Triune God vs. Mormon Godhead—Sijuwade Takes On Hansen 🔴 LIVE Debate

Today I've got a really exciting debate for you guys. We are debating the Trinity versus the Mormon Godhead. And my two guests are Dr. Joshua Siduati and Jacob Hansen. And um I want to give you guys a quick rundown of what you can expect if you watch this entire video.

This uh debate or dialogue is very structured. So basically we're going to spend the first half of the discussion focused on the Trinitarian concept. So, we've got Jacob presenting for about 5 minutes and then Josh has a whopping 30 minute presentation on his concept of the Trinity, which you guys want to stick around for because in my view, I think it's one of the best concepts of the Trinity out there. It's going to actually make it intelligible. If you've never heard the the Trinity explained in a way that sort of makes sense, then you're you guys are in for a treat for that presentation. Um, and I think I'm seeing Jacob even nod his head. So like he he even agrees like hey there's something to this.

So then so then after that we're going to do open dialogue for about 30 45 minutes. Then we're going to move into the second part of this debate which is focused on the LDS concept of the Godhead. And so for this we've also got Jacob starting. He's going to take as long as he need. He has slides and uh beautiful presentation as well. and then we'll turn it over to Josh for about 10 to 15 minutes and then we're going to go back to open discussion for again another 30 to 45 minutes. So, that's what you can expect if you watch this entire debate. And um instead of do these long drawn out introductions, my guess, if you want to learn more about them, go check the description of this video. Uh more than likely, you know who these guys are if you're watching this video. But let's uh let's go ahead and turn it into uh turn it over rather to Jacob for his opening statement uh his five minute presentation on uh on the Trinity.

Yeah. So, uh first of all, thanks so much Cameron for for having me on. And if you want to pull up some of these slides in the background that I have. Um, it's a real honor to be here with Dr. Siguati. I've uh actually I really really enjoy uh your your model. I actually find it to be uh I I agree with Cameron. I think it's the the the best model out there for kind of the Trinity. So, uh I'm actually kind of a fan. I'm actually a fan of Cameron's show as well. Have been for a while. Even though I know he sometimes rips on my faith and some of the things that we believe, but I think it's it's all kind of fair here. So, um, anyway, I I wanted to start out actually kind of letting everyone know that you're going to notice this is not going to be a really aggressive debate. This is more of a dialogue, I think, and we're going to kind of try and explore the differences rather than trying to go hard to like rip each other and dunk on each other here. And what you'll see in this, I I want to kind of set up Dr. Sigu in my presentation because I actually want uh people to understand his point of view. Um, and that's just let's just start with the general idea of the Trinity. People out there who might think, you know, oh well, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, that's the Trinity, right? Like that's all there is to it. And it's actually a little more complicated than that. Um, but I want to kind of go through it a little bit to give people some context as to what the Trinity is and why this conversation kind of matters. So, if you want to go to the next slide, Cameron.

Um, simple enough, right? There's one God. The Bible teaches, "I am the Lord. There is no other. Apart from me there is no God." So we got one God. So go ahead and go to the next slide. And who is that God? Well, Jesus is God, right? Jesus is God. There's one God. Jesus is God. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. So there's one God. Jesus is God. But it gets a little more complicated. So go to the next slide. And because you have Jesus out there saying, you know, when he's uh post-resurrection, "I am ascending to my Father and your Father. To my God and your God." So suddenly it's like, wait a minute here. I thought Jesus was God. Now we have this issue of him talking about his God that is also our God. Uh if you go to the next slide, um it gets even more complicated. Um, if you look in Philippians, for example, it's talking about "every knee should bow, every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." So, a lot of people look at this and they're kind of like, wait, what? I thought Jesus is God. Doesn't he get the glory? But no, the glory doesn't go to Christ. It goes to the Father, right? So, again, it creates these, let's just say, at least complications in it.

So, if you continue on to the next slide, um what what's happening is is that we're dealing with uh three persons and one God. That's sort of the tension that arises in in all of this. And so, if you go to the next slide, Cameron, this leads us to what are kind of known as the great Christological debates. It's trying to figure out that that issue like who is this Jesus and how does he relate to God? like was he God? In what sense is he God? What is the relationship between him and the Father? And this is something I put in there the dates 100 to 550. It's kind of those are is dates to some extent the the Christological debates to some extent still continue to this day um in in some way shape or form. So if you go to the next slide Cameron now I would say and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong on this if you want to interject. I would say that the majority view when people say um who is the one God, most people say it's the Trinity itself that that kind of is the one God. I I don't I didn't do a survey on this so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is definitely a very common and popular view. Would would you say that's correct? I'll kind of let you guys interject here for a second. Yeah, definitely. Okay. And and so um if you go to the next slide um and this is understandable you know in the Athanasian Creed it says "we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity." right? So the one God here reference is referenced to as the Trinity. But if we continue on to the next slide we can see that in the Nicene Creed, which is earlier than the Athanasian Creed, in the earlier creed it says that the one God is the Father Almighty. Okay? So again, we're kind of stuck with this this issue where there seem to be these contradictions that people struggle with.

So if we go to the next slide, um Dr. William Lane Craig, I'm a big fan of Dr. Craig, um even though we disagree on a lot of things. He says, "The doctrine of the Trinity as it comes to expression in later credal formulations like the Nicene Creed or the Athanasian Creed involves certain aspects that either depart from or add to the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. And I have no interest in defending formulations that depart from or add to the biblical formulation." So Dr. Craig is implying that there is a biblical formulation of the Trinity. If you go to the next slide though, we can see that people like um Richard Swinburne notably says that even if you regard the New Testament as the infallible source of doctrine, you cannot derive from it a doctrine of the Trinity. And so Swinburne would say that there is no biblical doctrine of the Trinity because it isn't fully formulated there. It's actually a later tradition of the church uh that comes comes about.

Now um if you go to the next slide, I mean we could just go to Jesus though, right? We could ask him who is the one true God? Jesus, who's the one true God? Well, he said in John 17:3 that "this is eternal life that they might know thee the only true God." So he's referencing the Father here and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent. Right? But he is making a distinction between himself and the only true God being the Father. So who is the one true God? If we go to the next slide. Well, Dr. Siguati, I've been watching your stuff and you make the case quite compellingly that the one true God is the Father and we should understand it in that way. And so with that, that's pretty much wrapping up my presentation because I want people to understand what the debate is that you're addressing. And I think you address it very well. So, I'll kind of turn it over to you to to take over from that point.

All right. Yeah, Josh, feel free to uh go ahead and start with your presentation.

Okay, great. Yes, thank you very much for that, Jacob. That was very clear and um yeah, you touch on a very um important distinction that can be made between how do we or who do we identify as the one true God that is clearly spoken about in scripture and then we also see later in the credal formulations. And so um interestingly even though I I would call myself a Swinburnian um in many aspects um I do disagree with Swinburne on on a few issues and one of the main ones is a doctrine of the Trinity because I do disagree with him. I do believe that the doctrine of the Trinity correctly understood can be derived from the Bible. Um and then it's formally defined uh within the credal formulations but it is found within scripture itself. Um and so we can sort of build that that sort of picture from a biblical foundation. What is the Trinity? How do we understand it? And um can we derive um the creed or what we would say is defined credally um as a Trinity from the Bible itself? I believe that we can. And the way we can do that is by first starting off with the idea that the one God is the Father. And we can see this clearly within scripture. And so I'm just going to list a few things, few scriptural passages which affirm that the Father is the one God and sort of you started touching on that in your presentation. But we see things where it says John 17:3 says Jesus calls the Father as you said um Jacob previously the only true God. We see in John 20:17 he states "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." So identifies that Jesus himself is saying that he has a God. Um and then we have 1 Corinthians 8:6 which says "for us there is one God, the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ." So that term that that sort of title the one God is ascribed by Paul to the Father instead of the Trinity as you were saying was commonly um understood to be the one God. And then we have uh 2 Corinthians we have "the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ." So the God, theos in the Greek, is identified again as the Father um and he's the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. We see Ephesians saying again "one God and Father of all, who's over all and through all and in all." We have other formulations. I'm not going to state all of them but the last one I'll state is 1 Timothy which says "for for um for there is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

So what we see quite clearly is the title. If we just use it as a title, the one God, we never see the one God being ascribed to something that we call the Trinity. And so if we take the Trinity to be a distinct object over and above the persons. So it's not just a collective term for the persons, but actually a substance which exists um and the persons are things which constitute it. Then we never see the one God being ascribed to the Trinity. We see the one God being ascribed to a person within the Trinity which is the Father. Um and then we see some other interesting things as well um related to this. It's not just that the title of the one God is ascribed to the Father but we also see that the term the name Father is interchanged quite frequently with the term God. So for example uh what we have we have in uh James 1:27 "religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this." So what we have here it's picking out a name God and it's picking out the name the Father and that's used again together in the same sentence. But then what you're going to see later is that there is an interchanging where actually it doesn't even use the term um it doesn't use the term sorry the Father but it uses the term God. So I'm going to focus on one in particular which is um which is quite important. So you'll have the term for example um you sorry you'll have that famous verse John 3:16 which says um "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son." So what we have here is instead of using the term the Father to say the Father gave his only begotten Son it uses the term God. God gave his only begotten Son. So what it's saying here is that the proper noun God is used to pick out a person who is then begetting another divine person, the Son. And so what we have here is that scripture a lot of the time assumes that the readers of the the early texts were not even needing to use the word Father to refer to that being. Normally now in the sort of common uh discussions about the Trinity, people would say God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. But what you actually see in scripture is a lot of the time in the the context of their language, they would not even need to use the word Father. They would just say God. God begot uh the person of the Son or God created and they will be referring to that individual, the Father. So the point here is is that the Father is used interchangeably for God. We see it appearing in scripture together with the Father a lot of the time, but you don't see that a lot with the Son and the Spirit. And you see it also um being interchanged where it's sort of replacing uh the term Father. Um and so that's sort of what it said here in more detail. But the key thing here is what we're seeing is that scripture identifies the Father as the one God while which I'm going to go on to now allowing us to make a distinction between the term God and between the term divine. So because we negate the we sorry we restrict the term God only to the person of the Father it does not mean that the Son and the Spirit are not divine. And that's something that's really important because what people will do if they're for example holding to a Unitarian doctrine. They would say well we can say that the one God is the Father but then because the one God is the Father the Son and the Spirit are then just mere humans um or mere created beings. So the Son is a mere human and then the Spirit is a created being. But then what we can actually see is that no that is not what scripture does. Scripture on the one hand does affirm that the one God is the Father. But then it does go on to also ascribe divinity to the Son and the Spirit. And so what we see for example and I'll go to the the first one um with the person of Christ we need to always remember within the context of um of second temple Judaism the pre the divine presence was something which was known to be um was known to be identified within two specific locations. So you had two areas where people said this is where God is or God is present in this place. So the two places in the second temple context was the temple and the Torah. So for example um when um when the the Babylonians came in 570 to um to take the the the Jews into into um uh captivity and then they destroyed the temple. the the post-exilic um uh writers were always saying that the presence of God had not come back to the temple. And so the the belief was that God's presence will come again and be within the temple because what we had was a progression from the tabernacle where God's presence was to then the temple. And so God was present in the temple until the destroying um at the time of Babylon. Um but then the idea here is is that there was a connection between divine presence and the temple. But then also when you had that period of the time where people were saying that the temple didn't have the presence of God, then people believe that God's presence wasn't just in the temple alone, but it was also in the Torah. So you didn't have to just go to, for example, Jerusalem uh when the temple was operative or then when the temple was destroyed. You didn't then have to say God's presence isn't with Israel anymore. Instead, God's presence was wherever the Torah is written um and is read. And so the idea here is is that God's presence was located in two places, temple and Torah. And so then what we have is then Jesus says two interesting things. He says that he came to replace the temple and he comes to in a way fulfill the Torah but also supersede it. And so what we have here is that um the temple function which we for example if you are going to the temple you'll go to the temple to sacrifice you go to the temple to sing praises to um to to Yahweh um on certain days. So there'll be many things where you'll be recognizing that God's presence is there. But now what Jesus was doing is that Jesus was saying that he himself is greater than the temple. And so people came to him for forgiveness. His life was offered as an atoning sacrifice instead of a sacrifice being giving in given in the temple. So the idea here is is that there is now a replacement of the temple with the person of Christ. And so the early um early followers of Jesus believed that the presence had now moved from the temple to the person of Christ. And so the temple now was not functioning for the Christians in the ways that it did for the second temple Jews because they had now had the presence of the living temple in the person of Jesus who is now with them. So the idea here is that Jesus came to replace the temple and from that we see the divine presence now being in the person of Jesus. Jesus wasn't just a mere mortal. He was the presence of God on earth in the same way that the temple functioned in that way. And we can also see this with the Torah. Jesus had the authority over the Torah to even give laws which in a way for a lot of people was astounding. How could he say things that the Torah had declared which were now not going to be applied in the way that they should be? Only God could do that. And so the idea here is is that Jesus again because he was the embodiment of the divine presence, he then had authority over the Torah. So the idea here is is that from the gospel texts we see Jesus's own actions relative to the temple and to the Torah indicating that he had the presence of God within him. But then what we can see then is that well what the question that then is raised well what was this divine presence? Well, then we see in later texts outside, not necessarily of the the gospels, but in other texts that we see around the gospels, um, such as the letters, we see then certain things such as the honors, the attributes, the names, and the authority that Jesus has and is ascribed by his followers indicating that he had the same divinity as the Father. So it wasn't just that he had the divine presence like God had um imbued certain objects or or things like that and and given his presence to those objects but he was saying that actually the presence that was in the person of Jesus was a presence that is identical to that of Yahweh because he shared the honors of Yahweh being worshiped alongside him. He possessed the attributes of Yahweh. Things of knowing things which were not known by um other people. Being present where his followers are um are congregating. As he said to where two or more are gathered, I am there. Being omnipotent in the sense of or having power a lot um extreme amount of power to be able to control the natural laws. So things we can say is that the honors, the attributes and names that he's given, the throne that he is sitting on indicates that the divinity and the presence that he had wasn't the type of presence that was of a different nature to that of the the Father to that of Yahweh. So we can then sort of move to a position of given Jesus's relation to the temple and the Torah, the divine presence was within him. But then the divine presence that he had wasn't just some imbuing of him with the presence of Yahweh like a spirit imbuing him with some powers but it was actually saying no the presence that he had given the honors the attributes and names and the authority that he had was the same as that of Yahweh the same as that of the Father. So we can sort of derive from this sort of sequential reasoning that the the divinity that the Son had was a divinity that was shared with Yahweh. So what we have here just building up a picture we have the scriptures speaking about there being one God the Father but then we have this individual called the Son who seems to have the divine presence of God and also because of the honors attributes names and authority that he has he seems to have the same nature or the same um divine um we can we can say the the same divine status as the one God. And you can say you can do this similar reasoning for the Spirit as um you can still see that the Spirit in a certain way um you can so the the by the way the methodology that I'm utilizing is something found within the literature this idea of that honors attributes names um and authority um and the idea here we can also apply this to the Spirit and we can see that the Spirit is given honors he's giving attributes names and authority which seems to be more than just a a spirit that is um coming from God but not God itself not divine divine itself because it seems to be given an honor which cannot be given to anyone but but a divine um being and the attributes that he the Spirit seems to have again seems to be things which are predicated of divinity and then the actions and the authority that he also has and he performs seems to be things that only a divine think a divine being can do such as being active in creation regenerating believers giving certain spiritual gifts as he wills. So these seems to be things that only divinity can be um sorry it's um something of a divine status can only have. But then so what we have here is that there seems to be in a similar way to Jesus there seems to be a divinity that can be ascribed to that of the Spirit. But then we don't just want to because someone could say well okay yes of course because the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father but what we see within the scriptures as well is that the Spirit isn't just a divine entity that is identical to the Father but it seems to be a distinct being who has personhood because for example the Spirit groans as it says in the scriptures. The Spirit speaks it teaches it guides it grieves. So it seems to be having personal um act performing personal actions or having um emotional states which can only be ascribed to persons not just impersonal spirits but then we also not just having him as a person but we have him as something which is distinct from the Father and the Son. It says that the Son will send another helper. So even though it says he's a Spirit of Christ it seems to be not identical to Christ. It seems to be someone who comes in the name of Christ but is distinct from him. And then we also have this um we also have this with um with the Father as well. It seems to me the idea here is is that the Son isn't sending the Father because if you think about it, if the Spirit is a Spirit of the Father, then the Son is sending the Father to the disciples. And that is not the way that it's supposed to work. It's supposed to be that the Son does the will of the Father, not that the Father does the will of the Son. So it seems to be that we have when it comes to the Spirit he is divine. He is a person because he seems to have emotional states and conscious states which can only be had by things which are personal and not impersonal. But he also seems to be distinct from that of the Father and the Son. So what we have from the biblical picture is this idea of um that there is one God that there is two other divine persons who share the same divinity as the one God and so that's the sort of the picture that we get from the scriptures and then what we have and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this but what we can sort of see with um the historical narrative is that the controversy that came off of this sort of biblical context that people were working within was the idea of yes, we have this one God. Yes, the Son is divine, but is he actually divine as the Father is?

