"God is Being Itself, Creationism Portrays Him as a Cause Among Others"

Great Bishop of Geneva! Can a Catholic Say the Bible is Infallible? · Creation vs. Evolution: Would Tuas Libenter Condemn Geocentrism and Young Earth Creationism Because of the Theologians who were Fine with Heliocentrism and Deep Time? · somewhere else: "God is Being Itself, Creationism Portrays Him as a Cause Among Others"

Modern Scholastics have a certain way of preferring Tertia Via over Prima Via. Here are Trent Horn and Pat Flynn explaining how the God of the Tertia Via, by the fact of being Being Itself and by the fact that Being and Goodness are convertible, is Goodness Itself, like a certain Iridium bar* in France was THE meter itself. They have oversimplified more than one parts of the argument, but they kind of have a point, as far as that goes:

Why the "medieval God" beats the "modern God" (with Pat Flynn)
The Counsel of Trent | 31 March 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO05XXXxZok

Here is, for one, how they speak of the Eutyphro dilemma, which is a very correct way of seing it:

So so the way we we split the dilemma using Plato's language 25:09 it's not we don't have only two choices to say [...] 25:14 is something good because God wills it is it good because he says so or does 25:20 God will it because it's good that goodness is outside of Him. The way 25:25 you split the dilemma is : God wills it because He is good or He is goodness 25:32 itself right and so naturally what He wills automatically will be good.

To be fair, in the video, I'm four minutes from the end, they have not mentioned Young Earth Creationists, they have mentioned William Lane Craig who isn't YEC, they have mentioned an Orthodox philosopher called Swinburne, perhaps he isn't either. They have not said anything against Kent Hovind or against Ken Ham or against Jonathan Sarfati. But other men have done so. If not every creation act followed from already existing natural laws, note the plural, and as physicists understand "natural laws", then God would have been "arbitrary" and therefore not the God Who's the Eternal Law, of which a human participation is the Natural Law (singular, as lawyers adhering to some theories of law understand the word).

Now, let's check what the Creation dot com has to say of the Eutyphro dilemma. Jonathan Sarfati** in a feedback:

Thus the dilemma can be shown to be a false one. God indeed commands things which are good, but the reason they are good is because they reflect God’s own nature. So the goodness does not come ultimately from God’s commandments, but from His nature, which then results in good commandments. As Steve Lovell concluded in ‘C.S. Lewis and the Euthyphro Dilemma’ (2002):

‘The commands of an omniscient, loving, generous, merciful, patient and truthful Being would not be issued without reason, and that since these characteristics are essential to God, His commands possess a strong modal status. It was also observed that God’s possession of these attributes is sufficient to give significant content to God’s goodness.’

In substance, Jonathan Sarfati has said exactly the same thing as Pat Flynn. So, believing in an all powerful God Who can do any miracle He wants and Who had a possibility to create or not create the world He created does not lead to believing in an all powerful tyrant who for no reason except his whim decrees something to be good or evil.

But back to the metaphysics of being, created and uncreated.

The idea of some critics of Young Earth Creationism (I'm reminded of my second Father Confessor, a Dominican Tertiary, I think the French former Dominican Jacques Arnould said so in a book, maybe Dieu n'a pas besoin de "preuves") goes a bit like this:

If you say that God created rather than that mutations and natural selection produced for instance mammals or for instance man, is "putting God and mutations and natural selection" in an either or relationship. It's like saying I either have to exist because I consist of atoms or because God gives me being, it cannot be both, which is false. Atoms*** are a created and non-ultimate basis of my existence, which should not be confused with the non-created and ultimate basis of my existence, namely God. Both are "the basis of my existence" but on two very different levels.

I'd perfectly agree that we should not confuse the levels. However, I would definitely NOT agree that any statement of the form "God and not X" is doing so. It would only be the case for all statements where X is the created and non-ultimate reason for something, and is actually the reason for something.

If I said "God, and not spacemen who try to elevate our spirituality and failed to do so with Atlantis, raised Jesus from the grave" I would not be committing this kind of fault. No Christian would agree such spacemen° even exist, or that they raised Jesus from the grave, or for that matter that they tried and failed with Atlantis and then judged it. As the spacemen are not the correct explanation, the denial of them raising Jesus from the grave would not be putting ultimate cause and created cause in alternation, they would be putting the ultimate cause acting miraculously against a fake cause supposedly acting by only better (material and spiritual) technology.

