The Confusing Incarnation

[Physics Guy]

I'm still trying to understand what terms like "substance" meant in ancient and medieval times. As I've said, I'm pretty sure "substance" didn't mean "material composition", though that's how we'd mainly use the term "substance" today. What I'm guessing is that the common problem faced by people in all times has been to try to explain why things happen as they do, and not otherwise, when that why isn't clear from anything we can easily see. The world follows rules that aren't obvious.

Today we tend to fill this vacuum of understanding by recognising that things are full of detailed microscopic structures, in which the smallest components follow very simple rules, but with so many interactions between all those tiny pieces that the whole thing can be incredibly complicated. That kind of explanation just wasn't available in past centuries. And yet people still wanted to explain most of the things that we want to explain.

So they turned to the kinds of explanation that they did have: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. They would try to explain rainbows and lightning with definitions and deductions. The whole idea that anything humans make up could define the real world just seems silly today. Kant demolished the so-called ontological proof for the existence of God by defining the greatest possible 100 Taler to be a hundred Taler that would necessarily exist in his wallet—and then noting with disappointment that in fact he had no Taler there. Most of ancient and medieval thought seems to me to overlook that same disconnect between the hypothetical and the real; you can't actually explain anything with definitions.

I reckon it's the rueful old joke about the rigged poker game, though. We know it's rigged, but we play, because it's the only game in town. When definitions and deductions are the only story you can tell about why we have rainbows, then they're the story you tell. And when much of your understanding of the world consists of stories like that, you get committed to a basic belief in the real power of logic. People were inspired for centuries by Plato's famous cave analogy, which says that the revelations of reason are to sensory experience as the light of day is to shadows on a cave wall.

Today we'd say that most of those enlightening revelations of reason were pure fiction, made-up words chasing each other in circles. They reached the right conclusions about what happens in the world—much of the time, anyway—simply because the conclusions were known in advance from experience. Their logical explanations about why things have to be as they are were mostly worthless, like invalid easy proofs of known theorems whose real proofs are much harder. Well; perhaps our descendants will shake their heads at how we thought it was such a big deal to map real events onto equations, when that doesn't explain why the equations are true.

Anyway it seems to me that even if the ancients used the term "substance" in a different way from us, still they kind of made it play the same role that we today make it play. They wanted to explain how things were in terms of what their substance was. They tried to say that things were really simpler than they might seem, because a lot of details weren't important, and once you filter out the irrelevant details you can recognise a few basic patterns that repeat many times in the world.

I think we can pull the trigger to say that in many respects the ancients and the medievals were just plain flat wrong, they were barking up the wrong trees, there's nothing to salvage from their whole kind of approach. We can still recognise that in some basic ways they were trying to do what we try to do. We haven't fully succeeded yet, either.

[Kishkumen]

it seems to me that even if the ancients used the term "substance" in a different way from us, still they kind of made it play the same role that we today make it play. They wanted to explain how things were in terms of what their substance was. They tried to say that things were really simpler than they might seem, because a lot of details weren't important, and once you filter out the irrelevant details you can recognise a few basic patterns that repeat many times in the world.

That’s an interesting observation, and a lot of what you say here is historically correct in terms of your description of intellectual progress. I don’t know enough to say whether, say, God’s omniscience was expected to fill the same role as the Lucretian atom. At first blush that suggestion sounds absurd, but if God is envisioned to be the ultimate reality, so to speak, or the fundamental thing upon which all else is contingent, then calling omniscience an aspect of God’s substance may not be too different from saying the world is made out of little bits. It just turned out that the latter was repaid by observational support, whereas the former remained an abstract argument lacking such a payoff.

It seems to me that those who recoil from a world of fundamentally meaningless materialism will prefer the option of an underlying reality that is pregnant with meaning, or, rather, is meaningful in an ultimate way and the source of all meaning. To say that finding a quark or other tiny bit of material substance is to do the same thing as argue God’s substance may have been true at one time, but those exercises diverged, ultimately creating two quite different conversations. The best classical theologians today do not dismiss the value of finding quarks; instead they insist that God will always underly the existence of everything and that finding a tinier piece of matter will never bridge the gap between a world of fundamental meaning and one in which meaning is an effervescent byproduct of one short-lived species’ evolutionary development.

Maybe the theologians are wrong, but those who fully embrace a materialist paradigm seem, for the most part, to be insisting on a vision of meaning that looks a lot more like the latter than the former. The fun thing is to watch materialists furrow their brows and lecture about meaninglessness like a parent telling their kids to grow up and eat their liver because it’s good for them. “Now we know for a fact that the concept of God is stupid and childish because we found a Higgs boson particle,” or some such. This board provides plenty of such entertainment. Materialists don’t find themselves humorous in saying such things because their perspective is accepted as self-evidently true. We have arrived at the point where technological mastery has become its own ideology replacing ultimate meaning with the meaning of ultimate meaninglessness. Only mental and psychological adults need apply for future viability.

