 It's sort of part of a kind of a temporal process, which indicates if you're begotten, what were you before you were begotten? The answer to that is that the Son is eternally begotten. What does that mean? It's a mystery. I think what we're dealing with here is what's sometimes called anthropomorphism. That is the sense in which we're trying to project beyond ourselves onto God language that we have that we use. But you already did by calling Him Father and Son. You already did. You cannot go back. I think what Christian theologians have sought to do is do the best they can with the limitations that we have. Didn't explain anything. Oliver describes a Latin or psychological trinity defined in terms of relations, which starts with God being one, God's oneness. In contrast with a social trinity, which starts with God being three, God's threeness. Personally, if forced to choose, I'd go with Oliver's own trinity. It's just confusing for no reason, man. I relish the linguistic gymnastics because they portrayed the mighty maneuvers we humans undertake to support our theological beliefs. You're right on that one, man. I bet there'd be more kinds of trinities out there. There are. In Hinduism, for example. I meet the director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame, a pioneer in analytic theology, Michael Ray. Hello, Michael. Theology justifying a trinity. Here's the analogy I like. Suppose I take a piece of clay and I make a statue of Gumby. Then I ask you, what's the relationship between Gumby and the piece of clay? You might say, well, they're the same thing. But I say, oh, now look, that piece of clay existed before Gumby. Something can't exist before itself. So they're different. Are they two different things? If I'm going to sell it, can I sell you Gumby and then charge you extra for the piece of clay? No. But the solution I like says, well, here's the relationship between Gumby and the piece of clay. They are the same but not identical. They're one in number but not one in being. Where you have two things sharing the same matter, you count one material object. My fist and my hand. There's one object here. The fist goes away when I open my hand. The hand doesn't go away. So in some sense, they're two separate things. Man, this is such a philosophical excursion into absolute nothingness. Yet again, I don't want to be disrespectful here. After all, this is my faith. This is where I'm coming from. However, why would you make this argument without understanding yet again that you're humanizing God? You're talking about fabricated, created things. We all know that God is transcendent of all of that. So why would you even use the example of clay? Why would you use the example of your created hand? Why would you even use any type of example that you find within creation? It of course doesn't add up. We all know God is eternal. God is transcendent. This is really frustrating. This relationship is all over the place. So Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I want to say the shared matter is the divine nature. Their relationship is analogous to the fist and the hand or Gumby and the piece of clay. The fact that they are centers of consciousness, I think that's a fair term. I haven't wandered into a heresy by saying that, have I? Depends a little on who you ask, but I think that's fine. So if they're each centers of consciousness, it sounds like that undermines the argument that they have the same nature when each one becomes a center of consciousness and that the claim is that they're all the same stuff. I think that's problematic. I think the divine nature is literally stuff. So there's that. I do want to affirm that there is different consciousness there. The tradition says that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share a will and they share an agency. But I think if they're going to be distinct persons, it has to be the case that the Father thinks things like, I am the Father and not the Son. The Son thinks things like, I'm the Son and not the Father. So the view I'm offering. Yes, you are absolutely correct. Because if we have that distinction, we face another problem, however, which means that they're not co-equal. If the Father really believes that he is the Father and the Son really believes that he is the Son, then we have two totally different attributes. I know that I'm not co-equal to my Son. I am his Father. I have dominion over him until he's 18 years old. Of course, we are not the same. And this is why it's problematic to say that God is manifested in three personhoods that are equal, that are absolutely co-equal, but not the same. Especially if we take the Holy Spirit into account. What does that even mean? So now you have one person, which is the Father. Okay, I understand how that is a person. Then you have the Son, which I yet again would understand how that is a person. And then you have the Holy Spirit. How is the Holy Spirit even a person to begin with? It says, hey, sameness is an identity. Just as you get the same material object, when you have two things that share the same matter, so too you get the same God when you have... Yeah, same material objects that share the same material matter. Did you notice what you just said there? God is not material. Two divine beings that share a divine nature. And then if you say, well, but how could those beings have different centers of consciousness? I think I'm within my rights to say, I don't know, but I also don't see an argument for the conclusion that they can't. Do you have a name for this here? It ended up being called Constitution Trinitarianism. Material Constitution is the relationship between two things that share all of their material parts in common. Michael's constitutional trinity stresses common essence as the core unifier. Frankly, after all the parsing and nuance, which I admire and enjoy, I'm left with the simple sense that the three whatever still struggle to be counted as monotheism. You are absolutely correct. For all I know, the trinity may indeed be ultimate reality, but to me, what can I say, the trinity just doesn't square with one God. So something would have to give. This is super interesting, man. You have an