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Jay'sAnalysis
Debating Roman Catholic Absolute Simplicity & Aquinas: Jay Dyer Vs. Dr. Francis Feingold
02:19:19
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- [00:00]
Howie Mandel
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- [00:31]
Bleacher Report Announcer
The bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
- [01:03]
Jay Dyer
Welcome, welcome, welcome. You're listening to Jay's analysis and we are going live. Let the audience trickle in here a little bit. See if we can build up a little bit of a watcher viewership listenership. Excuse me. Before we actually get going with the debate, before I send him. No, we're not late. I'm just, I'm on the road, so I'm at a bit of a disadvantage. I don't have my library with me and I'm not really familiar with Mr. Fine, Dr. Feingold. Actually, he. We have mutual friends. I've been friends with some guys for about a decade that set this up. And I'm glad to do this because it's been so long since I've done a real debate with a trained person in these kinds of ideas. You know, we get the Internet philosophers, but we don't often get trained academic types. So I'm going to send him the link now and I'm going to be going from, from memory here. I've got some of my articles pulled up because I'm on the road. But I didn't want to say no to this debate. And if, if need be, we may down the road have successive debates that deal with, you know, maybe questions that get raised in this debate. All right? So since I'm on the road, I don't have my summa with me. I don't have the summa contra gentiles. I don't have my thomistic commentaries. I'm going to be going from memory. But again, it's not that hard to know what Thomas's doctrine of divine simplicity is. It's pretty clearly stated multiple times in volume one of the summa and in volume one of the summa controgen teles. So I've sent him the link, so he should be coming in pretty soon and I imagine it'll be a pretty. Pretty laid back debate. Dr. Fine. Gold, how are you?
- [03:20]
Dr. Feingold
Good. How are you, Mr. Dyer?
- [03:27]
Jay Dyer
Okay, that's cool. Thanks for doing the debate, man. How are you?
- [03:31]
Dr. Feingold
I'm doing all right. Thank you for having me on. It's an honor.
- [03:35]
Jay Dyer
Yeah. I appreciate Justin putting it together. I know he was kind of looking for somebody to do a debate for a while and I think you would be a perfect category or perfect person for this category. You want to tell us a little bit about yourself and your research and that you. I think you did your dissertation on Thomas, right?
- [03:54]
Dr. Feingold
Sure. Yeah. So my dissertation, which I defended last November, was on divine impassibility in Aquinas. So specifically trying to deal with the problem of how to reconcile standard domestic doctrines like pure actuality and divine simplicity with the dependence of the love of the lover on the beloved, which seems to imply passibility. And are you still there because.
- [04:22]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, you know, you might want to cut your camera off because it'll use a lot of bandwidth and we might want to audio.
- [04:29]
Dr. Feingold
Let's see if I can figure out how to do that. There we go.
- [04:34]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, that'll probably be a little smoother now.
- [04:36]
Dr. Feingold
Sounds good.
- [04:37]
Jay Dyer
And I want to add to. To the audience that we will be. We. Are you cool taking questions?
- [04:44]
Dr. Feingold
Of course.
- [04:44]
Jay Dyer
Okay, so people in the audience, if you want to do super chat questions, we'll take those as usual. I always split the super chats with the guests, so Dr. Feingold will get half of the super chat questions that you guys ask. So come up with some good ones as we discuss here. I'm thinking maybe we could do a pretty free flowing conversation style. Doesn't have to be formal debate, mainly because I'm not at my library. So I'm on the road and I'm kind of going from memory. You have the home court advantage?
- [05:13]
Dr. Feingold
Well, sort of. I just have my laptop, but.
- [05:16]
Jay Dyer
Well, that's fine. So I'll do. How do we want to start this off? Do you want to. Let me ask you. Are you. Are you very familiar with Eastern theology or like the Eastern.
- [05:28]
Dr. Feingold
No, I can't claim a lot of familiarity. I have a couple paragraphs on polymosomi dissertation, but that's about it. So if you want to, maybe it would be good to do something like this where you give the basic polymite position, which I take it you'll be defending for it. I'll give the basic elevator pitch for Aquinas and then we can start probing.
- [05:49]
Jay Dyer
Sure. So I'll start off by saying that the palamite position actually isn't the. The position just of Gregory Palmas. In fact, it's a doctrine that I would say pretty clearly is taught in St. Basil's letter 234, where he explicitly makes a distinction between the essence and energy, or the essence and the operations of God. If we look at St. John of Damascus's orthodox faith in multiple times throughout the work, he makes the distinction between the essence and energy of God. Of course, in book one, he will say that the energy of God is one. Then he goes on to say that the energy of God is also multiple. For us, that's a one in the many question where we don't actually see a dialectic, but in fact the energies of God or actions of God are multiple. And later on on the orthodox faith, he even clarifies this in a more intense way when he talks about the energies in Christ in the Incarnation.
- [06:50]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello. Hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's director of research, Jake Gambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research.
- [07:04]
Jake Gambetta
What we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA. To answer the question of what is the future?
- [07:21]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff.
- [07:26]
Jake Gambetta
Yes.
- [07:27]
Malcolm Gladwell
Building actual physical machines.
- [07:30]
Jake Gambetta
Yeah. It's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [07:42]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right?
- [07:49]
Arvind Krishna
Yeah.
- [07:49]
Malcolm Gladwell
My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum?
- [07:55]
Jake Gambetta
By 2029 we'll build the first fault tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem.
- [08:04]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum has
- [08:14]
Megan McCardell
the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic and it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.
- [08:31]
Dr. Feingold
It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they are.
- [08:37]
Malcolm Gladwell
You know, I am a believer in America and it's worth fighting for.
- [08:40]
Megan McCardell
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [08:45]
Jay Dyer
Specifically, the relationship between the two natural wills and operations or energies in the two natures. This, of course, is because the sixth Ecumenical Council dealt extensively with debating the monothelites on the question of Christ and the Incarnation having two wills and two energies proper to those natures. So I would argue, as St. Gregory Palmas does against Barlaum, and as St. Maximus the Confessor did against against Pyrrhus the Monothelite, that the nature grace question and the question of the essence and energy's distinction in the Incarnation is even clearer when we understand that there's no dialectics. So there's no dialectics in the relationship between nature and grace. There's no dialectics between the relationship of Christ's human nature and energy participating in the divine nature and energy. So in other words, the uncreated energies of God. It's not just a question of God's relationship creation, but it's also solidified dogmatically and theologically in the 6th Ecumenical Council when it deals with this specific question. If you read the debate between Saint Maximus and Pyrrhus, you'll see that Maximus relies throughout in that 150 page treatise on this being a real distinction. This real distinction allows for God to remain transcendent in his essence and yet come down to us and allow us to participate in his uncreated glory and life. Jesus says in John 17 that he came to give us the same glory that he shares with the Father from all eternity. That glory, that light is not created, is in fact uncreated. And it's not something that just is postponed to an intellectual vision in the afterlife or the beatific vision. And in fact it's something that's participated in here and now. And we know that by the fact of the Incarnation. In fact, when the Fathers at the sixth Ecumenical Council and at the fifth by the way, talk about the Incarnation, they speak of the humanity of Christ as being deified via the Incarnation. Again, this process is done by the uncreated energies which proceed from the divine nature. Certainly, although they're not the exact same as the divine nature, in our view, that is the means by which the humanity of Christ participates in the divine life. That's explicitly stated, quoting from St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Gregory of Nazianzus and the theological orations at the Fifth and Sixth Council. So it's repe. Reaffirmed. We also have statements at the Council of Ephesus citing Saint Cyril of Alexander against Nestorius, that the bread and the wine in a similar way, participate in these divine energies. There are multiple references to these same ideas in the liturgies of the east, all which talk about the operations of God. The baptismal rite, for example, talks about calling down the energies of God into the baptismal font. And again, it's all just based on our Christological understanding, which we see as, again, dogmatically stating in the sixth and fifth Council that the energies deify the humanity. So that model of deification of Christ's humanity is the model for the individual believer, the individual baptized Christian, as they participate in God through the Church, through the sacraments. And that participation is a real participation, but it's a participation in the uncreated glory, an uncreated light, uncreated grace of God, not a created grace. So I would contrast this with what's later dogmatized, so not just theoretically or philosophically speculated upon in Aquinas in terms of how there might be a relationship between this absolutely simple essence and created beings, or this absolutely simple essence and the one person of the Trinity somehow becoming incarnate. Rather, it is the question of the Roman dogmas. And the Roman dogmas do eventually state, and I think I'm vindicated by this, not just in my reading of what's at the Roman councils, particularly like Trent or Vatican I, where dogmatic divine simplicity is stated pretty clearly. You also have the outworkings of this in terms of creative grace. You know, Trent has, if I recall, going from memory, a condemnation of different speculations about what kind of grace and justification is actually given in baptism. And one of the things that's condemned is the idea that it's not created grace. So in other words, the grace that is stamped upon our soul, the sanctifying grace, is a created effect. And of course this is again, in that sort of Aristotelian causal format of God, the cause and that we receive the effects of that cause, but the. The effects that we receive are in fact created. And I would argue that the reason that Rome has this issue is precisely because eventually in the dogma, the uncreated, created or Excuse me, The uncreated grace, essence, energy, distinction doctrine was eventually lost. So it was perfectly fine in terms of up until the 6th, 7th, 8th Council, if you count the 8th, our 8th, that is where it was stated explicitly. But it eventually, I would say after the rise of Frankish dominance, Charlemagne, the Carolinians, you eventually have this dogma kind of being lost and forgotten in Roman Catholic theology, pretty much settles into a pretty ossified, solidified doctrine of what divine simplicity is. So there are a lot of errors. I'm going to close up here with this opening statement. I think that's the main. The main point. We would say that there's a lot of errors that kind of flow out of this that you can tease out. And so my first clarification is that I'm not debating whether Thomas had good intentions. I'm not debating whether Thomas and other places in the Summa said things correctly. I'm not here to debate Augustine's intentions or Anselm's intentions, but rather just specifically whether or not the things that are stated, say, in Book one of Summa Theologica and in Book one of the Summa Contradentiles, about what divine simplicity is, if that actually makes sense with and comports with what is stated elsewhere about how there is a real distinction of persons. Because to us, it doesn't seem that there could be a real distinction of persons if distinction implies composition or division. In fact, that's a direct borrowing from Plotinus. It's Plotinus who first said, while following other Greek philosophers before him, that all consideration of distinction implies division or composition. And for us, we see that as many times refuted, particularly in the Christological heresies, but also in the trilogical formations of the early Church. So for us, all of these questions are linked. The doctrine of God, how he relates to creation, also the doctrine of Christology, the doctrine of the sacraments and the doctrine of eschatology are all intimately connected in ecclesiology in terms of how we view the essence, energy, distinction, and whether we believe that it's possible or not. So when it comes to Aquinas conclusions, I'll say that for my later critique. Given the fact that, for example, I don't see how creation can be a free action of God if we accept his doctrine of divine simplicity and the idea that all the actions of God are absolutely isomorphically identical to the essence of God, I don't see how we can say that there's a real incarnation if God is an absolutely simple essence, or, for example, how we would avoid Patroposianism. If God is an absolutely simple essence, in other words, that one hypostasis of the Trinity couldn't enter into a mode of being that the others do not. So for example, the Father is not crucified, the Father does not become incarnate, it's only the Son. But if God is an absolutely simple essence in which the the distinctions imply composition or division, it becomes difficult to see how there is a real incarnation, how God's actions within time and space are real actions signifying the divine power. For example, it's common amongst the early Fathers to speak of Christ's human nature being evident when he cries or when he eats. But we see the Fathers also making a strong argument for the divine power operant in Christ or through Christ, when he walks on water, when he does miracles, when he raises the dead, those are actions proper to the divine nature. And they're real powers entering into time and space from the divine nature itself. Now, we don't believe the divine nature enters into time and space, but in fact that it that it is possible for the uncreated to enter into time and space because of our belief in the essence energy distinction. And I'll close with. I would say our strongest case in that regard is the fact that for us, the theophanies of the Old Testament up until Augustine in book three of on the Trinity is when it's first question. The Eastern Fathers never questioned the belief that it is not created holograms or angels that are present, for example in Exodus 3 of the burning bush or in Exodus 23 where God says I will put my name in my angel, the angel of the Lord. It is consistently believed that these theophanies are of the pre incarnate presence of Christ himself. Thomism and Augustinian debates and discussions on the Trinity or questioning of this led to the possibility that led to the conclusion that it's difficult to see how an absolutely simple trinitarian essence could manifest within time and space. Therefore, we have to accept that these are just angelic created forms. We don't believe that they're angelic created forms. And neither do the Church Fathers who argue that these are, these are, this is the Logos manifesting within time and space. How is that possible? It's possible because of the essence energy distinction. So I will close with that as my opening statement and let you speak.
- [18:55]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello.
- [18:55]
Dr. Feingold
Hello.
- [18:55]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Mbetta. We discussed his vision for the future
- [19:05]
Jake Gambetta
of Quantum computing at IBM Research, what we always do is answer, what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA. To answer the question of what is the future?
- [19:25]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff.
- [19:30]
Jay Dyer
Yes.
- [19:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
Building actual physical machines.
- [19:34]
Jake Gambetta
Yeah. It's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [19:46]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right?
- [19:53]
Arvind Krishna
Yeah.
- [19:54]
Malcolm Gladwell
My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far away from that point point?
- [19:58]
Jake Gambetta
With Quantum, by 2029, we'll build the first fault tolerant quantum computer that is one that can run a very, very large, large problem.
- [20:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum.
- [20:19]
Bleacher Report Announcer
The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA's heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time, scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
- [20:49]
Dr. Feingold
All right, well, there's quite a bit there, obviously, so I may be leaving something out, but it sounds as though we've got maybe five or six areas that you covered. Right. So you've got. I don't know if you talked about this one explicitly, but you've got the distinction of attributes within God. You're going to have the problem of God's actions with respect to the world. You've got the problem of the Trinity. You've got the problem of the hypostatic union and the communication of idioms. And you have the problem of nature and grace and what it means to say that we share in God's life. And all of these are the same problem. So we should probably take those piece by piece. And I'll try to get to that in a minute. Since you did a little thing saying what you were clarifying is what you were trying to do and what you're not trying to do, I'll do a little bit of the same. So I'm not A theologian by trade. And my job, the thing which I'm trying to do here, isn't primarily to make sense of council documents or the Fathers. What I'm trying to do is to make sense of the coherence of Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity. As best as I understand it, I've messed around with the Trinity some. I'm not an expert on the hypoth, Aquinas's theory of the hypostatic union. So what I'll be saying about that will be mostly guesswork. So I'm just throwing that out as caveats here. But yeah, and what you said about impugning motivations, I thoroughly agree with that. I think we're both here to try to safeguard God's transcendence and try unity as best as we can. All right, so let me start my elevator pitch, which I'll try to keep fairly short, just by explaining why somebody like Aquinas would find the doctrine of divine simplicity appealing. And then we can go over how, in the context of that doctrine, you try to make sense of the other things that you talked about. Does that sound good?
- [22:46]
Jay Dyer
Sure.