So, something I really want to um emphasize now and we can pick up in our discussions is um the historical points because I think we're going to have more of um disagreements on that um more than the scriptural sort of narrative that I've I've painted. Um something that we need to um sort of highlight from the beginning is that the debate debate was never was Jesus a mere human or was he divine. That was never the debate. The there was always an assumption from the beginning that the that the the Son is divine. But in what way is he divine? That was the question that was open because it had already been settled at the Council of Antioch in the 3rd century um against Paul of Samosata where he was believing that Jesus was a mere human being. But the Council of Antioch could have already declared that to be heretical. So the debate then when we get into the 4th century is not concerning is he a human being or is he divine. It is the question of what type of divinity does he have? And the the second question is is he co-relative with the Father? Does he exist alongside the Father or does he exist as a created divine being? Because what Arius who was um a priest in the early part of the 4th century in Alexandria he went around saying that there was a time when the Son was not. That was his main sort of teaching. And so his main teaching was yes the Son is divine but he is he has a created divinity. He's a being who didn't exist from all eternity with the Father with the one God. And so what we had then in the Council of Nicaea was a push back from the bishop of Alexandria called um Alexander of Alexandria which is a bit strange with his name. Um but he was pushing back saying no that the Son is co-relative with the Father that means he exists alongside the Father from the beginning. And so the divinity that he has with the Father which was then added to the creed was that of him being *homoousios* with the Father that means of the same nature of the same substance of the same essence as the Father. So the question that was settled at Nicaea was um the question sorry that was was being answered was what type of divinity does the the Son have and does he has he always existed with the Father and the the answers that was given to that was he has the same divinity as the Father and he has always existed with the Father that was the debate then what you have going up into the um the latter part of the 4th century um is up until the second uh the second ecumenical council so the Council of Constantinople 381 is that you have a sort of push back on that idea. How can we say that he has the same um nature as the Father? Because for a lot of the theologians of that time who were anti-Nicaean so they were against the Council of Nicaea was that they believed that the term *homoousios* was problematic because it led to modalism because the the problem that they they faced was the term *ousia* and the term *hypostasis* which was used in the creeds were at that time synonyms. So they basically for a lot of people who were listening to those terms meant the same thing. So if you say that the Son is *homoousios* with the Father then it seems to be you're saying he's the same *hypostasis* as the Father. He's the same person as the Father which is just modalism. So for a lot of them they didn't like the term *homoousios* because it seemed to imply modalism Sabellianism which was declared to be heretical in the 3rd century. So what you then had was different theological camps who then started coming up with their own positions. So you had something called the *homoiousios* position which is a really it's a strange thing but basically it's a just an adding of adding of an 'i' to the the the term *homoios* *homoios* which just means similar substance. So you had some people who were pushed back and say no the Son yes he exists with the Father he's co-relative with the Father but he's of a similar substance he's not of the same substance and for them they believe that was allowing them to secure the distinction between the Father and the Son. Um you also then had something called the *homoian* sorry position which um basically just meant that um he is similar to the Father but they didn't want to go into metaphysical um discussions. So basically there was a lot of debate between the *homoiousians* and the *homoousians*. So Athanasius and then you had the *homoian* who were against Athanasius and they were going back and forth about does he share the same substance or does he have a similar substance but then you had this position that emerged which was the *heterousian* position which is basically saying guys just stop all of this philosophical talk and let's just say that he's similar to the Father according to the scriptures and leave it at that. And so the position of the church from around 350 or so to around the late 370s was the *homoian* position. Basically saying that we should just say he's similar to the Father according to uh the scriptures but we can't say how or in what way. But then what sort of popped up which basically led to the Nicene position being accepted was another position that was developed called the *heterousian* position. And this was developed by a person called well two people sorry um Aetius and Eunomius and they were sort of the arch heretics of the Arians because they basically said that the Son is of a different um substance to the Father. So the *heterousian* position was just basically saying the Son is of um of a different um nature to the Father and so he's unlike the Father in his essence. And so what um a lot of the people now who were in the *homoian* position and the *homoousian* position and the other position as well were basically saying well no this is definitely problematic because this is taking us back to Arius because if you say he's of a different essence of the Father then you're going to say he's a created being and so there was a time when he didn't exist which was obviously problematic because all of those positions declared Arius to be incorrect. So they did not believe that Arius was correct in saying that the Son is a created being. He's eternal. But is he of the same substance or is he of a similar substance or is he similar according to the scriptures? But the *heterousian* position went further and said no that the Father is only the one who has the divine substance. And so the Son the Spirit cannot have the divine substance because they are generated by the Father. And so for them, not to get into the technicalities of this, sorry, this it's turning to a bit of a lecture, but having a free lecture on a on a Tuesday might might be good for certain people. Um so but it is important uh just because it'll it'll allow our discussions to go in certain ways. Um the *heterousian* position um what it was trying to say specifically is he was saying that the um definitional attribute of divinity is unbegotten. So because the Father is the only one who's unbegotten, he can be the only one who's divine. So he cannot then share his essence with the Father sorry with the Son the Spirit because then they would not be able to be unbegotten because they will be begotten of the Father. So the idea here is is that they must have a different essence to the Father because to be divine is just to be unbegotten. So what this meant is that the Son and the Spirit are categorically different to the Father. Now them coming out with this position was something which was generally rejected by the other camps. And so what then happened was through the work of Athanasius and then through the work of Basil of Caesarea they basically said we are as these sort of camps of the *homoian* position the um *homoousian* and the um *homoiousian* positions. They basically came together and they were saying we're actually not really saying very different things but the *heterousians* are clearly saying something very different. So there was sort of a coercing together of a position which was now against the *heterousian* position. So they were basically saying we cannot take the *heterousian* position on but our positions aren't actually that different. We're just debating about technicalities. And then Basil of Caesarea provided basically the thing that brought the Nicene position to the forefront which was that he made a distinction between *hypostasis* and *ousia* because remember before the problem was that *ousia* and *hypostasis* were identical terms. If you have one *ousia* then you must also be one *hypostasis*. So you have the collapsing of the two persons. But then what we have now is that actually that is um what Basil did sorry is that he said no the *homoousian* sorry the *ousia* picks out the what is common to the persons and the *hypostasis* is a term which speaks about their particularity. So what may why we can say that there are um one *ousia* amongst the three *hypostases* is because what we're saying is that there there's just one common nature one underlying substance that is possessed by each of the persons but the *hypostases* are the particular individual individuating characteristics that make the *ousia* individualized for each of the persons. So the Father is the divine being who is unbegotten. The Son is the divine being who is begotten. The Spirit is the one who is eternally spirated or proceeds from the Father. And if you affirm the *filioque* through the Son as well. So the idea here is is that they made he made a distinction between *hypostasis* and *ousia*. So this then provided the conceptual categories to allow then the *homoian* uh the and the um uh the um uh *homoousian* and the um *homoiousian* sorry position to come together in sort of a *pro-Nicene* position which then was accepted in 381. And then you had um Theodosius I who declared the *pro-Nicene* position expressed at the council to be then the one which was going to be uh promulgated around the the the the empire itself. So the key point I want to say here is that it wasn't political mo um movements by the emperors which led to the *pro-Nicene* position being accepted. It was that actually there was a push back against um the radical sort of extremes of Trinitarianism and there was an identification of the similarities between the warring parties and then there was conceptual um developments which led then to an acceptance of the *pro-Nicene* position in 381 and then basically a closing of this with the imperial stamp by Theodosius in um 382 and onwards.

So, um, what this sort of leads to is then this being, um, Josh, I want to just jump in really quickly because we've been going, uh, about 30 minutes already. Do is there a way to sort of wrap things up? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we can go. I just want to just let me just, um, finish this last bit and then we'll get into our discussion. So, this is just sort of laying the basis for what we'll then take to be the doctrine of the Trinity. So we had as I said um the Nicene Creed which stated which expressed the *pro-Nicene* position um we then had the sort of um the convergence of the Nicene Orthodox position um which then led to what is the doctrine of the Trinity. So please I would say and I I'll like any push back from anyone uh when you hear people say the doctrine of the Trinity does not make sense it's a mystery or there are many doctrines of the Trinity and we don't have the clear doctrine. No, there is a clear doctrine of the Trinity which just simply goes as such. There is one God the Father and two divine persons the Son, the Spirit who are *homoousios* with the Father. That is the doctrine of the Trinity. One God the Father and two divine persons the Son and the Spirit who are *homoousios* with the Father. So *homoousios* just means of the same divine substance nature as the one God the Father. So that just means that all of the divine persons each have the divine attributes. So each of them are all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. Um but then what we also want to say is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are relationally distinct from one another. They are not the same thing as one another. The Father is a divine person who's unbegotten. The Son is a divine person who's eternally begotten by the Father. And the Spirit is the one who's eternally proceeding from the Father. And if you affirm the *filioque* through the Son as well. So what we have then is that we have two divine persons, the Son and the Spirit, but we have the one God being the Father. And why he is outside of the scriptural foundation and what you also see in the Nicene Creed is because the Father is the fundamental divine person. To be the one God is to be the stopping point for explanation. Because normally when we say something is God we are saying that that thing is the source of all reality. The Father is the only divine person who is the source of all reality. He is the fundamental divine person who has no source but provides reality to all other things including the Son and the Spirit. The Son and Spirit are not fundamental because they are generated eternally from the Father. So why we can say the Father is the one God is because he is the fundamental divine person. To be God is to be the fundamental divine person and the only one who is fundamental in the Trinity is the Father. So that's why we return to the statement of the Trinity that there is one God the Father and two divine persons the Son and the Spirit who are *homoousios* with the Father that means they're of the same divine substance or nature as the one God the Father. Uh we can we can stop it there and we can start um we can start our discussion.

Okay, all right. Yeah, let's do that. So, I'm going to turn it over to you guys and feel free Jacob since you've been quiet for a long time, I'll let you come in if you've got a question or if you want to start things off for us, feel free. You know, there's there's a lot covered right there as as people who are listening probably could tell. And Dr. Siguati is really an in-depth scholar who understands a lot about these issues. So, if you want to go in deep, Dr. Siguati is your man. Um, you know what? Actually, let me let me let me put up the super chat really quickly from uh Inspiring Philosophy. We we've had a few come in, but I just wanted to read this one. "You should listen to Dr. Siguati, Jacob. He can crush a full-grown man with his left pinky. This is why I don't disagree with him on anything. I like living." I was about to say I would not with Dr. Siguati ever do an arm wrestling contest. We might do this, but like I'm just looking through the screen and I need to get some gym advice from him. That's for sure. Um, so, uh just to kind of summarize some of this, I want to make sure that I I understand. So, so one of the big things that you're getting at here is a difference um in the nominal sense of the of the word uh God like as a name versus the predicative sense uh where God is a title something like that and that you're saying more or less that the Father, the reference to God as the one true God is using God in the nominal sense whereas using uh when we're talking about the Son and the Spirit being God we're talking about it more in a predicative sense in other words like They have they rightly have the title of God. I just want to make sure that that's that's correct.

Yeah. So, yeah, just um you you are on the right track. There's just sort of a little bit of nuance that needs to be had with the predicative usage. So the nominal usage is correctly you said is just saying that this is used as a name. So the way we understand this is that it picks out a name for something. Um but then um when we use the word God, we can also use it as a descriptive term. So it's not so much a title as such but it's more to say that this is a um it's something which says that this being has the property of divinity. So we can say yeah so we can say that something can be God in one sense and it can be God in the other sense as well and that would be the Father. The Father is God in the sense of having the name God because he's fundamental. But then he also has um the predicative usage of God ascribed to him correctly because he is divine. So it can be used in those two ways. But then the Son, the Spirit, they wouldn't have the nominal sense being used for um for them because they are not fundamental. So the key thing for me is to be God in the nominal sense is that you have to have fundamentality and the Son and the Spirit do not have fundamentality because they are eternally derived from the Father through eternalation. So so they would have to so so is it fair to say then the idea is that they're not fundamental because they are dependent on the Father for their existence. Is that correct?

Well yes yeah so dependence would be the main thing. So it it just al it just really depends on how you cash out fundamentality. Uh because fundamentality is sort of a metaphysical term which can be indexed to different relations. Um so it could be you say okay the Father, the Son, the Spirit are um let's say they're not caused for example let's say they're all uncaused being all all um uncaused beings but they could have a dependence relation of let's say grounding. So for for example for me I like the relation of grounding. Grounding is a relation which is a synchronic relation where you have for example let's say you have an H2O molecule and the O the two O atoms um and the hydrogen atom um those two atoms ground the H2O molecule. They don't cause the

H2O molecule to exist, but they ground it in existence because that, um, uh, relation is synchronic instead of diachronic. Causation is a diachronic relation. Um, so the key point here is, is that the way I normally cash out fundamentality is through the relation of grounding. So what I would say is that the father is ungrounded because he has no synchronic, um, explanation for his existence. There's nothing which is, um, grounding the father in existence right now. Um, but the son and spirit are grounded by, by something outside of them, which is that of the father. And so that's why they are, um, non-fundamental in that specific sense. Yeah.

And and and that's actually, it's funny because I'm gonna, what I'm going to do to push back. I'm actually not going to put on the Latter-day Saint hat. I'm going to put on kind of the more traditional cradle Christian sort of view. I actually, I'll read you a quote. Um, yeah, it says, quote, "If God is dependent on something else, then he isn't truly perfect because dependency implies a lack or contingency. And without that type of perfection, God would be completely unworthy of worship." Just as a little surprise, it's actually Cameron said that, uh, in a video critiquing something that I had said. So, um, and I, and I, and so I was wondering, like, to make a statement like that, where Cameron is implying that, and Cameron, you can come on if you want to chime in on that or or any of that. I'm fine with you coming in too. But, um, do can an, can a dependent being be truly perfect and worthy of worship? Like, I think that's sort of the, the heart of that question. Yeah.

So I would definitely say it can, um, because it, this is a problem that, um, it's, it's, it, it sort of, it's too strong of an objection because the only ones that could probably forward that objection is someone who holds to divine simplicity. Because anyone who's, someone who affirms that there is a divine person who isn't simple would say, for example, that the each of the divine persons depend upon their properties for their existence. So, for example, um, let's say you have a Richard Swinburne who doesn't affirm divine simplicity in the classical sense, or you have William Lane Craig, or one, any of those ones. So they would sell, they would take each of the properties that are exemplified by the divine persons to not be identical to the divine persons. And so then the problem that you have is there is a dependence relation then that is had between, um, those entities, sorry, the, the, the divine entity and the properties that it's exemplifying. Um, so obviously it depends, obviously what you, you hold to with abstract objects. So Craig might get out of it by having a different view about abstract objects. But again, the key point here is, is that you are going to have some form of dependence that a divine person is going to have. And so you don't want to have that as a objection because then you would say, well, nothing really can be divine unless you hold to divine simplicity. I hold to divine simplicity myself, so it's not really a problem. Um, but for someone who doesn't, and that's a lot of contemporary philosophers of religions and, um, apologists, they would have a problem of saying, well, there are some dependence relations that the, the divine persons have, um, outside of themselves, and so what that would mean then is that they cannot be divine. So I think dependence isn't, um, a problem to do with, um, relative to perfection. I think you can still be a perfect being who is dependent upon something else who just grounds your existence because for me, I've argued, um, quite, uh, strongly that our is not a divine property because what this objection is really getting to is that in order to be divine, you need to be our say, you need to be independent. But I would argue no, where the mistake is had is in order to be God, you need to be independent. And I would completely agree with that. In order to be God, you need to be fundamental, mental, but in order to be defined. Yeah.

Sorry. Oh, I was going to say, and and and I see what you're saying there. I guess one of the things is, is that being self, you know, the self-existent one, as it were. Um, some people, I think, might point to the scripture where Jesus says, you know, "Before Abraham was, I am," claiming he was the Great I Am, or self-existent one. And I think a lot of Christians might give that pushback. What, what's kind of your response to the idea of that Jesus might be?

So I don't, I don't personally take Jesus to be Yahweh. Um, I take the Father to be Yahweh. Um, and so what I would say is that Jesus was the agent of Yahweh in the Old Testament. And so, uh, the sort of theophanies that were, um, had by, uh, the people in, in that time, they were had of the person of Christ. They were had of the Son. But that was as an agent of Yahweh. Um, and so for me, Yahweh is, uh, the Father. Um, and so you can still, he can still say he is I am in the sense that he's involved in the work of the, the I am. He's involved in Yahweh's work. Um, so I don't have a problem with that affirmation, but I wouldn't personally go to say that he is Yahweh. I would say the Father is Yahweh. He is the one God. Um, but something I want to really highlight is, um, let's say you don't take my position on the Trinity, there are going to be a lot of conceptual challenges that people are going to be able to raise, um, against your position. If you take this position on the Trinity, I would say it clarifies a lot of what you find in scripture. As I sort of was saying at the beginning, you have all of those one God passages applied to the Father, but never being applied to something we call the Trinity. Um, and then we also have the Son and the Spirit being divine in a certain sense in the, in the scriptures. But then what the, the sort of, um, expression of the doctrine I'm, I'm putting forward just puts that together and says, okay, the one God is just the Father. But that doesn't negate from the Son and the Spirit being divine because being God and being divine are two different things. What a lot of people have is that they, they see it as synonyms. If you are not God, then you're not divine. No, God just means that you are the fundamental divine source of all things, and that is only one being who is that in the Trinity, that is the Father. But then to be, yeah. To be divine just means that you are maximally, maximally great. Yeah. Yeah.

