I'm not smart enough to be...

[_Tarski]

I'm not smart enough to be an orthodox Christian.

At MAD Rob Bowman explains the Trinity to me

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons (loci of relationality) co-existing eternally as one God (one transcendent, self-existent being who is solely responsible for the creation of all other beings).

I gave a lazy response just to get him to unpack the terms. But I don't understand the explanation above yet.

I am not smart enough to understand and affirm the doctrine of the Trinity.

I guess that means I couldn't be an orthodox Christian so that's one religion I don't need to worry about in my life.

My lazy response was:

"Ambiguous. It looks like I will have to throw out my previous idea of what a God is and then find out what your stipulative definition for "God" is. Otherwise this has no content for me.

Here is a new word I just made up. It is "Parpair". A Parpair is a being consisting of two persons (loci of relationality) who are parents of a nuclear family. They coexist as one Parpair.

In other words, your definition is consistent with "God" being a divine corporation of 3 people each separately deserving the title God in another sense, a group. A Mormon could agree with that.

A being could simply be a mereological sum of three persons. For all your definition says, that could be the case with the Trinity. The word coexist is in there to avoid that interpretation but what does coexist mean here??? My parents coexist.

In other words, you need to unpack the terms or it is just a prepackaged answer that Christians on the street could memorize and feel good about without knowing what they are saying. "

[_Some Schmo]

Explanations for the trinity are prime examples of religious apologists making up crap to explain away the crap made up by previous generations (which was also almost certainly made up to explain away the crap made up by their ancestors, and so on), and the evolution of religion continues...

[_Phillip]

If fully understanding the Trinity is a requirement to be Christian, then nobody is smart enough to be one. To be honest, I’m not smart enough to even understand why we would expect to comprehend or relate to God in the same way that we understand what it is like to be a human being or the elements of a mathematical proof. The God that classical theology posits – infinite, immaterial, eternal, the cause of all other existence, etc. – seems to me to be, basically by definition, something that we should only expect to have a partial understanding of. At least traditional Christians are honest enough to admit that their God is essentially a mystery: "the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable"

I would be more suspicious of a religion that claimed to have no mysteries about God. As Mortimer Adler put it with regards to his conversion, “"My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy." I’m a lot more comfortable putting the essence of a transcendent God on the proverbial ‘shelf’ than I am with shelving things like why a prophet needed to have sex with other men’s wives or why there is no evidence of a vast Jewish/Christian civilization with Old World technology in ancient America. At least they are mysteries about the ultimate nature of reality.

That being said, to me the basic motivation for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was the belief that Jesus is fully divine in the same sense that God the Father is divine. That when we divide things into created and uncreated categories, Jesus (along with the Holy Spirit) would belong in the latter. That uncreated reality is what Christians (and Jews and Muslims) call God. And since Christians had the idea on there being only one God thoroughly beaten into them, the Son and the Father had to still be one God in some sense, but at the same time also distinct. Hence the distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘person’. Christians would admit that our understanding of these terms as they apply to God are limited, but nevertheless that it gives a more accurate image of what God is to say that there is one God rather than three Gods, and that God is three persons rather than one person. But at the end of the day it is recognized that these are just imperfect attempts to describe something that is fundamentally different than the finite objects of our universe. “Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God”

Ok, now my head is starting to hurt!

[_Some Schmo]

As Mortimer Adler put it with regards to his conversion, “"My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy." I’m a lot more comfortable putting the essence of a transcendent God on the proverbial ‘shelf’ than I am with shelving things like why a prophet needed to have sex with other men’s wives or why there is no evidence of a vast Jewish/Christian civilization with Old World technology in ancient America. At least they are mysteries about the ultimate nature of reality.

But isn't that a convenient out?

I believe it because I don't understand it? I don't understand the appeal of Real Housewives or The Apprentice. It's incomprehensible to me that anyone should watch that utter trash. Should I therefore start to worship it?

Man, if I ever get to the point where this kind of logic is appealing to me, I'm checking myself in to the nearest funny farm.

[_Scottie]

Isn't this like saying that this life is a test and we are here to practice our faith..... but I KNOW this church is true?

[_Phillip]

As Mortimer Adler put it with regards to his conversion, “"My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy." I’m a lot more comfortable putting the essence of a transcendent God on the proverbial ‘shelf’ than I am with shelving things like why a prophet needed to have sex with other men’s wives or why there is no evidence of a vast Jewish/Christian civilization with Old World technology in ancient America. At least they are mysteries about the ultimate nature of reality.

But isn't that a convenient out?

I believe it because I don't understand it? I don't understand the appeal of Real Housewives or The Apprentice. It's incomprehensible to me that anyone should watch that utter trash. Should I therefore start to worship it?

Man, if I ever get to the point where this kind of logic is appealing to me, I'm checking myself in to the nearest funny farm.

I can understand why you would see it that way. It is an out. And I think that it only really makes sense in the context of the nature of God, not normal stuff like Real Housewives (my wife is obsessed with the series, it drives me insane) or God wants your money or God wants our leader to have sex with everyone. But if you think about what God must be if there is a God, it seems to me that there also must be some mysteries involved, some limit to our comprehension of God. If the God that a religion proposes is perfectly understandable then it must be just a human invention. Adler's point (who was a professional philosopher) is that there should be some aspects of God and our relation to that God that we cannot discover for ourselves unaided, that God must communicate those things to us in some way.

And the funny farm is not that bad: free drugs, lots of interesting people, no bills to pay.

[_Phillip]

Isn't this like saying that this life is a test and we are here to practice our faith..... but I KNOW this church is true?

Again, I only think the approach is valid if we are thinking about the nature/essence of a supposedly infinite, eternal, transcendent God. That was the subject of the OP (the Trinity). I do think that reason must play a role is sorting through various religious claims, like 'the church is true!', etc. I would also reasonably expect that my use of reason has its limitations when it comes to understanding what exactly God is like. Like I said, if there are going to be religious 'mysteries' (and I think there must be some), I am much more comfortable with them being about the essence of God rather than more mundane things.

[_Aristotle Smith]

Richard Feynman was fond of saying that no physicist understands quantum mechanics. I guess that means no physicist should teach anything about quantum mechanics.

Of course that's absurd, many physicists teach quantum mechanics and many students profitably take those courses every year. Likewise, I don't think any orthodox Christian really gets the Trinity. But that doesn't mean that the Trinity can't be true, nor that orthodox Christians should not believe something because none of them can understand it.

Just a pre-emption for those who will claim that quantum mechanics is somehow different because there is empirical data supporting it, while there is no empirical data supporting the Trinity. That actually makes things worse because now you have a theory which does explain empirical data, but which is still incomprehensible. And if you don't understand why that makes things worse, then you really don't have a clue about quantum mechanics.

[_bcspace]

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons (loci of relationality) co-existing eternally as one God (one transcendent, self-existent being who is solely responsible for the creation of all other beings).

I gave a lazy response just to get him to unpack the terms. But I don't understand the explanation above yet.

Despite Bowman's protests, the trinitarian god is an abstraction. It's either that or modalism........

[_Buffalo]

Despite Bowman's protests, the trinitarian god is an abstraction. It's either that or modalism........

...While the Mormon god is a hairless ape.