What Is God Like? (WARNING: Heavy Philosophy) w/ Fr. Gregory Pine

g'day and welcome to pints with Aquinas my name is Matt Fred and today I will be joined around the bar table by my good mate father Gregory pine and in today's episode we are going to be discussing the I've even written it down the three omni's God's omnipresence His omniscience and his omnipotence what do they mean what are some objections to them let's see what are we get what do we get into is a long and very fun chat oh yeah father Gregory pine destroys richard dawkins --is supposed argument well not supposed it was an argument or just a bad one and father Gregory shows why talkin has an argument against God's omniscience and omnipotence he tries to say they conflict in the in the God Delusion we talk about Molin ism and why you know father Gregory pine rejects that Ricky Gervais once asked if God was in his butthole sorry but he did he said if he's everywhere is he so we actually talked about that um oh and we also kind of asked questions I think a lot of people have you know like okay so if God knows everything and his knowledge is infallible and he knows what's gonna happen to me in the future and he knows that I'm going to hell then there's nothing I can do so why shouldn't I just sort of resign myself to have sort of fatalism this so this is a really kind of intense theological episode so I think gonna rule of it what do you think hey before we go any further click that bloody subscribe button down there would you subscribe then the Bell it makes me feel good and you know it also forces YouTube to let you know whenever we put on a new bloody put out a new video check this out strive I want to say a big thanks to the sponsor strive I created it by the way but I don't own it so strive 21 com is a 21 day detox from porn course that'll help you break free of porn last time you saw me advertising this we had 14 thousand men we now have over 17 thousand men going through the course basically for 21 days you get a short video from me and you are invited to a and 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only get access to that part of the interview if you become a patron at patreon.com slash Matt Fred fair enough good glad you're here here's my chat with father Gregory Pond [Music] I get emails constantly about like things that I you can do about the bags under your eyes you don't I do yeah hopefully almost you know are you getting beaten nope oh yeah people do that to me all the time like when I did a video with you during Lent someone's like well it looks like Matt's Lentz go off to a good start [Laughter] terrible awesome father Gregory point good a how are you I'm doing well thank you now you cut I'm you probably looks like that I'm looking over your shoulder but I'm looking at the good camera it's very confusing but anyway how you been I'm doing well let's see life in Washington DC is you know the sun is shining the grass is green I guess that's a song about Beverly Hills but never mind things are things are getting better the Diocese of Arlington you know opening up the dice Archdiocese of Baltimore opening out the Archdiocese of Washington opening up so public sacraments is like a big thing for the happiness and healthiness of the faithful that's good and then mystic Institute hustle just precedes a pace so we're just trying to figure out ways to have events with people you know because yeah the technology hustle is it's good it supplies for a need in a time of pandemic but people want to be with people so make that happen yeah we our church our Byzantine church opened up but we've been having Divine Liturgy for the last I'd say three yea last three Sundays okay that's awesome I'll tell you what's annoying is Catholics who whine and complain about how the bishops don't allow them to go to Mass and then you say to them oh well divine liturgy is offered tomorrow and it's outdoors and they say I'll probably just watch Mass on TV it's hard to say though okay so I think the Internet is a weird place this is this seems tangential but I think the Internet's a weird place especially when it's like so for instance you're doing these zoom calls or you're having like a you know you're doing a podcast or Quarantine lecture and you're trying to like look at the person whom you're addressing but in order to look at them and have them experience it as you looking at them you have to look at your webcam yeah so you aren't actually looking at them you're looking at your webcam so as to create the illusion or the effect of you looking at them the Internet's like that it's just like your whole life gets refracted through this bizarro land and so livestream masks you know I could say some things many things what I will say is that I did not watch one no did I have any desire to nor would I yeah I mean that's basically how I feel I understand no I I need to backpedal after you finish continue and then I'll backpedal I understand the pastor's want to maintain the connection with their parishioners right and then they want to help people make you know like good spiritual communion spiritual sacrifice and it's a way by which to go about that but like like phenomenologically when you when you kneel in front of your television you're like nah nah this isn't it you know there's this like there is a worlds of difference between seeing the Eucharist on your TV or on your