I have been engaging in an exchange with the writer over at Arminian confusions website. Thibodaux has struggled to understand the most basic and simple points. His whining about self-imposed dependencies was a waste of time and his views are quite shallow. Here is the latest installment of his failure:
@God isn’t the ultimate arbiter of what is correct on your view.
When the n00b’s reasoning skills fail him, outright lies are the his weapon of choice.
That was because of an argument that God couldn’t be the basis of all truth because certain facts are beyond the control of God(facts regarding human choices). That is your position. The choice is ultimately up to the individual. Man Doesn’t think God’s thoughts after him he creates his own ideas.
@It is the case that other things have that power(our ability to make it true if we choose one way or another).
Nope, if we wish really hard with all our hearts that God didn’t exist, it won’t make it true. Our choices can only [partially] determine what we do, not what is correct. The n00b is lost in a fog of confusion.
Certainly we don’t have the ability to choose for God not to exists on your worldview. But we should recognize that your theory of truth is changed by your rejection of aseity. God and truth are independent of one another. God in your view isn’t the source of human predication. God is subject to exterior forces chance and abstractions.
@Well, determinists think people make their own choices. So, that doesn’t actually distinguish your position from any other position.
Their choices don’t come from them, they’re totally predetermined externally. Case in point,
“@In other words, every idea originates with God because man can only think God’s thoughts after him.”
Their choices come from them in the sense that they make the choices. They form the intentions to carry out activities and so forth. All man’s thoughts are derivative of God. It is only possible to think God’s thoughts after him. How is that even debatable?
@I’ve heard no significant metaphysical difference between your view of freedom and an Open Theist.
Except of course the knowability by God part, which is what defines Open Theism to begin with. [Cue more facepalms]
That is more an epistemic point about God’s ability to know them. I’m asking for a relevant difference between their perspectives on the wills of man. Nothing has been provided and nothing really can be provided because there is no metaphysical difference.
@You may assert that God knows the future but only inconsistently.
[Citation Needed]
I’m assuming that you think God knows the future. So, I don’t need a citation for that. Do you now reject that idea? The conflict is between the idea God knows the future and humans have LFW. You affirm both of those, so why do I need a citation?
@I just pointed out the irony and hypocrisy of your constant claim that I’ve made up a definition of aseity
Note that I never said he made it up. I’ve argued this point before with other Calvinists. A redefinition of a word, even if old (such as Calvinists do with ‘Sovereignty’), is still a redefinition. My view of aseity, on the other hand, is no redefinition, but a clarification of its scope via sound argument.
Hmm let’s quote him:
But keeping His promises is still a self-imposed dependency, thus refuting our objector’s made-up definition of aseity.
Notice the problem of which Thibodaux you will have to choose.
Concerning my views on God’s self-imposed dependencies, when I pointed out that they don’t affect God’s ontology, he writes:
@Ah, so they are irrelevant as I’ve pointed out several times.
My points are irrelevant to a subject I wasn’t addressing? That’s…irrelevant.
So, here is why this is silly, you are in a conversation about God’s ontology and you bring up irrelevant things. But instead of admitting that you were chewing on red herring you decided that the conversation ceased being about God’s ontology and is rather about irrelevant things to what we were discussing. Genius!
@It’s called an analogy. I may need to learn how to write but this man needs to learn how to read. The keyword is “like”.
He utterly fails to establish how I’m “like” a JW in any meaningful way. Just more deceitful claptrap from someone who will spout anything to discredit those who disagree, no matter how inane.
Reread what I said because these things were explained.
@Notice that Christ changed via his human nature and his divine nature was unaffected. Basically, this just means that each person of the Trinity on your view has an incarnate form.
Non-sequitur.
Well, your view makes no sense. God changes and he does not change. That is a surface-level contradiction.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/you-asked-did-god-change-at-the-incarnation/
@Another nature in which they take to interact with the world. That was what I was stating.
Colder. Colder.
Right, you prefer the contradiction.
@So, God has two natures. A divine and a created. That was all I was trying to get across.
Nope, not even close. Straw. Man.
It isn’t a straw man to point out how saying The Son changed because he became a human as a model for the trinity’s relationship to time implies they are all incarnate. But your view seems to be the heresy of Eutychianism.
http://spirited-tech.com/COG/2018/12/23/eutychianism/
@But think God changes and is unchanging in the same nature is contradictory.
Already addressed. “While God’s innate attributes themselves do not change…” above. The n00b isn’t reading the argument.
God is timeless and temporal on your view. With no clarification, it is simply contradictory. How does that jive with Divine Simplicity?
@This is a flat out rejection of aseity because God’s knowledge is derivative from some external reality.