And I, and, and so I, I agree. I think that that's actually one of the things that I really admire about your model, is because a lot of people just ignore the scriptural problems. They ignore the, you know, the historical problems. They kind of ignore the logical problems, and then they just kind of are like, well, it's all a mystery. And I think that that's not a very satisfying position to a lot of people. And I think that you are recognizing that these problems exist and not ignoring them, and then you're presenting a model that I think is very interesting. But people will push back on it because here's, here's one that I've, I've heard a lot of people bring up as they kind of critique it, is this idea of, well, then it kind of seems like you end up with multiple gods in a, in a, whether it's predicative or whether it's nominative, they're sort of like, if you have predicative multiple deities, multiple gods, then you have something that isn't monotheism. But you define monotheism in a very particular way. Do you want to outline that?

Yeah, I, I will do that. Um, but can I just, I'm going to actually take a left turn on this. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So, can I just ask, sorry, Cameron, is it possible just to pull up the the PowerPoint again, if, if that's? Yes, no problem. Um, sorry, I've got loads of, I, I over, I over plan a lot of things. I've got a lot of stuff here. Why I like making these is because it helps me actually revise my own thinking on stuff. Um, uh, sorry, I just want to get to the last, this last slide here. Um, so if any, while you're, let me jump in really quickly. While you're doing that, I just want to highlight for the audience that we will be taking some super chat questions before we move into section two of the dialogue, which we're going to then critique the LDS concept of the Godhead. And so that's what we're going to do in section two. We're going to get there in maybe 15, 20 minutes. Before we do that, we'll do some super chat questions that have been sent in. So now's the time if you want to get your question, uh, asked and answered, then now's the time to send those in. Just wanted to highlight that as you, uh, continue with this, Josh.

Okay, perfect. So, um, something that needs to be sort of, uh, clarified at the beginning is that what I was expressing was not a philosophical model of the Trinity. What I was expressing is what I believe to be the biblical and historical expression of the Trinity. So what I was saying when the statement of the Trinity is that there is one God the Father and two divine persons who are homousios with the Father, that is what I find in scripture and I believe the Father's found in scripture and the Church Fathers express through the Consubstantial statement is that there's one God the Father and there are two divine persons, Son and Spirit, who are homousios with the Father. So what someone will then say is, well, how do we make sense of other things? So, for example, um, as you were saying, Jacob, you were saying, well, there seems to be, uh, too many divinities there, or there seems to be, um, some form of polytheism that creeps in.

Well, I was going to say, just to clarify, that's what I hear a lot of other critics. I don't have that critique. Like, I'm, I'm bringing up things that they would bring up. So, so then what that is, is that that is then not so much an attack on the, um, theological expression. It's then something where someone needs to have a more philosophically nuanced expression of the position. And so in my work, what I normally do is I would state the theological position and then I will do a philosophical explanation of it. Now, I'm not at all going to go into what this whole model is, but if anyone's interested, um, they can go and look up some of my work that I've done on this, but I've got a model that I call monarchical aspectism, which is a philosophical model of the doctrine of the Trinity as understood in the way I expressed it previously. And so, just in a very summarized sense, what I would say is that, um, the idea that there is one God, the Father. So, I'm going to read out this statement now. Everyone is probably going to be knocked out by this statement and say, "What? What is going on here?" But what this whole model does is that it allows everyone to affirm there being one divine substance in the Trinity, but you also can have all of the monarchical sort of aspects which I've spoken about. So, I'm just going to read it out as it is. Um, and if there's wants any, if you want any sort of explanation of what these terms mean, we can go into that. But monarchical aspectism just sort of explicates those two main things I said: one God the Father, and there are two, um, divine persons, the Son and Spirit, who are homousios with the Father.

So the first tenant says, one God the Father, i.e., the fundamental aspect of divinity, divinity in so far as it's located at R1, which bears a first-person perspective and fulfills the O role agent. So the Father is an aspect of divinity. So let's say we have this, um, so normally people who have followed my work, they would, uh, understand that I use sort of a trope, uh, theory to cash out, um, the divine nature. So I'll normally say that God is a trope. But let's just lose the word God for now and let's just use the word divinity. So divinity is a word that picks out this trope. A trope is just an object that, um, is self-exemplifying. So you can have like a redness trope. So, for example, if you have like my phone here, it's black, and so it has blackness tropes, which give it color. But anyways, a trope is just something which has its own character. So let's just say if you picture in that, that sort of image that I have here, there is a divinity trope, and to be the divinity trope is just to be maximally powerful. So there's this object which is maximally powerful. But then this object, divinity, is multiply located. So divinity is located in three regions: divinity is located in R1, R2, and R3. So region one, region two, and region three. To be multiply is just to fill your region. So whatever region that you're in, you fill that region, and you fill more than one disjoint region. So you fill one region here, another one here, another one here. So an example of this is normally things like time travel, where one thing will fill a region there, and then it'll time travel, fill another region in the same time, and, uh, time travel again, fill another region in that other time. So the key point here is that you have the same substance which is able to be located in disjoint regions R1, R2, and R3.

Now, divinity in so far as it's in R1 is what I call an aspect. So an aspect is just a way in which an object is. So, for example, I have an aspect of being a father. So Josh, in so far as he is a father, is an aspect of me, or Josh, in so far as he's a philosopher, is another aspect of me. Now, divinity has different aspects which are location-specific. So divinity is located at R1, um, and it bears an aspect to R1. It's located at R2, bears an aspect to R2, and it's located at R3 and bears an aspect to R3. And so, divinity in so far as it's located at R1 bears the attribute of a first-person perspective. And a first-person perspective, as I argue in my work, building on the work of Lynn Rudder Baker, is what is necessary and sufficient to be a person. So you're a person if you have a robust first-person perspective. So divinity in so far as it's at R1 has the first-person pers, has a first-person perspective. Divinity in so far as it's R2 has another first-person perspective, and divinity in so far as it's R3 has another, um, first-person perspective as well. But then also in those regions, it just, it doesn't just have a first-person.

Just a just a quick clarification. I, I just was wondering, so you do, you do, so you would affirm though that there are multiple, uh, first-person, like consciousnesses involved in this, in this equation that you're laying out, right? Is that correct? Yeah. Three different first-person perspectives. Yeah. Yeah.

So, perspectives are normally, um, location-relative. So because divinity is, um, located at multiple locations, it's going to have different perspectives at those locations. So divinity will have a first-person perspective in R1, region R1, but it will then, it will have a numerically distinct first-person perspective at R2. And then at R3, it will have another first-person perspective. Now, first-person perspectives, it's part of consciousness, but consciousness is more than just having the first-person perspective. It's more robust than that. So I just leave it as it having a first-person perspective, but I won't go further into say, oh, it's a center of self-consciousness, has different thoughts, beliefs, wills, and all those sort of things. So I would not affirm that. All I would say is that it has a first-person perspective at R1, and then R2 is a, a distinct one, and then R3 is another one.

And then, and then just in terms of location, so you're using that word. I'm not, I'm not sure like, because if, if God is immaterial and in all places, to to speak of it being temporary or or located in some location, I just wonder, is that, like, how, how would you reconcile that part of it? Because when I'm hearing it, I'm hearing locations and I'm thinking like they're in actual different physical places.

Yeah. Okay, good. So, I mean, you can cash this out in different ways. You can s take this as a non-spatial location. So, for example, it's quite clear that, um, Christians affirm that the Father and the Son have different locations in heaven because the, the, the Son, for example, is located at the right hand of the Father. So that's the idea that he's not located in the same exact location as the Father, um, sorry, the same region as the Father. So you can have non-spatial regions, and you can have spatial regions. So, for example, Platonists, if you're a Platonist, you will affirm that you can have things which take up non-spatial regions. Um, but if you're someone who holds to, let's say, an immanent realist view of properties, you would say that there, these properties take up spatial regions. So I leave it again as a, um, ambiguous sort of position to cash it out how we ever want. All you need to say is that there are disjoint locations that divinity is located at. And so divinity being in R1 has its own first-person perspective. And then the key thing here is it also fulfills certain relational roles. So divinity in so far as it's located in R1 fulfills the role of grounding divinity in so far as it's located in R2. And then divinity in so far as it's located in R2, if you hold to the filioque, you can say it also has, um, some part to play in grounding divinity and, uh, being located in R3. So you can think about it in this way. So, for example, if I time travel, I can then decide, okay, I'm going to time travel again, and then I'm going to time travel again, and then I'm going to time travel again. And the person who is, um, allowing those streams of time travel persons to come about is the first time traveler, if you understand what I mean. So that first time traveler would be the one who grounds then the existence of the other time travelers. So the point here is, is that divinity in so far as it's located in R1 is the agent of the multiple location of the other divinity, um, other locations that divinity is then, um, located at. So anyways, in sort of bringing this together in the most summarized form is that you have divinity being a multiply substance. So you have this one substance who is multiply located. It's located in region R1, and it fulfills, sorry, it has a first-person perspective and it fulfills a relational role of being the agent. Um, in R2, divinity is located there and it fulfills a relational role of being, um, uh, involved in the generation of the, the, the third stream of divinity. Um, and then divinity in R3 is then having a first-person perspective and also fulfills the relational role of, um, being grounded by the other, um, other locations of divinity. So anyways, the whole point in doing all this, sorry, Cameron, is it possible just to bring up that, that, um, picture again? Thank you.

So what this all does, by the way, is that it allows someone to affirm there being three divine persons because to be a person is just to have a first-person perspective in, in this model. So then what you have here is that you have there being three persons, but there is literally only one entity that exists, only one substance. So what you have is monotheism in the clearest sense of the word because let's say we have, um, monotheism understood as there being one God. Well, there's only one fundamental, um, aspect of divinity, and that's divinity in so far as it's located in R1 because R1 is, sorry, divinity in so far as it's located in R1 grounds divinity in its other locations. So it's the fundamental aspect of divinity. So we can call that God. Um, and then it also only posits one substance. You're not positing multiple substances here. You're positing one substance which is multiply. You can also say that there is only one power here because divinity in R1, R2, and R3 is the same divinity. So the power that's in R1 is the exact same power that's in R2 and R3. And then it's also has one will because there's only one divinity in R1, and then it's multiply in R2 and R3. So there's only one will then which is being posited. So whatever way you cash out monotheism, that could be there being one God. So there being one fundamental divine thing, there being one substance, there being one power, there being one will, you have all of those things being affirmed in this model. So there is no way that someone can say, well, you're actually talking about polytheism here because in any way you cash out monotheism, you're going to only have one coming out as the answer. There's only one thing that's been posited, um, outside of the three persons. So the key thing here is why I wanted to go into this is because, um, what in previous sort of, um, explications of the Trinity, um, I sort of left it at the theological level, um, and then some people bring up the objection of, well, there seems to be a possibility of multiple divinities or God or whatever it is. So there seems to be polytheism that creeps in. But actually, when you affirm the philosophical explanation that I put forward through monarchical aspectism, then you don't actually have there being any form of polytheism because whatever way you cash up monotheism, you're going to have it being affirmed, uh, by this model.

Yeah, real quick, a thought on that. Um, so if I'm understanding correctly, you, the way you'd look at at monotheism is to have one, uh, one God, meaning the the Father, but you can have multiple divine persons in this model. Is that correct? Is that kind of that it would be monotheistic even if you have multiple divine persons, but there has to be one that's fundamental?

Yes. No, but it's, it's even more than that. So if you go with what I might have said previously, um, that monotheism is just grounded in there being one, um, one fundamental person, then someone could still say, well, um, well, okay, let's say there's one fundamental person, but then you have all of these other deities that are non-fundamental, um, then do don't you just seem to have polytheism that's just clearly polytheistic, even though you have this one fundamental thing that's in control of everything? But actually, in this model that I'm affirming, you don't just have one, one God. You have also there being one entity that's posited because there's only one thing that you're really positing, that's this thing called divinity, which is then just multiply in two, um, three disjoint regions, and then it has first-person perspectives in each of those regions, and it fulfills certain relational roles. So then that's why we can then make a distinction between them. But actually, in the strictest sense, what we're really positing is just there being this one thing. So if you want to say monotheism is more than just there being one fundamental thing, well, we have one substance posited because let's say you go with something like Richard Swinburne's position, he would say that, um, the one God is a Trinity, but that aside, he would say that there is, um, in a way, there is predicative divinity, uh, had by each of the three persons. But then the problem that you have is that they are, they are each instances of divinity. So you have the Father being an instance of divinity, the Son being an instance of divinity, the Spirit being an instance of divinity. Now, let's say you said to Swinburne, okay, let's say we multiply that out of more than three, and let's say you multiply that by 100. So you had, um, 300 instances of divinity. Isn't that polytheism? Like, let's say I made that into a thousand instances of divinity. Like, how is that? You're saying, but you're saying because they're all the one, the, the one thing that each of these being, each of these divine persons have, that would constitute monotheism because they're still the one.

Yes. Because the, the issue is, is that multiple location, um, retains sameness across its location. So, for example, if you hold to, um, universals, the brownness of a, of a chair and the brownness of another chair is multiply, but it's the exact same brownness in each of those, um, each of those.

You're saying divinity, divinity itself is a is a single quality. So, if, but, but now this is what someone would say. I mean, as a Latter-day Saint, my my personal, and we'll get into that model, is that there is one fundamental kind of divine person, the Father, who is the, the, the fundamental source, but there are multiple divine beings that can rightly be called God. Now, I would say at the current moment, there are two of those, but I believe two additional ones, right, uh, but I believe that, you know, I guess I'd sort of ask, why is it only limited to two additional persons? Like, is it theoretically possible to have one divine source that is the fundamental source, and then have three or four or five divine persons?

Uh, no. So, okay, now this is again something where me and Swinburne, uh, differ. We both affirm, um, love. So it's a love argument. I don't know if you probably would have heard of that. I'm, I'm sort of familiar with it. Yes. Yeah. Um, but my love, my, so I've got a version of the love argument that I've published on. So it's in the journal of theological, um, called the love argument, um, reformulation, and so I utilize a love argument within this monarchical aspectism. So I would answer to you, no, there can only be, um, three multiple locations of divinity. So divinity cannot locate itself in more than two additional regions. So you'll have divinity in R1, R2, and R3, but it cannot go beyond R3. Now, the reason why is, uh, mine is a little bit different from Swinburne's, but it's still a love argument. So, my, the way I take this, um, to be is that it's interesting. Um, hopefully, I'd like to hear your pushback on it because I actually haven't shared it, um, through a stream, but I've done it in writing. Um, so, and you'll see when we get into, when we get into my model, just so you know, like the love argument is a big part of mine. So, okay. I'm interested in this. Yeah.

So, the way I take it slightly different. So I would say that, um, in order for divinity to, okay, let's change divinity, let's just use the word God now, so it's a little bit easier on the tongue. So, in order for God to have self-love, there must be another. Now, that seems very strange, okay? Because Swinburne takes it differently. He says, in order for there to be perfect love, there has to be, um, another who the, the first divine person can cooperate in sharing love with. But I take it differently. I say, actually, no. Um, because something I, I read and I took on from, um, Alexander Pruss and Eleanor Stump, was this idea that firstly, let's say we take love, the perfect form of love to be agapeic love. And agapeic love has three features. It has the feature of appreciation. So when you agapeically love someone, you appreciate them. Um, secondly, it has benevolence. So when you agapeically love someone, you show goodwill to them. And then the third form, the third aspect of, um, agapeic love is unity. So in, in order to have agapeic love with someone, you don't just appreciate them and have show benevolence towards them, but you also seek union with them, formal and real union. So think about this in a marriage. So I appreciate my wife, I show benevolence towards her, but I don't just leave it at that. I also seek a union with her. A union of my mind and my will. So we try and think the same things. We try and do the same things. But then we also seek a real union. And that will normally be expressed in a, let's say, a sexual way or whatever way. But there'll be a re, a union of bodies. Now, agape love, according to Pruss, um, is the, is the form of love which, it, sorry, it is the form of love. It's just agape. Agape love is, um, the fundamental form of love that we all aspire to have. Now, let's say, um, that someone has agape love, and Pruss will say that agape love is love, as I, as I just said. So every love that we have is really agapeic love. So all forms of love is going to have those three features. It's going to have appreciation. It's going to have benevolence. But it's also going to have a seeking of union in some way with that person. So if I love my friend, for example, I'm going to have appreciation for them. I'm going to have benevolence towards them. But I'm also going to, uh, seek some form of union with them. That means I want to think similar things to my friends. And sort of like, can you have union with yourself? Is that sort of the question?

Yeah. So the question then would be, you can appreciate yourself, you can have benevolence towards yourself, but can you seek union with yourself? Well, doesn't seem to make sense. I mean, how can I be united with myself?