The one question that would really confuse the issues would be "was He raised by God or by the reunion of His human Soul and human Body?" or "was He raised by God or by His Heart starting to beat again and His lungs starting to breathe again?" ... God acted through the reunion of a soul with a body, and this reunion by definition, unless hampered, produces a renewed heartbeat and spiration.

So, likewise, about Adam speaking, denying he evolved is not automatically a question of pitting created against ultimate cause, in both cases actual cause. It may simply be to get rid of a fake explanation of Adam speaking.

And another thing. St. Thomas did not put Tertia Via first among the proofs of God. If you know Latin, it means "the third way" ... what is the "first way"?

The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

In a parallel text, or a parallel edition of this text°°, it doesn't go "It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion." But it goes "It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion, like for instance the Sun" (utputa sol). So, Riccioli understood the First Way to correspond to the proposition "God turns the visible parts of the universe around Earth each day" ...

In other words, God could stop day and night by simply stopping to provide, by divine fiat, this motion. Here I am skipping ahead into the philosophical discussion as much as Pat Flynn was in the parts not quoted, but basically, if God is the ultimate cause why the Sun moves around earth, there is at each point of moving causation a natural previous cause and mover, except the caused cause which immediately comes after the uncaused cause, so, for St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed in crystalline spheres, that would be the sphere of the fix stars, which would be contiguous to inferior spheres, and then move them. To me, that would be the aether, a substance which is not in space,°°° but which rather is the substance of space or spacetime itself. Also identic to the aether that light is waves in. But God Himself would not be caused to provide this movement by some even mightier physical mover, God would rather be "moved" in another sense by the necessity we have for a certain amount of light, warmth, and not ten times more, and hence also for moderation, and therefore also for night but one that has no sufficient time to freeze to zero Kelvin, more like perhaps to -5 or -15°C when it gets really cold. And even in the order of purpose rather than of physical application of force, He would be the ultimate mover, since we exist for His glory.

But either way, He was perfectly free to not create us. It's not God, it's we who are arbitrary, since our existance is arbitrary. But it's arbitered by a decision by God. God's goodness isn't. We are.

When we speak of God's goodness, sometimes Fundies do get heat for in practical morals not believing God is goodness and incapable of ordering the evil. I'll hand the word to Jonathan Sarfati:

Some animals only suffer during their short, innocent, miserable lives, but they will never be compensated for this. If innocents suffer but never get compensated, that’s not righteousness, not by my definition at least. Of course you can say that God is the one who decides what’s right and what’s wrong, and that I shouldn’t be arrogant.

Yes, one could, because your knowledge is fallible and your conscience imperfectly informed. After all, you cannot prove that God hasn’t a good reason for allowing the suffering of animals, e.g. to achieve a greater good. See also the discussion in The problem of evil.

But that makes the word ‘right’ meaningless, because even the cruellest things can then be ‘right’.

Indeed, given our imperfect knowledge, you are in a sense right. Consider how a tribesperson from a low-tech culture might view the removal of an eye in a child after a minor injury that seems to have healed. The specialist knows that the patient has ‘sympathetic ophthalmia’, and if the injured eye is not removed, the patient will go totally blind in both eyes, as happened to Louis Braille. Removal of the eye (without anaesthetic, if none is available) seems ‘cruel’, but is definitely ‘right’ given the greater knowledge. God’s knowledge relative to ours is infinitely greater than the disparity between the knowledge of the eye surgeon and the tribesperson.

In other words, certain people who want to use the phrase "God is goodness itself, and some have a mistaken idea that God arbitrarily decides what is good" are simply after validating their own conception of good against God's revelation. St. Thomas certainly didn't go that route.

But even less, if possible, did He go the route of stating "the prime mover moves by secondary movers" (quotation from him, so he would agree with this part), "however this or that model posits a secondary mover is not moved by another secondary mover but bby the prime mover only, therefore this or that mmodel is wrong'" ... whether it be Biblical Creation account of Adam, or the Scholastic and Geocentric view of why we have night and day.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus
3.X.2024

Sanctae Teresiae a Jesu Infante, ex Ordine Carmelitarum Excalceatorum, Virginis, peculiaris omnium Missionum Patronae; cujus dies natalis pridie Kalendas Octobris recensetur.

* Actually, the alloy is 90 % platinum and only 10 % iridium.