Nope, because as I said, “Just as who God is faithful to isn’t the attribute of faithfulness itself, knowing specifics about us isn’t the attribute of omniscience.”
God doesn’t rely upon us to possess the attribute of omniscience, ergo God doesn’t have an innate dependency upon the world (as opposed to the n00b’s view, in which God innately knows about the world and it therefore must exist for God to be truly omniscient).
Yes, the true propositions about us aren’t apart of omniscience. Silly
@You’ve been refuted multiple times.
Strange. Apparently he’s confusing stepping in his own fallacies for refutations. Funny that he doesn’t actually cite any specifics.
Several articles refute your silliness.
@That was because of an argument that God couldn’t be the basis of all truth because certain facts are beyond the control of God(facts regarding human choices).
God letting us have choices is not “beyond God’s control.” Non-sequitur/straw man.
How are they not beyond his control? Isn’t that a good thing on your perspective? God doesn’t control the actions we perform. So, these propositions become true regardless of God. God could never cause someone to freely choose something. So, in terms of those facts in regards to human choices God has no power to make one truth be true over another. That must be one of those voluntary dependencies.
@Man Doesn’t think God’s thoughts after him he creates his own ideas.
Yep, which is why things that don’t come from the Father (per 1 Jn 2:16) can exist.
The verse is speaking to the things of the world and them not being of or from God. The world has metaphorical connotations for everything that is antithetical to God and his commands. Being they aren’t fitting to what God commands or his original design. It isn’t a denial of divine determinism. They are from the fallen world they originate with the world.
Another issue is where does this idea of “thinking God’s thoughts after him” arise from? Well, it is a more Van Tilian idea:
Most secondary discussions of Van Til’s doctrine of analogy have correctly contrasted it with the metaphysical assumptions of Thomism and Barthianism,433 but have fallen short of directly explaining how he avoids their same basic pitfalls. In an endeavor to accomplish both ends, we begin with the observation that Van Til’s doctrine of analogy concerns the relationship between different sorts of minds—that of God and man—and not between concepts and different grades of objects. Just as there are two levels of existence (uncreated and created) there are “two levels of knowledge, the level of God’s knowledge which is absolutely comprehensive and self-contained and the level of man’s knowledge which is not comprehensive but is derivative and re-interpretive.”434 The pertinent question regarding our thought forms is not whether they reflect external objects when taken in isolation, but whether they reflect God’s all-encompassing interpretation/plan for that object. After all, no object can convey the whole story about itself. But, supposing that there is a Creator who has foreordained the end from the beginning, it follows that he must possess a complete systematic interpretation of things. Man’s interpretations, then, are “analogical” of God’s when they reflect, in a finite measure, God’s perspective on reality.435 Capturing the sense of the term “analogy,” true beliefs are like the divine mind as its finite reflection, and unlike the divine mind as quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to God’s self-contained perspective. Notably, on Van Til’s scenario, all true beliefs are analogical,436 with the result that the skeptic cannot disparage man’s knowledge of God as more ambiguous than his perceptions of other sorts of objects (see fig. 12).437 In fact, because the knowledge of God is the precondition of true (analogical) knowledge of all other things, it can be said that theological knowledge is the most certain, clear, and well-attested of all.
Bosserman, B. A.. The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til (pp. 111-112). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Think for a moment of post-modernism. Some postmodernist reason for their position because they believe humans never can access to the whole of reality. For example, suppose I say it is 9/11 today. Your mind thinks back to the terrorist attack. But before 2001 you may have thought of a birthday. The fact of 9/11 has meaning in a greater context. But we never have a comprehensive context for all reality. We would have to be omniscient. Imagine a book from which you open to a random page read three words and close the book. Would you know what those words meant without knowing the rest of the book? That is how some postmodernist imagine human knowledge is like. Nobody has the full story. But suppose someone that has full self-contained and perfect knowledge of the book communicates with you. You would be able to know more about the book. This is why Van Tilians stress the importance of Divine Revelation. Furthermore, these very same arguments I’ve provided have been provided by others:
Understood in its fullest import, the doctrine of the Trinity, along with the doctrines of creation and natural revelation, imply a high Augustinian doctrine of divine sovereignty (Prov 16:4, 33; Ps 139:16; Matt 10:29–30; Rom 8:28; Eph 1:11).542 Since man, his faculties, his motives and powers are exhaustively inspired by and dependent on the Absolute Creator, it follows that they must be equally subject to God’s continued governance, such that they cannot deviate from His eternal plan at any point. It is equally impossible that God could elect to limit his sovereign direction or knowledge of human history at any point in order to allow for libertarian freedom on the part of man. On such a scenario, God’s knowledge would be ultimately receptive, and His will ultimately reactive, to the finite creation. And if even the slightest measure of independence is injected into the creation, God must cease to be the self-sufficient source of unity and diversity, and become instead a finite member of a super-divine dialectic between Himself and mankind.543 But of course, God is Triune. And it is impossible for His personal Will and personal Intellect to desist in exhaustively governing and comprehending all things, for if they could so negate themselves, they would have never been mutually exhaustive in the first place, but always threatened by an open future which resides beyond them.544 So again, the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of divine sovereignty mutually imply one another.