Now, Stump, then Eleanor Stump, then raised a similar type of question in a different context, and she was saying that union can be had in a self-loving context because individuals have disunity inherently. So we are disunited people. We have different beliefs. Sometimes we have conflicting beliefs. We have different desires. We have conflicting desires. We have different wants. We have different sensations that might be conflicting. So all of these mental properties that we have, they are divided. So we have a division within ourselves. And so when we love ourselves, we are bringing ourselves into union. I'm bringing my beliefs into union. I'm bringing my will into union. I'm bringing my, um, all of my, uh, aspects of myself into union. So then that deals with the problem for us human beings. Yes, I can have agape love because all I need to do is I need to have a divided self and then I seek union by bringing this divided self into a united self. But then the question that I had is, well, let's say agapeic love is love. Then if we say that God is love, that means he has agapeic love, then can he love himself? Because the problem with God is God doesn't have a divided self. God seems to have a united self already. So then can he then self-love because self-love needs to have a seeking of union, uh, with yourself? If you're already united, then you don't have that divided self. So then what I, what I then said is, if self-love, um, is agape love, and if God is supposed to have love, and thus love himself, then there must be a way that he has a divided self. So then the way I, I'm able to do that is by this multiple location, because then what you have is the selfsame being is then multiply locating itself. So you have divinity at R1, and then you have divinity at R2. So then you have two distinct things who can then work together in union. So then what you have is what I call an ecstatic form of self-love, such that there is an appreciation that divinity R1 can have for itself, divinity R2 can have for itself. There is a, a benevolence it can have for itself at those two locations. But then the union is going to be had across those locations. And so what you have is an ecstatic form of self-love. So then what I was saying is then there seems to be a necessitating, if God is going to love himself, then there must be a division amongst himself to have that unitive aspect of agape love. Um, and then just to, and this we'll probably need to switch into the next, the Godhead, please. Um, but then the, the, the last thing is, how do we get to that third divine person? So then the idea here is, is that, um, agapeic love seeks union, and the seeking of union is, um, best expressed through the generation of something else. So I would say within a creative context, there isn't something which is more unitive than the procreation of something else. So there's a lot more argument that goes into this, but the idea here is, is that within a romantic context, for example, what truly unites the couple, let's say in a marital context, is by those two loving beings procreating and thus generating a third who they can then bestow all of that goodness upon. And so the idea here is, is that in order for divinity R1 and R2 to have the perfected form of agapeic love, it will then have some form of generative act that brings about the third, which can then have that, um, unitive sort of love that they give towards each other. And so, anyway, there's so much more to to unpack with that, but the key point here is that it stops at the third because it doesn't need to go beyond that because what you have is self-love being instantiated between divinity at R1 and R2, and then the perfection of that self-love through the expression of the generative act being had at, um, R3, the, the multiple location R3. So then if you were then to have divinity at R4 and R5, you'll just have the selfsame thing that you have at R3. So then it wouldn't be a generation of necessity, but a generation of the will. So then you have it stopping at that. So, um, yeah, that, that's sort of the argument that goes here.

I had to add in this comment. Dr. Saju cooking so hard he's making himself sweat. You know, you know, you have the African pastors, you know, they sort of handkerchief. I don't know what's going on, but, um, I'm having a lot of, a lot of sweat. You need to turn your air down, bro. Just, I'm in England, but I don't know why it's so hot today, but it's all right. I'm, I'm, I'm going to be with you too soon, Dr. Sijuad. Everyone will be able to see everything if I'm sweating. All right, Jacob. I feel like, uh, man, the time runs so fast. I wish we could have more time to, uh, to get some more pushback. But let's move on to, uh, get through some of these super chats that you guys have sent in generously, and then we'll, uh, we'll get into section two.

So, this one from Daniel. Jacob, do you know Daniel? Um, I think I've seen him in the live chat. Looks, I don't know that I do. I might have, I might have interacted with him somewhere, but not off the top of my head. Okay. Uh, well, he says, "Mormons are monus with Joseph's theology of one eternal round and his theology of eternal matter and one substance. This destroys the ability to account for knowledge claims." I'm not really sure what the argument there is, though. Um, Jacob, feel free to push back, or I'm not sure that I, I'm not sure that I know what that argument is exactly. That that one would be, I'd need to flesh that out more to be able to answer it.

Well, I would, I would say there is a debate within Latter-day Saint theology around monism, and I tend to lean towards that, but, uh, but yeah, that's exactly how it relates to the destroying the ability to account for knowledge claims. I would, there's a lot baked into that language there that would need to be unpacked. All right. Uh, next one from writer John Buck. Is a Catholic allowed to affirm the operary arguments for the Trinity, such as Swinburne's love argument, since it's regarded as a mystery of the faith?

I'll leave that to you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Um, so I actually address that in the article. So again, I do, um, encourage people to go and read the articles because it's called the love argument reformulation. Um, it's on my Academia profile, so you can find it there, um, or on Theological, which is open access. So, um, what I, what I, the argument, try to give a, try to give a quick response to this one. I'll do, I'll do my best. Philosophers love their their meandering, but, um, I, yeah, so I would say that you can, um, but it would be the argument that I've given. So different from Swinburne's. Swinburne's argument is purely from a philosophical definition of love. Um, my argument is based upon agapeic love, which is understood to be the revealed form of love. So there is a dependence on revelation here because you're dependent on, um, agapeic love, and agapeic love is seen to be a supreme form of love because the Bible says it so. And that's why then we can then argue from, given that, um, agape love is the correct form of love that the Bible affirms, what can we say then, um, how many divine persons can we get off of that, um, understanding revealed love? Yeah.

This is an argument William L. Craig would hate. He would, would not enjoy this one. I think Dr. Craig's going to have some issues with Dr. Sijuada. We need to have that conversation. That would be Oh, all right.

Another one from Daniel. He says, "LDS does not teach two substances, spirit and body, or one substance. One is just finer than the other. Read Wrestling the Angel by Terrell Given." Any thoughts on that one?

Yeah, Terrell Given is a, is a Latter-day Saint, uh, philosopher and theologian. I actually recommend his books. I think he's really good. I'm, I'm, if, if you're into, he's a little more popular level. If you want to read kind of the more heavy duty stuff, uh, I recommend Blake Ostler's work, uh, exploring Mormon thought. He has a four-volume series that really gets into all this stuff in great detail. Basically, anything I'm going to say you guys is going to be largely based off of Blake Ostler's work because I find it to be the most compelling sort of explanation philosophically of Mormon positions. Um, but as far as there being not two substances but one, I actually agree that that is a, that is a Latter-day Saint position. Um, that we are, we are essentially monists. Though I will say that that is not like an essential Latter-day Saint position. I think there, there are Latter-day Saints who might push back on that. Um, but yes, that, that is not, uh, inaccurate.

All right, moving on. Michael Corleone says, "How would you respond to someone who uses St. Thomas's five ways for the existence of God to demonstrate from metaphysics that the Mormon concept of God cannot be God? For example, it cannot be pure act, or it is only an intermediate cause." Now, I know that we're about to like kind of get into some of these questions. So, maybe just give a, a sort of teaser, like a taste of.

Yeah, I'll give a little teaser, but, uh, we, we do not define God. We, we start from a very different presupposition about what we mean when we're talking about God. The, the classical, uh, sort of perfect being theology starts with this idea that God is that of which no greater can be conceived. And that's where the starting points, like, that's what we're looking for. And Latter-day Saints don't do that. There's, it's just a fundamentally kind of different starting point in how we define God. And I'm sure we'll get into that in the, in the later conversation here.

Any other thoughts on on that, Josh?

Yeah. Yeah. I, I would say it's probably good to go into the discussion, we can sort of pick up these, these type of type of things. But I think, yeah, I agree with what Jacob was saying. There just seems to be different philosophical assumptions that are in play with the Mormon idea and the classical idea.

All right, let's get through some more of these super chats though. Um, Michael, I really appreciate the, uh, the question, and we are about to get into, uh, that section very shortly. So your question will be answered basically in this, the entire second half of the show. Uh, Robert, "Source of all reality. Wouldn't that imply that the Son is dependent on the Father? So, the Son is not autotheos." Yes. And I'm, I'm over here with, I'm here with Dr. Sidu saying, yes, that's correct. Uh, yes. Yeah. But I, I, I think the creed is quite clear that the Son is not autotheos.

All right. Uh, slam, which is one of our moderators for Joshua. So, "God the Father wasn't always the Father since the Son proceeded from the Father. Don't you have to have a Son to be the Father?"

Yes, he was always the Father because, as I was saying in the historical, um, portion of what, of the, the, um, presentation, is that the debate that was settled was that the Son is co-relative with the Father. So the Son has always existed with the Father. So the Father has always been the Father because he eternally generated the Son. So eternal generation is affirmed by myself. So the Father brought about the Son eternally, but there's never been a point when the Father wasn't the Father or the Son wasn't existing with the Father.

All right. Next one from Daniel says, "Jacob, debate Jay Dyer on the Trinity."

We, we shall see. I, I'll, I'll put that in my, in my maybe folder. I've, I've, I don't know enough about Jay. I generally like to debate people that I feel like I understand their position first. So I'd have to take some time to understand Jay a little better.

Fair enough. All right. Dawa troll says, "Uh, am I kafir, kafir, kafir, kafir for doubting hijab would win in a boxing match against Dr. Suad?" Hi, Jacob. Had you debated a fellow Dawa? He has actually. He has debated a Muslim metaphysician. Is he still around? Is he still doing stuff? Or did he, uh, did he quit YouTube? I'm, I'm not certain. I, I think he moved, um, from K to Morocco. So, um, I don't, I don't know what's happened since. I would be really afraid to debate Dr. Sijuadi in person. He's, that, the, the physicality difference would make me a little nervous. Giant. It's, it's, it's purely, uh, just aesthetics, right? It's not actual, actual power. It's, it's just looks, it looks like it. Uh, all right, last one, and then we'll get to section two of the discussion today. Edar Edardo, Edgardo. Um, sorry, I'm butchering your name. "Are the Trinity the same substance or just the same nature? I understand nature to be the class or kind of being, and substance a being, a single being entity."

Um, I will affirm both. So I would say, yeah, they, they are distinct terms. So we can say nature can be a kind, nature. So the Father, Son, and Spirit are of the same kind, nature, uh, which is divinity. But then also specifically within my model, I would say that they are of the same substance because they are just simply, um, the multiply divinity. So each of them are, um, divinity of those different locations. So there is just one substance.

All right, Jacob, I would actually largely affirm what, what Dr. Siguati is saying, the idea of divinity being something that is one, uh, but that there being multiple. And this is where we might differentiate is the idea of different, uh, instantiations of that nature. I think I'll get that more into that in the model as we get into it, but that is more or less the, uh, the way that when you're talking about the oneness, that oneness is the, the divinity that is shared. It's the, as you were saying, Dr. Dr. Sui, the one thing that is shared amongst the three persons of the, what you would say, Trinity. I would say Godhead.

I love how respectful you are. You're just like, Dr. Sidui. We can, can we call you Josh? Can we just refer to you as Josh?

No. No, you can't. I kind of get it. You worked hard. Of course.

I was going to say, I kind of get it because you've been lecturing us the whole time. Yeah, it's, we shouldn't, when someone, when someone is as, as deep and as philosophical as Dr. Suiad, you address them as doctor.

No, no, no. Please, Josh. He's fine. Okay. Um, so I, I just wanted to

Highlight for the audience what we're about to do. Is so if you do send in a super chat, we're going to answer it at the end of this next section, just to let you know. So if you, if you send it in, you're expecting us to like, get to it right then. Uh, we're not going to do that. We're going to do it at the end of the section. But we're about to turn into now, we're going to critique the LDS concept of the Godhead. So, let's turn to that. And we're going to start with Jacob again for, um, he, he's got a presentation for us. And then we're going to switch it back over to Josh, and we'll get another presentation from him, followed by another 30 to 45 minutes of dialogue. So, uh, yeah.

Alrighty. Can you hear me? Okay? Is everything coming through clear, Cameron? Because I'm having trouble hearing you. Oh, sorry. No, that was that was my fault. But I had my microphone muted. Um, yeah, if you want to advance the slides to the next slide. Next slide. Okay, the next one, and then we'll be there. That's it.

All right. So, um, first of all, thank you to Dr. Suiad. Um, I want to say first and foremost that this question of who is God is one of the ones that separates people. They say, you know, Latter-day Saints, they worship the wrong Jesus, therefore, you are not Christian. And so the idea here is that the wrong Jesus is because we don't have the same conception of Jesus's relationship to God. We actually would say, very similar to what Dr. Siguad says, is that say that he is a fully divine person, but we would not say that he has the same sort of one substance with the Father because, frankly, just to be totally frank, I don't understand that concept. I'm going to go into why more in this presentation. Um, and that's sort of really at the root of for most people or a lot of people why Latter-day Saints are not Christian is because I wouldn't say that we necessarily reject the doctrine of the Trinity. I would say we don't even understand it. Um, it doesn't seem to make sense to us. So, if you struggle to understand this doctrine of the Trinity, just know that we're with you on that. Now, um, and and I do think it is a little tough for a Latter-day Saint to be told that you're not a Christian unless you affirm this doctrine that you don't understand. So that's that's why this, I would say, this conversation matters.

Now, where I'm really a huge fan of Dr. Siguad is he recognizes the problems that we see. He recognizes the historical problems with the one God being the Trinity. That's, uh, you know, historically speaking, it's the later creeds contradict the earlier creeds and scripture. There's obviously the scriptural problems. Dr. Siguad did a great job of outlining that. I'm honestly curious how people deal with the obvious scriptural distinction that Jesus and the Father have between one another in light of Jesus saying that the one true God is the Father. And then there's the logical problems.

Okay, so if you go to the next slide, the logical problem of the Trinity. Again, Dr. Suiad addresses this very well, but I want to point it out. If the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Son is not identical to the Father, and then you say there is only one God, you can't make that statement. Any, if you affirm, uh, three of these statements, you have to deny the fourth. Okay? You're not going to be able to to square this, this circle, as it were. Um, however, Dr. Suad has a brilliant way of dealing with this. If you go to the next slide, um, he says that look, the Father in that first statement is used as kind of a name, where the other one, it's a predicative sense that it's being used to describe that Jesus is fully divine. And if you write the statements out that way, there's no contradiction. It's fine. It works. So again, totally good with this. Um, very much, uh, a fan. But there's actually, and so I'm following with, uh, Dr. Sigu all the way on this. But then I say there's one other step that you, that you haven't hit, that you missed. And if you don't understand this problem, you won't understand the Latter-day Saint conception of God.

So let's go to the next slide. And this is the biggest problem. Let's go to the next slide. It's the notion that Jesus is fully God and fully man. Okay. Um, so their idea is in Trinitarian thought is that there are two natures in one person. And this is the hypostatic union and all of that doctrine. So let's, let's go to this and how I've heard it explained.

Next slide. Um, okay. So X is currently a brother and X is currently a cousin. No problem there. I, those two natures exist in me. I'm a brother and I'm a cousin. These are complimentary natures, as I see it. But let's go to the next one and now see if this always works. It doesn't always work, cuz for example, could something be both a frog and an acorn at the same time? Now, you could transform a frog into an acorn theoretically. But what I'm saying is is logically it's a, it's just an impossibility for a frog to be an acorn at the same time because the properties of a frog and the properties of an acorn are just different things. So we have what we call mutually exclusive natures or what I would call an unbridgeable ontological gap. These two things can't be the same thing because they are different things fundamentally. Okay, by definition of what they are.

To use a more simple example, we can go to the next slide. Um, the idea of contradictory natures is a, you know, just take a square. A square by its nature, its property is to have four sides. A triangle is to have three sides. You could transform a, a square into a triangle, but you cannot say that something is both a square and a triangle. Again, it's the idea of mutual exclusivity.

So, what about the natures of God and man as put forward by sort of classical theistic thought? So, if you go to the next slide, you have the nature of God and man. Okay. So if, if God is eternal and uncreated and self-existent, but man is created, finite, and dependent, this, are you can't be both those things at the same time. You can't be perfect and flawed at the same time. You can't be both necessary and contingent at the same time. You can't be both immortal and mortal at the same time. Now, knowledge is the one I want to focus on here because I think it makes the point the most clearly.

Let's go to the next slide. So in this, um, here's the problem. How can one mind, okay, be both all-knowing, the square, and limited in knowledge, the triangle? Right? These are two different things. They just don't go together. These are mutually exclusive categories. Well, some have suggested kind of an ad hoc solution to this problem. Go to the next slide, of the two-mind solution. The idea is, okay, Jesus has a divine nature and he has a human nature, and so he has a divine mind and a human mind. And so his human mind was limited in knowledge, but his divine mind, that, that knew all things, right? So there are two minds. But there's a really big problem with this solution, and that is, if you go to the next slide, yep, you got it. Um, the two-mind solution fails. I'll just give kind of the basic syllogism here that I think makes the point. A person is a single center of consciousness, thought, and will. Two centers of consciousness have two distinct subjects of experience, two selves, two eyes. It's two persons. But Jesus was only one person. He was not two persons. Therefore, Jesus cannot have two centers of consciousness, two minds.

So, go ahead and go to the next slide, because if you affirm that Jesus was two people, that's the Natorian heresy. And that's been dealt with pretty well, I think. So what we're left with is sort of this one mind that's all-knowing and another that is limited in knowledge. Okay. And this is just one example. There's a laundry list of the on that. What people want to say is that there's an unbridgeable ontological gap between God and man. But Jesus somehow was both of those things. In other words, God is a square. We are triangles. But Jesus was both a triangle and a square at the same time in the same person. And we just call that the mystery of the hypostatic union. And we just don't try and give a great explanation for it because you can't explain it.

So let's go to the next slide again. At the core of the problem is the unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine. Okay. So, but I have a question. And that question, if you go to the next slide, is, what if you are a child of God? This is a fundamental notion in Latter-day Saint saint thought. This is, I would say, the most radical and fascinating part of our theology. And it's different from that of the traditional Creole Christians who say that you are a creature. We say that we are children.