- [22:46]
Dr. Feingold
Okay. So the basic, right, the reason for affirming divine simplicity comes from affirming the philosophical and obviously theological doctrine of the first cause. What does it mean to say that there is a being who is absolutely first? What does it mean to say that there is a being which, unlike any being that we know of, does not need a further explanation behind itself? So all Aquinas's famous proofs for God's existence, and this goes for Aristotle as well, are going to argue from the. Our experience of, in the created world of things which are a certain way but didn't have to be, and arguing from that to a cause which you might say, not to use Aquinas own terms, but something which is a sufficient reason of its own being that way. Right. So the argument for motion, we see things that change, we see things that move. What does that mean? That means we see something which was in potency becomes actualized. And we want to figure out why on earth did it do that? What's responsible for it's going from potency into act. And you can say there was something else that actualized it, that's fine. But then you've got to ask the same question about it. Does it have an actualized potency? If so, what made that one actualized? And so you're going to keep on chasing that ball until you come up with something which has no potency, but just is pure actuality, right? So that's the famous mystic doctrine of actus purus I'm sure you're well familiar with. And Aquinas thinks that it's. Once you grant the pure act doctrine, in other words, that there is nothing, there's nothing in God whose reality has to be explained by something outside of itself. There's nothing in God that could have been otherwise, that was made to be the way it is by something that wasn't itself. Once you grant that, Aquinas thinks that, it's a short step to the doctrine of absolute simplicity. Because for Aquinas, whenever you have parts, what you're going to have is some sort of potency, act, relationship, right? So when you have there are different kinds of parts. I'm not sure how familiar you are with Aquinas's myriology, with his study of parts. And wholesome, the most obvious kind of parts is going to be integral parts, right? So like the bricks that make up a house. So in the case of a bricks that make up a house, you've got actually some mutual dependence relations going, because the house wouldn't be a house unless it was built up out of these parts. So there's dependence there. But likewise, these bricks only actually count as what they are in the parts of the house because of their dependence on the whole. Your cells are human cells because they're part of your human body. And so with regular, integral or quantitative parts, as they're sometimes called, you don't want to predicate those of God, because then you'd be introducing potency into what by definition can't have it. If it did have it, then you'd have to ask what actualized the potency, and you wouldn't have reached the actual first cause yet. So that's for integral parts, usually what people are worried about when at least people who grant that God's immaterial, what they're worried about when they object to divine simplicity, isn't integral parts. It's usually going to be accidents either. The kind of accident which Aquinas would call extraneous accidents, which in us would be things like color and shape and size and all that stuff, or proper accidents, which for us would be things like the powers of our soul, things which we can't help but having given our nature. So why can't there be a multiplicity in God of those? And so Aquinas's basic answer here is going to be, well, anytime that you have a. So there's a couple different lines of argument here's. 1 Anytime that you have a subject and a feature of that subject. So there's me and there's my color, that feature, that accident makes the subject be in a certain way, in other words, me, just as a human being. I can be all sorts of different colors. I've got potency. And what the accident does is it actualizes that potency in a certain way, makes me be actually tan or whatever. And that would imply that what's. It does imply that what's being actualized is of itself, potential. And so we don't want to predicate accidents of certainly of tannness or color of God, because, among other things, he doesn't have a body. We don't want to predicate accidents of wisdom or justice of God either, because, again, that would be to imply that what God is, the subject of which you're predicating these accidents lacked that actuality. And so Thomistic claims that when we say that God is wise, I'm not saying that there's an extra metaphysical reality which I'm plugging into the metaphysical reality, which is God. I'm rather saying that the metaphysical reality which is God. I can capture a facet of that, if you like, by my word, wise. And so that's one line of argument. Argument would be that if you were to say that God had an accident distinct from himself, then that would mean that this accident was actualizing God, and thus that God was in potency, and thus that God could not be really the first cause, and thus wouldn't be God. The other line of argument would be, I call it the limiting line of argument. And so the idea would be this, once you grant, and we'd have to do a couple more steps to show this, but once you grant that God is the fullness of existence, right? So if you grant the actus purus claim, and you also grant the Ipsum essay claim, and I can defend that if you like, Then you're saying that God is this pure fullness of existence of itself. And to say that the pure fullness of existence itself is something limited, which would be the case if I were to say that this pure fullness of existence itself had this little doohickey attached to it called wisdom, which was different from it and different from these other attributes, then I would be saying that the infinite and the pure and the what is per se, through itself is something limited and participated. And Aquinas thinks that that's also in flat contradiction to the claim that God is the first cause in which all other things Participate, but who himself participates in nothing. So I take it those are the two main lines of arguments against positing accidents really distinct from God in hearing in him. Now we have to do a little bit of work to pair what you're calling energies with accidents. One more thing. And then we can get into the. Trying to poke at the difficulties in each other's positions. So there's. You talked about operations. In particular, the word energea obviously comes from the Greek word which is most commonly used for operation. Aristotle uses it that way, although he also uses it sometimes to talk about form, if I'm not mistaken. And so there's this question of whether these arguments against divine accidents would also apply to arguments. Sorry, would also apply to divine actions. Aquinas seems to think that they do. So he classifies actions as a kind of accident. And so he wants to rule out all actions from God for the same reason that he rules out accident, distinct accidents like justice and wisdom and mercy and stuff like that. It's not clear to me, so I'm a bit of a heterodox tonus. I'm putting my cards on the table here. It's not clear to me that actions and formal accidents should actually be considered on the same plane. I think you can make a principled case for allowing a real distinction of acts of God's creature directed actions from himself in a way in which you can't make a good argument for real distinction of his attributes from himself. And we can get into my crazy theories for why that's the case later. Okay, so that's my basic argument for Aquinas's position as I understand it. Should I try to go through the. The various theological points that you're bringing up, or do you want to speak to what I just said?
- [31:54]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello.
- [31:54]
Dr. Feingold
Hello.
- [31:54]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast smart talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business?
- [32:10]
Arvind Krishna
My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process. Because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things.
- [33:00]
Malcolm Gladwell
To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com smarttalks.
- [33:11]
Bleacher Report Announcer
The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time, scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
- [33:42]
Jay Dyer
Well, one thing I would say to to in response is at first we do affirm that God is simple. Every Orthodox doctrine, every Eastern Father, and all the fathers, Western fathers as well, we all agree on simplicity. So it's not really a question of do we teach divine simplicity, but what in fact do we mean by that for us, you know, one of the key theological treatises is on the Orthodox faith. And of course Aquinas specifically deals with in his treatise on divine simplicity, he specifically deals with questions from John of Damascus. Right. Specifically on the essence energy distinction. So sometimes in Orthodox theology, yes, operations energeia, that's actually used in the New Testament multiple times of divine activity. So it signifies divine activity within time and space. But there's another important aspect that I should add to here that for Orthodox, this actually solves a lot of the disputes between the east and the west over the filioque and trinitarian questions, which I'm not trying to get into that, but it is important to germane to our discussion because we don't believe that it's necessarily the case that there's only actions of God towards creation or eternity. Now, in a sense, yes, there could be. I mean, there are those two things. But what I'm trying to say is that we believe in a level of energetic manifestation. So for example, when many of the Church fathers talk about the Spirit being manifested eternally from the Son, that is the our doctrine which is laid out at the Council of Blacharne as eternal manifestation, we see that as different from hypostatic origin of the Spirit. So the reason I say that is because it's not just the Spirit eternally manifesting the sun and the Spirit resting in the sun, as San Gregory Palmas and Saint John of Damascus say it's John of Damascus who makes this distinction between eternal manifestation and hypostatic origin. This is why St. John doesn't teach the filioque and in fact he rejects it. He says that there's no co cause or co producer of the Spirit other than the Father. The Son does eternally manifest the Spirit and not just that the Son and the entire Trinity manifest. In other words, all the trinitarian operations are from the Father through the Son and Spirit. This applies to eternal manifestation as well. So for example, some attributes of God are appropriate to all eternity. God's love has eternally manifested for all eternity in that trinitarian way. God's goodness has eternally manifested that way. But some actions of God, as you said, are appropriate to time and space, to history. St. Gregory Palmas and St. Maximus make this distinction. They talk about how God's justice, for example, in relationship to Sodom and Gomorrah, that was something that occurred within time and space and passed away. Some of God's actions occur within time and space and continue on into eternity. For example, the creation of the Church, setting up of the Church and so forth, the incarnation of Christ. These begin in time and space and they continue on into eternity. So not all actions of God are necessarily just related to the inter trinitarian life. God ad intra or God ad extra. There's also for us a very important other level of energetic manifestation, which is a helpful distinction and actually explains what is oftentimes confused in Roman Catholic teaching on the filioque. So I just wanted to add that caveat and also the second caveat, that we don't actually accept act as purists. So you began your opening statement by saying, well, if we accept the first cause argument and the actus purist position, then it does logically lead to these other things. And I would say you're right, it does. We would agree with that. However, we just simply don't accept that starting point. And this is the thing that I think most Thomas don't question is what if we just question that starting point? What if we just reject the Plotinian and the originistic doctrine, the Greek doctrine, the Hellenic doctrine of what simplicity is, for example Plotinus. And in the Aeneas he says God is an absolutely simple intellectual essence. God is.
- [38:05]
Dr. Feingold
Sorry, hold on, because that's not the starting point. The starting point is just the notion of God as first cause. Is that what you're attacking?
- [38:12]
Jay Dyer
Well, what I'm saying is that you can reason back through to talking About a first cause. It doesn't matter whether you want it. When we're talking about divine simplicity, the starting point is that that cause has to be absolutely simple.
- [38:27]
Dr. Feingold
That's not the starting point. The starting point is that there has to be a first cause and we prove from, or we try from the notion. Okay, okay, but we have it.
- [38:36]
Jay Dyer
Okay, but we have a completely different order of theologia. We don't do that kind of a reasoning back to the first cause. That was, that's an Aristotelian doctrine. Now church fathers talk about a first cause, but we don't talk about reasoning back to the first cause in order to get to a definition of God as simple. And then later by supernature, we tack on the person's orthodox theology is completely reversed. It's the other way around. We start with revelation from God and Christ. And that's how we, we don't, we don't know naturally about God being a fan first caused and then later God having three persons. It begins with a personal revelation of I am, that I am. This is why St. Gregory Palamas says to Barium, God doesn't say I am existent being, I am the super essence. He says I am he. For example, when St. Basil argues against Eunomius and he specifically argues on the question of what the one is to on, he argues that it is a personal question claim. It is about hypostasis. It is I am he. It is not I am essence, I am super being. I am whatever it's I am he. So even I know that you want to say I'm not starting with super essence, I'm starting with first reasoning back to first cause and then predicating about you analogically about what this essence is. What I'm saying to you is that we just reject that whole process, the whole.
- [39:59]
Dr. Feingold
Hold on. So there could be two things here. So maybe you're saying that you just don't think, think that any proofs for God's existence work. Is that what you're claiming?
- [40:07]
Jay Dyer
No, we believe in the transcendental argument as most compatible with orthodox theology. St. John Damascus makes a transcendental argument. But yes, I do believe the classical arguments don't work very well. Precisely before this, Precisely because of what? Because of this issue that we're talking about.
- [40:24]
Dr. Feingold
You mean they don't work because they get you into a place you don't want to be?
- [40:28]
Jay Dyer
No, I mean I argue with atheists all the time and refute them quite, quite frequently because of the transcendental argument. So it doesn't lead me to a place.
- [40:37]
Dr. Feingold
No, no, no. I don't mean like you don't want to. Don't want there to be a guy. What I meant is you don't like the five ways, for example, because they would imply divine simplicity. Is that what you're saying?
- [40:47]
Jay Dyer
They are bad arguments based on classical foundational epistemology and orthodox anthropology doesn't make sense with classical foundational epistemology.
- [40:56]
Dr. Feingold
Okay. So I think I would like for this discussion to be fruitful. I think we should do maybe two things. Maybe this is a rabbit hole. So tell me if you don't want to do this, but. So on one hand, I think it would be good to probe this five ways issue a bit because I agree with you that if we think that those are bunk, then your arguments for divine simplicity are going to be short of their foundation. But here's this other thing, so it's right. So let me grant to you for a minute that your starting point as a Christian should be revelation rather than natural reason. Start from God speaking in the burning bush rather than what we can know by the revelation which is written in the world around us, to paraphrase St. Paul. Right. Granting that, surely you would still want to maintain that whatever the God of revelation is, it's not caused and it's the sort of thing whose explanation you don't have to seek.
- [41:59]
Jay Dyer
Right, Sure. I mean, Eastern fathers will. Will say at times God is first cause. St. John Damascus says that.
- [42:07]
Dr. Feingold
And so what I'm trying to do, and what I think divine simplicity does, is it's a logical consequence of a coherent claim that God is the first cause. And so if you don't think that it follows from the claim that God is the first cause, I would be interested to see where you think that argument comes apart. I can restate.
- [42:28]
Jay Dyer
Why does the first cause have to be absolutely simple? Why can't there be composite first cause? I mean, there's no. In other words, I have to accept a whole bunch of other logical philosophical terms, of course.
- [42:42]
Dr. Feingold
And I'm trying to figure out which of those premises you're attacking. So the premise in question here would be whenever you have two things that are when I have an attribute, let's say, can we go with that as an example of composition?
- [42:58]
Jay Dyer
Okay, but go ahead.
- [43:03]
Dr. Feingold
When I have an attribute again, that's going to mean that this subject, according to the framework I'm using, the subject has been actualized by this distinct reality is in hearing in it. And so it seems as though if you're going to grant that the composition of subject and accident can be analyzed into a relation of potency and act. And you want to maintain that God is not. Does not have potency, then you're going to have to grant that God. Now, there are more premises there, so go ahead.
- [43:44]
Jay Dyer
But we don't maintain that.
- [43:45]
Dr. Feingold
Again, we don't maintain. Which part?
- [43:47]
Jay Dyer
We don't believe that God is pure act with no potentia.
- [43:51]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so let's rewind then. So it seems as though when I look around at ordinary things, right? And I see that I'm staring at the coffee mug on my desk, I see that it is this certain shape, and I can ask why. Right. And that's a good question to ask. It doesn't explain itself. It didn't have that shape and that color just because of the nature of the matter that makes it up. Right. So I need to seek outside of the cup for the reason why the cup is and why it is this way. And it's precisely because the cup didn't have to be this way.
- [44:27]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, I mean, I understand.
- [44:29]
Dr. Feingold
So in other words, whenever you have Aristotle's cause, which didn't have to be this way, and whenever you've got something which is this way but didn't have to be this way, you need to ask why. Okay, so I'm saying that if you say that God has potency and it's actualized, then you need to explain why that happened.
- [44:50]
Jay Dyer
Sure. Well, the first thing I would say is that if I adopt the Thomistic doctrine of what simplicity is, and if I identify God's actions with his essence, then it's very difficult to see. And I would say you can't argue that creation is actually a free action of God. Now, all historic orthodox theology.
- [45:07]
Dr. Feingold
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
- [45:10]
Jay Dyer
Because the act of creating the world.
- [45:15]
Dr. Feingold
I know this objection quite well.
- [45:17]
Jay Dyer
There's more to this objection, which I bet you don't know, which is that it's not just a matter of whether or not the action of creating was constrained by God's essence, because they're identified. This also a question of the divine exemplars. This is because Aquinas, multiple times in the summa, identifies the exemplars, the ideas behind the created things, with the essence of God. Now, if creation is based on the exemplars, then creation, it's hard to see how it's not also just as unchanging and eternal as the exemplars upon which they're based. And this is why. Orthodox analogy, that's why Saint Maximus, Saint Gregory. They don't identify the ideas or the logo with the essence of God. They are the things around the around God. This is why Dionysius, the areopagite who finished sites multiple times, that makes the distinction between essence and energy. This is why Dionysius says that you can never get to God's essence and you can't even via negativa reason about God's essence. It's not just a question of univocal or analogical. Analogic. Analogical.
- [46:20]
Dr. Feingold
That's another question which we should save for a little bit.
- [46:22]
Jay Dyer
But analogical doesn't work either because of the doctrine of divine simplicity as stated by Quantus.
- [46:29]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello.
- [46:30]
Dr. Feingold
Hello.
- [46:30]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business?
- [46:45]
Arvind Krishna
My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind it. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive.
- [47:17]
Jay Dyer
Yeah. Wow.
- [47:18]
Arvind Krishna
So we are not asking our clients to to be the first experiment on it. We say you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process. Because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things.
- [47:36]
Malcolm Gladwell
To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com smarttalks.
- [47:47]
Howie Mandel
Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie do it gaming team take on Gilly the king and wallow. $267 million gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown. Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Travy McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Neo right now@globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com everybody games.
- [48:17]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah. Okay, so first thing, I would like to keep the argument which I just gave separate from that. So there's two things that both of us need to do in this debate. So one of them is make the case for why our position has to be why we think it has to be the way it is, and the other One is to defend against objections to it. So when I'm giving you the potency act argument. Right. That's why I think it has to be the case. And then I need to defend against objections like. And then how do you make sense of freedom? Right. So likewise.
- [48:45]
Jay Dyer
Okay, but. But what if
- [48:49]
Dr. Feingold
energy's essence. Hold on just a sec. Right. You're saying you need to. One of the reasons why you believe in the energy's essence distinction is because you think it's necessary to safeguard divine freedom. And then you have revealed an objection. Right? So let's just keep these two separate things separate.
- [49:05]
Jay Dyer
I believe it because it's revealed. And I also believe my view of what God is in terms of simplicity, because it's revealed. I don't begin by looking at the composition of created things like coffee cups and try to reason back and say, well, there must have been a first simple cause that's not like a composite coffee cup. In fact, I don't have to go that route. And when you look at the early church fathers, when you look at the way Scripture talks about these things, it's a revealed doctrine, both of the persons and of what God's nature is, which we don't know what it is, of course. So no, we don't begin. As Paul says in Acts 17, the divine Ousia is not like any created thing. When he's arguing with.
- [49:43]
Dr. Feingold
You don't need to argue with me about that. That's actually kind of both of our points. So anyway, keep going.
- [49:49]
Jay Dyer
But, but, but Thomas also wants his cake and to eat it too, because he also says that this absolutely simple divine essence does. That there is an analogical similarity between what's in this essence, the divine exemplars, and the created forms. And the created forms are nothing like an absolutely simple essence. So there's a divide where there's not a bridge between this absolutely simple essence, because there's no uncreated grace. There's no bridge between the absolutely simple uncreated and the created, and they share no similarity. Then there's no basis for the analogia, analogia entus, or the participation in God in terms of redemption. It's all created grace. It's all bridged off by Doc. By Thomas's doctrine of simplicity. Now I recognize again that he wants there to be distinctions of persons. He wants there to be God acting within time and space in terms of the Incarnation, the Logos somehow entering into a mode of being that the Father and the Spirit do not. But our contention is that in the system as a Whole, with all of Thomas's claims and presuppositions. It doesn't work. It's contradictory.
- [50:55]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, let's keep. So we've got three issues on the table as of this moment. Right? So we've got on the one hand my question, which you haven't answered yet, which is how is it. Why is it that a composite of potency, enact, wouldn't need an explanation? You have a second question which you've addressed to me, which I haven't answered yet, which is how would it be possible for an absolutely simple God to be free? And then there's the third question, which is an epistemological question, which is if we don't, if we grant that the divine essence is transcendent, what are our predicates latching onto? Right? And that's the problem with analogy. And so those are, I think, three separate issues, and we should probably go over them one by one.
- [51:38]
Jay Dyer
Okay, so the first one is, I've already answered it. And I said, first of all, we don't accept that God is pure act with no potentiality.
- [51:46]
Dr. Feingold
That's not an answer, though. Right. Because what you need to explain to me is why is it right? So you're.
- [51:54]
Jay Dyer
It is an answer because in Christian theology, God is not explained in that way. He's revealed a certain way. So what? My answer to you is that we don't have an answer to. To Aquinas, to Aristotle's dilemma of accidents and substance because that's not how we look at and view God. We don't use that system. It wasn't used for the first thousand years. So I don't have to answer that question because it's not applicable to how we know who God is. We know who God is through revelation and through participating in that revealed light.
- [52:30]
Dr. Feingold
We're all on board with saying that revelation is true.
- [52:34]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [52:36]
Dr. Feingold
But the question is, I would challenge you to find examples in the scripture of saying, saying that God is in potency to attributes or stuff like that.
- [52:48]
Jay Dyer
You keep asking me where can I.
- [52:50]
Dr. Feingold
As much inferential work as I do,
- [52:52]
Jay Dyer
at least you keep asking me to use Aristotelian terminology and classifications and categories. And I just told you that we don't. And they're not in Scripture and they're not in the. In the first thousand years of the church. Father, Generally speaking, the thing that you
- [53:05]
Dr. Feingold
had said first was that you're fine with saying that God has potency.
- [53:11]
Jay Dyer
I was trying to speak to your terminology. For example, in Bradshaw's essays In his book where he says that if we follow through with saying that God has no potentiality, it's difficult to see how there's a free act of creation. But I'm moving the step back further and I'm saying we reject your doctrine of what simplicity is because it's direct from origin.
- [53:33]
Dr. Feingold
And I'm not interested in arguments from authority or where claims came from. What I'm trying.
- [53:39]
Jay Dyer
That's the first thousand years of the Church's debate. Of course it matters where they came from. If you're, if you're just rehashing Plotinus, then that's a problem. And Aquinas does that.
- [53:51]
Dr. Feingold
No, no. I mean, look what we're trying to do, or at least here's what I'm trying to do. Right? So we've got. We've got Revelation. We know by Revelation a couple things. We know more than a couple. We know that there is one God, that he's the first cause of all things, that he is three persons, and that the second person became man and died for our sins.
- [54:11]
Jay Dyer
I mean, have you ever considered a person?
- [54:14]
Dr. Feingold
Obviously it matters if something is directly contained in Revelation, but like what? Where, like these distinctions came from. I'm not sure why that's germane. Right. So to say that Plotinus originated this way of understanding what it means to be the first one. So, so why does it matter? This is just a methodological. It does matter.
- [54:35]
Jay Dyer
It does matter because it's the doctrine of the heretics and the doctrine of the Greeks that the early councils rejected. So every time the Christological controversies happen, they argue against guys who were influenced by Greek thought. This actually comes up in the writings of the Fathers and in the Councils. They say you've been influenced by the Hellenic ideas of what simplicity is. So if Plotinus talks about simplicity in a certain way, and in which it identifies all the names or attributes of the One with the essence of the One. And then when Eunomius says the exact same thing and St. Gregory of Nyssa writes an 800 page book against Eunomius and makes this very argument saying, hey, Eunomius, you got your argument from Plotinus, I would say that I can just simply repeat that same argument against you because Aquinas rehashes the same argument from Eunomius and from Plotinus. So absolutely what you're telling me, though,
- [55:28]
Dr. Feingold
is that somebody who by dint of using reason alone, with no help from Revelation, says some true things and some false things.
- [55:37]
Jay Dyer
No, that's not.
- [55:38]
Dr. Feingold
You who have the revelation should discard the Baby with the bathwater. That's what I'm hearing, right? Like when I say, no, most of
- [55:45]
Jay Dyer
these, Most of these were fine with classified pedagogy. So you're making a straw man. I didn't say that we have to throw out all philosophy or anything.
- [55:53]
Dr. Feingold
Like, if it's the case, the fact that Plotinus said something means that it's wrong.
- [56:00]
Jay Dyer
That's the origin of this.
- [56:01]
Dr. Feingold
I'm not willing to that proposition.
- [56:03]
Jay Dyer
Okay, do you understand
- [56:06]
Dr. Feingold
big part.
- [56:07]
Jay Dyer
Do you understand dialectics? Right. So when the early Church Fathers are arguing against somebody like Celsus, or they're arguing against Arius, or whether they're arguing against Eunomius, they often talk about how these heretics employ dialectics. And so, for example, it's Plotinus who pioneered this, right? It doesn't matter whether it's Plotinus who said it or whether it's Nestorius who said it. The same heresy is being restated. Who cares who said it if it's wrong in principle? So I'll grant you that, yes, it doesn't matter ultimately who said it. But I'm saying that when the Church Fathers argue against these things, they absolutely are concerned with, with the origin or the wellspring of where these errors come from. And I'm telling you that we reject the Greek philosophical origin of how we understand what simplicity is, and we actually just go to what's revealed. That's what the Church Fathers do. That's why they reject Hellenic dialectics every time there's a council, and particularly the sixth council.
- [57:00]
Dr. Feingold
My only point is, I'm not going to accept it as a valid counter argument that you say that this principle or whatever was articulated by Plotinus and Plotinus tell some heretical views. Therefore we must not hold this principle. That's not a valid argument.
- [57:15]
Jay Dyer
The argument is your doctrine of simplicity is the same as Plotinus's, and it's
- [57:19]
Dr. Feingold
radical and it's certainly not the same as Plotinuses, because the Trinity, right, the. The emanation of noose from the world.
- [57:29]
Jay Dyer
I already. I already answered early on when I said that the question wasn't whether Thomas also said correct things elsewhere, but whether the doctrine of simplicity itself wasn't the exact same as what Plotinus said. And when Plotinus says that all the acts and names and operations of God or the One are exactly the same as the essence, that's the same as what Aquinas says. And so when this is why Origen was led to say that the Son is a different subsistence, a different kind of created subsistence different from the Father because he identified the hypostasis of the Father with the essence. This is why Euus identified the Father with unoriginate and with absolutely simple essence.
- [58:09]
Dr. Feingold
In other words, you're saying that you think that the Plotinian doctrine, Plotinus thinks that the One is completely simple. Okay, fine. And that this one means can only be one hypostasis in itself. It can't be three that have the nature of the One. If you could even speak of the nature of the One, that you probably can't for him. And Thomas wants to hold that. That same doctrine of divine symbols. Simplicity, you say, but with persons.
- [58:32]
Jay Dyer
Correct.
- [58:32]
Dr. Feingold
That's inconsistent. Is that right?
- [58:34]
Jay Dyer
Yes. It's the same philosophical Greek idea of what simplicity is. And then they also. The idea of let's also tack on persons, let's use the Greeks insofar as they were good at talking about simplicity in the Monad, and let's tack on three hypostasis. And the argument is that given what's said in Greek and Hellenic thought generally that I'm talking about here, about what simplicity is, it doesn't. There's no place for it. Real distinctions in the persons. This is why it leads to modalism. This is why do you want to
- [59:04]
Dr. Feingold
get into Aquinas's Trinitarian theory then? Because that would be our next step. I'm still going to say. I'm like, I would like to go back to the problem of whether or not you're willing to say that God has potency. So I'm going to take that as just bracketed for the moment. Do you want to go to Trinity instead?
- [59:20]
Jay Dyer
I mean, if you listen to what I say, right? So when I said, yes, if you want to use your language and say, does God have potency? Then I would say in the sense of him not having to create, but yet he chose to create. That is something that he actually has.
- [59:38]
Dr. Feingold
So. Well, this is just a verbal. That part is just a verbal distinction, right? So Aquinas constantly uses this distinction between active and passive potency. And the only kind which he's going to deny of God is passive potency, which is the kind of potent.
- [59:53]
Jay Dyer
We can cut past all this and just make it very clear that Aquinas says that all the distinctions and the attributes of God are notional, they're not real, that they're just conceptual distinctions that we make. And so God's love is the exact same as the essence, is the exact same as the foreknowledge is the exact Same as the act of creating. That's ultimately foolish.
- [60:14]
Dr. Feingold
I agree with the first part of the claim. So he does say that God's essence is the same as his act of loving himself, which is the same as his act of knowing himself, which is the same as his act of existence, which is the same as the act by which he makes all things. That's right.
- [60:29]
Jay Dyer
It's also the attributes that are the same as the essence of God. Sure.
- [60:36]
Dr. Feingold
So then you know what we're talking about. We're talking about active earth, passive power.
- [60:41]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [60:42]
Dr. Feingold
So obviously. Right. God can make things that he hasn't made. But for Aquinas, that doesn't imply that God is. What we need to avoid is saying that God is receiving something or being actualized by something which he did not have to receive or be actualized by. Does that make sense? What we're trying to do is exclude receptivity or passivity from the divine nature.
- [61:12]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [61:12]
Dr. Feingold
Is that a goal that you're okay with, or do I need to defend that one?
- [61:15]
Jay Dyer
I don't think that any orthodox person would say that God's. That God needed anything in his nature or anything like that.
- [61:24]
Dr. Feingold
When I say that God doesn't have potency, that's just what I mean. So the cup is in potency to this shape or that shape by virtue of its matter. And so it's being actualized by that. And so the cups needed some sort of shape. That's what we deny. When we deny that God has potency. In Aristotelian terms, if you like the word need better or open slot or whatever, that's fine. Same idea.
- [61:47]
Jay Dyer
Okay.
- [61:48]
Dr. Feingold
Are we okay with that? Can we then agree that God doesn't have potency?
- [61:52]
Jay Dyer
As far as I can tell, yes. That makes sense.
- [61:54]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so that's all that we're trying to maintain. When we hold that God is entirely simple. We don't want anything in God which would fill a slot.
- [62:09]
Jay Dyer
That's not all that's right here. That's not always being good.
- [62:13]
Dr. Feingold
That's our reason for holding it. So if you can show what you need to do, and this is what I tried to do in my own dissertation, I'm arguing with you, but I'm actually at least half on your side. So if we get to that part in a minute. But what you would need to do is to explain why. Why the kind of multiplicity that you want doesn't involve actualizing or filling a need or an open slot or whatever in the divinity.
- [62:42]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, I would just.
- [62:43]
Dr. Feingold
Does that make sense?
- [62:43]
Jay Dyer
I would throw out all these categories. Big part, I would throw out categories.
- [62:54]
Dr. Feingold
Well, surely though, you're going to agree. No, no, look, you can, what you can, what you can do is you can tell me that these things. Right, so give me an example of multiplicity, say divine persons, you can say, and Aquinas will agree, of course, this multiplicity does not involve an actualization of the divine essence. And so we can allow it.
- [63:17]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [63:17]
Dr. Feingold
But what you need to do is for every case of an energy that you describe, you need to explain to the Thomist why this doesn't count as why you don't need these categories. Right. Why they don't apply. I think the onus is on you.
- [63:33]
Jay Dyer
No, it's not. Because first of all, there is a thousand years of the church using categories and explanations and terms that are not Thomistic and are not Aristotelian. So we already have this. So the onus is not on me, but actually on. And this, of course, you know, it was very controversial when, when Thomism began to adopt Aristotelianism. And ultimately, yes, it's not so much about this or that specific term, but it's about the.
- [64:05]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello. Hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Gambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research.
- [64:19]
Jake Gambetta
We, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA. To answer the question of what is the future?
- [64:36]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff. Yes, Building actual physical machines. Yeah.
- [64:45]
Jake Gambetta
It's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [64:57]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point
- [65:09]
Jake Gambetta
with Kanta by 2029 will build the first fault tolerant quantum computer that is one that can run a very, very large, large problem.
- [65:19]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum has
- [65:29]
Megan McCardell
the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post opinion called Reasonably Optimistic and it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.
- [65:46]
Dr. Feingold
It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together, to solve problems where they are.
- [65:52]
Malcolm Gladwell
You know, I am a believer in America and that's worth fighting for.
- [65:55]
Megan McCardell
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [65:59]
Jay Dyer
Almost scientistic approach to dissecting God in this way and not looking at how the. The revelation of what hupastasis is in the New Testament or what energeia is as opposed to fusis in the New Testament.
- [66:15]
Dr. Feingold
I don't know what you mean by scientistic. Right. What we've got is the data of revelation. Right? We've got.
- [66:19]
Jay Dyer
It's not data, it's not natural revelation as a science. Theology is not the queen of science. That's what I mean by scientistic. Right. It's about.
- [66:29]
Dr. Feingold
It's about seeking understanding. Yes, it is, but that's what science
- [66:34]
Jay Dyer
means, that understanding comes through the direct experience of God, not through the intellect.
- [66:42]
Dr. Feingold
Well, okay, so look, if you want to say that the only proper knowledge of God is by mystical vision, and then we're just wasting our time talking about him right here, that's probably true.
- [66:53]
Jay Dyer
Believe in an analogia that's applicable to the energies. Right. So the logo, you read St. Maximus, the doctrine of the logo, which he identifies as divine ideas. They're uncreated energies. They're not the essence of God. And so again, what you notice is that what distinguishes the orthodox position consistently across the board. That's why I started out talking about how we have a different anthropology, we have a different trinology, we have a different doctrine of Christology and a different eschatology and a different ecclesiology is because of the essence energy distinction, all these different points. So it's a whole system. It's holistic in our view.
- [67:29]
Dr. Feingold
I understand that, but. So let me just try to plug it, since you're back to energies. Let's just try to plug in that term energy into the question I was asking you. All right, so what Atomas is going to be worried about when he hears you talking about divine energies is the question of whether these energies would be such as to actualize the divine essence. I assume, correct me if I'm wrong, I think you would want to say that in fact they don't actualize the divine essence and that they're not received by or that they're not principles of God's existence or God's nature at all.
- [68:08]
Jay Dyer
What I'm trying to tell you is anything in God.
- [68:11]
Dr. Feingold
Is that a fair statement?
- [68:13]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, but what I've been trying to convey is that you have to reject Thomism, right? This whole system is a problem. So because you are trying to force me into the Aristotelian categories, I'm trying to tell you it's just.
- [68:26]
Dr. Feingold
This is not like Aristotle, right? To say that something can and not right. And that something's necessary or contingent. This is not Aristotle. This is just.
- [68:35]
Jay Dyer
You were talking about impotentia and actuality
- [68:38]
Dr. Feingold
and actors just means can be right. It's what can be. That's all it is.
- [68:44]
Jay Dyer
I know what contingency.
- [68:46]
Dr. Feingold
That's not Aristotle's copyright.
- [68:48]
Jay Dyer
I know what contingency means. What I'm telling you is that you are a Thomas. And these categories that you're talking about did come from Aristotle and they were introduced by, you know, Thomas and his. His teacher Albert Magnus. They were not the norm for the first thousand years of the Church. Now why weren't they the norm? Precisely because of questions.
- [69:11]
Dr. Feingold
Well, we're not trying to have an argument about terms here, right? You're. You're saying part.
- [69:16]
Jay Dyer
We are because. Because we reject your doctrine of simplicity. Don't. Do can you not see that how simplicity can be questioned?
- [69:27]
Dr. Feingold
Of course it can be questioned, but I'm saying that this doctrine of simplicity rests like can be questioned. I don't think that it can be successfully debunked. But okay,
- [69:40]
Jay Dyer
so there's a whole. There's a whole 800 page book that debunks it, written by St. Gregory.
- [69:45]
Dr. Feingold
There are lots of books that try to debunk it. That's neither here nor there.
- [69:49]
Jay Dyer
He's a doctor of the Church and he. And he shows that you know me and ism is modalism based on. It's his doctrine of simplicity. It's the act same doctrine, simplicity.
- [69:58]
Dr. Feingold
Hold on. We're not here to just trade claims. You're wrong or you're wrong. We're here to try to evaluate arguments. It's best as we can
- [70:08]
Jay Dyer
that Aquinas's doctrine of simplicity is exact same as Eunomius's doctrine of simplicity. And although the conclusions are different, Eunomius is refuted in 800 pages by St. Gregory Nyssa. And the whole argument is based on essence, energy, distinction, as well as other things.
- [70:25]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so let me latch on to that then. How are you defining the divine simplicity doctrine which you say Aquinas shares with Eunomius?
- [70:36]
Jay Dyer
Well, I can look at the summa under the questions like question three, the simplicity of God, where it's stated very clearly in those, what, eight questions. I think he says, is God composite? Is he absolutely simple? Is God's existence exact same as his essence? Yes, it is. Is there any accidents in God? No. Are all the attributes the same as the essence of God? Yes. Are they just logical distinctions? Yes. So forth and so on. I mean, there's not a whole lot of debate. I wouldn't think about what Thomas says divine.
- [71:06]
Dr. Feingold
And so you're holding that Eunomius holds likewise that God is identical to anything that can be said of him, and therefore there can't be a trinity.
- [71:13]
Jay Dyer
The only difference between Aquinas and Eunomius is that Aquinas wants there to be a via negativa and Eunomius didn't.
- [71:23]
Dr. Feingold
Ah, does Eunomius.
- [71:26]
Jay Dyer
You can fall on two sides of this coin. You can fall on the side of the coin with Aquinas where you want both things to be true, or you
- [71:33]
Dr. Feingold
can fall on both things are what Trinity of persons and unity of nature.
- [71:38]
Jay Dyer
Say what?
- [71:40]
Dr. Feingold
With the three, the two things are trinity of persons and simplicity of nature.
- [71:46]
Jay Dyer
What two things?
- [71:48]
Dr. Feingold
That's the whole. Both things at once. What two things? Simplicity of nature and Trinity persons and
- [71:54]
Jay Dyer
the via negativa where we can predicate analogically of God.
- [72:00]
Dr. Feingold
I'm not sure that the via negativa issue is what's at stake here. So let me try this may or may.
- [72:06]
Jay Dyer
This is why it's the exact same debate that St. Gregory had with Barium. Barium says that when we predicate of God, we predicate of him substantially but analogically. And St. Gregory responds by saying, if God is an absolutely simple essence and you only know created effects, you don't actually know God. You don't actually know God because you never know whether you're experiencing what attribute. Because all the attributes are identical to the divine essence, right? I mean, you don't know if you're experiencing love. How do you know if you're experiencing love or justice or foreknowledge or what? You never know because they're all the same as the divine essence and you don't ever participate in God.
- [72:38]
Dr. Feingold
I'm happy to get into the problem of analogical predication, but I'm not sure that's the same problem. Can we Trinity for just a sec?
- [72:45]
Jay Dyer
Sure.
- [72:47]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so let me just try. Maybe this will. Or maybe this won't be germane. To the. To your point, let me try to give Aquinas's defense Right. So this is now the other side of the coin. It's not arguing for his position, it's repelling objections, explaining why he thinks that his doctrine of simplicity is compatible with a trinity of persons.
- [73:09]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [73:09]
Dr. Feingold
Because it seems to me that you're just saying, straight up, it's just a case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.
- [73:13]
Jay Dyer
Right? Right. Correct.
- [73:15]
Dr. Feingold
Okay. So Aquinas's claim he holds divine simplicity to this extent. He doesn't want there to be anything in God which actualizes or is a principle of God's existence. Now, the reason why he thinks this is compatible with there being three subsistent relations in the divinity is because of how he understands the nature of relation. In particular, this is more Aristotelian framework. Bear with me. So in his framework, all 10 of the categories are going to have two sides to them. There's going to be the essay side, and there's going to be the form of the ratio side. Right? So you have dog nature in substantial form, and you have the essay which is proper to it, which is subsistent essay. And then you have quantity. This is form. And then there's the essay which is proper to it, which is in essay or inherence. And same for quality. And in the case of these two, there is a double sort of inherence, according to Aquinas. So quantity inheres. This cup is big, let's say quantity inheres in its subject, both in the sense that it draws its existence from that subject. Right. Quantity doesn't just hang out on its own. It's always the quantity of something. It inheres in that sense. And it here is in a further sense, which is that it posits that content, that formal content in the subject, and makes that cup be 3 ounces, whatever. So it serves now as a principle of that cup's being, makes that cup be in a certain way and same for quality. So all the things that we normally think of as attributes or as accidents have this double inherence that they exist in the subject, draw their existence from it, and they make it be in a certain way. So Aquinas is going to deny that there can be anything predicated of God, anything really distinct from God, inhering in him after the faction of quantity or quality. And the reason is, because quantity or quality inheres in that second way, and thus would, if really distinct from God, add something to God's being. Relation is different, according to Aquinas, because it doesn't do that. And inheres only in the first way. It's still got in Essay 1 Creatures, but it doesn't make its subject, it doesn't add any new content to the subject. So when you've got these two cups that are equal in size to each other, the size that's in the category of quantity posits content in the subject, actualizes it, modifies it. And based on the fact that it's got this thing which is modifying it, it's got this other feature which is the relation of equality, which doesn't add anything to the cup at all, doesn't make it doesn't modify, doesn't actualize it, doesn't limit it, nothing. So it's ratio according to Aquinas's pure towardness purely towards something else. So that's just among creatures. Transposing this to God is going to say, okay, so like everything else in God, our arguments for divine simplicity are right. The essay side of this accident is not going to be in essay, it's not going to be inherence, it's just going to be the self, same divine essay. But I can still talk about its ratio, its content being distinct from other relations in God, because these relations, their towardsness is not towards the essence, they're not positing something in the essence, they're not modifying, and they're strictly looking outward. And so I can say that God, when divine nature is to in case of the Father or from in the case of the Son, without actualizing, modifying, limiting, or what have you of the divine nature. And so for Aquinas, it's entirely principled to hold divine simplicity in the sense which I just stated, namely, there can be nothing in God which limits him or actualizes him, and at the same time to hold three subsistent relations in that divine nature. So it's not ad hoc, it's not just we're going to tack it on. It has to do with what it means to talk about relations in the first place.
- [78:10]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, I'm familiar with what he says, and the problem is that it doesn't work. So for one, the basic way to refute this is just to talk about the fact that this distinction is spoken of as relations of opposition. And yes, Aquinas does at times try to say that the Father is still the arche of the Trinity, but what he doesn't understand is that for the Eastern position, which is already to find this dogmat. Yeah, can you hear me?
- [78:37]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello? Hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast smart talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business?
- [78:53]
Arvind Krishna
My one advice to them Pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive.
- [79:25]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah.
- [79:26]
Arvind Krishna
So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process. Because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things.
- [79:44]
Malcolm Gladwell
To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com smart talks.
- [79:55]
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- [80:25]
Dr. Feingold
Hang on, I think I'll just say that again.
- [80:29]
Jay Dyer
Yeah. What I was trying to say is that this was already defined in orthodox theology. We already had a way to understand the relations within the Trinity precisely because we didn't have the absolute divine simplicity doctrine. So we already had an Eastern tradition that dealt with these issues, particularly in Saint Maximus, confessor, St. Photius and so forth, who really flesh this out on multiple levels. And that's because we don't have the absolute divine simplicity problem that we needed to even use relations of opposition. This does not come into play until Augustine and then later on picked up by Anselm and Aquinas. So the problems with this idea and the way that you formulated it is that I understand that Aquinas doesn't want it to be just tacked on. He wants her to really be, you know, three hypostases. But the problem is that when you get to this question of identifying the persons with the essence, which Aquinas is very dogmatic about, he says specifically that nature is person. This goes contrary to the fact that St. John Damascus on the Orthodox faith says very clearly that the identification of nature and person is the root of all heresies. And that's because St. John Damascus understood that all the dialectical heretics would use this as this kind of dialectical relationship between thing and other, one and many, simplicity and differentiation, they always set up a dialectical tension. And so relations of opposition, ironically, or the Augustinian shield, is a way to define the persons dialectically. The problem is that it doesn't work for one. The Spirit is subordinate in this relationship because he doesn't have a property that the other two have. And in fact, in Roman Catholic dogma, it's actually stated more than once that the Father and the Son are together a co cause of the Spirit. So the Father and the Son share a property that the Spirit doesn't have. All of this in order to maintain the system of how to differentiate between persons in an absolutely simple essence. Again, just toss out the absolutely simple essence doctrine of Aquinas, except the Eastern doctrine and you don't have this problem. The persons are differentiated because the Father is the arche, the unoriginate, the cause of the persons. The spiration is unique to the Spirit, generation is unique to the Son. And you don't need this relation of opposition's doctrine, which is a dialectical philosophical speculation approach and actually doesn't really distinguish a person because in fact every one of the persons shares this relation of being not the other. Right. Each of the persons is not the Son is not the Spirit is not the Spirit is not the father, etc. So not being the other two and the spirit not having a property of producing a person imbalances the Trinity. So the Spirit ends up being subordinate. And this is the chief reason why the east has a problem with filioque. So what you're talking about in a way to distinguish the persons, that doesn't do damage to divine simplicity. Not only does it not work, it's actually the root of the filioque. The filioque was introduced precisely because of this question and these issues and it just simply doesn't work.
- [83:41]
Dr. Feingold
All right, so first off. So I'm just going to reiterate my point about appeals to authority.
- [83:48]
Jay Dyer
So you're in a Roman Catholic Church?
- [83:52]
Dr. Feingold
No, I know.
- [83:54]
Jay Dyer
Appeals to authority, namely Catholic.
- [83:56]
Dr. Feingold
Although I would have appreciated, if you like later, email me the quotation you're thinking of.
- [84:01]
Jay Dyer
Which one?
- [84:02]
Dr. Feingold
The one about the root of all heresies. That sounds fun.
- [84:07]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, it's in on the Orthodox faith, famous quote where he's talking about Christology.
- [84:11]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, but secondly, apart from all that. So first off, so you want to go down the subordination to something. It's not clear to me a what you gain by or how. This problem is more your problem for me than it is for anybody, including for yourself. Because if you're going to say that subordinationism just means whether one person is going to be subordinate to another and as much as it is from another, then no, that's not what it is. Then you've got a problem. Right.
- [84:50]
Jay Dyer
So I said the Roman doctrine of the Father and the Son together sharing the property of being the co cause of the Spirit subordinates the Spirit because the Father and the Son share a property that the Spirit does not. So in class, if you read John Damascus or any of the Eastern Fathers or what's normative, even in some Catholic theology, they will make the claim that whenever we say something about God, the Trinity, it's either applicable to the Persons or to the essence. Right? So we're making a statement either about the unity of God or about the persons. There's no property that two persons share that the others that another person doesn't have. And in filioquism, as it's defined in Florence and the Roman dogmas, you have the Father and the Son as the co cause of the hypostasis of the Spirit. It's not just the eternal manifestation, which, which is what we believe about the Son sharing in the eternal manifestation of the Spirit, the Spirit rests in Him. But in fact, in the Roman Catholic dogma, there's. I don't think there's any question that it's the Father and the Son who are the hypostatic cause of the Spirit. So the subordination comes by the fact that the Father and the Son share a property that the Spirit does not.
- [85:59]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so it's true that Aquinas will say this much that there's four relations in God. There's going to be the relation of paternity, affiliation, of spiration, and of procession. And he holds of those four. And maybe this is the aesthetic pleasure that you're having with this. Only three of those are. I forget what the technical term is, but only three of those correspond to a person. The reason is because the first forth, namely spiration is not held in opposition, does not. Well, it's held in common by two persons. And so it doesn't serve to identify one person as. As opposed to another. Well, it's not clear.
- [86:52]
Jay Dyer
He uses relations of opposition and he tries to use affiliation, spiration, etc. So. So there's both are present in Aquinas, and it's only in the more radical filioquists that relations of opposition even entered as a way to do it. But it doesn't work. But there is a section where he talks about relations of opposition.
- [87:11]
Dr. Feingold
Oh yeah, no, no. Relations of opposition is central to Aquinas theory. My point was just sure, you have this aesthetic ugliness, if you like, that of the four relations with the two pairs, right? So paternity and affiliation and procession to spiration, only 3 of those pick out a person. And the reason is because the fourth spiration is shared in common by two of itself. I'm not sure why that's. Why that's a problem, if you want to explain.
- [87:39]
Jay Dyer
Because the Father and the Son share a property that the Spirit does not. And anything that you say about God is applicable either to the persons or to the nature.
- [87:48]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so by your theory, don't the Son and the Spirit both share a property which the Father does not? No being from.
- [88:00]
Jay Dyer
No, because. Because the way that they're defined as not merely being from the way they're defined as hypostatic origin. So generation defines the sun, spiration defines the spirit, and the Father is the sole cause.
- [88:15]
Dr. Feingold
Okay. And so. Okay, but so it seems. Trying to figure out where to start here. So it seems as though I could say in reply, what you've got there is they both share this property of being from. And one of them is from in this way which is being generated sonship, and one of them is being from in this way which is being spirated or proceeding or whatever. But it seems as though I can say the exact same thing with regards to spiration, right? Because I can say that the Son spirates the Spirit as from the Father, and I can say that the Father spirits the Spirit not as from. And so, although sure, there's a verbal similarity at the level of abstraction, the reality is there's no like, actual real relation which Father and Son both have, which the Spirit doesn't.
- [89:10]
Jay Dyer
But in the Roman dogma, they're defined as a co cause. Father and Son are hypostatically
- [89:19]
Dr. Feingold
no person is caused by any other.
- [89:21]
Jay Dyer
Of course they are cause.
- [89:25]
Dr. Feingold
The cause means to receive being. I don't think you want to say
- [89:27]
Jay Dyer
that this is typical orthodox and church father terminology. The Father is the sole cause. Even Aquinas uses this terminology.
- [89:38]
Dr. Feingold
So again, it just depends on what you mean by cause, right? By cause you mean something which makes something else. Obviously not Normally when we.
- [89:48]
Jay Dyer
It's in your own dogmas that the Father and the Son are the co. Cause of the Spirit's hypostasis.
- [89:57]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah. If you want to send me footnotes.
- [89:59]
Jay Dyer
Want me to read the dogma. Do you want me to read the dogma to you?
- [90:03]
Dr. Feingold
No, just go ahead and send me the footnote. But what I'm trying to do right now is just defend Aquinas's position. As I understand it, and to my knowledge, he's never going to say that the Father causes the Son. He's going to say that the Father generates the Son. He's going to say that the Son has the divine nature as from the Father. He's very precise in his terminology, and I think he tries to avoid cause for a reason.
- [90:28]
Jay Dyer
The term cause is used. They don't mean it in the sense of creating. It's just a.
- [90:33]
Dr. Feingold
It's just a terminology used as synonymous. For X's from Y, that's fine.
- [90:40]
Jay Dyer
Well, that's how it's used patristically. So they're not saying. Yeah. And many church fathers use this terminology. Again, it's in Florence. The Father and the Son are a co. Cause I'm looking for the other. I think it's Lateran it talks about. I'll give you the Denzinger here in a second. But. But again, the point is that you have a balanced position in the east where you don't have attributes or properties that two have. And saying from a source is not an attribute because it's not a positive relation, it's a negative relation that doesn't express anything that's part of that relation of opposition. We don't do relations of opposition. We do hypostatic origin as the way to understand the Trinity. And since the Father alone is the sole cause or arche of the Trinity, he's the unoriginate One. The only way to distinguish the persons is by hypostatic origins, by the fact that the Son is generated and the Spirit eternally proceeds.
- [91:45]
Dr. Feingold
Right. But how do you distinguish what it means to be generated and what it means to proceed?
- [91:50]
Jay Dyer
I will tell you at every single Eastern Father says to that very question, which is that we don't know what those words mean.
- [91:57]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, the towel. That way. But what Aquinas is trying to do is to give a principled reason for why these two should not collapse into each other.
- [92:11]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [92:13]
Dr. Feingold
And it seems as though that's something valuable to do it. Just to go back to the subordinationism thing. Again, it's just not clear to me. It's not clear to me why by saying that the father is strictly to, by saying that the son is both from and to, and saying that the spirit is strictly from, it's not clear to me why I am saying that one of these is like better or nobler or higher than the other.
- [92:47]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [92:48]
Dr. Feingold
Because Aquinas does discuss this objection and his point is simply that when you're talking about nobility, the nobility comes strictly from the divine essence. That's something absolute and that's shared equally by all. To speak of from and to, or from and to is not to speak in the language of better or worse or primary or secondary.
- [93:13]
Jay Dyer
The idea of subordination doesn't have to do necessarily with just defining what is less.
- [93:22]
Dr. Feingold
What do you mean by subordinate? What is it that you see as the problem with what you're calling subordination? And how do you define it?
- [93:32]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello. Hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Gambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research.
- [93:46]
Jake Gambetta
What we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future?
- [94:03]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff.
- [94:07]
Jake Gambetta
Yes.
- [94:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
Building actual physical machines.
- [94:12]
Jake Gambetta
Yeah. It's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [94:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right?
- [94:31]
Jay Dyer
Yeah.
- [94:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point?
- [94:36]
Jake Gambetta
With Quantum, by 2029 we'll build the first fault tolerant Quantum computer that is one that can run a very, very large, large problem.
- [94:46]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum has
- [94:56]
Megan McCardell
the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic. And it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.
- [95:12]
Dr. Feingold
It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they, they are.
- [95:19]
Malcolm Gladwell
You know, I am a believer in America and it's worth fighting for.
- [95:22]
Megan McCardell
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [95:26]
Jay Dyer
That again, in our triadology, which I again would argue is from the Eastern fathers and councils and not just like my speculation, our triadology doesn't argue that, that we can say anything about God that isn't applicable to hypostasis or to God considered as unity, right? To. To one God. So if we say wisdom, wisdom is a property or attribute that is applicable to all the persons, right? So it's not like the Father alone has wisdom and the Spirit doesn't, right? So that's a, that's a statement about God considered as God. It's applicable to all the persons because it's because, because wisdom is a. Wisdom is a natural attribute. It's a property, an attribute applicable to nature. So likewise, when we say that, we consider the will of God. Does God have three wills or one will? God has one will because will is a property of nature and not a property of hypostasis. And for us, this is applicable to anything that's said about God. So for. So when we, even when we talk about trinitarian relations, when we talk about how we distinguish the persons, we distinguish them by their origin, by the fact that the Father alone is. The fact that you have a problem with the Father being called soul, arche, or cause, I think shows a lack of understanding of what the Eastern fathers say when they define the Father as the cause. So for us. Hold on.
- [96:52]
Dr. Feingold
What you mean by cause is just. I think what I meant by what I meant by saying we're just talking about the relations of origin and that's fine.
- [97:02]
Jay Dyer
Okay, okay. But for us, it's not just a question of speculating about the Trinity. For us, this is how we know God. God is known first and foremost. As Paul says, one Father. So God reveals himself to us hypothetically or personally. We don't start with reasoning back and, and coming up with a first cause, simple essence. We start with the fact that God says, I am He. God is personal. Our ordo theology is different. Our order theology, right? We start with the Father and the Father as the sole cause, or arche, A R C H E in the Greek, as Basil uses it, is the cause of the Son in terms of generation, and he's the cause of the Spirit eternally in terms of spiration. And so that alone is the way that we distinguish the person. There's no other way. So anytime we make a statement about God. When we say, how do we know who the Spirit is? We say, he proceeds eternally from the Father through the Son. When we say, who is the Son? He's the One. He is eternally generated from the Father and eternally manifests the Spirit. Right. So those are the ways that we distinguish. And anything said about God in our trinitarian theology causes imbalance if we attribute a property, a positive property to two persons that one of them doesn't have. The Spirit, therefore lacks in the ability to produce a person. And this, in other words, the Father and the Son have this. This melded kind of co. Cause here, to use the terminology of Florence and I think the Lateran Council. Again, I'm going from memory here, but it is a Father and the Son together signify a single principle of the Spirit, to use the terminology.
- [98:45]
Dr. Feingold
Yes. The reason I'm having trouble with this argument is that it's just not clear to me what is so dire about the saying that this.
- [98:55]
Jay Dyer
Because nothing that's said of God, it doesn't produce.
- [98:58]
Dr. Feingold
And
- [99:01]
Jay Dyer
you say things about God.
- [99:04]
Dr. Feingold
The others too. The other two are because you're. You're happy with saying.
- [99:08]
Jay Dyer
You can actually, you can verify. You can see the subordination of the Spirit of the Roman Church over the last several hundred years. The Spirit is not given his proper role. And this is why you think that, you know, and this is. I'm not trying to get off on a trail, but the Roman Church thinks that you need the papacy to, you know, settle all issues, because the idea of Pentecost actually guiding the Spirit, guiding the actual churches is suppressed. It leads to the idea of why we need a Pope, because you don't understand the meaning of Pentecost and the reality of the Spirit. The Spirit is just as divine. He's not lack. He's not lacking in the ability.
- [99:42]
Dr. Feingold
You don't need to convince me that the Holy Spirit is divine. All I'm doing is I would want to deny firmly that being toward another person as towards rather than from, is somehow essential to being a divine person. I don't think you.
- [99:57]
Jay Dyer
He doesn't produce.
- [99:59]
Dr. Feingold
I do think that following down the filioque trail is a bit of a rabbit hole at the moment. Right. So
- [100:07]
Jay Dyer
filioque is a result of absolute.
- [100:09]
Dr. Feingold
I understand that. So you're saying that it's a. This clinching argument against divine simplicity, that divine simplicity entails the filioque and the bunk. And that's not going to work for me because I don't think the filioque is Bunk. Unless it seems perfectly legit to hold divine simplicity. So if you want to argue against the argument that I was giving before.
- [100:29]
Jay Dyer
The Father and the Son are a co cause or a co principle together of the Spirit. The Spirit does not have this property of protection producing a person.
- [100:39]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah.
- [100:40]
Jay Dyer
That is subordination. So he's lacking in a property that the other two share.
- [100:45]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, but I mean, you could say the same thing about the right. So I, I don't see why that's any more problem. Because the Father is. That doesn't mean that the Father is like better.
- [101:00]
Jay Dyer
No, you're not, you're not getting the point that for the first thousand years it was normative to say that anything that we say about God is applicable to either the person, persons, all, all of them are to the nature or to the. Or to them individually. So there can't be something that two share that one doesn't, that produces the imbalance. There's only one cause.
- [101:21]
Dr. Feingold
I'm not seeing the connection between those two claims and I'm also not sure
- [101:26]
Jay Dyer
everything which is predicated only one arcade in the Trinity. And it is the Father. And the Son does not share in his arche. In his hypostatic process. Property filoquism makes the Son share in what makes the Father distinct. Namely being the unoriginate cause of the. Of the Godhead.
- [101:44]
Dr. Feingold
Yes. I mean, and you're not going to like this. Right? But the Thomistic answer to that part of the problem is going to be what makes the Father be the Father. Right. Is the generating of the Son in the act of knowledge, which is this dyadic thing. And then what makes the Holy Spirit be the Holy Spirit is the fact that it results from the love of the two. Right.
- [102:08]
Jay Dyer
So again, this is why you use the same argument that the Arians used that the Holy Spirit is a product of the will of the Father and the Son. This is also the exact same argument.
- [102:20]
Dr. Feingold
I'm aware that you don't like the psychological analogy, but again, can we keep
- [102:24]
Jay Dyer
the no, because this is important. Because listen, St. Gregory Palmas uses the psychological analogy, but he applies it to eternal manifestation. And when he critiques the filial way, he says the Romans are confused because they mistake mission for hypostatic origin. And they also mistake eternal manifestation for hypostatic origin. So that's why I began the talk when I mentioned St. John Damascus talking about eternal manifestation of the Spirit. It's not hypostatic origin origin, it's John of Damascus who makes that Point. And that distinction in on the what's hypothetical origin?
- [103:00]
Dr. Feingold
What's not hypothetical origin?
- [103:02]
Jay Dyer
What we were just talking about with the Holy Spirit, the psychological analogy that you used, Right. This is from Augustine and it's in
- [103:11]
Dr. Feingold
saying that it's not the hypostatic origin that's a claim. I deny it. What's your argument?
- [103:17]
Jay Dyer
Because it doesn't work. Because the sun takes on a property of the. The Son takes on the very thing that defines the Father, which is to be the sole archaeology.
- [103:26]
Dr. Feingold
No, what defines the Father is to, according to Aquinas is to be inashibilis. Right. To not be from what defines notions of opposition.
- [103:36]
Jay Dyer
And I said earlier that doesn't work because the other two are not from which you admitted.
- [103:43]
Dr. Feingold
I can go over the text again, But okay, we've got, we can keep on going down the filioque trail if you like.
- [103:56]
Jay Dyer
Let's put it this way, let's put it this way. If you read on the orthodox faith, which of course Aquinas, you know, references many, many times, you will find that everything that I'm saying and claiming is 100 in line with what St. John Damascus is arguing. And my point is just to say
- [104:11]
Dr. Feingold
that may or may not be, that's not really my concern.
- [104:14]
Jay Dyer
But okay, I'm telling you to read it because you'll find my arguments are all from that and other orthodox writers. So I'm not making arguments that are like out of my head. They're actually from maybe somebody that you would find worth reading useful. Right. For the sake of future dialogue, I'm saying if you read that, you'll see all my arguments are there.
- [104:39]
Dr. Feingold
I would happily take the opportunity to read St. John Davison and the Roman Church affirms that.
- [104:44]
Jay Dyer
Right, so.
- [104:46]
Dr. Feingold
Affirms what?
- [104:48]
Jay Dyer
He's a doctor of the Church and Aquinas.
- [104:50]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, he's a doctor of the Church is not to affirm everything that they, that they say is true. Of course, but I'm not saying that
- [104:58]
Jay Dyer
because he said it. I'm saying that the arguments are there. And for future reference, you would. If you want to understand where I'm getting all this from there, sure.
- [105:06]
Dr. Feingold
Oh no, I, I, I appreciate that. But again, so just to recap what got us there. Right, so you're saying that divine simplicity is irreconcilable with the Trinity because the only way that's, that you can reconcile it with the Trinity is by subordinationism. I'm not convinced we can have, we can keep on having that argument. If you think that's the linchpin.
- [105:30]
Jay Dyer
Do you understand what I'm saying, though? Well, the problem is that you don't understand our position in terms of hypothetic origins as the only way to explain who God is. I mean, even the idea of the Father being the hurricane or cause is foreign to you and it's common in the Eastern Fathers.
- [105:46]
Dr. Feingold
I think you just said it was inexplicable. Right? Because I asked you what procession means as distinct from affiliation, and you said that that's in principle and unanswerable, and
- [105:56]
Jay Dyer
that's the answer of all the Eastern Fathers. Even Augustine says that we don't even know exactly what these words mean.
- [106:01]
Dr. Feingold
We have to know exactly what these words mean. But I'm asking you to give me some way in which in an imperfect creature we can distinguish these things.
- [106:10]
Jay Dyer
I mean, we don't know how to define them. We don't know how to define procession. We don't know how to find eternal generation and why these two things are different. But they are. And if you read the next several hundred centuries after Augustine of debate on this very question, what you come to find out is that the way that we distinguish the persons is different from the way Rome tries to do it. Rome tries to do it within a context of also accepting absolute divine simplicity. We don't. And because we don't, we have the. The Father defined by his role as arche or soul origin or cause of the Godhead. That means that, that for him to retain his. His hypostasis, he doesn't share that property of being the cause with anyone else. So that's why the sun can't take on. Listen. That's why the sun can't take on what is his defining hypostatic term.
- [107:03]
Dr. Feingold
I understand that. And the issue is that we're taking two different things as being the defining note of the Father. Right? So I'm looking right now at Depotencia 9 9, which is on whether there are only three persons in God.
- [107:23]
Jay Dyer
Hello. Hello. Well, it looks like we lost
- [107:35]
Dr. Feingold
hello being not born.
- [107:38]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello.
- [107:38]
Dr. Feingold
Hello.
- [107:38]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business?
- [107:54]
Arvind Krishna
My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% or what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say you can leverage what we did. We have. We're happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process. Because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things.
- [108:44]
Malcolm Gladwell
To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com smarttalks.
- [108:55]
Howie Mandel
Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my How We do it gaming team take on Gilly the king and wallow $260 million gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown. Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Travy McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Neo right now@globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com everybody.
- [109:24]
Dr. Feingold
Games. All right. Are you there? I was my computer. I'm looking right now at the Potentia 9 9, which I think is Aquinas's fullest explanation of how he thinks the three persons are distinguished from each other.
- [109:42]
Jay Dyer
Could be wrong about that.
- [109:44]
Dr. Feingold
But so what he takes as the defining attribute of the father is not being cause of the others, which is what you are taking. Right? So I grant you. Right. If you're going to say that another person, then the father and the son would collapse into each other on the filioque view. Right.
- [110:02]
Jay Dyer
The son.
- [110:04]
Dr. Feingold
That's not what defines the father. Rather, what defines the father is being in shibilis, which in other words means to not be born. Right? So to not be from a cause. And that's not true of either father or son. And so it seems as though that problem that you were just worried about just depends on what you choose as the.
- [110:27]
Jay Dyer
No, I recognize that Aquinas has a place for giving the father that role. That's not what the contention is. The contention is that when we see that as the father's only main defining property, that the son
- [110:44]
Dr. Feingold
or being the cause of another,
- [110:48]
Jay Dyer
that he is unoriginate and the soul God hate, Godhead. This is again the classical terminology of who the father is and Basil and Gregory Nazianzus and Gregory Nyssa and in the councils, that that can't be something that the. The. That the son shares in. Okay? And the son shares in that if he becomes also the cause of The Spirit. There's no
- [111:13]
Dr. Feingold
question what you take defining attribute of the Father.
- [111:16]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [111:16]
Dr. Feingold
So if you take the defining attribute of the Father as being the cause of a person, more cause, I mean, like the originating toward and.
- [111:28]
Jay Dyer
Yeah.
- [111:29]
Dr. Feingold
Then there would be two Fathers, and that's what you're trying to avoid. But if you simply take the Father to be that which is. Which does not proceed, which is not from another, then there's only one. And I'm not sure what the problem is.
- [111:43]
Jay Dyer
That's just another way of saying that he is the sole cause of the Godhead. He's not from another. Okay. The other two are from another. Right. So this is relations of opposition. And again, I'm trying to tell you that that doesn't work as a negative definition of who these people are, who the. Excuse me, hypostases are.
- [112:03]
Dr. Feingold
These persons. Yes. Yeah. I'm not sure what. What I lose by saying that he is that which is. By taking the Father as that which is who gives and does not receive, taking the Son and see who gives and receives and taking the Holy Spirit as He who receives.
- [112:25]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [112:26]
Dr. Feingold
Like that seems to distinguish all three quite nicely. You can say, if you like, that receiving is common to Son and Spirit. You can say, if you like, that giving is common to follow Father and Son. But these are different kinds of giving and they're different kinds of receiving, just like you said.
- [112:40]
Jay Dyer
Right. So Aquinas talks about. Sometimes the Roman Catholic Church will talk about the Father as the principal source of the Godhead and then the Son as a secondary source. When we talk about the spiration and what we say is that that's impossible because, number one, the Son can't participate in the Father's hypostasis, and number two, it gives two persons a positive property that the Spirit doesn't have.
- [113:08]
Dr. Feingold
So I get what you're saying, but I'm just going to repeat what I was saying, which is. I don't think I'm. Let me say it a different way. I don't think I'm giving any of the persons a real positive property, something which exists.
- [113:26]
Jay Dyer
The Father and the Son produce the Spirit.
- [113:28]
Dr. Feingold
Yes. Right.
- [113:32]
Jay Dyer
That's a real positive property that the Spirit doesn't have.
- [113:37]
Dr. Feingold
So maybe this is getting into the problems of divine predication or just problems of predication in general. So what Aquinas is going to claim is that not all of your. Just the fact that you can use the same word for something doesn't mean that there is in both cases the same reality corresponding isomorphically to your word. So Aquinas isn't going to say that there's two relations in the Father, one to the Son and one to the Spirit, because that would mean that the Father was two subsistent relations. What you've got in the case of the Father is one relation which is not from and toward, period. And what you've got in the Son is a relation of from and toward.
- [114:26]
Jay Dyer
Right?
- [114:26]
Dr. Feingold
Received, giving. And what you've got in the Holy Spirit is a relation of reception. There's no real thing which is shared, although I can speak of the Son and Spirit as receiving.
- [114:42]
Jay Dyer
The Father and Spirit of the Father and the Son really produce a spirit.
- [114:45]
Dr. Feingold
Do you say that the Son and the Holy Spirit really receive the Father?
- [114:50]
Jay Dyer
We don't use any of this gobbledygook because we don't believe Thomism. But I mean, we have. We have a way of distinguishing.
- [114:56]
Dr. Feingold
I'm just saying that receiving is as much of a positive predicate as giving. And whether or not you have that
- [115:04]
Jay Dyer
because you affirm hypostatic origin, supposedly Roman Catholics do. Supposedly does. And for the Spirit it is said to be from the Father and the Son as a single principle. There's no single principle in God that two persons share that the other one doesn't. It's a very simple argument.
- [115:22]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, no, and I agree with that. Right. I'm saying that there is no metaphysical reality which Father has and which Father and Son both are.
- [115:33]
Jay Dyer
Yes, there is. Your council say together they constitute a single principle of the spiration of the Spirit in terms of his hypothetical origin. So that directly repeats the claim.
- [115:44]
Dr. Feingold
No, because we don't say that the. There is a. No act of causing. Right? There's relations of toward and there's relations of. From the standard Thomasic model on this, right? Is that you have.
- [115:55]
Jay Dyer
Well, you can throw out the word cause and you can just say he's the principal source. The Father and the Son in the Roman Catholic dogmas are said to together a single source of the hypostasis of the Spirit.
- [116:11]
Dr. Feingold
I'm okay with that.
- [116:13]
Jay Dyer
That is directly what you said. A.
- [116:17]
Dr. Feingold
What's it, right? A property like whiteness or greenness or a relation or whatever, which is real in both Father and Son. Right? Again, just as you would not want to say that simply the fact that. That both Son and Spirit are from or are gen. Or proceed, let's say from the Father. You're willing to say that, right? That both Father and Son proceed from the Father?
- [116:44]
Jay Dyer
No, absolutely not. Because proceed is in the Greek, the akpurusis is a specific term that defines who the Spirit is. And generation is specific to who the Son is.
- [116:57]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, Is there a word we don't.
- [117:00]
Jay Dyer
We don't use these common attributes of. Well, both are from another. Right. We don't do relations of opposition.
- [117:08]
Dr. Feingold
Look, that's fine by me if you want to say that this. So you're talking about cause. Right? So you're using this word cause. Yes. Father causes, quote unquote.
- [117:21]
Jay Dyer
The Fathers and the Councils use this term of the Father.
- [117:25]
Dr. Feingold
That's fine. But you're going with that. Right?
- [117:27]
Jay Dyer
Okay.
- [117:28]
Dr. Feingold
Is there a correlative, by the way?
- [117:29]
Jay Dyer
They don't. They don't use the Aristotelian Thomistic view of this.
- [117:34]
Dr. Feingold
That's fine. Are you going to grant there is a correlative to cause which is being caused.
- [117:43]
Jay Dyer
Yeah. Okay.
- [117:46]
Dr. Feingold
Correlative is.
- [117:47]
Jay Dyer
It is true to say it is. Listen, it is true to say that the Son and the Spirit are from another. That's true. That's fine. All we're saying is that is not what defines the persons and. And lets us know the distinctions of the hypothesis. Right.
- [118:04]
Dr. Feingold
But simply being to another is not what defines the persons in domestic theology either. And not from.
- [118:16]
Jay Dyer
But you again understand that it's not
- [118:19]
Dr. Feingold
supposed to be too.
- [118:20]
Jay Dyer
But. But the whole dogma interjects a new principle into the Trinity of the Father and the Son together constituting a single hypostatic source of the Spirit. So you have a new. A new principle of a dyad introduced into the Trinity. And there is no dyad. It's always whatever's true is true of the Persons or of God as a whole. That's straight up classic orthodox Trinitarianism. And I'm saying orthodox in the general sense.
- [118:49]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, Look, I don't wanna. I'm trying to think of a way to say this without just repeating myself again.
- [118:58]
Jay Dyer
You're admitting hypostatic properties and causes or origins. We can throw out cause.
- [119:04]
Dr. Feingold
That's standard Thomistic Trinitarian theology.
- [119:09]
Jay Dyer
And the origin of the Spirit is from a Father and Son as one principle. Correct.
- [119:20]
Dr. Feingold
My knowledge of Aquinas's Trinitarian theology is not sufficient to allow me to say yes to the as from.
- [119:27]
Jay Dyer
Well, Prince, it's in Roman Dog. He does say that, if I recall. But I don't have the sumo on hand, so. But anyway, I don't think we're gonna have to. Maybe.
- [119:38]
Dr. Feingold
I would be really hesitant to say that. I would be surprised.
- [119:42]
Jay Dyer
That's the dogmatic teaching.
- [119:45]
Dr. Feingold
But I would be Surprised if he thinks of father and son as together doing one. What's it again? There is no action which is coming out of either one of them.
- [120:02]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [120:03]
Dr. Feingold
In this theology there's just relations of to and from. So again, there's no like source of. Right. So you're talking about a dyad being
- [120:13]
Jay Dyer
like a. Yeah, well, again the reason
- [120:15]
Dr. Feingold
that arrows producing a third thing. And I just think that's the wrong way to think about this.
- [120:21]
Jay Dyer
No, it's not the wrong way. It's the right way because that's how the Eastern fathers all categorize it and that's how it's used not just in the councils, but also when it comes to Christology.
- [120:30]
Dr. Feingold
No, I'm saying that that's the wrong way to understand what Aquinas is saying.
- [120:37]
Jay Dyer
Anyway. Yeah, so do we want to maybe move to.
- [120:42]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so what's that?
- [120:44]
Jay Dyer
Do we want to move on? I mean, we're just going to keep going, I think in, in circles about this because.
- [120:48]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, no, I, I, So maybe reading St. John Damascene is going to convince me is that the first filioque is so bad that it's this tremendous roadblock to, to any divine simplicity theory. But at the moment it seems to me that being able to like, I, I, I'm not feeling the problem of saying that both father and son can be said to spirit because again, this does not name a real relation according to Aquinas. And so like maybe I should, I would only be moved by it at the moment if to spirate were said to be a real relation defining a person for Aquinas, that would be inconsistent. Aquinas does not hold that but okay, so let me just, let's backpedal from this. Can I, can I ask you another question about the energies.
- [121:42]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello. Hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Ambetta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research.
- [121:56]
Jake Gambetta
What we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future?
- [122:13]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff.
- [122:17]
Jake Gambetta
Yes.
- [122:18]
Malcolm Gladwell
Building actual physical machines.
- [122:22]
Jake Gambetta
Yeah. It's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [122:34]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology, there will come a point when it will mature, right?
- [122:41]
Jay Dyer
Yeah.
- [122:41]
Malcolm Gladwell
My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point?
- [122:46]
Jake Gambetta
With Quantum, by 2029, we'll build the first fault tolerant Quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem.
- [122:56]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum.
- [123:06]
Bleacher Report Announcer
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- [123:36]
Jay Dyer
Okay?
- [123:37]
Dr. Feingold
So the central, the central problem, like I was saying earlier, that Atomus is going to have with talking about energies is if energies are in some way going to be positing something in the subject, right? So regular accidents like wisdom and justice, right? So when I say that I have these, right, they are from me, right? They exist in me, but also posit something in me. They make me be a certain way, right? So if we were to take energies in that sense, the Thomas is going to be very worried because it's going to seem as though you're filling a slot or an opening or something in God that the divine nature of itself doesn't have. Now, I presume that's not what you're saying, right? Do you want to characterize how your understanding of energies avoids that? How is predicating wisdom as an energy of God different from predicating wisdom as an accident of me?
- [124:41]
Jay Dyer
Because we don't identify. This is the point I was making earlier about analogical predication. We don't identify the predicates with the divine essence, which then makes them meaningless. We say that the predicates are analogical to the energies which are not. The divine essence
- [124:58]
Dr. Feingold
didn't answer my question. I don't.
- [124:59]
Jay Dyer
It does answer your question, because what you're talking about with you is actually an argument that Nyssa uses when he says that how do we understand the difference between act or energy and will and nature and person? He says, well, let's look at a human person, right? There's. There's an action that's distinct from the person. The person builds a house. That's an effect of the work that he did. We might learn something about that person, but we don't perceive his nature or directly know his hypostasis. By looking at the house that he built, we might learn a few things about him. When we. When we interact with that person directly, we interact with his hypostasis, which is makes what makes him distinct. And we understand that perhaps we share a common nature between me. And so you have. You, Mr. Dr. Feingold, have a human nature that I share. But I'm the hypostasis, Jay. You're the hypostasis, Dr. Feingold. So the Eastern fathers make these analogies, right, to who God is. And they say that in the same way that a man creates a building and we might learn about him and his wisdom and his works that are proper to human nature through creating a house. In the same way, there's an analogy to God creating the world. His energy and act of creating the world is distinct from who he is in his essence. Because if we said that the act of creating the world was the same as the divine essence, we would be led to all kinds of absurdities, such as that the creation of the world is exactly the same as the conflagration, because both are divine actions. So what we say is that the energies of God are the things around Him. This is the way that Saint Dionysius, the Areopagites, Saint Basil, Saint Gregory, Saint Nyssa, Nazi Angus, they all say that it's the way to understand this is to look at when Moses goes up on the mountain. And we're told in Exodus that Moses saw God face to face. But no man can see God face to face and live. So how is this possible? Was possible because the theophanies, the manifestations of God, the energies of God within history that operate, can at times even be made visible if God so chooses to, right?
- [126:57]
Dr. Feingold
So I mean, all of that that you're describing is completely compatible with what Aquinas says about divine simplicity, right?
- [127:02]
Jay Dyer
No, it's not at all.
- [127:03]
Dr. Feingold
Sure it is. Because Aquinas absolutely maintains the theophanies are
- [127:07]
Jay Dyer
not real in your doctrine.
- [127:09]
Dr. Feingold
I don't know what you mean by that.
- [127:13]
Jay Dyer
You don't believe that God's goodness was manifest, distinct from the essence of God. Moses didn't see the essence of God.
- [127:20]
Dr. Feingold
Manifestations of God's goodness are distinct from the essence of God, right? So look, only because you believe they're
- [127:26]
Jay Dyer
created effects, though you don't believe that it's actually the goodness of God. You believe that It's a created hologram or effect of God. This is why Roman Catholicism tends to not believe that the angel of the Lord it was the pre incarnate Logos, because that's, that's impossible in absolute divine simplicity.
- [127:41]
Dr. Feingold
Seems to me that you're trying to hold two incompatible things. So let me try to parse this out.
- [127:46]
Jay Dyer
I'm telling you that our view is revealed. Right? The theophanies are the Logos pre incarnate.
- [127:52]
Dr. Feingold
Hold on.
- [127:52]
Jay Dyer
One person become. Can become manifest within time and space.
- [127:57]
Dr. Feingold
Yes, I. I know that the person become manifest in time and space.
- [128:00]
Jay Dyer
But you don't believe that.
- [128:02]
Dr. Feingold
Sure I do.
- [128:03]
Jay Dyer
No, you don't. You don't believe that the angel of the Lord was a Logos. The. The Roman Catholic doctrine is that those are created holograms and not Christ himself. That's why you believe that the light of Mount Tabor is created light.
- [128:21]
Dr. Feingold
Well, let's rewind a little bit. Okay, so. And we can talk about how to make sense
- [128:28]
Jay Dyer
that the theophanies were real or that the light of Matthew 17, the transfiguration, was uncreated light. Every Roman Catholic I've ever met. But you've said, I've ever read is
- [128:37]
Dr. Feingold
Allus agrees with 100% is what you said at the beginning, which is that these things which you are calling energies are not attributes of God in the sense of things that modify him or exist in him, distinct from his essence, but rather they're things that show up in his works.
- [129:02]
Jay Dyer
St. Basil and St. Gregor. Nyssa, use the analogy of the sun and its heat and its rays.
- [129:08]
Dr. Feingold
Agree.
- [129:10]
Jay Dyer
Right. So the sun, the heat and its rays can be genuinely distinguished, but they're not exactly the same. We don't believe that the foreknowledge of God is exactly the same as the wisdom of God or the love of God or the justice of God. Like equating the foreknowledge of God with the justice of God makes no sense.
- [129:27]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so this is. I want to get into that argument in a minute. Okay. And quick question. So I know how to pace myself or what's left? How much time do we have left on this?
- [129:40]
Jay Dyer
I probably need to go pretty soon. We can set up like a part two, though, if you like. But we've been going for. How long have we been going?
- [129:49]
Dr. Feingold
It's been hour, hour and 50 minutes, I think.
- [129:52]
Jay Dyer
Okay, so let's say two hours, and then maybe we can pick up at a part two, if you want to do it.
- [129:58]
Dr. Feingold
Sure. Sounds good. Yeah. So the thing which I was trying to get at with the. The energy thing. Right. So what Aquinas wants to deny, and which I would want to deny with him, is that let's. He picked justice and for. And all. So let's go with that. All right. I would want. He would want to deny that these things taken and manifested in the world. Right. So let's say the justice of the damnation of sinners. Or is the justice or the foreknowledge manifested in prophecy or whatever. He would want to deny that these manifestations are attributes existing in God in the way in which I described quantities and qualities as existing in their subjects. Right. Does that make sense? In other words, they don't posit what you just described. And what Aquinas is holding with divine simplicity is the same in this respect. Neither of you, it seems to me, want to say that there is something in God distinct from the essence, which is nonetheless makes God be a certain way. Can we agree about that?
- [131:10]
Jay Dyer
As far as I understand your meaning,
- [131:12]
Dr. Feingold
I'm not sure there's no. So in. In my soul. There's a little doohickey, if you like the virtue of justice, which I wasn't born with. Right. It doesn't come with my soul. Please God. I've acquired a little bit of it over the course of the last 30 years and it makes me be in a certain way and it's distinct from me. That's not what you mean by energies. Right. What you mean by energy in my case would be something like I do something just right. And that shows you correct most of the time. For example, what you actually see is my just action. Am I getting that right?
- [131:49]
Jay Dyer
Correct. For example, in the New Testament when energeia is used, it's for example, when Paul talks about the operations of the spirit. Right. So the energies of the. The spirit is when he's talking about like the gifts of the Spirit. So when the Spirit grants prophecy, when he grants mercy to different gifts to the saints, the charismatic gifts. I don't mean charismaticism. You know what I mean? The word that's used there is inner gay, which just signifies divine operations or actions.
- [132:15]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah.
- [132:16]
Jay Dyer
And sometimes, yes, we would say that if you're talking about the attributes, the love of God, we believe that is an energy. And we even believe that the knowledge that we have that God's essence is one is also an energetic truth that we learn through von. Revelation.
- [132:32]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah. So if I'm trying to make sense of what you're saying and transporting it into my categories, I think I can assent to a lot of it, but it's going to sound like this. So tell me if you've got problems with this translation. So it seems as though you want to say that the energy can reflect, refer. When I speak of the energy of God's justice or of his unity or whatever, what you mean is not that there is an attribute distinct from the divine essence which inheres in the divine essence, but rather one of two things. And maybe you think these are the same thing. They don't sound the same to me. Thing one would be there is a work done in creation which manifests that which I am calling God's justice. Right. So that would be like the punishment of this sinner and the other one would be the content which I am predicating of God. Right. So when I say right, so you've got thing one, that's this thing which happened right here. The sinner got punished and there's thing two which is as a result of seeing this. I predicate this concept that I have of justice of God. And I don't want to say that this concept that I have of justice is like a concept of God.
- [133:51]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello. Hello, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Mbeta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM Research.
- [134:05]
Jake Gambetta
What we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA. To answer the question of what is the future?
- [134:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff, building actual physical machines.
- [134:31]
Jake Gambetta
Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted to the experience the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [134:43]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right?
- [134:50]
Jay Dyer
Yeah.
- [134:50]
Malcolm Gladwell
My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point
- [134:55]
Jake Gambetta
with Quantum, by 2029 we'll build the first fault tolerant Quantum computer computer that is one that can run a very, very large, large problem.
- [135:05]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing visit IBM.com quantum
- [135:15]
Dr. Feingold
has
- [135:15]
Megan McCardell
the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post opinion called Reasonably Optimistic and it's an antidote to the pessimist that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.
- [135:31]
Dr. Feingold
It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they are.
- [135:38]
Malcolm Gladwell
You know, I am a believer in America and it's worth fighting for.
- [135:41]
Megan McCardell
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [135:45]
Dr. Feingold
But I do want to say that I can predicate it of him. And so because you want to, on the one hand, deny that what I've got in my mind of justice equals God, but on the other hand you want to affirm that it gets to God somehow, you call this an energy, and this is an energy in a different sense from the actual work of damning the sinner. Does that all sound fair so far?
- [136:08]
Jay Dyer
Well, I laid out three distinctions at the beginning where I was talking about the energies of God as relating to eternal manifestation, the energies of God relating to creating creation, and then some energies that.
- [136:21]
Dr. Feingold
Let's just stick with things like justice and for knowledge for the moment.
- [136:25]
Jay Dyer
Well, there's a sense in which, I mean, you could say God is equal.
- [136:29]
Dr. Feingold
That's where I wanted this double distinction to show up. Okay, well, you get like trinitarian stuff and leaving aside hypostatic union stuff and all that.
- [136:41]
Jay Dyer
Well, but. But I want to stress that for us, all these things are related because you're not going to have the essence energy distinction without the proper doctrine of the Father as the arche and the right ordo theologia. So it's not like these things operate in discrete from the other other doctrines. They all hang or fall together.
- [137:00]
Dr. Feingold
I'll bear that in mind. And so tell me if I'm. If my lumping things or if my. If I'm saying something which would be corrected by bringing in some of the other sides. So what Aquinas would want to say. Right. So in this case of understanding, seeing God's justice and predicating it of him, you'll deny that there is a what's it which is up there in God, which is distinct from God's essence to which I am referring when I say that God is just. What he would affirm is that there are three things involved. There is the action, which is just. There is my concept of justice, and there's the divine essence, which bears some sort of resemblance to my concept.
- [137:52]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, but it doesn't. And that's the whole point, because the things in your head are particular and they're discrete and they're related to things in time and space. And history and the absolute, the absolutely simple essence which is supposedly identical to divine justice, God's justice. There's no way to know that that's what you're experiencing or bridging that gap, because all you know is. All you know is created effects. Right.
- [138:14]
Dr. Feingold
So, but I mean. So, but that's true of this isn't just true of God. Right. So we know all things through their operations. Right. I don't have any direct access to you. Right. I don't have access to you only through operation of talking.
- [138:26]
Jay Dyer
Right. That's how you and I know each other. But it's not just created effects in terms of knowing God. And in terms of knowing God, it's beyond created effects. That was what was true generally for the Old Testament period. Signs and symbols. Now we. Now we see Christ face to face, as Paul says in Second Corinthians 3.
- [138:46]
Dr. Feingold
That's right.
- [138:48]
Jay Dyer
No, you believe in the beatific vision. You don't believe we see Christ face to face.
- [138:54]
Dr. Feingold
I believe that what it means to say that I see Christ face to face now is different from what it means to see. See Christ face to face in the beatific vision, if that's what you mean. Right.
- [139:01]
Jay Dyer
Because now it's only created effects. Yeah.
- [139:06]
Dr. Feingold
So we're mixing issues again, I think.
- [139:09]
Jay Dyer
How do you know you're seeing. How do you know that it's the justice divine life?
- [139:13]
Dr. Feingold
And I know that this is big for Palomas in his. In the original.
- [139:16]
Jay Dyer
How do you know that it's the justice of God and not the foreknowledge or love of God that you're experiencing?
- [139:24]
Dr. Feingold
So Aquinas would say, depending on what you mean by that, that's.
- [139:28]
Jay Dyer
Well, I think it matters whether I'm under God's justice.
- [139:33]
Dr. Feingold
Hold on. If you're talking about. Right, so I can say this action. Right. So let's say that I. This action here seems to exemplify God's mercury, whatever. Right. So the sinner gets failed like 20 times and gets this new huge influx of grace and conversion. Okay. What is it that allows me to say that the name mercy is most applicable to this situation? It would be because what I see of this situation most maps with my creaturely concept of mercy.
- [140:06]
Jay Dyer
But to say that your creaturely concepts are analogous. Right. To something that is completely unlike the things that you think you have. Like, in other words, the divine justice is not like human justice. Right.
- [140:17]
Dr. Feingold
Of course, I'm willing to object to completely unlike. Of course.
- [140:21]
Jay Dyer
But so, so it's analogous. It's an analogy. But the thing that you're making an analogy to is absolutely simple.
- [140:29]
Dr. Feingold
That's right.
- [140:31]
Jay Dyer
And all, and all the predicates are actually identified. So how do you know that you're actually experiencing one or the other? Because they're not really distinct.
- [140:40]
Dr. Feingold
Right. So it depends on what you mean by what you're experiencing. Right. If you're saying that I'm experiencing God. Right. So if you're asking which part of God I'm experiencing, I'm saying that Tom is experiencing any part of God because God doesn't have parts. But if you're asking why am I applying this name to this manifestation, it's because this manifestation captures more of this concept that I have than of that concept. Yeah, I don't see a problem.
- [141:06]
Jay Dyer
No bridge between the concept and the thing. There's no bridge between the concept and the absolutely simple essence. You never know that actual thing. You only know created effects. And you don't know if your created effects match up to this thing. How can they. So this is why Palomas calls it atheism.
- [141:28]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm not going to say repeat what you said right before that last thing.
- [141:39]
Jay Dyer
All that you experience in your life are the created effects of this, this super monad essence. You never experience a direct example of God himself or God's justice within time and space. You only experience created effects of God. And so when you talk about the love of God or the foreknowledge of God or the mercy of God, you're not actually talking about something that you know that you've experienced. You're only talking about creaturely analog that, that you hope matches up to this absolutely simple essence wherein all of the attributes are the exact same. So it's meaningless.
- [142:17]
Dr. Feingold
The problem is that we're, I think that we're using talk about in two different senses. Right? So there's the via doesn't work if
- [142:26]
Jay Dyer
absolute divine simplicity is true. That's the crux of the argument because all of the things that you're talking about are not like an absolute simple essence. One creaturely effect is just. You're just interpreting a creaturely effect compared to some other creaturely effect.
- [142:45]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah. So trying to figure out where to start here again. All right, so look, I just disagree with your claim and then I'll see if I can give a principled reason for disagreeing with it.
- [142:58]
Malcolm Gladwell
Hello. Hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Ambetta. We discussed his vision for the Future
- [143:09]
Jake Gambetta
of quantum computing at IBM Research what we always do is answer what is the future of computing? Whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together? It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future.
- [143:29]
Malcolm Gladwell
Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff.
- [143:34]
Jay Dyer
Yes.
