Re: a question for monists

While I'm sympathetic with attempts to develop a "nonreductive physicalism," it does indeed encounter problems. One that has to do with God can be stated very simply without getting into the more difficlut issues involved with the Incarnation. If minds require brains, how can we speak of a mind of God prior to the Incarnation?

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
  To: lhaarsma@calvin.edu
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 4:32 PM
  Subject: Re: a question for monists

  On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 14:14:43 -0500 (EST) Loren Haarsma <lhaarsma@calvin.edu> writes:
>
>
> On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Bill Dozier wrote:
>
> > How does the Incarnation fit with the monist position?
>
> The Incarnation is a central mystery of the faith, with no easy
> explanation under ANY view of what it means to be a human being. I
> don't
> think dualism does any better than monism here.
> Suppose, for example, one imagined something like this: A normal
> human
> being is a material human body with an integrated nonmaterial human
> soul;
> the Incarnate Christ was a material human body with a divine
> second-person-of-the-Trinity immaterial soul. But in this picture,
> Christ
> is not fully human; instead, Christ is some mixture -- part human,
> part
> divine. The church fathers explicitly considered and rejected those
> sorts
> of pictures, insisting that Christ was both fully human and fully
> divine.
> So to do justice to that teaching under dualism, one should
> picture the
> Incarnate Christ as having a material human body with an integrated
> nonmaterial human soul, who is nevertheless also fully divine. Is
> that
> really any less of a mystery than a monist picture of the
> Incarnation?
>
> Loren Haarsma
>
>
  Anything involving the biblical deity is going to involve mystery, for we do not control or comprehend the infinite. Nevertheless, we are given information as God revealed himself that allows us to understand something about his nature and being. On this basis I hold that God is spirit, and that somehow human beings "possess" spirits (don't have an adequate explanation for that, either). I understand that, just as matter can mingle with matter, so spirit can mingle with spirit. There is a serious problem here, for in Jesus Christ one spirit is infinite and the other finite. However, the bible teaches that the infinite spirit emptied himself to become incarnate as a servant. This is not a full explanation, but gives us something to go on. I suspect that a proper explanation would be totally incomprehensible to us--worse than string theory to a two-year-old.

  In contrast to this, I do not see any way to combine a function with a substance, as required by monism. Substances have functions under various conditions. Mechanisms, made of substances, may be combined to have cooperative or sequential functions. But it is the mechanisms that combine, and function follows. I cannot say that contemporary theistic monists have not faced the problem squarely or have no answers, for I have not read all the literature. But my impression is that they approach problems with "Don't let on."
  Dave
Received on Fri Mar 25 16:51:08 2005