computer and actually seeing the Eucharist with your eyes without any intermediary or any anything in between and yeah I think people just I think people just want to see the Lord and I think that live streaming sometimes it confuses because you're like what's you know like what what exactly is going on and how my participants in this because like watching live sports makes sense to us and we feel a part of that but watching watching Mass is not it's not a lot of sport so yeah the sense of like how am I an agent how am I actually like acting and choosing and living and loving in this is just I think it's very difficult for many people like I had somebody text me to ask me like I missed a livestream mass like do I have to confess that like I didn't I didn't livestream the mass on Sunday and I was like no you do not know but you you have to confess asking me that now no I'm sorry no yeah because I think often times it'll be more fruitful for you to do something else you know like pray the rosary with your family or your take you know taking the words from my mouth so okay so let me backpedal cuz I tend to say things strongly and then offend everybody but no I think it's really great like if people want to watch Mass that's terrific I've got some guys from my men's group that would get their kids together every single morning they would actually sit down and watch Holy Mass on tell and I think that kind of created a structure to their day which was really cool it was also a way to kind of pray with maybe to connect them to the to the broader church I can also see it's just something that you miss you know just like you know like your family you want to see your family on Marco Polo or you want to see photos of them you know so it's kind like that but I never had any desire to do it maybe if I was 10 15 years younger I would have felt guilty about that but no I just thought it makes a lot more sense to me to leave my family and prayer why why would I turn on the television so we would do these large akathist to marry prayers on Saturday night we'd crank the incense up I would put on my bathrobe pretend I was a Franciscan my wife's like you've you've gone too far I didn't do that I didn't see actually how that how that had any real connection to you worshiping as a family but I'm glad I offered I offered the sacrifice on the eat no no oh I'm gonna get in trouble [Music] yeah so what about you have you been celebrating Holy Mass on your own or with the Friars or what yeah so I live I live in the convent with 75 men so we have mass here and then we've you know we continue to have mass for certain religious communities in the area and things like that so yeah it's certainly though it's limited yes funny is I just interviewed sister Natalia last week who's a Byzantine nun and she refers to the place they live as a monastery which in the West we typically associate with men and you just referred to your place as a convent which in the West we typically associate with women so yeah what's with that well our Dominican lingo is weird and I think sometimes it confuses people so then sometimes I use other words but we call this house a Priory so like Franciscans live in friar E's Dominicans live in priories the kind of typical language yeah exactly Wow a typical language to describe a house of Dominicans as Priory you often hear it referred to as as that and just common parlance but in a lot of the order they refer to it as a Content just like the Latin convinced whom whatever you get it coming together so yeah I say that sometimes but maybe I'm just weird well that's certainly the case that's why we love you Thanks so I'm pumped to talk about the omni's today and I want to kind of ease into this because I know like you know more than any human should probably on this topics so I want to kind of tiptoe into it maybe let's just begin by briefly saying what we can know about God's attributes in general and Aquinas his method of arriving at them and then we'll touch upon the three briefly and then delve deeper sure so I think a good way to approach it is just by considering the order of those first questions in the Summa so he's got the question on whether God exists and he's very modest right so he asks is this thing self-evident and he says it's self-evident to God but it's not self-evident to us so then can we prove it and he says yeah but we have to prove it by his effects so the way that we begin to say something about that God is and that God is this that or the other way is basically by observing what happens in the world and then reasoning back to his existence so that's like the five ways so like and the first way you're like stuff moves but in order for stuff to move something has to move before the stuff moves but in order for that stuff to move something you know dot dot dot well how does this stuff move there has to be something that's not moved that's moving the stuff to move the stuff and then you know you get got this thing we call God the mover of the stuff that itself is not a stuff moved and then once he's kind of gone to God by a variety of ways then he says what what further can we say about God and then he begins by saying well one thing we know is that God is not composed or he's not divided or he's not complex and the way that we are so if it is the case that God is an unmoved mover or the first cause or a necessary being or the