 Save 10% with my code Bobby10 on raw, organic, grass-fed and grass-finished, freeze-dried organ meats from grassland nutrition. Link in the description box. Alright guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Guys, this is the ultimate last shot at The Trinity. You guys recommended The Trinity a philosophical inquiry by closer to truth. Allegedly, this video is a philosophical, intellectual masterpiece on The Trinity, which even the Jewish community appreciated. This video is very long, so probably we're gonna split it in two parts. With no further ado, let's have a look. God, if there be such a being. My approach has been generally analytical, philosophy of religion style, examining the nature, essence and traits of God, if there be a God. I've generally not considered sectarian doctrines the specific God claims of diverse religions, but in my avoidance have I limited my scope. You sure have. Obviously, this is what many new ages realize at the end. They think they can reinvent the wheel, and ultimately they just discard thousands of years of religious practices. If it means absolutely nothing, then later in their journey they realize that there is a lot of value in it. It is very similar to martial arts for example. Let's say you want to learn fighting from scratch, but then after a while you realize, hmm, there's actually a boxing gym nearby. Oh, there's actually a Jiu Jitsu school. Ha, maybe I could learn wrestling here. Then you get to appreciate the thousands of years of martial art, and it's the same with spiritual practices as well. Why would you want to learn it all by yourself if we have so much evidence? Christianity is so common that our ears have become dull to its astonishing, some would say preposterous claims. True. Is God triune a trinity? Is one God three persons? How could one be three, or three be one? That's the question. The notion to be charitable does not strike me as obvious, perhaps not even coherent. Yet very smart thinkers, philosophers hold disbelief. What arguments do they pose? One need not be a Christian, or even a Theist, to appreciate clever moves of logic and linguistics, and humanity's search for deep reality. Of course, this is actually something that was very impressive to me coming from a break of Christianity, because I was a Christian, I was baptized at birth, and then in my 20s I fell away from the faith, and I explored many different ideologies, be it spiritual ideologies or even nutritional ideologies. I went vegan, I fasted, I drank the shamanic brews in the Amazon jungle, and whatnot. Just then to later realize, hmm, the religious folks are not that silly and stupid as I thought. Quite the opposite. When I saw the first debates between Theists and atheists, out of the sudden the atheists looked like spoiled brats that were complaining that their room shouldn't be cleaned in front of their parents. Their arguments, quote unquote, about a reality that exists with no creator started to seem silly and unsophisticated. That's why this man here, even though he might be an atheist, gets to appreciate the intellectual depth of those theologians. Interesting. We're gonna see something objective. As objective as it can be. The Trinity, how could one God be three persons? I can't allow the numbing repetition of the term Trinity to obscure its disruptive assertion. What's to be learned from its strivings for coherence? Should I immerse myself in the world of philosophical theology? Feel what it's like to think like a Christian philosopher. I visit one of the world's leading centers for philosophical and analytical theology, Scotland St. Andrews University, the Locos Institute. I begin with a leader in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, a past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen. Peter, a Christian claim of God gets you immediately to a Trinity, which if I'm sitting back and thinking about the structure of reality seems pretty bizarre. What are these three things that compose one God? I promise you I will answer that question, but I want to begin with this. I'm impressed by that. Assuming that there is a God, why did he bother to make a world? That is, why did he bother to create anything besides himself? Now, Jews and Muslims have a very good answer, so that love could exist between persons, so that there could be persons who love each other, and there could be persons who cooperate to do things. I don't think that this is really the Muslim claim. The Muslim claim is God created us to worship him for each other. All these good interpersonal relationships could not exist if there were only one person, the divine person in the world. But of course, that does imply that there are goods that are not inherent in God's nature. The Christian doctrine says that all goods are inherent in God's nature. Not only is there one person who loves another, even if there was no creation, then there would even be two persons cooperating to do something for a third person. All these goods exist, full and perfect and complete inside God, so that everything that happens in all the goods of interpersonal relations that happen in the created world are a kind of copy of these. Yeah, and as beautiful as that might sound for a few, he explains here that God ultimately in his unity wouldn't be able to experience love because he would be alone. This is really what he's saying here. So therefore, he needs multiple personages in which he then can transmute