Datheron

Hm....I was thinking about this as I was walking home from school, and thought it might be interesting to share it with the board; if nothing else, to allow it to be scrutinized and <ahem> constructively criticized if possible. Note, however, that this is not supposed to be formal in any sense of the term; it's merely the thoughts of a college student on his way home from a few mind-numbing lectures.

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What is thought? How do we define thought? The very notion seems incomprehensible, or perhaps untouchable, given that we are using the mechanism itself to attempt to devise its origins. Indeed, that's a path that I didn't try to trample on; rather, I sought the answer to the question of "what makes thought possible?"

Let's conduct a simple thought experiment. Think of any possible subject or object, abstract or otherwise. Now, begin to remove the pre-conceived notions that you may have about that object; its visual appearance, sensual experience, its lingual descriptions, etc. As you do so, you should begin to feel like that the subject at hand is becoming less and less definable, until you're at the point of where all you have is a bracket label for that object. Once we remove that, then we have nothing to relate ourselves to that object, and it effectively becomes unknown.

The point of that exercise? Just that any and every object is only "thinkable" when given its definitions, and those can only be acquired within some context. The various images, sounds, etc. that are stored in our minds in association with that object make no sense unless we already know the meanings of those definitions, and in turn those rely on further definitions, until we reach a point where we must relate to the outside world in some shape or form to make sense of the entire set. In some sense, this is the contingency of thought, by which I mean that abstract, complex thoughts rely on simple thoughts, which themselves ultimately rely on some external source to provide a basis. Furthermore, if that is the case, then a mind in a void would not be a mind at all - if it has no context by which to relate anything to, it cannot think.

Which brings up the topic of the discussion, creation ex nihilo. If what the above claims holds water, then it is obvious that God cannot have created the Universe out of nothingless, or that he himself came first. If he thinks, then his thoughts must be contingent on some external factor, which then destroys his definition of "First Cause". Since he has no context to base his thoughts upon, there would have been no way for him to think of a draft of the Universe in order to create it. Hence, ex nihilo is impossible.

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Now, I realize that the argument requires a very interesting view on the nature of thought, but once we establish that viewpoint, it seems rather automatic that the conclusion is to come about. What I'm worrying is the various assumptions that I may have made, or some faulty logic that I'm not accounting for (remember that this was not meant to be a formal proof, however). Furthermore, I'm wondering whether anything has already been published on this area of thought, and if so, what the authors/titles may be. I'm truly interested in pursuing this line of thought, so any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Keep thinking!

GunnerJ

Oh course, then there's the somewhat mystical notion that nothing really "exists" to be created, because everything "exists" inside the mind of God. Thus, God's "conceptions" and "labels" are all that exist.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Datheron,
Good thinking! You’re mind works like mine (no insult intended).

I agree with what you said about thought. Your "abstract, complex thoughts rely on simple thoughts, which themselves ultimately rely on some external source to provide a basis" is a re-statement of St. Thomas Aquinas's point that all knowledge derives from our senses. What you infer from this about God is where we part company.

You said:


You fail to consider the Triune relationship God has with Himself. This is how He fulfills your demand that His thoughts "be contingent on some external factor." It is no wonder that the second person of the Blessed Trinity is called the Logos, that is, the Word. A word is the expression of a concept (God the Father) which when articulated is experienced as an animating wind also known as the Holy Spirit (third person of the Trinity). – Sincerely, Albert the Trad Catholic

Datheron

Well, yea, it doesn't address the possibility of pantheism, but then again, the ideology is pretty much impossible to refute anyway, and if nothing else, Occam demands that we shave it away.

Datheron

Albert,

Yea, I was fairly certain that I wasn't the first one to come up with the notion.

Only that we still have the actual relationship to be resolved. It's great that God can depend on himself as a basis, but where did that basis come from? This is usually where the fuzzy thinking and the hand-wavy explanations on the Trinity begin to take place, which still makes very little sense after 2000 years of clarification by bright minds. Did God develop into the Trinity (that is, from Word came the Father), then? If so, is there an explanation for how the molded together, found some of that Holy Spirit lying around, in order to form the Christian Triune God that we all know and love?

JL

From Nietzsche's Will to Power, passage #473:

#557:

Make of it what you will, I dug these up in about 5 minutes. There's a lot in the book you might find useful.


Something else to consider is the absurdity of non-existence being an alternative to or preceeding existence. There was a thread about it not too long ago, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I believe it was called. If you think about it non-existence is nonsensical. It is that which is not.

excreationist

Here's <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=21&t=000381&p=" target="_blank">Why is there something rather than nothing?</a>... it was in the Philosophy forum.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Datheron,
You ask, "Where did that basis (for God’s triune relationship) come from?" It comes from the only metaphysical explanation for being that is possible.