Now, what this does philosophically, if you go to the next slide, is it erases the distinction in kind or the ontological gap. And rather, it becomes a difference in degree. So like an acorn and an oak actually share the same nature. They're both technically the same kind of thing. They're species, but they're different. So, if in the Bible it was to say that there's no one like me, it's saying there is no one. It's like the oak tree saying, like, "Who are you guys? You bunch of acorns." Like, to compare yourself with me, no one is a tree like I am. But it doesn't mean that they're different kinds of things. They just are different in their degree.

Now, if you think this is totally just ad hoc, made up, no scriptural basis for this, let's go through some of it. So first of all, in Genesis, it talks about that God made us. And it's also interesting, I'll just note, it says, "Let us plural make man in our plural image after our likeness." Okay, so there's this idea of image and likeness. And a lot of people think, well, it's just kind of an allegory. It's a metaphor. It doesn't have anything actually to do with actually being children of God. Except for in a few chapters later in Genesis chapter 5, when Adam has a son, it says that his son is in his own image and after his likeness. So it's the Bible, if we're being consistent, is using the image of having children in images and likeness in the very book of Genesis in the same way.

In, uh, Acts, it talks about, "For in God we live, and move, and have our being; for we are also his offspring." You can go to the next slide. This one is one of the more fascinating ones. See, when Jesus was, they're kind of like, Jesus is claiming to be God, and so they're going to stone him. And they come up and they say, "We're not stoning you for any good work, but for blasphemy; because you, a mere man, claim to be God." Okay? So they're saying, "You can't claim to be God if you're a man." Those are different ontological categories here. This is a, this is blasphemy. But Jesus doesn't correct them. He, what he does is he just looks at them and says, "Is it not written in your law, I said, 'Ye are gods'?" So he's throwing back at them saying, "No, no, no. You guys misunderstand. You guys are the same kind of thing that I am." Right?

So, how about the next one? It, in, in, uh, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about, he says, "Be therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Now, the idea here, the word here in Greek, *teleios*, it means like something like fully mature, complete, uh, has fulfilled its full fullness of its nature, right? So, what if you, if you understand that sort of a conception of what perfection means in the Greek, it's saying to be sort of fully mature or complete, even as your Father in heaven is fully mature or complete. Think of the acorn and oak analogy as you look at that.

So, what this does is, if you go to the next slide, is it, it creates a gap of degree rather than a gap of kind. So here's a question. What if divinity is humanity fully realized? Okay. Now, we talked about love and the oneness of God. Right? It's really interesting, especially when you understand this idea of perfection being completeness or wholeness, where Christ, okay, John 17, a lot of people will be like, well, it's just about ministry and it's about, you know, them being really united, like, you guys go, like, good, be a team as you go out there and minister to the world. Okay, this is right before, this is like his last prayer before he goes and is crucified and all this stuff happens. This is his last meeting with the disciples. I don't think he's going to be like, "Hey guys, go out there and do rahrh and be a good team." He's saying something really profound here, and people don't realize it. He says, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them which also shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us." So before I continue here, the oneness of God problem, Jesus and the Father are one. He's saying he wants us to be one with them, too. And he says, "And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one." In other words, in the same way that we are one, that I share this oneness with you and you, Father, I want them to share in that as well. And then he says, "And I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect, complete, whole, fully mature in oneness, in the oneness of the divinity that Dr. Suiadi is talking about right now."

Go ahead. Let's go to the next slide. Now, again, you're thinking, "This is nuts. This is crazy." Like, you're talking about them being gods. Oh, shoot. On my slideshow itself, I forgot to, uh, let me, I can fix this right now, I think. Oh, hold on one second. Um, hold on. Well, remember that I've got, I've got it on my, on my side of things, so I can't. Oh, yeah. Um, yeah, I, I will read what's underneath that. What's underneath the highlighted part is actually really, really important here, but we'll go through it one at a time. So, Romans 8:17 talks about the Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him. Now, there are talking about adoption in these. I do know that there is an adoption motif that's being used, but I would argue that both are being used. And the idea of adoption in the ancient context is the idea of being adopted into the covenant relationship. To the Jews, there was an idea that the only people that were kind of like in the family were the, uh, were the, it were the, the Jews. And this is obviously saying, no, we're, we're all actually under God as his children, uh, through Christ. And so there's kind of, I think, both motifs are playing out. But this is the one that's really interesting in Revelation. This is Jesus Christ himself speaking, uh, to John. And he says, "The one who conquers, I will grant him," and this is blanked out, but it says here underneath that, "I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne." Okay, this is language saying you get to sit on the throne with God and Christ.

Now, this leads in very nicely, if you go on, to the early church notion of theosis. Now, I will fully admit that the early church fathers didn't cross the ontological gap. They had assumed sort of a Greek metaphysics that said, well, we can have theosis, but we can't go all the way, right? But regardless, they very clearly saw what these verses were teaching. And it's, it's kind of funny. I like, uh, I like Athanasius because like, I sometimes quote this to people and I say, "Hey, there was a Mormon leader who said God may become man so that man might become God." And they're like, "Oh, that's heresy." And it's like, actually, I was quoting Athanasius. Um, and then Irenaeus says, you know, "If the Word became man, it was so that man could may become gods. The Word of God became man that you might learn from a man how man may become God." This is Clement of Alexandria. And if you look into the literature on this, it's just theosis is all over the place. Like anyone who denies it is just, it's, and it's a very early church teaching that that we were to be deified, um, and come into that.

So again, if we go to the next, uh, slide there, um, but there's only one God, right? We have to be these hard monotheists. I'm actually really glad that Dr. Sigu is willing to sort of question that, that assumption. Because if we go to the next slide, there's a question. What if the Bible is not hard monotheistic? And by hard monotheistic, I'm talking about the idea of this metaphysical monotheism, right? Go look at the biblical scholarship. Like, you guys, that's been debunked. Like, the Bible is not a hard monotheistic text. It is a, uh, it has, uh, some various sort of nuances, but it isn't monotheistic in that hard thing. So, everyone's like, "We got to be hard monotheistic." I'm like, "Why? The Bible isn't." So, let's just go through some of it.

Next, uh, the council of the gods. Um, Psalm 82. This is obviously Michael Heiser has great work on this talking about this idea that God has taken his place in the divine counsel, in the midst of the gods he holds judgment. Um, again, I talk about Genesis 1 where it talks about God, right at the beginning, there's multiple involved. So the text itself does not say, "Hey, this is hard monotheism." We can get to some of the verses that seem to suggest that. Now, I also want to make this disclaimer. Michael Heiser did hold to the ontological difference of Yahweh to all other beings, um, which actually conflicts with the idea that Dr. Sijuadi said that Yahweh is the Father. Because, anyway, I'll get more into that a little later.

The next one is, is the Yahweh slide. If you go to that. Um, so the one true God is Yahweh, and, you know, that's what, um, Dr. Sijuad had brought up. But this creates a bunch of problems. Um, Jesus claims to be the Great I Am. But if he's not fundamental, why is he making that claim? In Joel, it says, "Everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh shall be saved." But we are told to call on the name of Jesus to be saved. Philippians says that every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. This is Paul quoting Isaiah where Yahweh is saying to every, every knee shall bow. So, is Yahweh Jesus? Is Yahweh the Father? That's an Old Testament issue.

Now, as we get more into the intertestamental period, where, where, so what happened is, is in my understanding of the history, is that about the time of the intertestamental period is really when the monotheism of the Greek Hellenized world really starts to hit even the Jewish world. And so the Jews sort of adopt a more hard monotheistic stance. But even then, there were heretics within the sort of, uh, Jewish world that held this idea of two powers in heaven, the God and the Son of Man. Uh, Alan Segal has his book all about this, showing that, you know, the early heretics were the ones who believed in these complementary powers in heaven.

If you continue on to the next one, what we're getting into here, um, is actually, let's, let's skip down. I'm going to come back to this one. In the New Testament, we have, uh, divine beings. Dr. Sidiati, you've again, the New Testament doesn't present like a hard monotheism, so far as I can tell. You know, there are three, and, and a lot of the Christians would, would, would be like, "Yeah, hey, Dr. Siguad, you're, you're leaning too close to polytheism here because you'll say like, this was a quote you said, 'Yes, definitely in the predicative sense, there are three gods. There are three entities that are predicated God.'" And I think we will have to say that. And so, a Trinitarian would say, "Yes, there were other deities that were existing." Uh, and the ones that are important are the three perfect deities. Um, so if we continue on again, why are we making this hard metaphysical monotheistic assumption? The Old Testament shows a monarchical theism, council of the gods concept. Intertestamental period is full of the idea of two powers in heaven, which Christians very much adopt. The New Testament has a monarchical theism, as Dr. Siguati has pointed out, where the Father is the most true, the only true God. Pre-Nicene, I, I would say leans monarchical monotheistic. Uh, historically, there's a lot to that. Uh, and it isn't really until the post-Nicene period that you start to get, such as with the Athanasian Creed and others, that really start to see the, the Trinity as the one true God.

So, if you go back up, um, um, to that restored gospel truths, it's, um, now down. Come down. There it is, right there. So, this is the idea of the, the, Oh, shoot. Um, actually, let's go down. Let's go down a couple more. Next. Next. Okay, this is what I want to do. So you have to understand that we believe that we are restoring something that is actually consistent with the earlier views. The earlier view was a monarchical theism, not a metaphysical monotheism, a hard monotheism. In the early view, there was no explicit ontological gap. It was just a gap in glory or degrees. The early view held to a subordination of the Son to the Father. Uh, you can see it in scripture. In the early view, there was no creation ex nihilo. That's a later thing. Um, the early view would be a God that has parts, passions, you know, isn't this divinely simple, immutable, ineffable thing that, that, that later sort of creedal formulations came to.

So, um, you know, if you want to go to the next one, actually, um, I want to bring up this objection that people are going to bring up. Um, uh, actually go to the next one, one more after that, because people will bring up, "But, but, you know, hold on, Jacob, like the Bible says there's only one God, right? It's hard metaphysical monotheism. Uh, there's the, the Shema, which says, 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.' There's Isaiah 45 that says, 'There is no other God. Apart from me, there is no God. I am the first. I am the last. Apart from me, there is no God.'"

If you go to the next slide, um, these actually, Michael Heiser does an excellent job of explaining that we got to be very careful that we don't say that they, the Jews, had a conception that there were no other deities out there. Um, because these, these statements of their, "there's none like me," "there's no one besides me," these are Near Eastern incomparability idioms. In other words, they're, they're phrases. They're kind of catchphrases that existed in that time. And we know that not only because of other Near Eastern texts, but because the Bible itself. Babylon says, um, you know, speaking of Babylon, um, in Isaiah, it says, "Now therefore hear this, you lover of pleasures, who says in your heart, 'I am, and there is no one beside me.'" Or Zephaniah says this, "This exalted city said in her heart, 'I am, and there is none else.'" This is an expression of saying like, "Who's like me?" Like, "I'm the best." It's expressing a difference in kind rather than a difference, I'm sorry, not a difference in kind. They're talking about other cities. It's just describing that we are the best of all of the cities. We are, we are higher and above all of them.

So, if we go back to that slide that was out of order, it's about five back, let's say. Uh, it says, uh, "Restoration of early views." Um, actually, no, wait. Uh, up two more, I think. Let's go to that. There it is. "Restored Gospel Truth." So this is, and I know we went into a lot of philosophical stuff with Dr. Sijuadi and things, but in this, um, in this view that Latter-day Saints have of God, um, it all comes down to this, these kind of basic truths. First of all, is that you are a child of God with a divine potential. You are not just a creature. Your God is the Father of your spirit. When Christ said, "Your Father and my Father," he was talking to you. Um, and that says something about your character and your nature. You have a potential beyond your imagination. Your F, um, your Father, our Father, is the Most High God. Divinity emerges as a consequence of right relationship. Again, to go back to Dr. Suiad, I agree that divinity is what emerges as it, it's like divinity is the nature of relationship. What we're experiencing when we experience true love, union, and communion with other people is divinity. And that can grow to beyond our imagination. The Son and the Spirit are fully divine because they are one with the Father in love, will, and purpose. Just like how he said that he wanted the disciples to be one with them in that, in that loving relationship. Um, Jesus Christ made possible our entering into that oneness of divinity with them by choosing to love as they love. And that's what our life is actually all about. Our life is God giving us the chance to make the choice to see if we will choose to be the kind of being that they are, to love, to grow, and if we will choose Jesus Christ as the one who will lead us to that and make possible our coming into full communion in that loving relationship with the Father. And that is my long rant. So there we go. I appreciate that.

You know, I, uh, I did want to highlight here, just thank you for, we had a technical issue, and that's why I'm having to do the slides for him and stuff. And so I appreciate you having some patience and also the audience, uh, kind of getting through some of these technical issues. But let's turn it over to Josh whenever you're ready. Feel free to take away your, uh, presentation.

A concept. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this one, um, unlike the other, the other section that we were looking at. But, um, I do want to, and so firstly, thank you, Jacob, for that. It was very clear, um, and very interesting what, um, a lot of the connections that you made, um, so thank you for that. But I do want to raise an objection. So my focus now would just be a specific objection, which I believe is a central tenant of the doctrine of God within the Mormon, um, sort of fundamental theology. And this is focused on the concept of divine exaltation. So, just to state what the formal definition of exaltation is, the Mormon doctrine that God the Father, so we're focusing now just on the Father. So we'll leave the Son and the Spirit aside for now. So we're just focusing on the person of the Father. So the Mormon doctrine that God the Father was once a non-divine being who through an adherence to eternal laws and ordinances achieved godhood, establishing the pattern by which humans may potentially attain divine status, and who himself is part of an infinite regress of divine beings, each having progressed from mortality to godhood through the same eternal pattern. So the idea here is, is that the Father, in the most simple sense, had a father. And so the Father was, um, eternal, but he had a father or had another divine being who exalted him to a divine status. And so then the Father.

Yeah, sorry, I, I just, and I don't want to interrupt. I just want to make sure that, that I understand a couple things. Is where that it's in quotes there? Do, what was the source of that quote? Yeah. So, no, it's quotes from, it's from my own work. That. Are you? So I've got, I've got. Okay. Okay. Because I, I was going to say that, that, that the idea that God the Father had a father, just, just to be, again, to just for clarity's sake, that is not, uh, that is not an explicit Mormon doctrine. There are Latter-day Saints, like myself, like Blake Osler and others, who don't hold to the idea. So, if you're going to offer a critique of the infinite regress model of God, I'm actually very interested to hear it because there are Latter-day Saints that push it. And I'm, I'm interested in, in the critique of that as well, because I do think it's a live option, but I'm, I don't hold it myself, but maybe you'll convince me it's not a live option. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, no worries.

So, I, I'll just tell you the structure of, of this critique. So, I'm going to state the traditional position. I'm going to critique it. I'm then actually going to bring up, because I, I am aware of great Blake Osler's sort of, um, monarchical position. I'm then going to show how that's not tenable within a Mormon framework. And so you have to affirm the traditional position, but if you affirm the traditional position, it's incoherent. So that's going to be my, my main object. So, um, but anyway, as, as you were saying, so this statement is from, for my own work. I've got a paper that's under review, um, which is just sort of cashing this out more, but anyway, this is the doctrine in a, a sort of clear sense that it's the idea that the Father was exalted from mortality to a divine status. Now, sort of the, the, um, the theological framework that we have for this is that is it's the idea that the Father was eternal. So I'm not disaffirming the et, the, the eternality of the Father. The Father was an eternal spirit, but the idea here is, is that he wasn't eternally divine. So the traditional position within, um, orthodox forms of Trinitarianism is that the Father is eternal as a person, but also eternally and essentially divine. The idea here is, is that the Father isn't essentially divine. He is contingently divine. That means that he became divine at some point. Prior to that, he was, um, existing as a non-divine being.

Now, the primary textual sources for this doctrine are, people would say, is the specific teaching that you find from Joseph Smith. So you have something called the King Follett Discourse. Um, and so this was just sort of a sermon which was, if I'm correct, more the latter part of, of, uh, Joseph Smith's life, and he was doing a, a funeral, um, oration where he was sort of stating these key terms, um, and some things that he said sort of support this idea of exaltation. So I'll just read. Uh, so Joseph Smith stated, "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see it." He also states, "It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another, and that he was once a man like us. Yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did."

We then have something in the sermon in the grove. So he stated, "If Jesus Christ was the son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that he had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a Father, and there was ever a Father without first being a son?" We also have him stating, "Hence, if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that he had a Father also?" So that's speaking about God the Father. So what we have here are sort of clear statements that you have this individual, the Father, who was mortal, who had, um, a prior, um, being who you could say was, uh, before him temporally, or you could say it's just an essential ordering. But there was a being in some way before him who exalted him to the status of divinity. And we can say then, in a clear sense, that the Father had a Father who then exalted him to the divine status. Uh, we then have other individuals after Joseph Smith who state clearly things like, "As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be." So the idea here is, as Jacob was saying, sort of the potentiality of all of humanity is to become God. But the idea here is, is that God himself also went through that process of exaltation of being like us, mortal, and then becoming God.

We also have people like Brigham Young, uh, who was influential as well, who stated, "Our Father in Heaven was once begotten of a previous heavenly world by his Father, and again he was begotten by a still more ancient Father, and so on." So you have this eternal regression as such, this infinite regress of divine beings. Now, um, let's sort of move away from, and there's other, you can, if people are interested, I can send this, there are other individuals who have sort of supported this, uh, from other texts, but we can move off, sort of the scriptural support, and I want to raise a problem with this. So let's say you affirm the traditional position that there was a time when the Father was not divine, and then he became divine. I'm then going to raise a conceptual challenge against that position. Now, I call this the contingent divinity problem. It's the logical impossibility of acquiring divine attributes.

So, in a more simple sense, because I, I really want to shorten how much I'm going to, going to speak, um, but the simple sense here is that you cannot ever become divine. If you were not divine in the first place, you can never be divine. Divine is an essential characteristic of a being. It cannot be a contingent characteristic of a being. So if you're not divine essentially, you can then never become divine. So there cannot be this idea of exaltation where something can become divine. So this doesn't just apply to the Father, who I'm focusing on, but this actually undercuts the whole position that you were saying, um, Jacob, of us all becoming divine like God. You cannot do that. It's literally logically impossible. And now I'm going to show why this is the case.

Let's focus on omnipotence. Okay? And why I focus on omnipotence as the divine attribute is because I believe it is the fundamental divine attribute. It is the attribute from which all the attributes come. So omnipotence, and I'm following sort of Swinburne on this, um, is the definitional attribute of God, which we can just say is the attribute of being able to bring about any logically possible event. So, you can use event terminology, you can use action terminology, but it's the idea that there are no logical limitations to the exercise of this power. Now, um, I believe that all other divine attributes stem from this. To be, um, omnipotent, that will lead to you being omniscient. To be, um, omnipotent, that will also lead to you being perfectly good, being perfectly free, being eternal, all these sort of things. So if you can show that omnipotence is not something which can ever be gained, then that also means you cannot gain any of the other divine attributes because they stem from, um, omnipotence. So if omnipotence is gone, you sort of lose out on all the other divine attributes.

Now, I'm going to sort of show why, uh, you have a problem. So there are two paradoxes that can be raised against, um, the gaining of omnipotence. Let me define my terms first, as philosophers like to do. So an essential attribute is an attribute that you have and you must have in order to exist. So, for example, a human has the essential attribute of taking up space. You cannot exist as a human and not take up space. And you could say a human has the essential attribute of being rational. You cannot be a human without being rational. So these are attributes that you must have in order to exist. A contingent attribute is an attribute that you can have, but you can also lack, and you can gain it as well. So, for example, height. The height that an individual has is a contingent attribute of that individual. They didn't have it, um, maybe 10 years ago, then they're taller 10 years later. So these are attributes you can gain. You can also lose as you, as you, um, go older, get older. Weight is a contingent attribute. So the key thing here is you can gain and you can lose it.

Now, if you take omnipotence as a contingent attribute, as divine exaltation requires you to do, then you're going to end up with two paradoxes because the only way to gain omnipotence is either that you cause yourself to become omnipotent, or someone else causes you to be omnipotent. So, either you make yourself omnipotent, or someone else makes you omnipotent. Now, the problem that you have with self-causation is that it leads to a bootstrapping problem because if someone lacks omnipotence, in order to gain omnipotence, you already have to have omnipotence because, um, to be omnipotent is just to have no logical limitations. You can perform any, any logically possible event. Now, if you are not omnipotent, that just means that there are some events that you cannot cause. Now, in order to become omnipotent, you then need to have the ability to bring about any logically possible event. But then you're already assuming from the beginning that you have omnipotence. So I'll, um, repeat that again. So if I'm non-omnipotent, I can perform actions, but I cannot perform every logically possible action. If I am omnipotent, I can perform, um, every logically possible, um, action or I can cause any logically possible event. Now, in order for me to become omnipotent, I then already have to have the ability to perform any logically possible event because then it doesn't make sense to say that I'm not omnipotent. I can't cause any logically possible event. But then at T2, I can cause any logically possible event. It seems to be contradictory. How can you at T1 have a restriction to logic that you can't cause every logically possible event, but at T2 you can cause every logically possible event? What made the change?

So the problem that you have here, you, is that you seem to have, um, a bootstrapping problem. The only way you can gain omnipotence is that from the beginning you already have the ability to bring about every logically possible event. Then you can gain the attribute of omnipotence, which is causing every logically possible event. So it seems to lead to a paradox. If you think you can cause yourself to have omnipotence, it seems like you already have to possess omnipotence. So self-causation doesn't seem to be a way.

Now, a Mormon, however, wouldn't say that the Father caused himself to be omnipotent. They would say that the Father of the Father caused him to be omnipotent. But then you have a problem here. This leads to another paradox because, um, and I'll just focus on the volitional conflict problem. If you are interested, um, when the paper does come out, you can contact me to to get this. Now, in order for a being to cause another being to become omnipotent, that being, as we've already said, already has to have omnipotence. So, in order for it to bestow omnipotence on someone else, it already has to be omnipotent. But then, if that being is omnipotent, and then it brings about an independent being from it, who then is omnipotent, this is going to lead to the volitional conflict problem.

Now, this is the, the classical problem where can you have two omnipotent beings? Now, the Trinitarian has a way out of this because the Trinitarian says that the Father is independent, but the Son and the Spirit are dependent. So the Father, um, the, sorry, the Son and the Spirit do the will of the Father. They do not have their own independent wills. So there's never going to be a conflict of the will, even though the three persons are are omnipotent. But with, um, a Mormon idea, you have the Father having an independent will from that of, um, his Father. So then you have two omnipotent beings who have independent wills. So then how can you stop their wills from clashing? Now, someone could say, well, um, because they're perfectly good, they're always going to do the same, the, the, the same thing. That doesn't help because you don't have to look at the performance of good actions. You can look at non-moral actions. So, for example, if the Father, so I'm going to change this because the Father and the Father's Father is just fairly difficult, uh, to say. So let's say you have divine person one, you have divine person two. So if you have divine person one, who is omnipotent, and he decides to, um, allow the sun to rotate on its axis in a clockwise direction. But then divine person two says, "Actually, I want the clock to rot, sorry, I want the sun to rotate on its axis in an anticlockwise direction." How do you stop those wills from crashing? Because they have nothing to do with morality. So the way that people normally get through this is by saying they focus on moral questions. But of course, the two divine persons, being perfectly good, are going to do the same thing when it comes to morality. But when it comes to things which are mundane, but which are, which are non-moral, how can you stop those wills from clashing? You can't. Let's say you have Abraham. God is going to call Abraham to go to this land, and the other God is going to call Abraham to go to that land. That's not a moral question. How can you stop those volitions from clashing?

With a Trinitarian, have the way out of this because the Father is the, the fundamental one. All things flow from him, and that includes the will. So then the will of the Son and the Spirit is always going to be to bring about the will of the Father. You don't have independent wills here. So with the exaltation problem, if you have a being that brings about another being that's independent from it and is omnipotent, then there is no mechanism at all to stop their wills from clashing. And so that means there cannot be two independent omnipotent beings. It is logically impossible. So if you have then the position that's taken in, in Mormonism, that you have the exaltation of the Father by his own Father, then you have this paradox bringing about, how do you stop there being a volitional clash?

Now, just very quickly, I'm not going to go into detail. So the only way out of this is to say that omnipotence must be an essential property. It cannot be something which is gained by a being. It must be something that's had by that being, because a being cannot cause itself to be omnipotent, and it cannot give omnipotence to something that's independent from itself, because then there'll be the possibility of volitional clash. Now, the way that I believe Jacob will get out of this is by just saying, "Yes," and he'll probably be high-fiving me and saying, "Oh, this is completely correct. I don't believe that the traditional position." I don't want to go that far. I, I have some pushback on that, but, but that might lead you kicked out the church, but, but you probably won't go that far. But you, you will maybe see some challenges and say, maybe there's some grounds to, to some issues that have to be raised. And so what I believe is that you'll probably adopt, um, Blake Osler's position where the Father has always been divine. So Blake Osler takes a position which is interesting. It's a very interesting position, but it's a position that basically says that the Father was divine. Then there was a period of time where he ceased to be fully divine, and so lived as a mortal man, and then he became divine again. So, if, if I'm correct, is that, is that correct with Blake's position? Uh, yes, more or less. I, I, he might have some pushback on it, but more or less, I think that's, yes. So, T1 he was divine. T2 he became mortal and so ceased to be fully divine. And then at T3 he was exalted and became divine again.

And and to clarify, he's he he's doing that in the context, like with Jesus, because Jesus was fully divine, became human, which can't, can't be, you can't be divine and human at the same time, and then became divine again. And so his model is to say that something similar to that happened with Jesus, and that's why Jesus said, "I only do that which I've seen the Father do." Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very good. Thank you for that. Um, I will, and in our discussion part, we can, we can, I will. Yeah. No, I just wanted to, I just wanted to clearly represent what Blake's, what Blake's kind of. Yeah. Yeah. But I will, I will just push back on the idea. I do believe Jesus can be divine and human. But we, we'll speak about that. But we, yeah.

With Blake's position, he sort of provides a way out of this by saying, because the, the traditional idea that I was speaking about was the Father was not divine at T1. He then became divine at T2, and then from that point was divine onwards. But then Blake's position is that, no, he was divine. Then there was a, a point of time when he wasn't divine, um, whilst he was a mortal being, and then he became divine again. So that's sort of Blake's position. And so, um, what I would push back with Blake's position is that I do believe that there are two main ways that someone can challenge this. The first one is, I believe there's a textual challenge to this. Um, so this is just sort of based on the work of, um, I think he's called Joseph Pankratz, if I'm correct. Uh, so he wrote an article that was sort of going through Blake's interpretation of the main texts that he sort of draws, um, from to, to sort of ground this, this position. And he would say that, actually, no, there's a misinterpretation that Blake gives to the King Folet sermon. There's a misinterpretation that he gives to the sermon on the grove. Um, so the key point here is, is that, um, he thinks that actually the sermon on the grove and the King Folet discourse doesn't require the interpretation that Blake gives. And so I do leave it to people to go and look at that because I don't want to spend a lot of time. But someone could say, just simply that Blake has taken a position that doesn't seem to fit with the text. And so there are people who have critiqued him on textual grounds.

But then also, I would personally critique him because it doesn't escape the problem that I've raised. It still leads to the philosophical problem because Blake says that he reacquires his divine status. But then that means then that omnipotence is a contingent property. Something that you can have and something that you can lack, and then something you can repossess. But then that still leads to the problem when he comes to repossess it. Does he come to repossess it by himself, or does he come to repossess it by someone else giving him omnipotence? You still have the same paradox. He can't give himself omnipotence when he was mortal and thus become exalted again. Neither can someone else give him omnipotence. And so the Father can't then bring him up and allow him to be mortal because then that will lead to then the two volitional, um, omnipotent beings. And so you have the same problem. So Blake's position doesn't deal with the issue because it still needs a reacquisition of omnipotence, and so it takes omnipotence to be a contingent property when it can only be an essential property of a being. So that's my main problem. So my issue is, if omnipotence is something that can be, um, is only essential, so it cannot be possessed contingently. It cannot be gained by a being, then a Mormon who takes a traditional position of divine exaltation cannot affirm, um, sorry, is in a logical paradox and so cannot affirm the truth of their position given the logical absurdity it leads to. But then someone who takes the alternative position that Blake would hold to cannot take this as well because they still have to hold to a reacquisition of the property. And so they still have the logical problem that I've raised, and therefore they still have the, the question to the truth of their doctrine. So that's the main problem, um, that I, yeah, that I'm thinking of, and I'll love to discuss this, uh, more with you.

Yeah. No, it's, it's, and and thank you very much. A lot of these are objections I've heard, but there are some that are that are newer to me. Um, one of them that I, I want to go back to because there are a couple assumptions here that that I think that would help clarify some of it. Um, one is, um, for example, the Kingflet discourse. Um, just so everyone's aware of what that is. Um, it's, it's not part of our canon of scripture. And I actually would ask, Dr. Sidati, are you aware of anything in our canon of scripture that that supports the infinite regress of God's model? I would say no. I would say no. Um, yeah, there, and and because I don't, there there isn't, in fact, that's the reason that I don't hold to it. That's my primary reason is because I don't think it's well supported in scripture. Um, and and one thing too, when you're talking about divinity, see, I think there's another thing is there's a way that you're defining omnipotence in this example that I think is again, it's, it's just, there's some talking past each other that's going on. In Blake's model, divinity is not something that is, well, divinity would be defined as a fullness of love. It's a type of loving relationship, and that the divine properties are emergent from that type of relationship. And when we talk about omnipotence, we don't talk about it in the classical sense, but rather we talk about being able to do all that it is possible to do. So not being able to do logical contradictions. So I just wanted to clear those up, um, as, as something that I think is important to understand. But I, sorry, just, you were talking about. Yeah.

Oh, just real quick on the omnipotence thing. One last thing before we we switch. I, I do, I do have this question because it has to do with the the idea that there could be a difference in wills and that the son, in somehow, there could be a conflict there. Well, one thing that you have with a dependent God, where Jesus Christ is dependent on the Father for his very existence. Then you also have a situation, so far as I could tell, where the, where God could cause the Son not to exist. The, because only the Father has self-existence in and of himself. And so therefore, theoretically at least, logically, it is not an impossibility for the Son to cease to exist. But the Father always has to exist. And so I look at that, and if we're talking about omnipotence in your model, you seem to posit something where there, where there could potentially be a, a dependence relationship, a contingency relationship that would disqualify someone from being omnipotent. Okay, I guess I wanted to see how. Yeah. Yeah.

I would, I would respectfully disagree. Um, okay. Because it's a property of divinity to be eternal. So if the, if the Son is eternal in the same way that the Father is, sorry, if the Son is divine in the same way that the Father is divine, then he'll also have the attribute of eternality. So, but not fundamentality. Oh, no. But I'm talking about fundamentality, not eternality. I'm talking about a dependent relationship. Yeah. But you said something which was your main challenge, if I'm correct, was that there is a possibility that the, the Son could cease to exist. The Father could decide to for the Son to cease to exist. Well, that's not possible. Even though the Father is the ground of the existence of the Son, he cannot ever cause the Son to cease to exist because the Son has the property of eternality. So it will be logically impossible. It wouldn't be part of his omnipotence. Remember, omnipotence, as you even just affirmed, is the ability to do possible things. Then what? Then in what? Then, and I guess, and I want to just clarify that, then in what way is Jesus dependent on the Father for his existence? If doesn't saying that you're dependent on someone for your existence mean that there is a possibility that you could not exist? Oh, not at all. So you can just have something that, two eternal things, which are just, one is, one is, um, resting as such on the other. So the way you can think about it is like Jenga blocks, for example. The Jenga blocks above the, the foundational level are dependent upon the other Jenga block existing. However, it could be that you just have these Jenga blocks being positioned in that way for all eternity. So the idea here is, is that there's just a, um, dependence relation in the sense of the Father, sorry, the Son exists in virtue of the Father. Why the Son exists is because of the Father. If you have a, um, a question, an explanatory question for why the Son exists, you say, well, in virtue of the Father. But this is, but you can't say, but you can't say it in the other direction, though, right? You can't say that the Father's existence is dependent on the Son. So it still would mean that the Jenga tower could fall over, and the bottom block would still be there. Yes. Yes. But, but you're talking about a counter possibility. So it's not something which is possible given the property that he has of eternality. And you have actually two, there are two properties you can speak about, perfect goodness and eternality. What you're speaking about is something that could never be the case because the Father will never exercise his will in that way to bring about the Son's non-existence, given his perfect goodness. Secondly, and with the eternality one, because he's eternal, that means you, you have no beginning to existence. You have no end to your existence. The Father could not exercise his omnipotence to bring about the Son to stop existing because then that would be a logical impossibility, given that he can never cease to exist, given his eternality. So all the idea here is, is that there is an ontological ordering to the Trinity. The Father, the Son has his divinity because he has it from the Father. But this is something, this is something that he, there are two things that I would like to get to, if possible. Um, one of them was the, the. Yeah.

So in kind of going back to what your presentation was all about, Jacob, was the, uh, the, the two natures view in how do you, how do you always square, yeah, how do you square the full, um, the, I'm sorry, the omnipotence, or I'm sorry, omniscience argument? The idea is that there only being one mind that is both all-knowing and not all-knowing at the same time, like that sort of a problem. That's, that's, I'll tell you right now, that's probably at the heart of this, is that contradiction in natures is the hardest thing for me to understand or figure out. Yeah. I, I didn't want to just like forget about your opening presentation and just like focus on these other objections. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Um, I, I will get to that. I just, just to tie in a nice bow what I was just saying. Um, it's an idea of there is a hierarchical ordering in the Trinity when it comes to fundamentality, such that the Son exists in virtue of the Father, but he has the same divine nature as the Father. So if the Father is eternal, the Son is eternal. But there has always been this ordering such that the Son derives eternally his nature from the Father. So there's never, the Father does not derive his nature from the Son. But they're both omnipotent. Yes. But that's not an objection because why, why would that then mean that the Son cannot be omnipotent? Why would it? Because he would lack, he would lack a say, which is the ability to exist, he's dependent on something else to exist, and that thing is not dependent on him to exist. That's the property of omnipotence. You're, you're converging two different properties, the property of being self-sustaining and the property of being omnipotent, which is the ability to bring about any logically possible event. They're two different properties. So, you can have being a dependent being, but also being something that can bring about any logically possible event. You just are something which is eternally dependent on something else, but you can also bring about any logically possible event. And there's a side that I, there's a side to which I actually really like that because in a Latter-Day Saint conception, a lot, one of the biggest objections that's brought up is that these other gods must be contingent beings on a more fundamental being. And I'm saying that, like you, that I don't believe that fundamentality is an essential characteristic of divinity because what divinity is, is it's a relationship of love that exists between, uh, between beings. Okay.

