Since God is the first principle from which everything proceeds (since before creation and outside God there is nothing), for something to be a necessary truth (such as one + one equals two) it must in a sense proceed from some essential truth of Gods own nature. Ergo that it is necessary that one plus one equal two, or more implicitly, that there is a necessary order that is not some direct imposition of divine will (rather than such an order being pure chaos where numerical values, or shape and form, are non-existent.) thus to my thinking indicates that the rational necessity of these truths, emerges from the rational nature and being of God (the divine logos, creative reason). Since God "is being" and is reasonable, than everything that surrounds God and proceeds from him as first principle must necessarily comport to that reason. Thus why the universe has cosmic order mathematical and otherwise, since it is a reflection of the divine creative reason. Chaos as such (such as square circles) is anathema to the reason of God, God is reasonable and thus his creation and everything that proceeds from him is comprehensible (even considering the fallen nature of existence and so forth)
The position you're suggesting here is very similar to that of Leibniz, who also thought that all necessary truths derive from God, but not from his will. It seems to me that this kind of makes sense provided you have an extremely abstract understanding of what "God" means (as Leibniz did). Indeed Leibniz effectively defined "God" as logical space, i.e. the context in which concepts have meaning; if you're going to do that then I think it's fine to say that necessity flows from God, and indeed that God necessarily exists, but the price of saying that is that "God" no longer means what we normally take it to mean.
If on the other hand you're going to take "God" in a slightly more traditional sense, as a personal being of supreme perfection, then I find it much harder to make sense of this kind of idea. You say that God "is reasonable". But what does it mean to be "reasonable"? Surely it means that a person conforms to reason; that they behave in a certain way, they think in a certain way, and so on. But if you say that then you're assuming some kind of objective, or at least independent, standard of what is reasonable. If you're going to say that God's nature
determines what is reasonable, then what determines God's nature in the first place? God could have been like anything - he could have had contradictory properties - and that would have been rational. What causes God to have non-contradictory properties? Isn't it the fact that he's rational? But then "rational" is logically prior to the divine nature.
What I'm trying, rather badly, to say here is that you're trying to do two things at once that don't mix well. You're trying to talk about God as if the distinction between order and reason, on the one hand, and chaos and irrationality, on the other, is a meaningful one even before we bring God into the equation. You must do this if the claim that God is rational and ordered is to mean anything. And yet at the same time you're trying to say that God is the origin of the distinction between order and chaos. But this isn't consistent. If God were really the origin, then the question "Why can't a proposition be both true and false at the same time?" isn't answered by saying "Because God determines the laws of logic, and God is supremely rational", because this doesn't explain why it's rational for God to endorse the law of excluded middle rather than to reject it and allow what are to us logical impossibilities.
You can see that this problem directly parallels the Euthyphro problem we began with.
This sounds awfully like an objection of "the theist attributes everything to God, the atheist as brute fact, they describe the same thing therefore the theist attribution is nonsensical" which is logically flawed, since if God is creator than everything in creation does find its ultimate origin in him. I would also say that there is a differentiation, since the atheist conception ultimately falls into the problem of contingency, and the possibility that if there is no God the universe in reality is entirely incomprehensible.
No, my claim isn't that just because the theist attributes to God what the atheist attributes to nothing "God" and "nothing" come down to the same thing. It's more that the
concept of God which is demanded by the kind of explanatory work that
this version of theism makes him do turns out to be so abstract, and so divorced from how we normally think of God, that it's not so unlike atheism. (In some ways classical theism itself is more like atheism than we might normally think, but that's a discussion for a different time.) It's one thing to say that God is a perfect being, a personal entity who has unlimited power and knowledge and who always does what is right. That's an idea with content and which we can discuss. But it's quite another to say that the divine nature is the source of all necessary truth and the determinant of rationality itself. What does that even mean? I don't think I understand the concept of a
nature that can do that kind of thing, which is why I suspect that this kind of theism is really starting to break down into mere words. That's why I say that "God" here has become largely indistinguishable from "it just is". What's the difference between saying that logical truths are true because of the divine nature, and saying that they're true because they just are? Note that the theist, on this picture, isn't even attributing logical truths to the divine will (as Descartes did, and I can understand this notion of God
choosing to make some things true and not others), but merely to the divine nature. Hasn't the "divine nature" just become a magic box to hold non-explanations? What does attributing these things to the "divine nature" actually tell us that "it just is" doesn't?
An atheist can accept that there is a necessary truth (since a man, as a rational creature, can observe creation and see something is necessarily true and not subject to alteration), I just think he deludes himself as to a necessary truths ultimate origin. He accepts for example that logical order (even if we limit that term to just mathematical necessity) is a necessary and inherent aspect to existence, yet he takes this as a brute fact avoids asking the question of why this is so, and where does necessity originate. The theist of course answers this question by saying God is the first uncreated principle upon which everything is contingent, therefore everything that is contingent upon that first principle is necessarily a reflection of the nature of the divinity (be it mediated by his will, or because something [like chaos or an un-liftable boulder] is anathema to the possibilities of the divine itself, and impossible for it to create)
Right. So you accept that an atheist can believe in necessary truths (though you think that she's wrong about their source). It would seem, then, that on your view an atheist could believe in moral truths, provided that they're necessary truths. Of course you go on to say:
As to moral truths this consideration is somewhat different. I do think they can accept that there are necessary moral truths, but I think that this acceptance is an unprincipled exception to their atheism which reflects the truth that morality is inscribed into the human nature. I say this because if atheism were true, than there is no necessary moral truth at all (and morality itself would be an illusion), since our own existence would be brute fact with no meaning or purpose (for the universe itself would have no meaning or purpose, and therefore no purpose or meaning could be ascribed to anything within it).
This seems an invalid argument to me. Yes, to the atheist, existence is a brute fact, and (probably) the universe as a whole has no meaning or purpose. However, it doesn't follow that the atheist thinks there's no meaning or purpose to anything within the universe. (That would be a sort of reversal of the fallacy of composition, i.e. think that because the whole lacks a certain property, any given part must also lack that property.) It's perfectly possible to deny that the universe as a whole lacks meaning and purpose while claiming that some things within it have meaning and purpose, because we give them meaning and purpose ourselves. I can think, for example, that my life has no cosmic significance, because it came about by a series of accidents and the operations of non-purposive natural laws; nevertheless, it has meaning because I ascribe meaning to it; and it has purpose because purpose is something that can arise within a naturalistic universe. "Purpose" is, after all, a property of living things, or at least of some living things. And no doubt an atheist can derive the notion of morality in a similar way, as arising from our own values.
However, I was arguing that an atheist doesn't have to have such a view of morality, because an alternative possibility that's open to the atheist is to think that moral truths are necessarily true, independent of what we think, and they're true in the same way (or for the same reason) as other necessary truths such as those of mathematics and logic. Now you say that this would be inconsistent with the atheist's belief that the universe as a whole has no meaning or purpose. I don't see why. The reason is that morality isn't really the same thing as meaning and purpose. I can hold that there is no purpose to the universe as a whole while still thinking that murder is objectively wrong and charity is objectively right. I don't think there's any contradiction here. Indeed I could probably hold that there's no purpose to my life, or to anyone else's, and still think that murder is objectively wrong and charity is objectively right. There's only a contradiction if you think that moral truths must be founded upon notions of meaning and purpose; but our hypothetical atheist thinks that moral truths are
necessary truths, which means they're not founded upon anything. They're just true, and that's that.
What's the difference between a cult and a religion? And do you consider Scientology a cult, religion, or something else?
There are various features that sociologists take as typical of cults. For example, cults have charismatic leaders around whom a kind of cult of personality develops. They typically isolate converts from their family and friends, forcing them to devote their lives to the cult. They use methods of coercion (psychological, financial, etc.) to get members to devote their lives and resources to the cult. And so on. Cults can be religious or non-religious; Alcoholics Anonymous and related movements are sometimes regarded as cults, or at least of having some cultic features. Scientology is arguably a more clearly religious cult. But then it's very hard to define "religion" in the first place anyway.
I don't know much about Scientology, but it seems pretty clear that it has a lot of features in common with cults. It is at the very least surely more cultlike than most mainstream religions, at least in their usual forms.
My religious studies professor refers to Arius as a Gnostic thinker, citing his notion of Jesus as a lesser god and his devaluation of history. I'd never heard Arius categorized as such before, but I'm also not an academic. But then again, the academic I heard it from focuses on African-American religion, and just teaches a general history of Christian thought class, so it's possible he's misinformed about the fourth century. Since you're more of a Patristics guy, I was wondering if you could weigh in some on the notion that Arius was a Gnostic thinker.
This seems very implausible to me. The notion that the Son was a lesser God was not a gnostic belief; it can be found in Justin Martyr (he devotes much of his
Dialogue with Trypho to defending the notion of a "second God"). Your professor is right that a typical feature of gnosticism was the elaboration of great numbers of quasi-divine figures, but belief in quasi-divine figures was certainly not restricted to gnosticism, and it takes more than that to make someone a gnostic. For one thing, Arius believed in the same quasi-divine figure as anyone else; he didn't add any others; and he just denied that this figure shared the divine nature with the Father. If that makes Arius a gnostic it ought to make the Nicenes, such as Athanasius, gnostics too, since they also believed in the Son (but said that he does share the divine nature). Other typical features of gnosticism included the belief in special, secret knowledge which saved, belief that the physical universe is evil or otherwise bad, and a distinction between the creator of the physical universe and the true God. Arius had none of these traits.
Name once when God has put righteous through judgement along with the wicked?
Matthew 25, the story of the sheep and the goats. The Bible consistently attributes the act of judgement to God; I don't know of any notion in there that only some people get judged.
Everyone gets judged, though of course not everyone gets the same verdict.
The Pauline view, of course, is that the Old Testament distinction between the "righteous" and the "wicked" is out of date, and that salvation comes through faith, not through being righteous. (At least that's the traditional interpretation of Paul.)
That wasn't God judging Job. God tests us all the time and that is to see what we are made of.
Well, the book of Job itself says otherwise - it says that God's purpose in allowing Job to suffer was not to test him but to prove to Satan (portrayed here as a member of God's entourage - note that the Satan character plays different roles in different Old Testament books, as there had not yet developed a consistent notion of who he was) that Job would never forsake God no matter how much he suffered. In other words, God is portrayed as knowing (correctly) that Job would never forsake God; he allows Job to suffer in order to demonstrate this to someone else, not because he's uncertain of it himself.
The notion that God needs to "see what we are made of" seems to me inconsistent with divine omniscience and divine creation. If God knows everything, and if he is our creator, he ought to know what we're made of without having to conduct any experiments. Omniscience is traditionally taken to mean not only that God knows everything (at least, everything knowable), but also that God's knowledge is all intuitive - he knows what he knows immediately and directly, without having to learn it.
I'd say that this notion is also inconsistent with the divine love; God is supposed to be perfectly loving, which means that every action he takes with regard to us is for our benefit, not his own. But allowing us to suffer with the aim of increasing his own knowledge would be for his benefit, not ours. Any explanation for God allowing human beings to suffer - whether Job or anyone else - that's consistent with the Christian claim that God is love has to make it plausible that, whatever God's precise reason, it's done to benefit us. Anything else will make God just seem like a cat toying with a mouse.
