Let’s say a Muslim asks “how many gods died on the cross?” It seems like every obvious answer seems to land you in heresy: Say “one” and it sounds like you’re either claiming the Father suffered (patripassianism) or that there are multiple gods and one of them died (tritheism). Say “zero” and you’ve denied that God truly died for humanity. Say “the Trinity died” and you’ve collapsed the distinction between the persons. The model of Conciliar Trinitarianism dissolves the puzzle through a careful equivocation on the word “God.” Predicatively, “God” works like a descriptor, it applies to anything that exemplifies the divine nature. In this sense, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are each “God,” because each exemplifies the one divinity-attribute. Nominally, “God” works as a proper name, and it refers to one entity alone: the Father, who is the unsourced source of the Son and the Spirit. There is exactly one “God” in this sense. With this distinction in hand, the crucifixion question splits in two: Nominally: zero gods died. The one God, the Father, did not suffer or die. Patripassianism is avoided. Predicatively: one entity that is “God” died. The Son, who genuinely exemplifies divinity, truly died on the cross. The reality of the incarnation and atonement is preserved. Without the equivocation, you’re trapped. Univocal use of “God” forces you to either deny the Son’s death, implicate the Father in suffering, or count multiple gods. The two-sense distinction lets you affirm what orthodoxy requires: the one God (the Father) did not die, and God (the Son, predicatively) genuinely did. This way, monotheism stays intact and the persons stay distinct. Thus, the Christian is not forced to take on unwanted consequences.

Hey everyone! Just wondering what y’all’s thoughts on the abortion debate from a philosophical standpoint. I know that many people believe that something is not a “person” until it has a mind. Dustin Crummett gave a couple of arguments in favor of this position in a video on Joe Schmid’s channel “Majesty of Reason” where he was debating Trent Horn on abortion. One argument he gave was called the cerebrum transplant argument, where he essentially said that if one’s mind and organism separate, one goes with the mind and not the organism. Hence, one must be their mind, and not their organism. What are y’all’s thoughts on this?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the moral problems that the Bible often presents. When this topic comes up, the first thing that comes to mind is God’s command to kill the Canaanite children, and although many apologists like William Lane Craig have tried to argue that such an act was morally correct, the most adequate response is to affirm that the text is a hyperbole that does not imply that children actually died in the conquest. However, that problem can be transferred to the flood that occurred in the time of Noah, and although it can also be applied to other cases (such as the death of David’s newborn son or Sodom and Gomorrah), this is simply the clearest example that comes to mind. I want to carry out a process that I like to call “evaluation of theodicies under restricted conditions.” I’ve been thinking about this and I cannot find any that are truly satisfactory, and many of them simply seem like attempts to avoid facing the real problem and to downplay it. I would be especially interested in hearing new responses or stronger versions of existing ones, because so far none seem successful to me. First, I want to clarify the framework I am assuming in order to avoid answers that change the playing field. 1. The flood in the Book of Genesis corresponds to a real historical event (although possibly regional rather than global). 2. The event was caused or intentionally brought about by God. 3. God is morally perfect and omnipotent. 4. The flood was carried out as a punishment for human beings. 5. Children below a certain age do not have full moral responsibility, and therefore are not guilty of wrongdoing. 6. No one who is morally upright would want to kill innocent children when there is a way to avoid it. Under these conditions, I am evaluating theodicies with a very specific criterion: is the flood morally justifiable? The focus of this post is on children because it is easier to empathize with children than with animals or plants, since although they share innocence, there is debate about whether they have souls, suffer, or even consent to death, but the argument could also be extended to them.

Recently, during the debate prep on Thursday, Tim used an objection to things with beginnings needing causes in the property of quantum fields to generate particle-antiparticle pairs seemingly at random with no source. While the obvious response to this is to point out that just because we don't observe the cause doesn't mean there isn't one, and this effect is still contingent on the properties of the fields themselves. However, this led me to think about this effect and how the naturalist would use this process to explain where stuff comes from. A few important notes. 1. Both the Theist and Atheist are following Ockham's Razor, so the theory with the most post hoc assumptions is worse. 2. In physics it is a well-known principle that the source of the vast majority of physical laws comes from symmetries in the universe. 3. One common theory for the Big Bang is that the massive energy condensed into particle anti particle pairs in a process called creation or pair production. 4. The way this process doesn't violate the conservation of energy on normal scales is that the particles and antiparticles annihilate each other. One might ask if these particles always annihilate each other how could the universe come about. The answer is this: In our universe where basically all of the fundamental laws of physics are derived from symmetry we have one absolutely necessary violation of this called CP violation. This causes the decays of Kaons to slightly favor matter to antimatter. The physics itself is not as important as the asymmetry. If the naturalist is to attempt to impose a simple mechanism for the structure of the laws then they would be most reasonable to choose symmetry as this mechanism. To account for this effect they would also need to create an arbitrary limit to this mechanism and establish an asymmetry. This shows that not only are the constants (like the tuning pegs on a guitar) are finely tuned for life and existence, but the underlying structure (the guitar itself) is also finely tuned.