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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    42
    It is impossible for God to be a single Person; the conce... — Carmelics
    Home/Trinity
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    It is impossible for God to be a single Person; the concept of a unipersonal God is incoherent.

    Trinity
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.If God is perfectly loving by his very nature, he must eternally be giving himself in love to another.
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    • 2.God is free not to create, so the object of his necessary love need not be a creature.
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    • 3.Therefore, the other to whom God's love is necessarily directed must be internal to God himself.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Perfect love does not require an eternal co-equal object; it requires only the disposition and capacity to love, which God can exercise freely in creation.
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    • 2.Aristotle's self-thinking thought (Metaphysics XII) demonstrates that a perfectly self-sufficient divine intellect achieves its highest activity in self-contemplation, not in relation to another.
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    • 3.Conflating the eternal exercise of love with love's necessary precondition smuggles a temporal model of love into a discussion of atemporal divine nature.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Islamic and Jewish philosophical theology, from Maimonides through Al-Ghazali, consistently demonstrates that strict divine unity is coherent and even rationally preferable to plurality of persons.
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    • 2.The supporting argument illicitly assumes that God's essential properties must be fully actualized eternally in the same mode they would be in time, which begs the question against classical divine simplicity.
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    Trinity

    Related

    Aristotle's self-thinking thought (Metaphysics XII) demonstrates that a perfectl...Conflating the eternal exercise of love with love's necessary precondition smugg...God is free not to create, so the object of his necessary love need not be a cre...If God is perfectly loving by his very nature, he must eternally be giving himse...
    +4 moreShow less
    Islamic and Jewish philosophical theology, from Maimonides through Al-Ghazali, c...Perfect love does not require an eternal co-equal object; it requires only the d...The supporting argument illicitly assumes that God's essential properties must b...Therefore, the other to whom God's love is necessarily directed must be internal...

    Similar

    The claim that there is only one God is true only of the conceptual un...71%On Trinity monotheism, God is not identical to any single personal bei...69%On a one-self trinitarian view, neither the Father nor the Son is iden...69%The Trinity is just an ordinary case of one-many identity.68%

    Source

    AI-extracted3/3 agreementValid
    SEP: trinity
    Craig, as summarized in the passage
    View source passageHide passage
    Like Swinburne (see section 2.3) Craig argues that it is impossible for God to be a single Person because “if God is perfectly loving by his very nature, he must [eternally] be giving himself in love to another” (593). And since God is free not to create, but must be loving another, “the other to whom God’s love is necessarily directed must be internal to God himself” (ibid.). For Craig this is a plausibility argument rather than a strict proof, in support of the claim that the concept of unipersonal God is incoherent. Unlike Swinburne, he does not seem to think that this argument is importa...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The extracted argument accurately represents Craig's plausibility argument as described in the passage: God's necessarily loving nature requires an eternal object of love, which cannot be a creature (since creation is free), so it must be internal to God, implying God cannot be a single Person.

    Confidence: The argument is clearly attributed to Craig and its premises and conclusion are explicitly stated.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit