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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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God's active, doing things, but not changing, exactly. Maybe changing in relation to other things, but not in relation to himself. If you think that's unbiblical, I have a quote for you: "I, the LORD, do not change." And another: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever"

You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.

The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.

I do think that Jesus Christ moves, just not in respect of his divine nature. For humans to change our actions, we generally need to move our bodies—throwing something involves tensing of muscles, shifting of weight, etc. There's no equivalent for God, just direct acts. Your possibility that everything could be motionless is a good point! I can't articulate any reason way it would be impossible that everything exists necessarily. Indeed, there's at least one system, a version of mathematical platonism, where that's the case. But I have concerns with that system (it seems to mess up induction, for one). More arbitrary systems are less plausible to me. I don't know why e.g. the phone I'm typing on might exist from itself, but a single necessary being with God-ish properties seems more plausibly necessarily existent.

You're entirely correct on the biblical quotes, I should have checked better that what I was saying worked. They're only weakly persuasive, not strongly so. James 1:17 seems slightly stronger. Predestination's probably a point in favor as well, since that's clearly biblical. Declaring the end from the beginning, predestining all things according to his council, etc. fits pretty well with a God who doesn't internally change. (to be clear, that isn't conclusive on its own, but it's evidence in the right direction)

The problem with singling out Jesus as special (or as some kind of flesh robot remotely piloted by god) is that these are heretical (the former would be a kind of Docetism the latter similar to Apollinarianism), Jesus is supposed to be real god and real man.

The problem with making "motion" have a special meaning is that the argument is generally taken to proceed from self evident, observable properties of the universe and making "motion" be some metaphysical property would take that away. I'd argue that the distinction between per se and per accidens already does that but whatever.

Predestination is a whole other can of whorms with the free will problem, the soteriology problems, etc.