A Smart Christian

[imported_luckyme]

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Jesus was both God and man. As man, He was subject to ....

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HE can't be both. It's possible to look at it like a shared possession of a body along the lines of Multiple Personality Disorder ( if it exists) but at the level where a person exists ( I am not my arm) I can only be a person ( by definition, since I am something else I am not a person). So to say, God shared a body with this guy Jesus would capture something meaningful. To say 'he' was both destroys the person 'jesus' because people don't have god qualities. "They" were both, sharing the carpenters body. Entity I, jesus the man. Entity 2, the god. The is no dual 'he'.

[NotReady]

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He BECAME a man... his nature changed.


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He became a man but His divine nature did not change. Christian theology has been consistent at least since Augustine - Jesus has two natures, divine and human. And no, no one understands it very well. It's similar to the Trinity, God is three and also one. There's no logical inconsistency because the different aspects are taken in different senses. There's much on both these topics that can help with the difficulties, but they are both doctrines that we can't fully grasp.

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Is Jesus omniscient now?


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I'm not sure concerning His human nature. I will say these concepts are in the Bible and are impossible for us to understand fully.

[NotReady]

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"They" were both, sharing the carpenters body. Entity I, jesus the man. Entity 2, the god. The is no dual 'he'.


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It's a mystery. In can only be stated, it can't be explained. Many analogies have been used but are always lacking. All I can say about it is the Bible presents this concept and it's perfectly logical to believe that God would be above our logical capabilities.

[imported_luckyme]

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All I can say about it is the Bible presents this concept and it's perfectly logical to believe that God would be above our logical capabilities.

[/ QUOTE ] Naturally, or should I say, supernaturally, god is above our logical capabilities, but 'being a man' isn't. Else, we'd have no idea whether to shake hands with it or shoot it and have it for din-din.

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"They" were both, sharing the carpenters body. Entity I, jesus the man. Entity 2, the god. The is no dual 'he'.


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It's a mystery. In can only be stated, it can't be explained. Many analogies have been used but are always lacking. All I can say about it is the Bible presents this concept and it's perfectly logical to believe that God would be above our logical capabilities.

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The "fact" is... when Jesus was on Earth, he did not have all of his God-qualities. He did before he was born as a man. Ergo, his nature changed. Unless you want to equivocate the word "nature".

[NotReady]

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Unless you want to equivocate the word "nature".


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It's not an equivocation because He had two natures. But I can't give a full, logical explanation of what that means. If the doctrine was that He had one nature and then gave contradictory descriptions of that nature it would be illogical. Having two natures isn't illogical, it's just impossible to understand what it means.

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Unless you want to equivocate the word "nature".


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It's not an equivocation because He had two natures. But I can't give a full, logical explanation of what that means. If the doctrine was that He had one nature and then gave contradictory descriptions of that nature it would be illogical. Having two natures isn't illogical, it's just impossible to understand what it means.

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So he had 1 nature, then 2. That's a change of "nature" then. His nature was to have 1 nature... then his nature was to have 2 natures. Whatever that means. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[NotReady]

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SETI isn't a scientific theory. It's a search.


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It must claim to be based on science. If not, it should be funded by artistic foundations, not scientific ones.

The crux of the argument from the site you linked is:

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In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.


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Error number one isn't made by anyone I've read or anything I've thought. I've always thought the search was made based on any sign of intelligence. For instance, our own TV signals, though not sent as a message, would enable ETs to infer we are here.

Error number two is also not part of my understanding of SETI. I don't think of it as looking for compexity, but artificiality.

The whole article is just an attempt to define terms in such a way that SETI is scientific and ID isn't. It draws artificial distinctions and focuses on differences, ignoring similarities. Much turns on the definition of artificial. The presupposition that isn't stated is that the universe is a closed system, therefore by definition whatever occurs in the universe CAN'T be attributed to God. Of course, the whole question is always decided at the outset. If DNA is designed, there is a Designer. If DNA isn't designed, it's an accident. The conclusion depends on the premises. What is meant by design and artificial? But formally there's a basic similarity between SETI and ID. Both believe it's proper to infer intelligence behind something that has no natural explanation.