So, um, yeah, we, we will come back to this, but I'll, I'll answer, um, what Cameron said at the beginning. Um, so again, not to market my own stuff, but, um, if someone is interested, I do have an article that was, um, I think it was released last year or the year before. Um, it's called "On the Metaphysics of the Incarnation." Um, it's by, it's published in the International Journal of Philosophy, Religion. Um, there's another article as well, which is "Logical Problem of the Incarnation: A New Solution," which was in Religious Studies, that might have been a few years ago. But anyways, um, there's sort of two ways I deal with this. I, I believe that you can have a solution. So the idea here is, uh, the orthodox or Chalcedonian position on the Incarnation is that there is a single person called Christ who has two natures, two complete natures, divine and human. And then the way that you can deal with this logically is by a methodology called reduplicative predication. Reduplicative predication. So what this means is that you predicate, um, in, um, with respect to the different natures. So logically, then there is no contradiction. So if you say, for example, that, um, there is something which is fully red and fully, um, yellow at the same time, that's a contradiction. But there is, is there anything that exists that's fully yellow and fully red at the same time? Yes, there is. It's called an apple. And so I don't know if an apple's yellow, really. But anyways, you can say, yes, this thing is red, but yes, this thing is yellow. But the way that you are doing that is that you are doing something called reduplicative predication. You're predicating relative to the parts that it possesses. Um, in so far as it has a red, sorry, in so far as you are speaking, just, just to clarify, and you, and you do embrace partialism, then, as God is no, just one second. Go with it. It's an analogy, but, um, with the analogy in this example, it's, it's predicated to parts. Um, so what you will have here is that in so far as you're referring to the, um, the skin, it has redness all over. In so far as you're speaking about the core, it has yellowness all over. And so the idea here is that you're predicating relative to a certain distinction in that thing. So what will be the, the contradiction that you are bringing is if you say Christ is P and not P in the same way and in the same sense. But no one says that in the Incarnation. People say that Christ is P in so far as he is D, and then Christ is not P in so far as he is H. So there is no logical contradiction there because you're not saying he is P and not P in the same way, in the same sense. So the way that people have dealt with this is just by predicating to each of the natures. That is the logical way to deal with it. There is a metaphysical question that you also raised, which is slightly different, but logically there is no problem in the Incarnation because all you have to do is use "in so far as" or use "qua" phrases and say, Christ as divine is, um, all-knowing. Christ as human is not all-knowing. So it's a qua move or reduplicative predication, which can be applied. Can that be applied to the, to the mind problem, like the idea of all knowledge in one mind? Yeah.

So now you're talking about a metaphysical question because what you did is that you brought two different problems together. The logical problem is a problem of, am I actually, um, um, transgressing the law of non-contradiction? If I was to write down this phrase, am I contradicting? Well, you're not. If you say Christ is P and not P, then you are contradicting the law. You are contra, you're transgressing that law. But if you say that Christ is, sorry, Christ, um, as X is P, and Christ as Y is not P, then you're not contradicting yourselves. So logically, let me, let me, let me see what I steal on that. I just want to make sure I understand. So you're saying that, like, to say Christ, it would be a contradiction if you said Christ is all-knowing and Christ is not all-knowing. That, that would be a problem because that's a contradiction. What you're saying is Christ, in so far, in his divinity, is all-knowing, but in his humanity, is limited in knowledge. But doesn't that posit two minds? No. No. One second. One second. But what I'm trying to do is divide the problem. So you raised a logical problem. Logically, there is no problem because when you use a strategy, because no Christian is saying Christ, um, is P and not P in the same way, in the same sense. No one says that. What they are saying is Christ, in so far as he has divinity, is like this, and in so far as he has humanity, is like that. This was always the conciliar position. So the, the, the logical problem is not actually a problem once you understand the strategy. It's a looseness of speech. When people say Christ is knowing, Christ is all, not all-knowing, what they're doing is that they're being loose in their speech. But if they're being more strict in their speech, what they're really saying is Christ, in so far as he's divine, is all-knowing, and Christ, in so far as he's human, is not all-knowing. So that is the way that then logically you have no problem. Now, the metaphysical question is different. How could it be the case in reality that there is a being who has, um, all-knowingness and does not have all-knowingness? Now, not to send people to sleep, for I probably have to, for half of this, uh, discussion, getting into deep philosophy, but, um, my own model is called the dispositional Incarnational, uh, Incarnation Model. So the way I deal with this is by saying that Christ is dispositionally divine, but he's occurrently human. Okay. Now, what I mean by that is, if you paint a square in your mind. So just have a square in your mind, and it's called the ontological square, and have different things at the angles of those, uh, of those, uh, of the square. So you have at the bottom left, you have object. At the top, you have kind. At the right hand, you have attributes. And then at the bottom, you have modes. So what you're positing is objects, kinds, attributes, and modes. Now, let's say you take a tomato. I know you might say tomato, but let's just go with tomato. Tomato. Tomato. We're all good. So let's just go with the tomato. So you have an object, which is a tomato. The tomato is an instance of the kind tomato. The kind tomato has the attribute on the other side of the, the square, characterizing. So it gives the property of redness to all of the things that fall into that kind. So you have the tomato, it instances the kind, uh, tomato, and then everything that's a tomato has the attribute characterizing, um, each thing that falls into that kind. And then when you get to the bottom, you have something called modes. Modes are particularized attributes. So then the modes of an, um, of an attribute are the things that we have, that actually we possess. The kind doesn't possess it. The, the, the object possesses it. So you have the tomato. It has a kind, has a relationship to the kind tomato. The kind tomato is related to, uh, that, the, the category of attributes by the category of attributes characterizing everything that falls into it. And then you have modes. And modes are instances of an attribute. And so then the object is connected to those modes by the mode of redness characterizing that object. So the, the red apple, sorry, the red, um, tomato is red in two different ways. It's red dispositionally and it's red occurrently. To be dispositionally red is to just be an instance of the kind tomato. And the kind tomato is then characterized by the attributes of redness. But then to be a currently red is to actually have a mode of redness, to have redness given to you by, um, a specific mode, which is then an instance of that attribute. So you can have an attribute in two ways, dispositionally and occurrently. Now, um, going to Christ, prior to his Incarnation, Christ was dispositionally divine and he was occurrently divine. That means that he was an instance of the kind divinity or deity, and then each instance of that kind deity, and we'll limit that just to three. Mormons might like, love to have a lot more. We might go a little further with that, or, or, well, just to clarify, we don't believe that we can all become uppercase G type gods, members of the Godhead. We are not becoming equals with Jesus and the Holy Spirit in, in a certain sense, relationally. Absolutely not. We just believe that we can become fully divine, sort of a lowercase g type God. Okay. Okay. So, um, you have, uh, Christ being an instance of the kind deity, and there, the Father and the Son are also instances of that kind, and so then the attributes of, let's say, omnipotence, omniscience, all those attributes which are on the other category, the third category, they are all characterizing things that fall into that kind. But then Christ also possesses modes of divinity. He has omnipotence, he has omniscience, he has, uh, eternality. These are all things that he personally possesses as modes. So Christ is dispositionally divine by being an instance of the kind deity, which is then characterized by the divinity attributes. And then he's also, um, occurrently divine by him, um, having modes of divinity. Now, uh, that was prior to the Incarnation. Christ was dispositionally divine and occurrently divine. After the Incarnation, Christ only is dispositionally divine, but he's no longer occurrently divine. What Christ is, is he's, uh, occurrently human. So, what you now need to do, and this is in, uh, my work on this, uh, you have two squares now for Christ post, uh, Incarnation. He has the, the, um, uh, let's say, the divinity, uh, square, and in that square, you have just Christ and the kind and the attribute of divinity, but you don't have any modes. So Christ is divine by being an instance of the kind divinity, and that, that kind divinity is characterized by divinity attributes, but he's not a currently divine. He doesn't have modes of divinity. He doesn't have omnipotence as a mode anymore. He doesn't have omniscience as a mode. He doesn't have eternality as a mode. But then he has another square that he's now part of. He's also an instance of the kind human, and he has all of the attributes of humanity, which, um, characterize that kind, and he also has modes of humanity that could be limited in knowledge, that could be limited in power, that could be limited in, in, um, in spatial location. So what you now have is Christ is dispositionally divine, but he's occurrently human. So what that means is that Christ retains his divine nature. He's still divine because a nature is a kind nature. So he's still divine by just being an instance of the kind divinity, but he possesses, um, he doesn't have modes of divinity. So he has modes of humanity. He has modes of having a certain spatial location. He has modes of having limited knowledge. He has modes of having limited power. He has modes of whatever things that make humans. So then the key thing is, is that you don't have Christ, let's say, we go with the knowing the hour problem. Now, a lot of people have this issue because, well, how does Christ know the hour, but he doesn't know the hour? Now, some people like, um, Andrew Lok, would say that Christ, uh, you know, didn't really know the hour. Sorry, knowledge of the hour wasn't the question. It was Christ said he wasn't aware of the hour. So he wasn't aware of the hour, but he knew the hour. But that's not what the Greek says. The Greek really, really says that Christ is, he doesn't know the hour. Now, my model allows you to affirm that literally, but still affirm the full divinity of Christ because to be divine is just to be an instance of the kind deity, and then all of the attributes are characterizing that, that kind. But then because Christ doesn't have modes of divinity, he's not going to have the mode of omniscience. So he's not, whilst he's on earth, he's not going to know the hour. He's not going to be able to do things which an omnipotent being will be able to do. So he only has that sort of, is it, is that, I mean, I'm not saying it is modalism, but it seems to imply almost like a, a type of modalism within the person and divinity of Christ. No, exactly. Modalism is, is not, um, modalism is a trinitarian doctrine which, yeah. No, and I mean that, I don't mean that is that modalism, I'm saying it does it seem to, I'm trying to make sense of it in the sense that there are different modes of Christ. Yeah. That are, let me clarify, um, so in philosophy, modes is just a term that we use for particular properties. So, for example, um, redness is, you can have redness as universal, but then if I have redness, or let's say cream, so I have a cream-colored shirt, this color cream is a particular thing that's had by this shirt, but it's also universal. So the, the point here is, a Christ has the modes of omniscience, omnipotence, and, um, omni-benevolence, and all those sort of things, and he had that prior to his Incarnation. After his Incarnation, he doesn't have those as modes, yet he's still able to be fully divine because he still has the, um, uh, he still is an instance of the kind deity, which is then characterized by the divinity attributes. Now, the, let's say someone was to say, well, how is he still divine? The way that he will say he's not divine is if he stopped being of the kind deity. So when he became human, he just ceased to be of the kind deity and he was only of the kind humanity and then had, uh, the humanity modes and so was a currently div, uh, human, sorry. Then that would mean that he was just a human being. But because he still was of the kind deity, he still was divine, yet he had these attributes. So that means he's able to be limited in knowledge, but still be divine. So that deals with the metaphysical question here.

Real quick, I wanted to, uh, we've been going for about two and a half hours, and there's still a little bit more to discuss. Do you guys have more time, or, or do we need to start things? I, I could probably go for another 20 minutes or so, I would say. Probably my time. Then I probably got to get, get going. I have something. Do you guys either of you need to use the bathroom or anything like that before we, before we continue, just because it's been so long? I think I've been sweating out all my water, so I'm good. I'm good. Don't worry. Okay. Um, why don't we, why don't we move to discuss because I'd really like to hear Jacob's thoughts on the, uh, the paradoxes that that Josh was talking about, and and how he thinks that there's, there's no way that you can start out as human or even go from divine to human and then go to divine. So, let's maybe talk about those paradoxes of omnipotence, and yeah, Jacob, what are your thoughts on that?

I would say so as far as going from divine to human and then back to divine. See, we don't make the ontological distinction between divinity and humanity. We believe that divinity is the fullness of humanity. It's the ultimate manifestation of what you can be. So in our, the way that we actually define divinity in that way, it doesn't, it doesn't create that sort of a problem. With that in mind, [Music] um, Jesus himself in scripture seems to be, seems to lack things. And and you would say he, he lacks it in his humanity, and obviously we've kind of gone through that. But to me, it feels like those are very, very complex explanations of something that there's a, it's sort of a razor. What's a simpler solution? The simpler solution is just to say that, for example, it says, "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself." That's in John 5:26. I mean, it's, it's giving this idea that there are things being granted by the Father that Jesus does not have in his mortality. And so that is to say that, at least when Jesus was human, that he was human. Now, again, we can create the distinction that Dr. Suad has brought forth and then come up with the explanations that he's given, which I'm, I, I'm trying to understand them more than anything. Some of these are pretty technical, and, and, and I'm sorry, Dr. Deciduity, maybe I'm, I'm not quite there to understand all of them. But, um, I think that there is a simpler explanation that's much more elegant when you create ontological parity, and I wonder why is it like, what in the scripture, in the text of scripture, necessitates that there be an ontological distinction between God and man rather than a, a merely difference in degree?

Okay. Um, I'll address a few. With Occam's Razor, it's the simplest explanation, um, possible, but it's also about, um, the simplest explanation that's necessitated. So, what I would say is that you take the simplest explanation that you need to give. So, we need to give an explanation of what scripture, um, says to us. And well, that's, and that's that's my question. Does it necessitate it in scripture? And if it does, where? Yes. So I think it's quite clear, as I was alluding to in my earlier part of the discussion, that scripture does affirm that Christ is divine. Scripture affirms that he's divine in the same way that the Father is divine. But then it also seems to affirm that he is human. He's a being that became human at a certain point. Now, the explanation of that from an inferential perspective of, is we have human, um, sounding attributes that Christ has. We have divine sounding attributes that Christ has. What do we do? Do we either say that he is just divine, and then those are just metaphorical? Or do we try and say, no, they're both literally predicated of Christ? So then how can we, with the principle of charity, bring these two things together in a coherent way? Now, the Latter Day Saint would do that by by saying that they're the same, they're the same kind, not a different degree. But then it doesn't escape the problem. My problem is that you, you, the Christian, sorry, the, the Trinitarian or the, the, the Chalcedonian Christian would say that, um, the way we make sense of it is by saying that Christ is simultaneously divine and human. But that you're saying that there was a point in which Christ, um, or I don't know, let's move from Christ because actually my problem was with the Father, and it seems like the lower, because that's my, my issues with Christ, I have, I actually agree with you a lot on the Father stuff. It's the Christ stuff is where I find, because once we introduce humanity into this, and we say that there's an ontological gap in its essence, I say, look, if there is the ontological gap that's unbridgeable, then Jesus bridges that gap somehow. Yeah. And so I wonder why, you know. Yeah.

So I would, I would question your interpretation of Michael Heiser because Michael Heiser does say very clearly in his work that, uh, the God of Israel was species unique. Absolutely. Just, just so everyone knows, I, I don't want to misrepresent Heiser. Heiser does that. But here's what my question is: Why does Heiser say that? There's nothing in the text of scripture that necessitates that interpretation. But then again, if we're going with the, the, the weight of scholarship here, you'll have to look to people like Larry Herardo. You have to look to people like Richard Borin, who are very clear in saying that actually there was an ontological distinction between the God of Israel and all the other deities that could have existed. So yes, they completely agree with you. There were other deities that were, um, ascribed, sorry, that were affirmed within the Judeaic worldview. But there was a uniqueness, an ontological, a species uniqueness that was given to the God of Israel. And so, are there scriptures that support that? I just, I don't see it in scripture. So Bulan would say that the way in which, for example, the divine identity of, of, um, of the God of Israel was expressed was through him being the sole creator of all reality, him being the sole ruler of all reality, him being the being who's worthy of worship above all other beings. And so then will build on this and saying, yes, the Jews were only, they were happy to affirm epistemologically that there were other deities, but the only one in which they gave cultic worship to was the God of Israel. They did not give cultic worship to any other being outside of the God of Israel. Can I, can I address that? Because I, I, I understand those arguments, and, and, but those arguments can all be applied except for created. We'll get to that in a second. The idea is, is that, is that, okay, so there's only one God that you're supposed to worship. Doesn't mean that God is of a different kind, just because I have one president of my country, that doesn't mean that he's a different kind than me. These are just discussions in degree. But creation is, is another one. But that is if you assume creation ex nihilo, which we don't. Okay. But you have to remember, you need to go into the Second Temple worldview or into the ancient Judeaic worldview, and the way in which they expressed ontological distinction was through worship and cultic worship practice. So yes, within our own perspective, yes, worshiping something doesn't mean that they're necessarily ontologically different. But within the, the worldview of the Jews of those periods, worship was given to God because he is the sole creator and ruler, and thus is ontologically distinct from all other beings who are created. And so that's why they weren't given worship. So worship was the expression of that ontological distinction. It was the result of it. Why we don't worship any other being is because God is the one who created us. He's the sole one, and he's the one who rules over all the, all the other deities. And so that's why worship is given to him alone. So it was the expression of that.