utmost or the end of all things then he doesn't have a body okay because it wouldn't make sense that a body be a first mover in the way that we've just described nor is it the case that he's got accidents the way that what we do you know like stuff that's kind of part of his identity but less so than is truest identity and then he goes through all these different ways of qualifying how God is not God is not composed and by the time that you get there you've got his like the real heart of what he's after which is that God is just pure act and the language of act and potency is familiar to some but not familiar to others basically potency is is what a thing could be but isn't yet and act is the realization of a things nature so act means that it's firing on all cylinders so if you think about you know like in my own case I'm alright let's like I'm six feet you know four inches I'm like 175 pounds but I am potentially to ten if I let myself go and instead of eating a balanced diet and exercising I just sit in the same place and just you know just consume an incredible amount of calories you know I just ordered chick-fil-a for breakfast chick-fil-a for lunch ejaculate for dinner and I get I get milkshakes every single time and I make like a serious point of having myself conveyed about the house unlike a litter I was like listen I can't I'm not in the walking business because I got a gained weight here okay so I'm potentially 210 but if I were to go about that progress you know like go about that plan of really putting on the pounds then I would be actually 210 okay that's a stupid example but when we say that God is pure act he is being firing on all cylinders there's nothing unrealized in God he is just being itself there's nothing like you know God could be in this way or could be in that way but you know he just didn't get around to it or you know it's a lazy morning you know like god I'll get to that later than the afternoon God just is pure be so once you have that in place then you can talk about these other things that come like God being perfect right so lacking nothing proper to what it means to be God or God is good right so same time says we call this things good which we desire which kind of elicit our appetite and God is good and the utmost sense because he is in the utmost sense and then you get into the Omni questions so God is omnipresent right God is um the potent or omnipotent and I think like the way that he describes it is that he'll go through it God is eternal right so he's present to all times God is unchanging right he's present to all of being God is infinite God is one or you know God expresses a unity and there you have you know like basically questions 3 through 11 of the prema pars which you know there's some there's some heavy philosophical language and some of those articles but that's effectively what we're saying is we're saying that since God is being in the utmost sense or exhausts all that there is a being and we can then we can qualify it qualify the way we understand God and kind of rule out certain things that race you know okay just want to pause a moment to say thank you to our second sponsor who is that you've guessed it hallo no hallow but hallo H al l o w comm is a Catholic meditation app to help you find peace and grow in your spiritual journey check it out it's really great it really really is great very well produced they've put a lot of money into this thing it's incredibly well organized easy to navigate and it's a hundred percent Catholic so you don't have to run into any of that kind of weird New Age stuff that you might on other mindfulness and meditation apps this is the app you want to get now hallow has a completely free version of their app you can go download it right now they have content that's updated every single day lexy o Divina staff beautifully and listen to the to the daily readings you can have beautiful Gregorian chant behind it all that sort of thing lovely but you can also get free access to no sorry not free you can also get access to the entire app by becoming you know but by paying for it but if you want to get access to the entire app for a whole month for free just to try it out click the link in the description below use Matt Fred and the promo code and that will set you up you'll be set to jet check it out check them out hallo comm hallo comm all right back to the interview it's gonna ask I was gonna ask you about that this way of negation because Aquinas famously says we can know that God exists but we can't know what he is I don't know different philosophers have said yeah we can't know anything about and we can't even speak about him Aquinas disagrees that while saying we can't know what he is so maybe just kind of breakdown that via negativa for us yeah sure so that's that's like a famous text at the beginning of question three of the Prima pars but he says alright we've proved that God is he says ordinarily in an Aristotelian science after you've proved that the thing is then you want to go ahead and show what the thing is but he says with God we don't have access to God in the way that we have access to other things that we can observe and so we're gonna have to be content to say how God is not and by ruling things out basically we're kind of like clearing out a space so that we can circumscribe the mystery we have like a basic sense of where God is to