atheist here or a consciousness researcher that does understand intuitively, even though he doesn't believe in one God, he says, hey, even if the trinity is the ultimate reality, then it's either or. Either we have a triune something or we have one God. Listen one's grip on one God or we can once hold on the trinity. Neither is nice for traditional Christians. Are there other ways for a kind of trinity to be really one God? I asked the former professor of the philosophy of the Christian religion at Oxford, now at Rutgers, Brian Leftow. One way you can start to get an entrance to it would be from one of the prime trinitarian texts at the beginning of the Gospel of John. We read, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. Now there are two different thoughts there. The word was with God. That means the word and God are two different things. I am with you. We would not say that I am with myself ordinarily. True. On the other hand, the word was God. Well, that's a claim of identity. And so it's as if the word was God with God, God repeated, God a second time over. Now, one way I like to make sense of that would be in terms of time travel. To the extent that time travel doesn't make sense. Imagine that I were to leave the room right now travel back in time a few minutes and then enter and stand here and sort of ask myself a question and answer myself. You then have left towel with left towel, left towel twice over. So one way I think about the Trinity is it's as if God had a life which involved something like time travel. Now notice what's going on when I travel in time. Wow. There's one substance. There's me in two different places. Wow. There's two of something. There's two episodes of my life going on at once because there's the earlier episode when I'm still here and I haven't time traveled and there's the later episode when I've time traveled, when I've come back in and here I am bothering myself. So if time travel is imaginable and conceivable then it's imaginable that one person live a life in which at every time more than one episode of that life is going on. That I think is one way of understanding what the Trinity would be. It's God has this really odd sort of life in which he's always living three episodes of it at once. Why it would be that way? Well, that's one place in which the doctrine is mysterious. So my understanding is that the traditional Christian view is that there are really three persons or sometimes centers of activity in the one concept of God but the three persons are really distinct. Yes, distinct but co-equal is the claim which I say is the biggest contradiction because if you are distinct that means you are different. If you are different you cannot be co-equal. Myself there are two really distinct entities that are talking to each other. I mean my later self might ask my earlier self a question that my earlier self didn't know was coming because my later self might have thought it up while he was getting into and out of the time machine. So there's certainly two distinct centers of consciousness going on here. What's nice about my version of it is that it secures monotheism for the view pretty clearly. I mean there's just the one God who's being repeated over and over again. This is so hilarious and tragic at the same time. First and foremost listen closely. He says my version. Who are you? Are you a prophet? Why would we listen to your version now? 2,000 years after Jesus. Why don't we listen to Jesus's version to begin with? But anyways, yet again listen closely. He says that his version secures monotheism. So they're really grasping at straws here trying to appeal to monotheism knowing subconsciously that it doesn't appeal to monotheism at all. If you start from three separate things and try and sort of build one God out of that you wind up with a very weak sense of monotheism and that's not how the doctrine is supposed to work. I wouldn't suspect that God was this way if I weren't a Christian and didn't accept it on a revealed ground. I'm willing to accept that there are sources of information that an unaided reason wouldn't have access to. Brian's Trinity, more than other trinities, is strong on monotheism. Good for one God. As a logical consequence, however, Brian's Trinity must be and is weak on three persons. This is amazing. They're debunking themselves. It has to be done. It's kind of sad but liberating at the same time. This is really the snake eating itself. It is self-autolossus in a sense. They're destroying themselves from within. It has to be infinite. I appreciate the adroit time travel innovation. The innovation. Novice that I am, I cannot much distinguish this tripartite time travel God from the long-labeled heresy where the three persons of the Trinity are really one divine person. You are a smart man. Thank you, man. My head swirls with competing trinities A notion of reality that even if true, pardon me, would still seem an odd way for reality to be. I'm wondering now how to make the best case for the Trinity. I asked the emeritus philosopher of the Christian religion at Oxford, Richard Swinburne. The doctrine of the Trinity claims that there are three divine persons, but the other two derive from the Father. The doctrine says they derive necessarily. That is to say it's not a voluntary act of the Fathers to produce the Son and the Spirit. It follows from His essence that He will do so. If we see something as the obviously best act to do and we have no temptation to do anything else, we'll do it. So for God too, if He sees something as the best thing to do, He, not being subject to temptations in any way, will inevitably do it. The sort of God to which arguments lead is a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and is perfectly free. That is to say He's free from inclinations to do things. Yeah, and now you're saying that God will ultimately do something. So you are speaking about the essence of God that ultimately will produce the best outcome which in your mind is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which is the Trinity. Which would mean that the essence of God produced the Trinity. So even if you would accept the Trinity, it would only mean that