My dear sisters in Christ, Betty and Alamo, I am blessed by your discussions. BB, your first response to 21st connects with where I am going with my sermon for this week, so I fastened onto it. The theme is from James 1 in which poor and rich are encouraged to acknowledge the fragility of their own existence...their morality. Instead, we are to focus on being “rich in the Lord.”
The discussion ranging from Anselm to Plato does that for me, but I especially liked the “concreteness” argument you made, that Michelangeo is not somehow imprisoned in the Sistine Chapel. It’s connection to the theme of the sermon is irrelevant to your discussion, but I do appreciate the tie-in you provided, that God is simply “outside” those things. They would not and could not move Him at all. So insignificant is gold, for example, that the streets of heaven use it for mere paving stones, and so insignificant are precious stones, that they are walls and foundations in the heavenly city.
21st century, just a bit of an encouragement that is off topic, as well. HTML. The lines you draw on the page really don’t present your arguments very well. You would do well to use italics, blockquoting, lists, etc. to set off your arguments as opposed to those you quote.
When I read your statement that readers simply weren’t understanding what was you and what wasn’t, without backtracking to your original posts and relying on these recent ones, I knew a big part of the problem could have been formatting.
Clarity in formatting is such a huge aid for those of us reading anything said by another. Perhaps you have all these html skills already and just avoided them because you were in a rush. That’s fine.
The bottom line, though, is that clarity is the responsibility of the message sender and not that of the receiver.
acknowledge the fragility of their own existence...their morality morTality
And I join you in appreciating betty boop's illuminating insights! Truly, I cannot thank her well enough for all of them for she seems to ever have the forest in view while I am engrossed with a single leaf.
The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness sheds light on many of my leaves.
Indeed it brings to mind Max Tegmark's Level IV Parallel Universe model which posits that everything we observe "in" space/time is actually a manifestation of mathematical structures which really do exist outside of space and time. Or to put it another way, what an observer "in" space/time perceives as real is actually a manifestation of reality which is not subject to space, time, energy-momentum, etc.
Of course the Physicist must not under the principle of methodological naturalism allow God the Creator to be mentioned in his theory. But to a Christian it is obvious:
I, too, would love to be able to hear your sermon!