love, experience love with. But this is yet again a very anthropomorphic approach of understanding God. This is yet again very humanizing, of course, because we are in a duality. This is why we experience it that way. Hey, in order for me to experience love, I have to have a wife. Maybe in order for me to experience a different type of love, I need to have a son. This is very human. God in his unity is love, of course. He has those attributes within himself. At the same time, he is transcendent of everything. He is transcendent of the dichotomy of a duality. In his singularity, there is no division. He is the alpha and the omega, after all, in the Christian worldview. So he is the beginning and the end with no beginning and no end. He doesn't need a subject for his love. God would create and also have everything inside that goodness for the total reality, goodness of reality would need inside God's nature. And Christians end up having the one and the Jews and the Muslims have the other. But how is this possible? That is, the Muslims in particular, Jews might be more polite on this, but both believe that the Christians are triathletes. They believe in three gods and the Christians insist that they believe in one God, but that's not very believable. How could there be three persons in one God? Because each of them is divine person. Each of them is God. For me, the argument ends by saying that there is an essence of God. Because even if you look into the Orthodox doctrine, you look into the Catholic doctrine, you will see that the trinity is not the end. It's not only Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Those are the persons, but you have the essence of God. And the essence of God, even from a Christian worldview, is absolutely unknowable. And so therefore God has those three personages through which we in turn can know him. But they will agree that in his essence, in the core of God, so to speak, it is a unity after all. It is indivisible. And this is why the doctrine of the trinity, no matter how you like to frame it, you might want to call them persons. Okay, in Hinduism, you have Brahmin, which is the essence of God, so to speak. And then you have countless manifestations of God. And those manifestations, some choose to call Gods again. So can't you see that it's very problematic once you start adding anything to God? One way around this mystery is to think that there might be no such thing as just counting, but rather counting by f's the Christian. I mean, how many Gods are there? One way for the Christian answer was, well, there isn't any unique answer to that question. What do you want me to count them by? You use the word God, so maybe you want me to count them by Gods. That is by divine beings. Oh, in that case, there's one. But do you want me to count them by persons? Oh, well, there are three then. And if you think that's contradictory, that's because you think there's such a thing as absolute counting. If you really believe that there are these three... Okay, so now you have to twist it so far to say, ah, just because you believe there is ultimate counting, this is why it doesn't work for you. You are playing intellectual word games to confuse people. But everybody can see right through it, man. You are telling us that there is one God, but no, then there are three persons. And ultimately, if somebody tells you, okay, that leads to three Gods, you say, what is ultimate counting? The centers of consciousness, three persons and go, why do you care if somebody calls it monotheism or tritheism? What do you care? Yeah, we do care because we have a long history of paganism and paganism in some instances led to child sacrifice and other very disgusting practices. We've seen that every single time people start worshiping something besides God, this doom saw society. And this is what we want to get away from. And this should have been the motivation of Christianity as well. But apparently in the Roman Empire, it was not that easy to sell monotheism to the pagans. And this is why we have this modified version. So children of the Jews, they're our parents. We believe in their God. It is their God who has become, we believe incarnate in Jesus Christ and his triune nature revealed to us later. There can't be about when anything more stark than the insistence of the Hebrew Bible that there is one God. It is extremely important to us that there is one God. But we find that in our tradition revealed to us that there are three. Okay, so you exactly explained why this is flawed. You find within your tradition that it is three. But at the same time, based upon the old Jewish sources, which you trust, it is one. So you debunk yourself, man. Peter posits that for God to have within God's own self, intrinsically all perfections, including love, God must consist of three persons. Exactly what I said in the beginning. Social contract requiring interrelationships. No, love is a social contract for people because we live in a duality for us to come close to the love of God, not really reach it, but close to the love of God. We need interpersonal relationships. God is transcendent, and he is the opposite of us mere mortals. He is eternal. He doesn't need interpersonal relationships. Such reasoning is derived from what's called perfect being theology. Analyzing God's traits as nothing greater can be imagined. But why should God, if there is a God, conform to human notions of strict perfect beingness? Moreover, he's not