I like your posts because you are light years beyond most of us in being able to engage with all of these different arguments in a truly thoughtful way. I enjoyed your post above immensely.

[Holy Ghost]

...the idea of the incarnation. It is definatly not something which has been approached as substance and accidents as if Jesus human quality were accidents. The creedal decisions were that Jesus was genuinely all human and still genuinely God. He was not just sort of human.

So human+ ? Genuinely god? To be god, then the being must also be human?

(that is probably helped to be seen as possible by the idea of the Trinity in which the Son seperate person is eternally God. I think there is no way to bridge the whole gap of understanding beyond noting that no human can understand God completely.

How do humans know there is anything about God beyond the edge of human understanding? That is, how can we know there is anything about God that we don't in fact comprehend?

A couple thoughts on the matter do come to mind. First if humans are created by God and have no other source of being then there is not much barrier between the two.

Is the same true of the giraffe that God created, and for which there is no other source of being?

In the incarnation God wills to limit himself.

Limits himself in what way? Does he not have the ability to unlimit? If so, is he actually limited?

I think it can be said that the whole story and meaning system of Christianity requires the idea of incarnation as both really human and God. IN simple outline we come from God but our potential which is injured can be renewed, expanded and given new destiny by people sharing a new life with God in Jesus. This sharing is hope and faith looking to actualize the living principals Jesus spoke of and tried to embody for us. I think this makes more sense if Jesus in truly human sharing our ignorance uncertainties and fears. He lived by faith as we live by faith.

So from AD 0-33, Jesus was not all knowing but was ignorant, uncertain and fearful?

I find myself well aware that I am saying the Christian myth does not function without the idea of the incarnation. Maybe that means it is just myth and the mystery of incarnation is just a story device to make the story flow. On the other hand the flow of the story may be a reflection of a pattern of real meaning. That pattern might be understood as having more substance than the accidentals of how did this divine and human fit together.

Does the duplicity of talking out of boths sides of one's mouth that is creedal Christianity propel it by defying logical examination as an unsolvable 'mystery'?

[huckelberry]

...the idea of the incarnation. It is definatly not something which has been approached as substance and accidents as if Jesus human quality were accidents. The creedal decisions were that Jesus was genuinely all human and still genuinely God. He was not just sort of human.

So human+ ? Genuinely god? To be god, then the being must also be human?

(that is probably helped to be seen as possible by the idea of the Trinity in which the Son seperate person is eternally God. I think there is no way to bridge the whole gap of understanding beyond noting that no human can understand God completely.

How do humans know there is anything about God beyond the edge of human understanding? That is, how can we know there is anything about God that we don't in fact comprehend?

A couple thoughts on the matter do come to mind. First if humans are created by God and have no other source of being then there is not much barrier between the two.

Is the same true of the giraffe that God created, and for which there is no other source of being?

In the incarnation God wills to limit himself.

Limits himself in what way? Does he not have the ability to unlimit? If so, is he actually limited?

I think it can be said that the whole story and meaning system of Christianity requires the idea of incarnation as both really human and God. IN simple outline we come from God but our potential which is injured can be renewed, expanded and given new destiny by people sharing a new life with God in Jesus. This sharing is hope and faith looking to actualize the living principals Jesus spoke of and tried to embody for us. I think this makes more sense if Jesus in truly human sharing our ignorance uncertainties and fears. He lived by faith as we live by faith.

So from AD 0-33, Jesus was not all knowing but was ignorant, uncertain and fearful?

I find myself well aware that I am saying the Christian myth does not function without the idea of the incarnation. Maybe that means it is just myth and the mystery of incarnation is just a story device to make the story flow. On the other hand the flow of the story may be a reflection of a pattern of real meaning. That pattern might be understood as having more substance than the accidentals of how did this divine and human fit together.

Does the duplicity of talking out of boths sides of one's mouth that is creedal Christianity propel it by defying logical examination as an unsolvable 'mystery'?

Ghost, I can reply to your comments, each by number.

1to be god one must also be human?
no
2Everything I know about anything informs me there is more that I do not know. To travel north to British Columbia informs me that there are regions to the north of that that I do not know.
3 giraffes?
Of course and our dogs as well
4 could God unlimit himself?
Of course, the limit is action in conjunction with the mortal human Jesus not a matter of fundamental being.
5 Jesus experienced ignorance and fear?.
Of course.
6 It is not illogical to realize that there are things we understand only in part.