** CMI : Feedback archive → Feedback 2007
What is ‘good’? (Answering the Euthyphro Dilemma)
https://creation.com/is-good-what-god-commands-or-does-he-command-what-is-good

*** The ones observed in electronic microscopy are presumably real.

° Even Jimmy Akin, pretty well known for being rather favourable to spacemen, would not accept that they are our spiritual guides or that they are the main agents in wreaking judgement over iniquity.

°° First Part, Question 2. The existence of God
Article 3. Whether God exists?
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3

°°° It would be in space as Newton and Riccioli understood it, but not as Aristotle, Aquinas and Einstein understood it, where it would be identic to the fabric (Einstein) and be one instance of "the surrounding body" (Aristotle's definition of space).

Was the Lewis trilemma unsound in form, Beversluis?

When it comes to the formulation by Lewis, which is most appropriately so named, probably not:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Quoted via wiki, referencing Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity, London: Collins, 1952, pp. 54–56. (In all editions, this is Bk. II, Ch. 3, "The Shocking Alternative.")

Now, the form has been considered unsound by John Beversluis.

Another criticism raised is that Lewis is creating a false trilemma by insisting that only three options are possible.[36] Philosopher John Beversluis comments that "he deprives his readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious implications".[37] For example, it is logically possible for Jesus's claims (if any) as to his divinity to have been merely good-faith mistakes resulting from his sincere efforts at reasoning, as well as for Jesus to have been deluded with respect to the specific issue of his divinity vel non while his faculties of moral reasoning remained intact. Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig cites this as a reason why he believes it is an unsound argument for Christianity.[38]

notes 36 to 38 go to:

• Lord, Liar, or Lunatic: C. S. Lewis – Jesus Trilemma, About Atheism, retrieved May 5, 2014
• Beversluis, John, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 56.
• Craig, William Lane, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, Crossway Books (1994) pages 38–39.

As I just added in that wiki section, this misses (in fact more than) one point on C. S. Lewis' formulation:

Nevertheless, this misses that C. S. Lewis formulated it in terms of

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

This means, the Lewis trilemma as per naming author, is a general principle, applicability of which to Jesus is established elsewhere (i e, C. S. Lewis was dealing with a subset of the pentalemma, since already in other places excluding guru hypothesis or lacking historical veracity). The trilemma branches out where the overall questions deals with whether Jesus

• said it
• and meant it about the God of Judaic Theism.

Lewis was establishing elsewhere he believed there was excellent ground to take Gospels as eyewitness accounts (his arguments particularly involves John chapter 8, the passage recently disputed since omitted in Sinaiticus, if I recall correctly).

So, overall question whether He said it, elsewhere dealt with in positive, overall question whether He meant it about the God of the Torah and not about some Pantheistic concept also elsewhere dealt with in positive. The trilemma is formulated as a general law, applicable to Jesus in this precise case. It is not, except by concentration on nude quote in isolation, a trilemma exhausting all that could be said about Jesus. Once question is correctly limited, we see the trilemma as a correct answer.

Now, another thing, it is also formulated as a response to a specific back then popular meme:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.

A man ready to accept Christ as a great moral teacher is obviously accepting Him as historical. He is obviously also accepting in some sense His teachings are accessible. If he means "by reading the Gospels" he must be admitting both a historicity at least for logia and the context that is clearly Judaic and not Hindoo. If instead he actually means Jesus was a guru, he is probably accessing info on Jesus from some ... Hindu guru, or some seance, or some dream, or sth else, but not from a well informed reading of the Gospels in historical context.

Any argument for Christianity is unsound if isolated from the facts making it applicable, and many would be inadequate as overall arguments for Christianity in isolation, since the facts making it applicable are not directly stated in it.

The writer G.K. Chesterton used something similar to the trilemma in his book, The Everlasting Man (1925),[11] which Lewis cited in 1962 as the second book that most influenced him.

In fact, GKC was more like stating the uniqueness of the claim, in a passage leading up to the claim.

This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion . Nor is it even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone exaggerated unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.

The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Brahma. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.

A few paragraphs down from beginning of Part II On the Man Called Christ, chapter iii The Strangest Story in the World
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/everlasting_man.html#chap-II-iii

Where we also get the answer to Hitchens, if he thought Christ mad.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Severian of Scythopolis
21.II.2019

Scythopoli, in Palaestina, sancti Severiani, Episcopi et Martyris, qui, Eutychianis acerrime se opponens, gladio peremptus est.

His killer was an Eutyches-follower (or his killers were, if more than one) that is, more or less a Copt. His city is now called Bisān or Beit She'an.