A worldview that welcomes sense-making (instead of making it problematic) is our birthright, as it were. We spontaneously receive a world in which logical (mathematical) laws, moral absolutes and nature’s observable regularities all cohere, even though those three classes of things are wildly disparate kinds.
It’s also a world in which you and I are not the only persons. We intuit, not infer, the personhood of certain other beings, who also make sense of the world, negotiating their cognitive business with the help of logic, morality, natural law, each irreducible to the others. Persons have fallible yet reliable (or reliable yet fallible) memories, and we know that fact about everyone we meet before we meet them. (Even the preceding sentence is true only in a certain worldview.) As I noted and asked last time around:
. . . our “person-realism” is no more deducible or otherwise inferable from our nature’s logical side from our capacity to evaluate; or either is from our inductive ability; or either is from our realism about the world and the many who are “not me.” We take these radically different yet mutually comporting things for granted every waking minute of every day. What is the justification for taking for granted a network of basic beliefs that functions as a worldview?
Further:
These wildly disparate aspects—logic, the love and pursuit of truth (and other absolute values), world-realism, person-realism, pattern-grasping, the reliability (and fallibility) of memory—form a network of . . . “non-negotiables”: we won’t give up any of them. Apart from that network, none is intrinsically intelligible.
Leading to this claim:
Exactly one network of non-negotiable beliefs, argues this Christian apologist, adequately explains the unity required by this diversity because it identifies and affirms its one absolutely indispensable member: the Triune God of the Bible.
I argued that the intelligible predication we all depend on presupposes the equal ultimacy of unity and diversity; any reduction of either to the other destroys the possibility of predication. (Think Parmenides and Heraclitus). I left for a future post—this one—an argument to the conclusion that the godhead’s plurality is not just any multiplicity, but a triunity or trinity, consisting of not more or fewer than three persons. Only an argument for that is an argument for Christian theism, not a theism that bears a family resemblance to it.
The argument for triunity, made first by Brant Bosserman in his The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til, proceeds by a process of elimination (whose logical force is not independent of but rather presupposes Christian theism).
A maximum of one divine person makes diversity itself problematically derivative.
A maximum of two divine persons implies that their context is abstract, not itself personal.
A third divine person, however, can provide the personal context for the other two, as each of the other two provide the personal context for the third. Each person is “in” the other two. Their diversity is not derivative of their unity, but rather equally ultimate.
Why not a fourth (or fifth or more)? Because that would introduce impersonal couplets or “groups” of persons. A group is not concrete. There is no nonarbitrary role for a fourth person equal to those of the other three. To relate persons one and two to person three is to treat all three concretely, not abstractly. God is, as Bosserman has it, “the absolute personal context of creation”: if the ultimate context in back of everything were, say, space-time, that is, “an empty sphere of chance,” then “impersonalism reigns supreme and God ceases . . . to be the master of created history” (179-180). I beg your indulgence as I quote Bosserman at length:
The Father and the Son are related to one another within the personal context of God the Holy Spirit; the Father and the Spirit are related to one another within the personal context of God the Son; and the Son and the Spirit are related to one another within the personal context of God the Father. As facilitators of intra-divine relationships, each Triune person must be be construed as indifferent to the others whom they relate. Instead, each person in himself is identical with his activity of relating the other two. . . . (178) [A] Triune person must be defined as an individual who resides above, and is active within, a dynamic between [sic] three persons of whom he happens to be one. . . . (179)
Any other number [than three] of divine persons would create a disparity between the personal contexts and the personal relationships; between the “one” and the “many” of the Godhead. For example, if God were bi-persona—perhaps as Father and Son but excluding the Holy Spirit—one of two equally problematic conclusions would follow. Either (a) the Father and the Son would be reliant on an impersonal context as that which could facilitate their mutual relationship and definition; or, (b) one of the two persons would have to function as an unrelated and thus undefined context, in whom the other resides as an individual monad. In the former case, both divine pesons are at the mercy of an impersonal universe, in the latter case, the two person represent an indefinable context and an indefinable individual, respectively.
One encounters the same sort of difficulties when the number of divine persons is haphazardly increased. For example, a quadrinity in whom the Father, Son, and Spirit are married to some fourth person, “x,” must subordinate the individual persons to abstract and impersonal “groups,” and/or render the persons divisible into impersonal parts. If the relationship between the Spirit and person “x” were facilitated by the Father and the Son together, then the actual mediator of that relationship, and that things which comprehends the Trinity, would be an abstract and impersonal “group” formed by the Father and Son, rather than a concrete person. Neither the Father nor the Son, but that “something” between them, would be the true facilitator of the relationship between the Spirit and person “x.” But the very profundity of the Trinity lies in the fact that that which unifies all things is not an unknown something, but a personal Authority Who [sic] we might come to know and trust because He is also a concrete individual.
It is equally unacceptable that the Father alone might function as the context of the Spirit-“x” relationship, for then (a) the Son would be indifferent and uninvolved in some activity of the godhead, adnso fail to fully express/comprehend the entire divine being in himself; and (b) the Father would cease to be an absolute person since only the relationship between Spirit-“x,” and not the relationship between Himself and His Son, would fall within the sphere of His own self-activity. Both the Father and the Son would be mere parts of a generic nature that comprehends them both.
Finally, it is also to no avail to suppose that the seven possible pairs of relationships between any two persons (F-S, F-X, F-H, S-X, S-H, and X-H) could be mediated by a single third person. Such a scenario would create a disparity between the divine persons, as some would have to function as the contexts of multiple pairs of relationships, and others of only one. (180)
Our common reality is intelligible in its equally ultimate unities and diversities—including the organic coherence of logical (mathematical) laws, moral absolutes and nature’s observable regularities—just because it was created by and therefore must reflect the Triune God, not a chance-riven chaos. The opponent of the Christian theistic, i.e., Trinitarian, worldview fatuously attempts to secure his cognitive footing either in a swamp or the void.
To be continued.