be found because we've ruled out where God is not to be found now is he still going to transcend the compass of our minds you better believe it you know as they once saying in VeggieTales God is bigger than the boogeyman okay but he's also bigger than our minds in addition to being bigger than the boogeyman and so we can't expect to have comprehensive knowledge of God but we can have a kind of access to God by saying like it okay he's not divided he's not imperfect he's in no wise lacking goodness he is not finite he is not time bound he is not pet cetera etc etc so we're ruling things out when we when we say those things about God trying to think of an analogy and this might be terrible so please feel free to shoot this down but I I wonder you know if I came back from vacation and I found that my door had been broken into or at least is open I might initially think okay maybe I left that unlocked unlocked but then I walk in and I see you know the chair thrown over here and it looks like something's been in here I don't know what it is but I'm ruling out now what it's not and then if I get into the bedroom and find that the safe has been raided kind of thing I'm like okay so it wasn't the wind that opened it and and it was a being like it was a being that came in and it was an intelligent it was it wasn't a like a ignorant being it had to have intelligence is that kind of like what we're doing or totally not at all no yeah I think I think that's a great analogy because you're judging by the effects so you're looking at the effects and you're like okay door how could this have happened either I'm an idiot you know okay granted but is that true in this case all right um or the wind blew it open it's like well you know I live in Washington DC in the month of May and the wind is constantly blowing we have a sign out front of our prior which is advertising drive-through confessions and I fixed that thing like two dozen times because it keeps getting destroyed by like 45 mile an hour gusts which is just devastating for me you know so like okay it could be the wind or it could be something else it could be my dog who has somehow like grown opposable thumbs and got good at picking locks we can't rule it out you know very intelligent talk but maybe I can rule it out you know so like you're judging by the effects and you're ruling out what it can't be so it's to hone in on what it is and then yeah and then you go into your room you're like okay it seems that if it were my wife she wouldn't have thrown the chair over because she always you know she gets very angry with me when I throw the chair over you know in my in my unbidden fits of Rage nor can it be my dog because my dog is very well-mannered when it comes to furniture I've had long talks with him about dander and he has very solicitous I've actually trained him to vacuum it can't be him you know so you like your again you're honing and honing and then you get to this is a bad man you know robber I love the word robber it just kills me it's a good word where does robber come from I'm sure you know I have no idea I know the Latin word for it I think is rough Pina like rapacity I think that's the truth yeah st. Thomas describes the difference between robbery and theft he's like one is it's done and like open combat robbery yes it's done in secret I just love that like I want to grow up to be a robber I want to take my guys on that's all right all right okay so yeah we so we can't know what God is but we can we can come to know certain things about him by rolling out what he isn't and obviously we could spend a long time talking about the different attributes of God but we had to hone it in for the sake of the show omnipotence omniscience and omnipresence I don't know what or do you want to take them in but before we even extremely kind of delve into any of them can you just give us a brief brief synopsis what do they mean in English and what do they mean in general yeah sure so I guess a the way that st. Thomas would treat them would be omnipresent omniscience and then omnipotence because omnipresence is a matter of being omniscient is a matter of knowing and omnipotence is a matter of willing so make sense so omnipresence is just to say that God is present to all of creation and we can go into the way in which he is present to all of creation and then omniscience is that God knows all things not like he's surprised by all things and comes to discover them in time like he's a quick learner know but is to say that like God God's knowledge and giving of being two things entails that he knows them through and through and then omnipotence is that God can do all things that accords with his nature and the nature of those things with which he interacts okay so that's the basic shape alright that's good so let's let's but instead of asking you right off the bat to explain omnipresence let me ask you a different question how do how do people including faithful Catholics Catholics usually misunderstand what omnipresence means what are their false beliefs about omnipresence right so I think that a kind of some sometimes people will talk about it as if it were pantheism mm-hm and in theism and pantheism is just like that everything is God so you'll find this in some like Vedic religions so like religions that you'd associated with India or like East Asia and the idea there is that everything is just