Posted on 07/18/2010 6:04:05 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
>>>>”A good argument?”
1. God must be incarnated by an immaculate woman.
2. Jesus is God
3. Mary is a woman
Conc: Mary is immaculate
You’d need “4. Mary incarnated Jesus”
for a better argument.
And it’d be better from an objective perspective to use “give/gave birth to” instead of “incarnate” in order to simplify the terms and remove as much complexity as possible without harming the point of the proof.
If you did these two things then the syllogism would be closer to proper form. However...
The original syllogism we were looking at proof for was:
Jesus is God
Mary is the mother of Jesus
Mary is the mother of God
The first premise, Jesus is God, would need to be proven; unless of course, both sides of the argument are willing to accept this as fact. Then the second premise, the same. The conclusion is true if the first and second premises are true - by definition of terms. So, it’s pretty tight for Christians, those accepting the divinity of Christ and Mary as his mother.
Now, in your new syllogism, we have the same consideration to deal with in the first premise: God must be incarnated by an immaculate woman.
This would have to be either proven or postulated by mutual agreement.
I don’t think you are willing to accept it, and the Catholic doctrine does not assert it.
I realize that many use something similar to your syllogism to argue for the Immaculate Conception; however, this has logical problems (among them infinite regress) for me personally - I’ve never used it or given it much weight. Others see it differently, but I haven’t seen a tight logic for it.
And it’s not required that I, or any other Catholic, give it weight or teach it or hold to it as doctrine.
The doctrine is not that Immaculate Conception was a requirement for Jesus’ birth, but that it was a “singular privilege and grace of God.” The full declaration is:
“We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.
Therefore, neither of us is accepting your first premise, so you must prove it, by another syllogism, in order to hope for a valid conclusion. I doubt you have a proof you accept, given that it’s most likely you don’t accept the IC.
So, I don’t see this route as something you’d pursue in your path to a simple syllogism to prove that “Mary is not the mother of God.”
Yep, that's what the Church teaches. We call the incarnated God "God".
That's why I limit my related assertions to language like "it is fitting that God be incarnate in ....). And if I were asked why I think that I would START by saying, "Well, the Church teaches that she is immaculate, and what's kind of neat about that is blah blah blah...."
As far as I can see the argument as you make it is internally okay, but, as I say, the first proposition is difficult. It seems to be that (while it's silly to talk this way) if God wanted to be incarnate in a hooker with a drug habit He could do it. I'm sure not going to tell Him how and where and when to do it.
(In fact, once at an AA meeting in Boston, I met a hooker in whose heart God was clearly struggling to be born. She had been converted, as far as I could see, sola gratia.)
(Ahem, for the record, I was there as part of my clinical work in chemical dependency.)
But, once He's done it, I can find reasons it's 'fitting' for it to have been done in such and such a way.
Is that at ALL clear? Sometimes I feel like I open my mouth (or bash my keyboard) and only fog comes out.
Well, okay, as long as we clarify that the Incarnate God is indeed God and then delineate the distinctions between "the Incarnate God" and "God." Because, formally, 5 and 6 necessarily imply that the Incarnate God is not God.
If that is satisfactorily done, then Prop 6 is okay except that for umpty-ump years the distinction HAS been drawn and of the two optional articulations "mother of God" won.
A common formulation of the Trinity:
The Father is NOT the Son and NOT the Spirit.
The Father is God.
The Son is NOT the Father and NOT the Spirit.
The Son is God.
The Spirit is NOT the Father and NOT the Son.
The Spirit is God.
There are not three Gods, but
There is one God.
Jesus is the Incarnate Son of God. He is "Dominus meus et Deus meus," as Thomas says without rebuke.
To the extent that Thomas is right to say,"... ο θεος μου." [ho theOS-moo, (the 'the' has an unvoiced th, as in "thing", and the 'e' is like 'eh'-- so I was taught FWIW.)] to that extent Mary is the Mother of God.
Had Thomas said "Trinity" or "Father" or "Spirit", he would have been wrong, and to that extent Mary is NOT the mother of God.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
But, as I may have said one or two times already, if it's good enough for the Church at Ephesus and Chalcedon it's good enough for this dawg.
;-)
But the "fitting" argument as presented is likewise invalid.
We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.
Let's see how the argument is presented:
1. Mary is born.
2. Because of Jesus, Mary is immaculate.
Conc: God graced Mary at her birth to be immaculate.
The whole argument is out of order! It doesn't follow. There's nothing fitting about it.
It's not an argument, it's a declaration of doctrine. It's not presented to be accepted on its logic or required to conform to reason, only faith, to "be believed by all the faithful."