- [143:34]
Malcolm Gladwell
Building actual physical machines.
- [143:38]
Jake Gambetta
Yeah. It's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before.
- [143:50]
Malcolm Gladwell
Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right?
- [143:57]
Jay Dyer
Yeah.
- [143:57]
Malcolm Gladwell
My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point
- [144:02]
Jake Gambetta
with quantum by 2029 we'll build the first fault tolerant quantum computer that is one that can run a very very large, large problem.
- [144:12]
Malcolm Gladwell
To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit IBM.com quantum
- [144:22]
Howie Mandel
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- [144:52]
Dr. Feingold
I just disagree with the claim that if X is limited and Y is infinite and per se rather than participate participated that it follows that X is that there is no similarity whatsoever between X.
- [145:07]
Jay Dyer
All you all you know is created effects and you never know that thing itself. So you have no referent for it.
- [145:14]
Dr. Feingold
Yeah. So look, when I say let's try to give concrete examples, right.
- [145:19]
Jay Dyer
That is the analogy Entus. Right.
- [145:21]
Dr. Feingold
Well, I'm not quite sure how you're using these words. So let's just try to give concrete examples and let's see where we part
- [145:27]
Jay Dyer
way the analogia Entus and Aquinas the analogy of being, right is that there's. We can look at the world, we can see being. We can predicate that God is the super being. But of course he doesn't have being in the exact same way as everything else has being. Because the being in this world is composite. It's caused the being that God has is the super being that's uncaused and not composite. Right. So there's there's an assumption of analogy, right? And we're not using univocal predication, we're using analogy, right?
- [145:59]
Dr. Feingold
I mean, the idea is that it's supposed to be the same thing signified, but different mode of signification. That's your classic line, right? So let me just try to give an example. So when I say that you are loving or whatever, right? So I don't have access to the habit of love which is in your soul, but I do have access to the actions by which you work for the good of others, right? And so on the basis of your doing these actions, I predicate love of you, where love means that in you, by virtue of which you will the good for others. And you see, you seek their good, right? So and in us, this, that by which you will and you seek work for the good of others is this extra little habit which is added onto your soul, which is different from the habit of wisdom as evidenced by the fact that you can have one without the other.
- [147:01]
Jay Dyer
We just don't use these categories.
- [147:04]
Dr. Feingold
I'm just trying to explain what Aquinas mean by this. Okay? And so when I talk about God's having love, it would be the same, same sort of deal in this respect, right? I don't have access to God's love. I don't see inside his essence. What I have access to, just like you said, is are these manifestations. I see God becoming man and dying on the cross for us.
- [147:25]
Jay Dyer
Created effects.
- [147:27]
Dr. Feingold
Hang on, I'm not quite done yet. And because of this, right? So I say, when I say that God is. Has love or is love, what I mean is that there is in God that by which he does this act which is seeking the good of seeking the good of others. It's just that in this case, the. That by which he does this operation is not an extra little. What's it. Which is added on to Him. It's just Him. And I can't fathom that. But that's what I mean. That's why I predicate the same word of me and of you and of God.
- [148:06]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, analogical categories, that's fine.
- [148:08]
Dr. Feingold
But I'm just trying to make sense of what, what we're saying, like why we think that it makes sense to apply the term loving, let's say, to God.
- [148:18]
Jay Dyer
But you're only looking at created analogs. And none of those things are the thing itself. So you don't actually know that God has love.
- [148:27]
Dr. Feingold
Oh, do I know that you have love?
- [148:30]
Jay Dyer
Yeah, but, but knowing that I have love doesn't mean that you know God has. Because how do I know another created effect.
- [148:37]
Dr. Feingold
How do I know that you have love?
- [148:40]
Jay Dyer
Because you have a personal, personal interaction with me. And you're in your doctrine. It's not.
- [148:46]
Dr. Feingold
What do I have to have a personal interaction with you to know that you have love?
- [148:52]
Jay Dyer
Well, you might hear secondhand from somebody, but the point is that. That we're not. We're talking about God himself, right?
- [149:00]
Dr. Feingold
Well, no, but I'm saying that both of these things. Right. So it can be.
- [149:03]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [149:03]
Dr. Feingold
So in case of you and me, right. It can be the case that I see you doing something good to another or I can see you doing something good to me. Like taking these two hours out of your day to talk to me.
- [149:12]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [149:14]
Dr. Feingold
And both of these give me.
- [149:16]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [149:16]
Dr. Feingold
Allow me to predicate a view. Something which I don't directly see.
- [149:20]
Jay Dyer
But how do you know that that is God showing love to you as
- [149:25]
Dr. Feingold
opposed to somebody else?
- [149:28]
Jay Dyer
No, if God is an absolutely simple essence, you don't know what you don't know that you're actually experiencing any of these things. You can only do analogical predication because the effect.
- [149:37]
Dr. Feingold
Right. The thing which I am seeing, right. Which you don't know.
- [149:40]
Jay Dyer
You don't know that that created effect is an action of love because you don't know God himself.
- [149:46]
Dr. Feingold
But I think you're just getting the sequence of questions backwards. Right? So what I mean by love just is, right, that by which you do this kind of operation.
- [149:56]
Jay Dyer
You don't know that God is doing that.
- [149:58]
Dr. Feingold
I don't. Wait. I mean, I don't know that this operation that I see in front of me is an act of love. Is that what you're saying?
- [150:05]
Jay Dyer
You don't know that God is doing that act of love because God is outside of time and space and absolutely simple according to this doctrine.
- [150:14]
Dr. Feingold
Say what you're saying. It could be. For all I know, it could be somebody else.
- [150:18]
Jay Dyer
Maybe. Maybe God is exacting justice on you. You don't know because. It seems attributes are the exact same as the essence and all the attributes are synonymous with one another. You never know God or what you're actually experiencing within history is from God.
- [150:40]
Dr. Feingold
I, I don't see how that follows at all. Right. So it seems as though it's perfectly possible for one and the same form that I just on the level of creatures. Forget God for the moment. Just on the level of creatures. Perfectly possible for one and the same.
- [150:52]
Jay Dyer
The reasoning.
- [150:54]
Dr. Feingold
Hold on. It's perfectly possible for one in the same form to Be responsible for different operations unless for different manifestations. Right.
- [151:01]
Jay Dyer
To give that work for God. You can't.
- [151:03]
Dr. Feingold
What?
- [151:03]
Jay Dyer
You can't reason that up to God like Thomas want to do. I'm telling you. What I'm trying to argue is that the analogia doesn't work in your view because God is absolutely simple. If you believe in the essence energy distinction, it would work. No, no, no.
- [151:17]
Dr. Feingold
But you're gonna have to repeat. But let me restate why I'm having.
- [151:21]
Jay Dyer
Attributes are the same, and they're the divine essence. Therefore, within time and space, you don't actually experience God's love or God's mercy. You don't know what you're experiencing, if you're experiencing God at all, because all you experience created effects. There's no analog between what's in your mind and the absolutely simple essence where all the attributes are melded into one giant monad.
- [151:44]
Dr. Feingold
Bear with me for a sec and tell me which part of this picture you're being bothered by. Okay, so I see this. Let's say I'm Adam, okay? And let's say I know whether. Let's say by revelation, whatever, that God just made this place and that he gave me all this stuff up to and including this help mate who's pretty awesome for my good. That's definitionally an act of love. Right.
- [152:12]
Jay Dyer
I'm asking you how you know that God did that out of love.
- [152:15]
Dr. Feingold
Let's say God sets up.
- [152:17]
Jay Dyer
Well, now you're relying on. Which is what we would agree. Yeah, you should rely on revelation. You can't rely on all these created effects.
- [152:25]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, let me see if I can reset it. So to say that something is an act of love, right. Means that it is done conscious.
- [152:35]
Jay Dyer
Right.
- [152:35]
Dr. Feingold
It's not done randomly. It's done deliberately for the good of another. Yeah.
- [152:44]
Jay Dyer
Okay.
- [152:44]
Dr. Feingold
And so what you're asking is how is it that I can tell that this act that is the creation of the world around me is an act which was deliberate and which was done for my good?
- [152:59]
Jay Dyer
I mean, I don't know how many times I can restate the argument. It's because it's a very simple argument. I'm not trying to be mean.
- [153:05]
Dr. Feingold
Are you denying that? I just want a yes or no.
- [153:06]
Jay Dyer
No. I believe that God created the world in love, absolutely. But that's because there's a direct bridge between God and the world.
- [153:15]
Dr. Feingold
That's not what I was asking though. So I'm just saying this thing out here, maybe this is the trouble. So you're saying that you can only know whether something counts as an act of love if I have some sort of direct, independent access to the source from which it sprang. And I'm saying that it works exactly the opposite way and that I assume that I infer, if you like, that there is a source from which it sprang if I see the operation. So I don't have any direct access to your love, and I never will. All that I have access to is your operations of love. And I know that whenever there is an operation, there is corresponding to it something by virtue of which this operation happens. And that's something I call the habit of love. And it's exactly the same in God. It's just that in the case of God, that habit isn't a habit.
- [154:07]
Jay Dyer
You're just stating the position. You're not addressing the point, which is that the God that you're talking about is absolutely simple and all the attributes are identified.
- [154:18]
Dr. Feingold
Right. But what I'm trying to say is to call this act an act of love. I don't need to already know what it's sprang from. The direction of inference goes the other way. It seems as though you're saying in order to know that this is an act of love, I have to first have access to that from which it came.
- [154:36]
Jay Dyer
I know you're reasoning up from creatures and you're saying creaturely love suggests that there's some ultimately divine love. And I'm saying that that doesn't work, because for one, what you say God is in terms of absolute divine simplicity bears no resemblance to the creaturely love that you're trying to make it analogous to.
- [154:54]
Dr. Feingold
And that's just what I fail to see, because it seems like the reason
- [154:59]
Jay Dyer
all the attributes for me, God will,
- [155:02]
Dr. Feingold
is good for me. Hello. Hello.
- [155:04]
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I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast smart talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business?
- [155:20]
Arvind Krishna
My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind it. If anybody is not using AI to make their development developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things.
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Malcolm Gladwell
To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com smarttalks.
- [156:21]
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Dr. Feingold
It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they are.
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Malcolm Gladwell
You know, I am a believer in America and it's worth fighting for.
- [156:47]
Megan McCardell
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- [156:51]
Jay Dyer
Because all of the attributes are identified with the divine essence and the distinctions are only creaturely. So if the distinctions are only creaturely, you never know if the creaturely idea in your head actually matches up to the absolutely simple essence that it's supposed to mirror.
- [157:08]
Dr. Feingold
Let me see if there's another way I can do this. It seems to me that what you're presupposing here is that in order for a predication of a term to be truly predicated of a subject, the term has to be isomorphic in content with some discrete reality in the subject. So in other words, in order for me to say that you are just, there has to be something in you which has just something real, something distinct from all the other rest of the parts of you which has just what I mean by the word justice and nothing else. Are you committed to that? I don't.
- [157:59]
Jay Dyer
I'm kind of getting a little flustered here. Not because I just. I think we're going around and around in circles because you're just restating what analogical predication is. And I'm asking you to explain how you can really predicate of God if all of the attributes of God and the names of God are absolutely identical to the divine essence. And you're just.
- [158:21]
Dr. Feingold
And I'm doing my best to explain that, but I'm just trying to make sure that.
- [158:24]
Jay Dyer
But you're just restating what analogical predication is. And I know what it is.
- [158:28]
Dr. Feingold
So I'm just asking you to like, agree with me or disagree as I go. So I know where I need to. Need to set up. My, my battle lines are, are you committed to saying that the in order for a true predication to happen, the formal content of my. The term I'm predicating has to be exactly coextensive with a real thing.
- [158:53]
Jay Dyer
We don't believe in univocal predication.
- [158:56]
Dr. Feingold
Okay, so if that's the case, why can't it be that two of my terms should have a formal content which is less than their referent, to which I'm applying them?
- [159:13]
Jay Dyer
Because the referent, namely God in this case is completely different because he's absolutely simple and all of the predicates are identical.
- [159:24]
Dr. Feingold
Here we are going in circles. Okay, let me see if I can try this another way.
- [159:29]
Jay Dyer
And by the way, it doesn't work either to say let's start with creaturely love and then reason up because we all know what love is. No, we don't. In fact, I would. Again, that's a classical foundationalist assumption from this kind of epistemology that we would reject. You don't have a clear idea of something like self evident maxims or something like this that you can then reason up to build up to God. In fact, if there's no way to understand those maxims or those foundations epistemologically or logically or whatever without presupposing God's
- [160:00]
Dr. Feingold
existence, well, that's a whole other argument. Do you want to keep on going with analogy for a bit or should we just.
- [160:08]
Jay Dyer
I'll have to go and let's take some. Some super. So people who are listening, if you want to take. If you want to ask questions. I'm sure this will take a few minutes. But the you can ask your super chat questions now. We already have a couple here. One from Gil amos Russias for 5$. He says the Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, the Holy Ghost uncreated. Not three uncreated, but one uncreated Athanasian Creed. Actually, even Rome admits that the Athanasian Creed was not composed by Athanasius. It's a later forgery. And the Orthodox Church does not accept the Athanasian Creed. But yes, we agree that all three of the persons are uncreated. Gilemus Rustius, again for $5. When the Paraclete cometh, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father. Right. Proceeds from the Father is a statement of, in our view, hypostatic origin. The Father is the sole arche, is the only source of the Spirit. Jesus says he will send the Spirit into time in history. All orthodox writers believe in the mission of the Spirit being sent by Jesus. This is why it began the debate making the distinction between economia or the mission of the spirit within history. The eternal manifestation of the spirit, which applies the Augustinian psychological analogy. In St. Gregory Palmas. The Son eternally manifests the spirit Spirit. But then in terms of hypostatic origins, the father alone is the arche. Soul and cause of the persons in our view. Are there any more super chats? If not, I think we will call it to a close. Give them a few minutes. Yeah, man, this was. This was pretty intense, pretty heated, pretty. Pretty deep stuff. I appreciate you coming on and doing it, and if we get a few more.
- [161:59]
Dr. Feingold
Appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, yeah.
- [162:01]
Jay Dyer
If we get a few more super chats, I'll split the money with you, but.
- [162:04]
Dr. Feingold
Oh, gosh, no, don't worry about that.
- [162:06]
Jay Dyer
Well, I always do that with guests. Any of you Theo nerds out there want to ask questions, send us some money.
- [162:15]
Dr. Feingold
What did we do?
- [162:16]
Jay Dyer
Two hours, a little bit over.
- [162:18]
Dr. Feingold
Yep.
- [162:19]
Jay Dyer
Okay. All right. Well, I'm not seeing any more super chats, so I guess we'll call it a close. And thank you, Dr. Feingold. Very eloquent, very good at explicating his positions. Good defender of Thomism.
- [162:32]
Dr. Feingold
We will think about this, but let's
- [162:36]
Jay Dyer
do on this for a while and we'll come back with maybe a part two.
- [162:41]
Dr. Feingold
All right, well, thank you.
- [162:42]
Jay Dyer
All right. God bless and have a good day. Thank you, Jack. You too, man.
- [162:47]
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Dr. Feingold
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