a kind of outworking of the divine nature so there's no real distinction to be drawn between God in the world the two are just kind of coterminous and then pan an theism is that the world is just kind of like a part of God so God transcends the world in a certain sense but truth be told the world just is a partial at working of the nature of God so what we're saying here is not that mm-hmm we're not saying that everything is God each thing has its own nature and its own proper integrity and it is able to operate by its own proper principles so like you really are a human being and you really act as a human being and you really are free you have human thoughts and you have human loves and you perform human deeds and God is you know gives that to be and he gives that to act and and he makes you to be as you aren't to know and to love as you do but you want God in the strict sense I think that's that's a helpful waiter yeah that round that's it that's helpful I think another misunderstanding people have is they think that omnipresence means that God is sort of like the force in Star Wars that he's spread out throughout throughout the universe like a physical thing like a gas okay he'll be yeah that'd be wild bigoted yes what so what would you say to that hmm yes I would say that if a thing is material it's therefore limited in some way because if it's ever material it's here and it's not there cuz you're like oh what if we're like a really really big material thing well there's always a place beyond you know just think of you know make it as big as you like potentially infinite but then it's going to have a term and beyond that term there is something else so whenever we're talking about matter even if we think about matter is more real than the immaterial which is not the case the immaterial is more real than the material even we think about in those terms we're always going to come come up against limitations so like by virtue of the fact that I am an embodied human person I am just this man and not another so on account of the fact that I am like lanky Haggard tired hungry you know all these things I will never be like strong athletic coordinated all the things that you know one wishes he worked so because of the fact that I have these you know like this flesh and these bones I don't have certain perfections that a human being could have so whenever you have matter you're limited so when we think about God is like a gas dispersed as it were you know we're basically conceiving of an immaterial thing in a material way because our minds just want to grasp onto material things because that's just how we work you know we have bodies and we want to interact with other things through bodies which thanks be to God the Lord gives us His only begotten Son and human flesh in the Incarnation it gives us the sacraments to which we can lay hold it gives us a variety of helps which are embodied so that we don't make idols of other material things just because our minds need something to lay hold of and our hearts need somethin to worship okay so if when we say God is omnipresent we don't mean that he's identical with the universe and when we say he's omnipresent we don't mean that he spread throughout the universe like a sort of gas what how is God everywhere what does that mean so so a thing can be in a place in two ways as contained in that place or as exercising its action or activity in that place so we talk about God being present we're talking about him as exercising his activity in all places so first he's giving everything that is its being so all all things that are in this you know and though in the world that we experience whether rocks or trees or you know like stegosauruses or like David Copperfield or like you know the President of the United States or computers cameras techno meters cameras the Archangel Ray feel all these things they are but they could not have been and you have to account for the fact that they are and the fact that they are is bound up with their having being with their being called forth from nothing into being and only God is competent to call forth from nothing into being so God gives this gift of being and God continues to give to give the gift of being so long as the thing is so someone might say though that sounds ok maybe when it comes to sticker sources but God didn't call this camera into being Nikon did or Nikon or however you pronounce it sure okay so this camera created by Nikon or Nick on as it were so it's composed of different material parts right so it's composed of plastic which I guess is composed of like petroleum and other you know chemicals and things like that all of its things you know like you can think about it in terms of what they come from and those things they come from could have been or could not have been and yet are so when we talk about cameras being like the description is a little harder to grasp because it's not a substance in the way that like a tree is a substance or in the way that a dog is the substance or way that you are a substance but its if not a substance it's composed of substances and those substances need you know need to be but they only can be in a way that is shared in God's being as it were so because not necessary that they are and as a result of which we have to account for the fact that they are and God accounts for the fact that they are so we're saying