Again: I don’t see this route as something you’d pursue in your path to a simple syllogism to prove that “Mary is not the mother of God.”
ph
What that means is that this is a statement of the essentials of the dogma. If somebody wants to talk about the dogma, he's got to take all the pieces into account or he's not talking about the dogma. It's a singular privilege and grace; it's done by the Omnipotent God; it's done in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ (so, in other words, Mary didn't do it herself and it depends on what Jesus did), and she was sinless from the very beginning of her existence.
It's in no way an argument. It's, so to speak, the rules of what the dogma is. You'd have to read elsewhere in the encyclical to find where the arguing part happens.
And I thought I said that it was only in light of the dogma that I would say it was "fitting." God does everything well. If you think God 'did' the Incarnation and you think He 'did' the Immaculate Conception, then you can enjoy the thought that the perfect man was conceived and gestated and all the rest by a sinless mother.
But no serious theologian argues that because anything else would have been "unfitting" therefore He MUST have done the IC.
Again, I hope that's clear. It is as if you were looking at a law that was passed and expecting it to contain the explanation for why it was passed, or reading the verdict and expecting it to contain the evidence. I hope those analogies are useful.
This is a good point and leads me to make another:
As often happens, either naturally or by intent, we've drifted away from the original discussion. What was posted was a logically syllogism and the debate was over its validity, truth, proof. The rules of formal logic are quite different from the rules of a court and very different from the rules of doctrine.
If we stay on topic, we are under the rules of formal logic, and here, only valid syllogism - using deductive reasoning - are considered "proven" or true.
Inference can be evidence, but it can't be "proof" under the rules of formal logic. MD's "fitting" comments are perfectly valid inferences, can be considered evidence, but are not deductive proof, and as I read it they weren't intended to be.
TC's IC premise was claimed as a hidden necessary premise and used initially as a means to build a syllogism that disproved MD's conclusion "Mary is the mother of God."
My response was A) This premise can be true or false and not effect the conclusion and is therefore irrelevant; and B) The Church does not maintain that the IC was logically necessary (or necessary at all) for the Incarnation - and therefore irrelevant again.
Unless, TC comes up with a different approach or with another way to tie the logical necessity of the IC to the Incarnation, then, thus far, the search for a "simple syllogism to prove Mary is the mother of God is false" remains elusive.
Now, somehow, the definition is different than the dogma. Whatever happened to fide quaren intellectum?
All I wanted to do was claim Mary was the mother of God.
But apparently that isn't good enough for Romanists. Romanists need to spin all kinds of wierd dogma into that simple statement of faith.
I proved that the additional premise that the IC was necessary for MMOG made the MMOG false.
I proved that the additional premise that IC was "fitting" for MMOG made MMOG false.
What kind of Nestorian heresy can I expect next from the Romanist Church?
THE ROMANIST CHURCH HAS COMPLETELY MANGLED THE SIMPLE DECLARATION THAT MARY WAS THE MOTHER OF GOD!
the definition is different than the dogma.
But that is not what we said. what we said is this (with an addition:
Definition (=dogma) : reasons for the definition :: verdict : arguments in a trial :: The Pythagorean Theorem : Euclid's proof of the theorem.
It seemed that you quoted the definition and criticized it as a poor argument. So it seemed that you thought a definition would BE an argument. But it's not. It's the CONCLUSION of an argument. I say, "In a right triangle of sides a, b, and c, where c is the side opposite the right angle, the area of the square on side a added to the area of the square on side b equals the area of the square on side c."
That's not an argument, it's a proposition. The argument is in the proof.
Similarly the definition is not an argument.
AND the proposition that Mary was Immaculately Conceived is not argumentatively related to the proposition that she is the Mother of God. The latter was held to be true and dogma by the Church since Ephesus and Chalcedon, while the former was discussed but not taught as true until the definition was promulgated.
Whatever else one might say about it, that would indicate that the Immaculate conception is neither a logically necessary conclusion from the title Theotokos NOR is it an essential part of the "proof" of the appropriateness of the title.
If I have been sophistical, it was entirely without intent. I do not see where I was.
So, Jesus is the Son of Himself, and Mary is His Mother?
I guess I just haven't understood what you were saying. Were you saying that We think that the IC is necessary for MMOG? In any event I saw no proof.
I proved that the additional premise that IC was "fitting" for MMOG made MMOG false.
How did you prove that? I'm so sorry, but I didn't see anything that I thought was a proof.
Not strictly speaking, not if you're doing the Trinitarian thing. Jesus is God the Son. As man and as God he is Son of the Father.
Bring on the argument. git r done.
I believe in God, his Son and our Holy Spirit. May God bless us all
I believe in God, his Son and our Holy Spirit. May God bless us all
Ja, Er ist der sohn von sein Vater und autotheos.
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