God actually created the Trinity. Then what He sees is a reason for doing them in virtue of their goodness. Now, if God the Father were a solitary God, if He were the only God, there would be something rather wrong, wouldn't there? People have said surely a perfectly good God will be a perfectly loving and a perfectly generous God. But how could that be if He existed all by Himself? And surely perfect goodness, perfect generosity, perfect lovingness would want to create some other being with whom to share everything He has and was. And therefore God's perfect goodness requires Him to share. And hence the need for a second person to the Trinity, given the traditional name of the Son. Now, two can be a bit selfish. It was Richard of St. Victor in the 12th century, I think who first saw this point. He said that if you really love anyone, you will want to find someone for them to love other than yourself and to be loved by other than yourself. Otherwise, your love is selfish. You want it for your own sake. And therefore the love of the Father. Again, as potentially beautiful that might sound to some people, it already presupposes that God is selfish, like a human would be selfish. But because God is self-sufficient, there is no jealousy. There is no selfishness in God truly. At least nothing as we would expect it in human beings. Do you understand? And this is why it all leads back to a singularity. If you look at this life in causal chains, you see cause, effect, cause, effect, cause, effect. You have to come back to the first cause. And the first cause has to be uncourced, uncreated. And this is that one cause, that one God. But you are adding something to that cause. You are adding three personages to that cause in order to explain that cause. That cause itself, as you admit in your own doctrine, is not to be explained. It is ultimately unknowable. Nobody tries to explain the essence of God because you subconsciously understand that this is God. The essence of God is God. The Trinity, if it were to exist, would still be a creation. The Son would inevitably bring about a third member of the Trinity because this would mean that each member of the Trinity would have someone else to love and be loved by other than the third member of the Trinity. That is to say, three is the minimum number. Yeah, essentially you are just proving that you are not a monotheist because you do not trust one God. You cannot trust that one God to be self-sufficient and loving enough in himself. You then attribute to him that he must be selfish then. And this is why you rather believe in three Gods that love each other. Necessary for unselfish love. That's it. Let's be honest. And therefore I think this is, to my mind, a strong, prior argument for the doctrine of the Trinity. There are three divine persons and the three divine persons follow from the one person. But why only three? That's the objection. Why stop there? And the answer is this. Three is the minimum number necessary for unselfish love. But if there is three, then that demand for unselfish love would be satisfied. Now, God cannot create the best of all possible worlds. Any world he creates would be less good than some world he could create because more is better. So, if you were to say, well, wouldn't it be better if there was a fourth divine person or a fifth divine person? The answer is, well, of course it would. But then there would be no reason to stop anywhere. But in that case... Don't you understand that you just said that God created the minimum that is needed to have goodness. God created the Trinity. That's literally what you just said. God's perfect goodness would be satisfied by his creating only three because it's not logically possible to do the best. But it is logically possible to do the best kind of act. And the best kind of act would be to create three divine persons. And any fourth person would therefore be only created by a voluntary act and someone created by a voluntary act would not be God because he wouldn't be a necessary being. So three is not merely the minimum, but the maximum number for divinity. Then with logic and argument they seek to explain or at least to make plausible how one God can be three persons. Not too much three persons which would undercut one God. Not too much one God which would undercut three persons. Not too much one God. No, no, no. We don't want that. The Latin or psychological Trinity privileges the one God. Constitutional Trinity explains how three divine persons are numerically the same without being identical. Trinitarian Mysterianism, who knows how it works? I guess that's the fallback. I guess so. I'm taken by Swinburne's argument for the necessary existence of three divine persons and of only three, not because I think it's true, but because it is a masterpiece of philosophical rigor. Yet if three fit some higher order good or principle, a kind of abstract object, then wouldn't that good or principle be more fundamental than God? The Trinity indeed has challenges. So this is of course an atheistic perspective. He believes as long as it leads to more goodness it is more important than God, so therefore it's more important than truth. Oh, forget it. Closer to truth. No, you're not. All right. And this is it for today's video. I'm going to cut it off here because it is long enough as it is. Nevertheless, I want to say that this was a really entertaining watch. Ultimately, however, it was the Christians that ate themselves from the inside out and debunked the Trinity. For me, coming from an Orthodox Christian background, very tragic to watch, but very interesting details were pointed out here because ultimately they realized if you have more Trinity, you will have to have less monotheism. If you want to go towards more monotheism, then you have to have less Trinity, a beautiful display that those two concepts cannot coexist. All right, guys, but this is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave the thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. And if you want to support this channel via Patreon, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support, guys. As always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.