determinate position in space, and unless they are physical simples, they have physical parts that otherwise occupy a determinate region of space M. Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, third ed., 2006), 85. 

For this reason, I deny that God or divine persons are "concrete beings". Trinitarian persons aren't property-instances. Trinitarian persons lack a spatial and temporal mode of subsistence. Trinitarian persons aren't contingent entities whose nonexistence is possible. Rather, they exist necessarily. 

As a unitarian open theist and temporalist, Dale has a radically different concept of God than I have, but he's not entitled to foist his definition onto me. I reserve the right to define my own position. And I'm using standard definitions. 

(Never mind that Jesus was obviously in both time and space – that’s another post…)

That's so grossly simplistic. The body of Jesus subsists in time and space, the soul of Jesus subsists in time but not in space–while the divine nature or Son subsists outside of time and space. That may not be Dale's position, but that's my position. 

Right. So the “Persons” are in some sense parts or components of the Trinity, but are not parts of it like my body has parts. As you said, “The one God consists of three persons.”

That's such an uncouth notion of parts. It's like saying the Mandelbrot set has parts, or the number Pi has parts, or modus ponens has parts. 

Ironically, Dale's position is the mirror-image of Thomistic simplicity, according to which, for God not to have parts, he can't have any internal differentiation. Each attribute must be identical with every other attribute. But when we're referring to timeless, spaceless minds, the notion of parts has become so attenuated, so far removed from the original physical frame of reference, that it's worse than useless. 

Right – these “members of the Godhead” are thinking, conscious beings. In Cartesian terms, minds or souls, non-physical entities or beings or (as he says) “individuals” which have mind and will, able to intentionally act. Yep – beings! Three powerful realities, the sort I call “selves.”

Dale is too nearsighted to realize that I could easily recast my position in terms of "being". It's no contradiction to say God is one being and three beings, since "being" has both quantitative and qualitative senses. Dale can't anticipate how his own usage may be turned against his position. 

Now let’s get more specific. What else are each one of these three beings, in his view? Divine. What is the noun for a “divine being” or “being which is divine.” It is: “god.” Hence, his view is that “the Godhead” are three gods. His reply? It doesn’t matter, of course, whether tritheist Hays calls them “gods.” His Trinity theory straightforwardly implies that they are.

Once again, Dale is hopelessly simpleminded. Even if we went with the noun "god", there are, as I've pointed out on more than one occasion, different kinds of nouns: abstract, concrete, proper, common. 

In what sense, in his words, is he calling each of them “divine”?

By “divine” I mean having all the divine attributes.

Right – essential, defining features which any god must have, such as omnipotence and omniscience and eternity and uncreatedness. We get it. Whatever has all the features essential to being a god, is by definition a god.

Invalid inference. The persons of the Godhead don't each have a separate package of divine attributes, as if they instantiate a common nature. 

If A is a god, and B is a god, and they’re not the same god, yes, it does follow that A and B are different gods.

Which only follows from Dale's tendentious usage. He's shouting at himself in the bathroom mirror. 

Now it occurs to tritheist Steve to solve his problem by saying that only the Trinity is a god…

I said the Trinity is God, not the Trinity is a god. And that's something I've said for years now. 

so that none of the persons is a god, none of them is fully divine. Our tritheist needs to go back to the drawing-board, it would seem. 

Notice how Dale's mind works. He's incapable of addressing a contrary position on its own terms. Instead, he replaces the actual position with his counterfeit, then proceeds to disprove the counterfeit.  

He’s just denied the third claim in his own summary of his Trinity theory. It does work, to escape the tritheism of this theory, to switch to the view that only the Trinity is a god, though none of the “Persons” is a god. (Like me, then, he’d be denying that there are three fully divine).

Notice how Dale is utterly unable to distinguish what I actually said from his proxy.  

For those keeping an eye on the Bible – he’s now in the teeth of the NT, which plainly teaches that the Father is the one true God (i.e. the only god), and so implies that he must have all the features necessary for full divinity. Unfortunately, Hays (if he really commits to this escape), has demoted the Father to somewhat less than full divinity, in order to elevate the Trinity to unique and full divinity.

Isn't that droll? He asserts his unitarian interpretation of the NT, then imputes to me the consequences of denying the implications of his unitarian interpretation if that were true. Dale is such a bungler. A elementary qualification for a competent philosopher is having the critical detachment to differentiate his own position from opposing positions. But Dale chronically reframes the opposing position in terms of his own paradigm, then objects to the implications of the repacked position. But he's commenting on a bastardized position that isn't consistently his own position or the opposing position. It isn't possible to have a constructive exchange with an interlocutor as dense as Dale. 

Hays hopes that the three gods’ mental access to each others’ minds will somehow help, somehow breaking down the “dichotomy” that separates one mind from another. But still, his scenario of all-around telepathic access is described by him as involving three minds, each had by a different thinking being. So it seems to get nowhere.

Actually, I didn't say the Trinitarian persons have telepathic access to each other's minds. Rather, I used a comparison to establish a point of principle.

In ordinary human terms, three human minds are three self-contained minds, independent of each other. So that would be three different "beings". 

If, however, we consider the thought-experiment of total telepathy, then three minds blend into each other. At that juncture, the hardline distinction between three different "beings" begins to dissolve. On that thought-experiment, where does one mind end and another mind begin? Dale constantly resorts to simplistic false dichotomies. 

In my second post, I offered him an inconsistent triad, inviting him to explain which he denies and why. He declines to give a answer (despite his move above in the direction of denying 3). Instead, he concocts some sci-fi scenarios, and asks how they relate to my structurally parallel triad of claims, about dogs rather than gods.

He doesn’t say what his point is. Is it that he, absurdly, thinks that the three claims could all be true? Or is he trying to argue that we should doubt our judgment that they can’t all be true?

It’d be fun to discuss time travel and “parallel universes” some time, but I think here they’re a distraction from that fact that our tritheist needs to respond to this inconsistent triad

i) Philosophers routinely use science fiction scenarios to model philosophical issues.

ii) Dale's "inconsistent triad" is predicated on a rigid notion of numerical identity, but I'm presenting counterexamples–which he ignores rather than refutes. 

His desire to shift the conversation to sci-fi scenaries shows that he may not realize the weight of my point that the mere structure of these claims renders them such that they can’t all be true. 

To the contrary, Dale is laboring to shift the conversation from content to empty structure. But that fails, as my counterexamples illustrate.