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Yet first impressions can sometimes be mistaken, for many Hindus regard their gods and goddesses as manifestations of the Supreme God, Brahman.

I understand the concept of the trinity is different. It does not consider Jesus or the other two gods as manifestations or avatars of the supreme god, it considers all three to be the one god equally.

Hi Bob,

Not quite, our understanding of the revelation advances, but there is no new revelation.

The point I was making was that it advances through our introspection. As I said "Other than that [new revelation] we might try to discern deeper meaning by subjecting past revelations to logic and comparisons with what we know to be real. If these past revelations do not "add up" after we apply these tests, honesty demands that we should be prepared to abandon them - at least until new revelation makes sense of them."

Engineers!

I can't help it - that's the way I was created!

You seem to be stuck on the notion that God somehow needed to be created. Throughout our long discussions I have maintained that God was not created, but has always been, had no beginning. In other words, God is.

As I have said before, if the universe is "everything that exists" then God is part of it. If the universe needs a creator so does God.

Conversely, if God does not need a creator the universe does not need a creator.

If you machine a cyinder into a wedge and view it from three orthogonal directions or project it onto a screen you may see a circle, a square or a triangle, each of these distinct shapes can be properly said to be truly that of the one object or being. When we say that Jesus is God, we obviously do not mean that Jesus is the Holy Trinity, but He is a Person of God (Divine Person).

I quite like that analogy. Are you saying that the thing we call Jesus is really a projection, a representation or a mirage of God?

Hi Bob,

But what constitutes reality?

Now there's a question!!

Coincidentally I picked up a book at the bookshop on Sunday that addressed this question on the very first page ("The Pig that Wants to be Eaten", by Julian Baggini). As he says, philosophers have a habit of finding something we think we all know and then providing reasons for making us doubt we know it after all.

The catch 22 is that in order to advance such profoundly sceptical arguments the philosopher needs to use the one thing he cannot afford to doubt - his own ability to think rationally.

In effect there is no guarantee that there is no "evil demon" deceiving any of us about absolutely anything in our world. Or we might be mad and our insanity blinds us to the fact that others do not see the world the way we do. Or maybe evolution has endowed our minds with a fundamentally flawed set of logical principals.

So, in order to make any sort of progress we need to be able to trust our ability to reason and trust the data before us. This is where logic and the scientific principal is so useful. If we find things that are contradictory or nonsensical we need to be confident enough in our reasoning powers to dismiss them, or at least suspend our judgement of one or all of them. Honesty demands no less. This is why I believe it is dishonest of the church to claim the trinity is real - it doesn't make sense in our logical framework and there has been no success in rationalising it. The "best" that can be done is to speculate that it is a "mystery" or that god uses a different logic system to the one we do - hardly at all helpful and more like the behaviour of an evil demon that deceives us rather than an open and loving God.

> As I have said before, if the universe is "everything that exists" then God is part of it. If the universe needs a creator so does God.

??? I do not follow your logic here.

I thought it is relatively straight forward. If god is real and exists he is part of all that exists (by definition). We can substitute the word "universe" for the phrase "all that exists". (We might divide the universe into realms of the natural and supernatural, but nevertheless the term denotes everything that exists.) If the universe requires a creator then God, as part of the universe, also requires a creator. This highlights the nonsense of certain arguments for the need for a creator.

For example, arguments like Aquinas' uncaused cause are effectively arguments from exception. They exempt something (in Aquinas' argument, God) from the need to be created. He thinks that every effect has a cause and follows this reasoning in an infinite spiral. It can only be broken by positing that at the beginning there "must have been" an uncaused cause. In other words, Aquinas believes there must be an exception to the rule that every effect has a cause. His error is to leap to the conclusion that this uncaused cause must be God. As I said, if God is part of all that exists then there is no reason to expect that he deserves the special treatment of being labelled as the exception. If there needs to be an exception it might very well be that the natural world is the exception and God was brought into being by it.

I have often thought that there is a very compelling argument that religion, the scriptures and the churches were invented by Satan, the ultimate deceiver (ultimate "evil demon"). If there is one thing we can say about religions around the world it is that they are all different and all claim to be the one true religion. What else but an evil demon would want this circumstance to continue, especially when the differences have caused many bloody conflicts and much damage, pain and suffering.

Hi Bob,

But, as I have said over and over again, God is not part of the universe. All else follows including Aquinas' uncaused cause.

You might be able to define the universe to exclude god, but you have to agree that God is part of everything that exists.

For Aquinas' argument to work you need to divide things that exist into two categories; those that are caused and those that are not caused. There is no test (as far as I know of) to differentiate these two groups and there is no limit on the number of members in each group.

Aquinas' argument inherently assumes that there is only one thing (one cause) that is uncaused and assigns the label "God" to this thing. Clearly this assumption of uniqueness is unjustified. There might be many things that are uncaused; there might even be an infinite number of them. Spacetime (which I think is what you mean by "universe") is an obvious candidate. Perhaps even self awareness might be another in the "uncaused" category.

As interesting as Aquinas' argument is, it really gets us nowhere.

My statement "if the universe requires a creator then god requires a creator" is a shorthand way of saying that there is no justification for special treatment of your God.

Humm, don't believe in God, but do believe in Satan. Very, very interesting.

Thank you for winking when you said that!

Hi Bob,

> You might be able to define the universe to exclude God, but you have to agree that God is part of everything that exists.

In the very broad sense of the term perhaps,

That's the sense I am interested in and the one that makes it obvious what limitations are inherent in Aquinas' argument.

No, there is but one uncaused, God. As I have said before logic tells us that there had to have been an initial cause, in other words, something was made from nothing and that required an entity with no beginning.

There is nothing in Aquinas' argument that makes it impossible or illogical for there to be more than one un-caused thing. Can you explain why you think there can only be a single one?

Until science reaches zero and defines it definitively (and most physicists say that is not possible) God is the only logical explanation.

I don't think that holds at all. Cause and effect require time to exist. Anything that exists outside our spacetime (outside our universe) has no meaning in the context of cause/effect in our spacetime because it does not share our time. (I guess it is theoretically possible to extend the concept of cause/effect beyond our own time dimension, but I don't think that affects the arguments too much.)

>There might be many things that are uncaused; there might even be an infinite number of them.

The Greeks try that and rejected it. It is called polytheism.

No. Polytheism is the belief in many gods. I am talking about the existence of multiple things that are un-caused. It was Aquinas who labelled one of these "god", but that is not necessary nor logically justified.

> Thank you for winking when you said that!

Sorry about that.

Nothing to feel sorry about! I enjoy that sort of humour.

Hi God,

LOL!!!

My reputation is growing!!