Evidence for God from Science

Kurieuo wrote:Maybe Nessa could do a Kiwi version?

Jac3510 wrote:.

Jac3510 wrote: Now it's clear to me that we can think of all of those things in God -- His anger, sadness, hope, joy, love, etc. But really these aren't "fundamental" ideas. They are all related to God's will and/or His intellect. His will insofar as He wills things to happen or not happen and His intellect insofar as how He judges what has happened. So I, for one, would say that God's emotions are an analogy of an analogy. You could say that God's emotions are second order analogies, I suppose. But I think we just need to be very careful here, because I don't think it would be proper to think of God's essence under the auspices of one of those emotional analogies in the same way it is to think of His essence under the auspices of a proper perfection. Yes, the Scriptures say that God is Love, but that language, while very true, is very poetic. John wasn't making an ontological statement about God's nature. It's easy, then for us to say that He is Love. But is God Sadness? Is God Despair? Is God Fear? Because if attribute them to God, that's what you have to say. I'm not comfortable with that..

Jac3510 wrote:
I agree quite a bit with what you've written here, Mallz. So long as we understand that His hatred and mercy are not two different parts of him, such that when we are unrighteous we relate to Him through this part called wrath and when we are hurting we relate to Him through this part called mercy, then you've stated it very well. To the extent that we speak of divine emotions, we are (like when we're discussing divine attributes) talking about the way that our intellect conceives of this selfsame essence. We are the variable, not Him. It's just that in the case of emotions, our language is analogous twice over. That is, in the case of the normal attributes, we are speaking analogously by one step. So God has power, but because He is identical with His essence and existence, the way in which we think about His power is only similar to how we think of our own. Or put differently, we identify in ourselves this thing called power, and we see that God can be thought of in some very real sense of having power. That's one way to consider the divine essence. Since we are finite, we cannot consider it, in itself, fully and completely, so we have to think about it within one particular mode, and that mode must be from our own perspective. And since our perspective is that of a composite, temporal entity, so we think of God that way. And so while there truly is something "like" power in God, that "likeness" makes our language analogical.

But in the case of emotions, we have a double analogy. So let's take sadness. When you feel sadness (or any other emotion), you have an intellectual judgment of a particular thing and then a physical reaction to that judgment. So a thing judged one way with this particular physical reaction, we call sadness. Now, in God, we have judgments of things (by analogy, of course). But we also have this analogy of an analogy in the idea of a physical reaction. God obviously doesn't have a physical reaction since He isn't physical. Nor does God react. But insofar as the physical reaction is closely related to the nature of the judgment ("that is sad!" we say), there is a sense in which we can see a similar type of "reaction" in God. So that's why I say such language is a double analogy: an analogy of an analogy.

Anyway, as to your question, I say that simply because John wasn't trying to write a metaphysical thesis. If you had asked John if he identified this emotion called love with God Himself, He would be confused by that. He would talk about how important love is and how it trumps all things. But even then he'd be less interested in the emotion per se and what it is rooted in . . . the idea of putting someone else's needs before your own, of doing what is good for them first, and so on. The "others orientedness" of love is what he would focus on, not the physical reaction in your body we experience as "love." John understood clearly that God doesn't have a body. He says that God is Spirit, and spirits don't have physical reactions to anything and so don't feel "love" in precisely the same sense we do. They don't feel anything sense feeling is something that bodies do! So they "love" in a sense similar to the way we do but not identical to the way we do. And that's enough to show that "God is love" is analogical. It is true as stated, but it's true in an analogical sense.

Jac3510 wrote:I agree quite a bit with what you've written here, Mallz. So long as we understand that His hatred and mercy are not two different parts of him, such that when we are unrighteous we relate to Him through this part called wrath and when we are hurting we relate to Him through this part called mercy, then you've stated it very well. To the extent that we speak of divine emotions, we are (like when we're discussing divine attributes) talking about the way that our intellect conceives of this selfsame essence. We are the variable, not Him. It's just that in the case of emotions, our language is analogous twice over. That is, in the case of the normal attributes, we are speaking analogously by one step. So God has power, but because He is identical with His essence and existence, the way in which we think about His power is only similar to how we think of our own. Or put differently, we identify in ourselves this thing called power, and we see that God can be thought of in some very real sense of having power. That's one way to consider the divine essence. Since we are finite, we cannot consider it, in itself, fully and completely, so we have to think about it within one particular mode, and that mode must be from our own perspective. And since our perspective is that of a composite, temporal entity, so we think of God that way. And so while there truly is something "like" power in God, that "likeness" makes our language analogical.

But in the case of emotions, we have a double analogy. So let's take sadness. When you feel sadness (or any other emotion), you have an intellectual judgment of a particular thing and then a physical reaction to that judgment. So a thing judged one way with this particular physical reaction, we call sadness. Now, in God, we have judgments of things (by analogy, of course). But we also have this analogy of an analogy in the idea of a physical reaction. God obviously doesn't have a physical reaction since He isn't physical. Nor does God react. But insofar as the physical reaction is closely related to the nature of the judgment ("that is sad!" we say), there is a sense in which we can see a similar type of "reaction" in God. So that's why I say such language is a double analogy: an analogy of an analogy.

Anyway, as to your question, I say that simply because John wasn't trying to write a metaphysical thesis. If you had asked John if he identified this emotion called love with God Himself, He would be confused by that. He would talk about how important love is and how it trumps all things. But even then he'd be less interested in the emotion per se and what it is rooted in . . . the idea of putting someone else's needs before your own, of doing what is good for them first, and so on. The "others orientedness" of love is what he would focus on, not the physical reaction in your body we experience as "love." John understood clearly that God doesn't have a body. He says that God is Spirit, and spirits don't have physical reactions to anything and so don't feel "love" in precisely the same sense we do. They don't feel anything sense feeling is something that bodies do! So they "love" in a sense similar to the way we do but not identical to the way we do. And that's enough to show that "God is love" is analogical. It is true as stated, but it's true in an analogical sense.