Post by himself on Jul 22, 2011 5:50:01 GMT
An imperfect person may, occasionally, produce something that is perfect
An example would be nice.
Perhaps we are confusing different uses of the words "good" and "perfect"?
Certainly. A being is perfect when it lacks nothing which it needs to be fully itself. Thus, a perfect triangle would have three straight sides of lines of zero width meeting in three completely closed angles. It may accidentally be cut from green felt, meaning that its greenness and its feltiness are accidental to its being-a-triangle. The triangle would not be imperfect if it were instead purple or were drawn in chalk instead of cut from felt. However if the chalk lines were wavy, thick, or failed to meet in closed angles, the triangle would be imperfect.
The triangle is a good triangle to the extent that it fulfills the perfections of triangularity.
+ + +
I meant ethically better - less suffering and sin.
But would that not be boring, an earlier complaint of yours? If one of the perfections of a human being it the ability to choose heroism and to rescue another, would that not require a world in which such heroism might be practiced, a world of striving? Does not overcoming danger require a dangerous world?
Action and change also require passage of time (I would have thought), so on the same logic, there can be no action or change in heaven. Which I think would be boring.
How could it be boring if no time passes? Can you be bored in an instant?
But when we theists use first cause type arguments, we dismiss (I think rightly) the idea that the universe could be causeless - with the picture in our mind of God existing and being the cause that began the universe. I know some cosmological arguments use cause in a timeless or eternal sense, but I think it makes no sense to say that God created without also saying that there was a state (let's not call it a time) when God existed and his decision to create had not been actualised.
That shows the limits of imagination. There is no "when" outside of time. This is all big bang physics stuff and not easy even to conceptualize. We can only approach it from analogy. It is like "up" from Flatland. Aquinas, since he had no big bang physics, could not postulate the world as finite in time and so assumed secundum argumentum that the world was itself eternal. That did not prevent it from being caused.
My futile question was Could it have been the case that God didn't exist and nothing ever existed or ever will? God is postulated as a necessary being, i.e. if he existed he necessarily exists, but could he not have existed?
He is not postulated as a necessary being, but a necessary being is deduced and subsequent to other arguments is equated with God. As a being of Pure Act, God is the one whose essence just is to exist, and so is Existence Itself. Once you reach that point in the argument, your question equates to "Could Existence not have existed?"
Well in reality, no-one in the play [Hamlet] exists in the play at all. So the parallel is invalid.
Dude, work with me. It's not a parallel, it's an analogy. A is to B as C is to D. That is, God's relationship to creation is like an author's relation to his work. Of course, it's not exactly the same, but a sand table with waterways is not "exactly" the same as an electrical circuit, either.