conforming to perfect human notions of beingness. He's not conforming at all. If anything, we can try to conform to him. Point of the story is that the Christians tried to fit God into this anthropomorphic box of interpersonal relationships. Don't you see? It's not as if this imaginary God has to live up to our standard. No, we don't understand that he transcends our standard. Does Peter's explanation hold with only a particular kind of trinity, a so-called social trinity, where the three persons that compose the trinity have separate centers of consciousness with independent wills and intents? A lot of fancy words for nothing. I meet a professor of systematic theology, a pioneer of analytic theology, a fellow with St Andrew's Oliver Crisp. At the heart of the doctrine is the idea that God is one in essence, but three in person. That is, there's Father and a Son and a Spirit, and these three are distinct, though they share somehow in one divine essence. One model says, well, in a way, these three are something like relations. Subsistent relations is the term that St Thomas Aquinas uses. So the Father and Son and Holy Spirit are one. Aquinas is quoted often, but Aquinas lived 1200 years after Jesus. He was somebody that philosophized further on the trinity. Why don't we go back to Jesus if we see him as God and wonder why he didn't talk about trinity explicitly? If Jesus was God incarnate and the trinity is important for us as a doctrine, wouldn't it be just logical that we would have one verse about Jesus talking about the trinity? And it can only be differentiated in the fact that they bear these relations to one another, being begotten of the Father, being spirited by the Father and the Son, perhaps, and being ingenerate or not being generated by anybody that's the Father. So just the relations distinguish the person. Well, another option is this. Yet again, anthropomorphism, Father and Son, you need a human relationship wrapped around God to cater to your human feelings so you feel closer to God. God transcends the Father and the Son. Say that what you've got is a much more robust sense of distinctness. You've got Father, Son, Holy Spirit and their persons in this sense that they have each sense of will and consciousness and so they can make decisions together. And then there one in the sense that let's say three human beings are instances of the one thing humankind. That's sometimes called a social view of the trinity. The first one is sometimes called a Latin view of the trinity or a psychological view of the trinity. Emphasizes the oneness and this second view emphasizes the distinctness of the three-ness. But the worry is that you so emphasize the three-ness that it's not sufficient to retain monotheism, which is what you want to have if you want to remain part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And some Christian religions have been happy to bite that bullet, but that seems to be to my way of thinking to be too great a cost. So it's not clear exactly in order to explain the trinity sufficiently, you would have to jump out of monotheism. You would have to become a polytheist in order to explain the trinity sufficiently. But we have to be careful here. We do not want to do that. So we're gonna stick with a vague explanation of the trinity in order to stick with monotheism. Do you understand that those two concepts bite each other? They do not work with each other because they're not the same. You have monotheism and you have polytheism. You have monotheism, one god and you have the trinity. Polytheism. To me that the different families of views out there of trying to understand the trinity ultimately work, my own view is what I would think of as a kind of trinitarian mysterianism. In other words, it is a mystery. I acknowledge it's a mystery. I confess the doctrine at the heart of it. How do we make sense of that? I'm not exactly sure. I don't have a clear idea of it and I'm not sure that anybody has a clear idea. What about? Okay, so you just admitted that nobody has a clear idea of it. You will have to accept it as a mystery. But at the same time this mystery is the reason for your salvation. You will have to believe in that exact God. You will have to believe in the triune God in Jesus as God to be saved according to your doctrine. But you can't even trust it and therefore you say it's a mystery. This is the definition of blind faith, man. The idea that these three things are sort of different faces of the same thing. Right, now that is what's known as a trinitarian heresy or a mistaken view that the church has distanced itself from, which is called modulism. Modulism is the view that you've got basically one god who wears three different masks on three different occasions. You might think it's a difference between, you know, Batman and Bruce Wayne. They're both the same entity, but one wears a mask and one doesn't. But you're talking about the same individual. Now the problem with that is it's insufficient. It's insufficient in the sense that you don't have a robust sense of persons. What you've just have is one entity. So that's not trinitarian. If the reality is there are three gods, I don't care if there's a modulism or not. That's what it is it is. But what bothers me is some of the internal contradiction. Because if it's God, it has to be either everlasting or atemporal. But in that case, how can you have a father and a son begotten is 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.