Bosserman, B. A.. The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til (p. 143). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
@All man’s thoughts are derivative of God. It is only possible to think God’s thoughts after him. How is that even debatable?
Since man’s thoughts are often evil, such an inane theory would make God the author of sin in defiance of the biblical citation above.
I responded to that above and gave a further rationale for why people have thought the way I do. The understanding of the citation is what I disputed. For it isn’t clear that John was denying determinism from the quotation and it would contradict verses implying that God does determine such things.
@But we should that your theory of truth is changed by your rejection of aseity.
That’s both grammatically atrocious, and entirely unclear.
I edited it slightly above to state we should recognize that truth is independent of God in your scheme.
@God is subject to exterior forces chance and abstractions.
If he means *involuntary* subjection, then it wouldn’t be a self-imposed dependency as I argue.
[concerning me being kind of sort of like an Open Theist]
Sure, but then these self-imposed dependencies are just incompatible with aseity. If God is subject voluntarily to outside forces, then he voluntarily gives up aseity.
@That is more an epistemic point about God’s ability to know them. I’m asking for a relevant difference between their perspectives on the wills of man.
Kind of like I have little difference of perspective with a Roman Catholic on the Trinity. There’s a reason why ‘association fallacy’ is one of the dumber fallacies out there. He also still utterly fails to establish how I’m “like” a JW in any meaningful way.
I explained the JW analogy in a previous article. It isn’t my fault that you’re just incompetent. I stated that no difference exists between Arminian and an open theist in regards to what freedom a human agent has. You said there is some mythical difference between them. I challenged you to provide a relevant metaphysical difference because free will is a metaphysical dogma. But you provided an epistemological one.
@The conflict is between the idea God knows the future and humans have LFW. You affirm both of those, so why do I need a citation?
[citation still missing]
I don’t need one. You would make a great Muslim apologist.
@Hmm let’s quote him:
I stated it was our objector’s made-up definition, as in what he’s propounding. Nowhere did I state that *he* made it up. He needs to brush up a bit on his reading comprehension.
He is technically correct. It doesn’t imply that I made-up the position. I think he probably thought that initially and change his mind but I can’t read minds. I find it ironic he criticizes my reading comprehension when his responses are so poor and reflect someone that hasn’t thought much on these issues. They are barely responses to the things I’ve said that it is just hard to read such waste of words.
@you are in a conversation about God’s ontology and you bring up irrelevant things.
Our objector appears very confused, since my points weren’t about God’s ontology (except how it’s not affected by self-imposed dependencies).
Yeah, I don’t think you comprehend the complaint. The point is that you talk about irrelevant things. Get with the program. (He will respond by continuing his irrelevant conversation).
@Well, your view makes no sense. God changes and he does not change. That is a surface-level contradiction.
From someone who practices little more than surface-level reading, this comes as little surprise. Already refuted with my point, “Christ as a man was inarguably temporal in some respects” See above.
Yeah, it is almost like Christ possesses two natures.
@Right, you prefer the contradiction.
[Citation needed]
Lol
@It isn’t a straw man to point out how saying The Son changed because he became a human as a model for the trinity’s relationship to time implies they are all incarnate.
God doesn’t have to become incarnate to deal in time. He manifest Himself in time on numerous occasions in the OT prior to the incarnation.
Yeah, when I state God is incarnate, I simply mean he takes on multiple natures. It isn’t like the Father and Spirit must be born of a virgin or something.
@God is timeless and temporal on your view. With no clarification, it is simply contradictory.
‘Transcendent’ and ‘immanent.’ Existing outside of time, but capable of manifesting Himself within time. He invokes another strawman.
When he manifests himself in time, is that truly him? Is he there qua his divinity? If yes, then he is temporal/spacial. If not, then he is timeless and those manifestations are theophanies.
@Yes, the true propositions about us aren’t apart of omniscience. Silly
“Just as who God is faithful to isn’t the attribute of faithfulness itself, knowing specifics about us isn’t the attribute of omniscience.” See above.
@Several articles refute your silliness.
[citation needed]
The Council 