We know something exists. Ergo, the possibility of nothing is nonexistent. But what few people realize is that One Thing is as much an impossibility as nothing is. Even the semantic formulation of all that is as the One Thing is impossible.

To rationally conceive of one thing, we must also conceive of some other thing (or some non-thing) that it is not. We must also conceive of the nexus between the two, that is, the event horizon where one thing leaves off and the other thing begins. This is the rational foundation for the necessity of a Triune God.

The three persons of God, like the three geometric dimension of our reality, are equally necessary for His being. And yet the Father is greater than the Son in the same sense that the One Thing is greater than its surrounding anti-thesis. And both the Son and Holy Ghost proceed from the Father (c.f. the Nicene Creed) in the same sense that both the boundary and what’s beyond the boundary are brought into being by the One Thing's existence.

In short, the metaphysical basis of being is triune. Anything more, is derivative from that. This can be expressed mathematically where 1 = God the Father, 2 = God the Son, and 3 = God the Holy Ghost.
1) Two and three proceed from one.
2) Two is the numeric expression of halves being a whole as the Father and Son are one.
3) Three is the numeric expression of the relationship between halves.
4) All other numbers are merely progressive repetitions of the first three numbers (e.g., 10 = 1 number, 10 = 5 + 5, i.e., two equal halves, 10 = 4 + 4 + 2, i.e., two equal halves and a third capstone number holding them all in relationship.
-- Sincerely, Albert the Trad Catholic

Datheron

Albert,

Or that the being itself is impossible.

We're in agreement thus far, although probably on very different terms.

The definition of one object/subject being a conglomeration of others. Alright so far.

So you're saying that the Son and Spirit came after the Father, correct? Let's just make sure...

Albert - that is one of the worst cases of wacky numerology that I have ever seen. No, three is not the magic number for some fundamental property of the Universe: mathematics only requires zero, superstring demands at least 10 dimensions, we ourselves live in four dimensions, matter has a total of four states, etc. Trying to put significance into numbers where none exist is the worst form of rationalization.

But back to the order of precedings; since you didn't elaborate, I can only assume that you mean the Father came before the other two parts - the Son and the Spirit are contingent upon that Father. Then, according to my OP, the Father therefore was not sentient and could not think until the other two parts were created to give him the comparative elements to do such a thing. However, as we may easily count, the smallest number of objects needed for thought is two - just another object for us to begin to make comparisons - which makes the Spirit other unneeded. (as a matter of fact, one can argue the abstraction of dualities in our Universe much better than trilogies)

But this still doesn't answer my original proposition - from whence did the Son and Spirit come from? The Father could not think; he did not know that he would need another body in order to begin to think, so it's either by program (automatic) or by luck that the Father was actually able to get more parts of himself to begin the process of thought. In either case, I have shown that God, at one point, did not have will. He, like the classical explanations of the coming of the Universe and of life, came about by necessity or blind chance, which then of course makes him no better than the Universe's humble beginnings.

(BTW, thanks for the links on the subject. I'll check them in a bit, probably after my painstaking finals are over...)

Ender

Why dig through Nietzsche's Nachlass and overlook his published work, stuff that made the cut? Personally, I think there are some winners in that collection of his unpublished notes, but why doesn't anybody respect Nietzsche's own judgment that he excluded them from his published books? Heidegger made the same mistake and declared "Will to Power" as Nietzsche's Magnus Opus.

Eh. you're commiting a fallacy that resembles the great idealist Bishop Berkeley's notorious arguments for immaterialism. (see 3 dialogues of Hylas and PHilonous, dialogue 1)

If you think there is something self-defeating in speaking of that which is unspoken of, or self-contradictory in conceiving of material for conceptualization that exists independent of being conceptualized you are making the same mistake the bishop committed.

This is called an illegal quantifier shift. While there is indeed a contradiction in "conceiving of something existing unconceived" only if you are referring to something particular, something that is unconceived as a state of affairs - symbolized in logic: "Ex (Cx & -Cx)". *

However, there is no contradiction in conceiving of there being something or other that exists "unconceived" which is symbolized as "C(Ex -Cx)" Berkeley, and apparently, you, are evidently confusing the second with the first by putting the quantifier on the wrong side of the 'C' operator.

~Speaker 4 the death of God~

• Note: the E is the existential quantifier, and i know it's supposed to be backwards, but heck.