Um, can I, can I really quickly? Yeah. I was, I was going to say, I mean, we do need to wrap it up, but I, I just, I wanted to ask Jacob, like, do you think that, uh, do humans ever become omnipotent? Yeah. Uh, is that part of that? So, so omnipotent, if, first of all, good philosophers, we need to define our terms. Can, to be able to do all things that are possible. Yes. Human beings have the capacity to do all things that are possible through God, and through him divinizing us to be able to do that which is possible, we can also do that which is ultimately possible to do. But you have to define omnipotence in a way of omnipotence is the ability to do that all that which is possible. But then it leaves open the question of what is actually possible. And I think that that is, that is a deep philosophical. That's the way, that's the way in which I defined it, though. So I defined it as the ability to do anything logically possible, or the, the ability to cause any logically possible event. So it was exactly the way that I defined it. So then if you're going with that definition, the paradox is still applied to your position because then how could it be the case that, uh, God, or whoever makes the Father to be divine, or you to be divine, and thus, um, gain omnipotence? How could that be possible, given that omnipotence cannot be something which can, something can come to possess? So my question is, how do you deal with those paradoxes? How can a being cause itself to have omnipotence, because the ability to do anything possible, as you said, or how can a being, given omnipotence, without there being any volitional, um, clashes with those wills? So how would, how would you deal with that problem?

Well, first, I would, I would wonder, my position would be that that, uh, all of the divine properties, all of omniscience, and these sorts of things, emerge from a consequence of a loving relationship. Okay. So I believe that these, I, I actually don't believe that these properties are, let's say, inherent, but rather they are emergent from a type of relationship, and that's what divinity is. That's kind of the Oscil view, and I, I tend to find it to be pretty strong. Um, with that in mind, um, I don't, I guess I'm not understanding necessarily the depth of that paradox, because if divinity is a type of relationship that, that, that from which emerges these different attributes, why can't someone acquire that through a relationship that they develop? And, and it's life being a time when we develop that relationship with each other and with God? But that's just restating the problem, uh, in different language. My, my problem is that you cannot come to have divinity as an, sorry, let's just focus on omnipotence. You cannot have omnipotence as an emergent property. It's something which you either possess essentially, or you don't possess it. And so my problem, help me, help me understand that, those two reasons. So let's go with the second reason. Let's just go with the, the, um, bestowal of omnipotence in, within that loving relationship. Mhm. Let's say the, uh, D1, um, bestows omnipotence on D2. How do you stop them from having a volitional clash? Because there, because a loving relationship is defined as a relationship where you're in harmony with one another. Yes. But you can, but yes, but harmony about what, what type of things? So, for example, I'm in, I'm in harmony. Yeah. I'm in harmony with my, my wife about, um, you know, about things. We're supposed to be in perfect harmony. Yeah. Only, well, I would say, I would say that that I could say that there is a divine ultimate will, but I would say if I'm in a loving relationship with someone and there is a cl, there isn't clashes of volition, what happens is that we end up working out between us because we value the same things, the same solutions to the problem. This is the same reason there's not a volitional, this is the same reason there's not a volitional clash between the Father and the Son. No, there is no, because it's just, wait, there's a volitional clash between the Father and the Son. One second, let me. Yeah. Go ahead. So, it's the possibility of there being a volitional clash is all that's needed for the argument to land. So, just if there could be that area of disagreement, then there couldn't be two omnipotent beings. Okay? In a marital relationship, in a marital relationship, there is the possibility of volitional clash, but they can still have their enduring existence. But with the two omnipotent beings, there cannot be the possibility of a volitional clash. So my question is, with non-moral questions, how could there not be a volitional clash? Should the sky be blue, or should the sky be red? I would say that, I would say that that ultimately we align ourselves with the will of the Father. And there is to have a loving relationship with the Father is to align your will with his. He, that, that is what we're doing. And that, that is the one divine will that we all sort of align with in a way of being in the world. And so there isn't, to say it's sort of a contradiction in terms to say we have a clash in our perfectly loving relationship. We don't. No. So, but what you're, I think he's trying to say, Josh, I think he's trying to say that it extends beyond the, the sort of loving characteristics or or, um, it extends, um, beyond the moral, you know, the sorts of moral concerns. It also extends to just any decision. It ultimately goes back, like you're going to defer back to the Father. But you can state that, but the question is, why does it? So the only way you can, you can affirm that is by assuming some principle that if there are these two divine beings, yeah, but then what's the grounding for that principle? Why should I believe that the Father, the Father's will is ultimate? We all are aligning ourselves with the Father's will. Even Jesus Christ himself said, "I don't do my will, but the will of the Father." And I don't think he just meant in moral matters. I think he meant in all things. He defers to the Father for for that. And now, when you're talking about this problem of possible conflicts, sorry for interrupting, but remember the objection isn't about us. We've changed the topic. The question was about the Father reacquiring divinity. That was my question, not about us. So, okay. Yeah. Can the Father reacquire omnipotence? That's a. I like this. So, you're saying, let me make sure I'll steal, I'll try and steal the objection. The idea is, is that the Father is, um, aligning his will, or, or there has to be some fundamental being, and so when he leaves this, then it's sort of like, who does he align with now, right? Because he is now misaligned. Is that, is that sort of it? No, I'll ask a question. So, um, when the Father reacquires omnipotence after his mortal souljourn, okay, he goes through living a mortal life, he then reacquires omnipotence. How does he do that? Does he do that by himself, or does he do that because someone else gives him omnipotence?

I would say that it is a relationship to an external third. Uh, so this is going to need me to step back a minute to, to, to frame something. Two things. Number one, I would say that I'm, I'm agnostic on the how the Father became mortal and exactly, or if, if that, how that all works. So, so personally, that's an area where I'm a little bit more gray. But I would say this, that my model for understanding divinity is that we have a concept of eternal law, let's call it, and an objective reality that God exists within himself. Okay? And God has to align himself with the nature of reality in such a way that produces maximal flourishing. He has done that. And the, and the Son and him have entered into the laws of reality that govern loving relationships. Right? Um, and so what emerges from this is that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are all aligned according to the laws of reality to have the maximal loving relationship that could exist. The Father, for the reason of having additional experience, becomes mortal, leaving that perfect united relationship so that he himself could experience something. This is very theoretical. And then he's able to, conceptually anyway, you're able to re-enter that alignment with that way of being eternally, but now you have something additional. He has the experiences, the only knowledge that could come through an experience like that. And so he has grown.

So Josh, I know, I know you're going to have some pushback on this. We do need to wrap things up. I've got a crying baby back here, and it's time to pick up the kids from school and stuff. So, um, Josh, give me, give me maybe one, one more pushback. We'll give Jacob the last word, and then we'll do, we'll get through these super chat questions as quickly as possible. Okay. So, yeah, my, my main issue is it doesn't still escape the problem. So, the problem is.

Just push back another step. So, the issue that you have is if you go with your position, your position is that there was a point when he was mortal. The father was mortal. No, he was divine. He was omnipotent. Then he was mortal. Then he reacquired that divine status. He reacquired his omnipotence. My question is, how could he do that? Did he do it of himself that he reacquired his omnipotence, or did someone else give him that omnipotence?

Now, if you go with the first, um, way out, then you seem to have him needing omnipotence in the first place to even then reacquire omnipotence. So, it seems to be paradoxical. It's not possible. Then, if you go with the other one, and there's another being that gave the father his omnipotence and so allowed him to return to being divine, then you have to have the issue of, well, how do you have their two wills being aligned? You would say, well, there's just a harmonious sort of, um, relationship, but then why should there be that harmony? What establishes that harmony? What's the principle undergirding it? So, there has to be further philosophical thinking and grounding to that position. It can't just be asserted. You can't just say, "Well, it's harmonious." Okay, great. But then it's like, it's like if the Trinitarian just saying, "Well, the Trinity just works. Three in one, one and three." I, yeah, but you have to then cash it out. How does that work?

So, well, how does that harmony work without there being a volitional clash when it comes to non-moral things? With moral things, we have a question. We have an answer. Because they're perfectly good, they're going to be aligned in doing only what's good. So, they'll know no conflict. But when you have non-moral questions, why is there that harmony there? Yes, there's a loving relationship, but they can still have volitional differences. Should I have the, um, if I say to my wife, "I want to wear a red shirt," she says, "Maybe you should wear a blue shirt." That's not going to mean we don't love each other anymore. We're still in a loving relationship. So, then with the father, with the father and the being that makes him omnipotent, if the father wants the sky to be red and the other, uh, divine being wants the sky to be blue that made him omnipotent, how do they have that harmony being established? What's the grounding philosophically for that? It seems to be that there isn't anyone that can be given. Thus, you seem to have that same problem of volitional clash. And so any possible, let's give, let's give Jacob the last word here.

Yeah, I would, I would probably say, at least I'm trying to understand the objection and answer it the best I can. I would say it has something to do with something like agency and free will. Um, we are all free. God is free, and there are things that ultimately can affect our relationship if we do them. If I wear a red shirt or if I wear a blue shirt, my wife doesn't really care, and it doesn't affect the relationship. So, it doesn't affect the emerging sort of power that comes out of the relationship I have with my wife when I do. So, there are, there are aspects to our existence that we're totally free and we can do what we want. And so the only time that there would be a volitional conflict of wills between two persons would be if, like, every volitional conflict would ultimately, um, emerge because we don't, there is a moral thing, like, I value this, you don't value it. So, there's a conflict in values. I just don't think that in a loving, a perfectly loving relationship that, yeah.

I, so to just use an example, I'll try and be brief on this. With my wife, there are many things that my wife is just like, "Do what you want. Like, do whatever you like." And God gives us that freedom, right? But there are other things that if she does them, based on just the way reality is, that if she does them, it will hurt our relationship. Okay? And so those are the things that we, that in a loving relationship, you're perfectly aligned on. You grant perfect freedom to the things that are, that don't hurt your loving relationship. And then you grant, um, and then you have total alignment on everything that could, because you are committed to the relationship itself. So, something like that. Maybe it doesn't answer all of it, but that's that's my best way of of sort of trying to handle that that objection. All right, let's, uh, turn to these super chat questions. Yeah, Josh, I know he's like, he's like, "But I want to answer that." The problem is, the problem is, Cameron, honestly, we've gone through so many things that are so deep, and I know Dr. Suad as well, like, we could take any one of these topics and do like a three-hour podcast on them. Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Daniel is back. He says, "Jesus commands prayer to him alone in the Old Testament. People pray to Jesus in the New Testament. Alma, Nephi pray to Jesus. Mormons cannot pray to Jesus. Any thoughts, Jacob?"

So, this comes down to some of the confusion between who Yahweh is and who Jesus is. I think that it's something that on both sides of the equation, uh, we all have to deal with verses where there's some conflict between, is Jesus Yahweh? Is the Father Yahweh? I think that there may be a conceptual issue even in the original writers, for example, in the Book of Mormon, which came from an Old Testament paradigm to where some of those might be. Um, and so I don't worry too much about that. Um, it isn't, it's, it's pretty small on my list of like problems because the way I see it is that we all have that problem of trying to figure out who Yahweh was in the Old Testament and if it was Jesus or if it was the Father. All right, let's move on to the next one. Arrow says, uh, Jacob, subject/hypostasis does not equal mind. Don't conflate soul mind, which the intellect is an organ of, with hypostasis, which is, uh, the thing that experiences the subject. They are really distinct but not separable categories.

Um, to that, I would say, I don't think it, you have to, I don't think you have to break it down in that way. It's simply the mind is the thing that has the knowledge in it. Okay. It is the, it is the thing that has the knowledge, and it either has all of the knowledge in it, or it has no know, or it has limited knowledge in it. And a person has one mind. And so you have to figure out how to, uh, have one mind. Okay, that, that's a commitment that has to be made, and then say that mind is both fully human, meaning it has limited knowledge, and fully divine, meaning it has full knowledge. I think that's a paradox that that can't be resolved. And that's only one example of the paradoxes that exist within it. I think Dr. Siguadi offers some interesting insights on that, um, that he gave. I, they're a little technical. I, I'd have to go back and and look at those again, but that'll probably be the next thing that I, that I do after this, uh, after this thing. I'll have to dig deeper into that, that, uh, that paper that he wrote on that. All right. Arrow has another one. He says, "And he mischaracterizes Greek philosophy as well. The Neoplatonists believe that we could be reunited in nature with the One God. He is more in line with the strict Neoplatonists than the Christians."

Yeah, I would say that if you're going to say that we align with Neoplatonists with a materialistic philosophy that we have with God being embodied, I think that's going to be a big no. Um, as far as the, I think that there were aspects of Neoplatonism that absolutely made its way into, uh, I don't think anyone can dispute that that made it into Christian thought, especially in the early church. The only question is, is did that thought actually enhance our understanding and bring us closer to a true understanding of God, or did it actually corrupt the original understanding of God that existed in scripture? And I would make the case that the Greek influence on Hebrew thinking, uh, turned God into the abstraction, uh, that can't be embodied, and Jesus is a fully embodied resurrected being. And so I have trouble squaring that circle with the old, you know, the, the God that is embodied in Jesus Christ and the immaterial substance, which seems like a contradiction in terms, but obviously there's philosophical language behind that goes back to the Greeks. I think it created more confusion. So that's kind of my long answer. Sorry, Josh. Any any thoughts on that before we, uh, Yeah.

No, I mean, I agree with you. I think there there's always been elements of Neoplatonism within Christian thought. So just having some Neoplatonist aspects within your worldview isn't necessarily going to make it anti-Christian. Um, so I wouldn't say it's a very strong objection as such. Um, yeah. All right. Uh, next one. And then the next three are pretty quick. So, uh, this one I think is our last substantive question or comment. LDS doctrine says God's grace doesn't stop at saving you. It exalts you. It transforms you into the joint into a joint heir with Christ, inheriting all that the Father has. If that offends you, maybe your view of God is too small. So, I think Zach is a, uh, maybe, Josh, any any thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, um, so if you're speaking about theosis, the the idea here is that within a sort of an orthodox Christian perspective would be it's a participation in the divinity of of God by grace. Um, but it isn't a literal transformation into something which has a divine nature. It is a participation in that divine nature. Um, and so I, I think you can hold to what he wants to affirm because you do have joint heirs with Christ being, uh, within a participatory form. Um, so but you don't need to then go to that, I would say extreme of saying I'm actually going to then be transformed into a divine being. Um, I can still have all of what he stated within a participatory framework which is given by theosis. Yeah. And just a quick note on that, like, and that is largely the Latter-day Saint position is that we just, we just go that one step because we don't have the break. We, we believe we're children of God. So if we participate fully in the nature of God, that is to be fully divine. And just as Jesus fully participates in the divine nature of the Father and is emergent from him as a dependent being, we too in that same way can become participators in it. So that's sort of our perspective on it. All right. Word Radio says, "Let's go." That was their comment. Um, I do want to mention though, I, I, Josh is going to be back on the channel next week. Uh, we're going to be talking about the ontological argument. So, if that sounds exciting to you, that's what we're going to be talking about. Uh, the ontological argument doesn't excite everyone, but, uh, excites me and it excites Josh. He's even written a book on it. That's what we're talking about. So, I'll be tuning in. I, I'll be tuning in because that's one that I'm still trying to figure out. I can see the strength of some of the other ones. That one I'm, I'm still kind of stuck in that, is this a really good argument or is this a really bad argument? I'm trying to figure it out. So, I'll tune in. Yeah.

Is in typical fashion, like I was reading through it over the weekend and Josh is, yeah, he's, he's got some additions to the argument that are well worth consideration. I'll put it that way. So, all right. Uh, last two. We got one from Victor says, "Josh, help us cook Blake Osler and settle this LDS issue. Jacob was clearly out of his comfort zone." No. Hey, I'd love to set up a conversation with you with with with Blake Osler. I, I'm a big admirer of Blake and I think you guys could have a great combo. Yeah. No, but I, I think you represented the position very, very well, very clearly, and so, yeah, and you have a very warm spirit. So, yeah, thank you for this discussion. All right. Last one. Uh, from Word Radio says, "Just got here. We'll watch the whole thing. I, but I'm sure I know how it went already. Jacob's probably won the theological and logical arguments, but Siduati probably won optically because he's a handsome devil with a sexy accent. Sorry, Jacob. I think my wife is fitting in. I don't get in trouble. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I think it went pretty well. I think we both, I think we both were pushing back and forth, and and it's definitely, you got to really be thinking when you're listening to Dr. Siguati. He's, he's a, he's a well-tied man. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You have to, you have to really tune in. I mean, it, it was for me, it was, it was difficult, and I'm not even in the debate. I was just like, man, Josh, you had to do the square thing, didn't you? You had to go into his attributes and the, that's the problem. I pushed him there. I end up going to the next level. So, he has to go there, and then it's like, then it's like, crap, man. Now he's, now he's getting really technical. It's gonna be on my. No, it was good. It was good. The, the visual help with the square thing I did, I think that did actually help. I had some questions about it, but, uh, maybe we can chat about that later on Facebook chat or something. But I appreciate both of you guys, uh, joining me and and everyone who's watching this, uh, whether you watched it live or whether you're watching it after the fact, I really do appreciate you guys. So, yeah, um, yeah, thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you guys for joining me, and we'll see you in the next Capturing Christianity.