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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that God must exemplify pain.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Pain is a real property, not a mere absence.
      ?

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    • 2.God is the ground of all reality.
      ?

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    • 3.The ground of all reality must exemplify every real property.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Classical theism holds that God is ipsum esse subsistens — the pure act of being in whom all perfections are identical with his essence.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Pain, insofar as it involves awareness of privation, presupposes a gap between actual and ideal states that pure actuality cannot contain.
      ?

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    • 3.Therefore God cannot exemplify pain without contradicting the classical doctrine of divine simplicity and pure actuality (Aquinas, ST I.3).
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Process theology (Whitehead, Griffin) holds that God has a consequent nature that genuinely receives and feels the world's suffering as divine compassion.
      ?

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    • 2.Divine feeling of creaturely pain is not numerically identical to creaturely pain but is an empathetic prehension that transforms suffering into redemptive experience.
      ?

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    • 3.God exemplifying pain in this analogical, non-identical sense satisfies the grounding requirement without making God a patient of brute unintelligible suffering.
      ?

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