Hey community 👋🏽 I’m thinking about starting a Substack and I want your input. For those who don’t know it, Substack is a sleek platform built for writers and bloggers. It’s become the new wave in long-form content: clean, easy to use, and genuinely enjoyable to read on. The idea: post my longer thoughts there regularly so you can actually see how I think in full detail. Stuff that just doesn’t fit on a platform like this. I’ve got a ton of ideas and papers I’ve been sitting on that I haven’t published yet, including: • Arguments for God • Historical apologetics • The problem of evil • High Christology And a lot more you haven’t heard me talk about yet. If this is something you’d want to read, let me know in the comments. If there’s real interest, I’ll seriously consider making the move. Thanks, everyone 🙏🏽​​​​​​​​​​​​

I recently learned about Kants Critique of Pure Reason and I was wondering if his argument indirectly undermines arguments from contingency for Gods existence. Because arguments from contingency require us to conceptualize causality and necessity beyond the bounds of space and time(or beyond experience), doesn’t it follow that we can’t really pull any knowledge from these arguments if we accept Kants framework? I’d be open to any corrections if I misunderstood Kant (probably) or arguments from contingency!

Random question for classmates: how do you stay consistent with learning and engaging with the material in this class or just philosophy in general, especially when you have your own doubts or things that might hold you back from fully engaging with things? Just curious and love to hear more from the people in this class! :)

I just watched Tim, Than and Coley video responding to Dan McClellan about Christology and boy it was awesome, and it sparked a series of thoughts that I wanted to write down because it helped me clarify where I currently stand in this debate. First, just to summarize what I understand to be Dan McClellan’s position. As far as I understand it, when he talks about high Christology, he does not think that high Christology necessarily means Jesus is included within the identity of Yahweh. Instead, he argues that what people call “high Christology” can be explained within the framework of Jewish agency traditions. In other words, Jesus can be extremely exalted, can carry divine authority, perform divine functions, and still remain an exalted agent of God, rather than God himself. Now to be clear, the idea of divine agency in Judaism is real. Agents can represent God, act in God's name, carry God's authority, and sometimes even perform actions associated with God because they are delegated. That part is not controversial. But what struck me while watching the video is that the debate actually follows a kind of back-and-forth between two explanatory models. One model, associated with scholars like Richard Bauckham, argues something like this: in Second Temple Judaism, there are certain prerogatives that uniquely belong to Yahweh—things like being the creator, receiving worship, exercising sovereign authority over creation, sharing divine glory, and so on. When those Yahweh-specific prerogatives are attributed to Jesus, the simplest explanation is that Jesus is being included within the divine identity. The exalted-agent model then responds: not so fast. In Jewish literature, agents can be extremely exalted. Angels, heavenly figures, and mediators can carry divine authority and perform divine actions without themselves being God. So attributing divine functions to Jesus does not necessarily mean he is included in the identity of Yahweh. And at that point, the conversation should move to the next step.

Basically, the napkin analogy in this discussion really rubbed me the wrong way. If I remember correctly, TJump asked something like: what finite number would demonstrate the capacity to hold infinitely many napkins? And from that, the conclusion was that since we can’t provide such a number, then we can’t have knowledge of any omni-properties. And honestly, that just feels completely off. Because the way we argue for omni-properties has nothing to do with enumeration. That’s already the first mistake. It treats omnipotence or omniscience like they’re just really big quantities, like “a lot of napkins,” or an actual infinite number of napkins, when that’s not what they are at all. Omni-properties are not about how many. They are about the absence of limitation. And we already reason like this in other domains, especially in mathematics. When we say a series converges, we don’t go through every single term. We don’t need to. We analyze the structure of the series. Same thing when we say there is no biggest number—we don’t check all numbers, we show that for any number, you can always go further. That’s a structural demonstration of no upper bound, not an enumeration. So demanding a finite demonstration of infinite capacity—like the napkin example—is just asking for the wrong kind of proof. Now, applying that here, what we actually need to show is not “how many things” a being can do or know, but that no limiting principle applies to it. And this is where the idea of ultimate reality comes in. Like from the PSR and the blob of everything we can say the totality of reality has a necessary foundation, aka Ultimate reality. If ultimate reality exists, then it is: - the necessary ground of all reality - not dependent on anything else - the ground of all conditions, distinctions, and possibilities Now here’s the key point that gets missed: Any limitation that ultimate reality would have cannot be extrinsic, because there is nothing outside of it to impose that limitation. It grounds everything. Like there is nothing outside the Blob of everything.