that like God creates all things to be and he continues to hold them in being because like I don't have sufficient explanation for the fact that I am it's like hey you know like why do you exist well it's like you know I got this bod here and I got this soul like that's this is kind of like taking my bod to and fro it's like no but like your bod could not have been you know you get he gotten well whatever who cares but it also could have been otherwise like it could have been better it could have been worse or it could have been this way or that way so how do you account for the fact that it is in the way that it is and I mean God answers to this question because he makes it to be as it is so yeah like Frank sheet has this cool illustration and yeah ology for beginners yes I know what you're gonna say earth nice so he's talking about how a you like think of a carpenter yeah it's a piece of fur like a chair and he gets some wood and he fashions from it a chair and if he leaves the room that chair continues to exist or subsist by virtue of the materials from which it is made so you know it continues to last by virtue of the fact that it's composed of wood and that would kind of goes on being but he says in a more fundamental way like think of us you know we were created out of nothing ex nihilo so if God were to quote-unquote leave the room then we would subsist on that from which we were made which is nothing which is to say that we would return to nothing now he's basically extending this logic to all of material creation and all spiritual creation so everything that is needs God to account for the fact that it is because it doesn't have a sufficient explanation unto itself of why it exists right because because it could not or it could otherwise and so we talk about God being present to all things as giving them being right so that's like the first way in which God is present to all things have you heard the analogy of sort of like if I was to say where's father Gregory pawn I mean you know in a sense like your hand is part of you but like your soul is active throughout your body is that a good analogy like you you are you you can make things happen with your body and God could God is can act wherever in the yeah that was a terrible way of putting it I'm sorry he's yeah you you say it better for me place no that's great so actually the st. Thomas asked the question of whether so in one sense yes in another sense no so like San Agustin asked the question of whether God is like a world soul like animating the world so he says no that's that's not the case we want to rule that out because God doesn't enter into composition with the world but I think that the idea of like a soul being present to the whole of a body is you know it's a great analogy for how God is present to all creation because you think about the soul gives life to the whole body and yet we can't like locate the soul in one particular part of the body you know it's not like you know the pineal gland which Descartes talked about yeah nor is it like you know especially in the brain or especially in the heart or especially in the big toe it's just when we see a living thing we say like okay that thing is living and so we we reason from that to the fact that there is a soul animating it because it is animate and so to when we see a being we reason back to the existence of God that there is something present which is giving it to be right and and we're not gonna make like a judgment as to like you know like you know is it more in the head is it more on the heart is it more in the big toe no he's just he's giving it to be he's imparting to it that's very act of being and the act of being is associated with the form in the case of the human person the form is the soul you know so there's there's a really yeah there's a good kinship there between those between those concepts it's a really difficult thing to wrap your head around isn't it because I feel like as we try to mentally grasp what's going on when it comes to omnipresence we're still thinking about God as a certain size that that sort of covers everything and so he's everywhere in in the way that yeah yeah you think of your body being different places yeah yeah no I think that's like when you think about what st. Thomas is doing in the Summa and this is a bigger point but you can think about it is like conceptual therapy so we have these notions about God and sometimes the notions that we have about God are good and sometimes they're less than good but they always stand neat perfecting and so what st. Thomas is doing with language is he's not just like you know he's not just showing off like I can I can make sweet arguments look at me go but he's using language to actually purify our understanding of the concepts and in the process purify our like our use of the language itself so it's kind of like analytic as a woman yeah that's not his principal preoccupation he's really more just concerned with with the things themselves he's engrossed by the things themselves but whenever we talk about God like there's this cool passage in one of the conferences of st. John Cassian where he talks about this monk who espoused what it was later called as the anthropomorphize heresy who he thought about God in bodily form and when he was you know when he came to grips with the fact of his error is really devastating for him right so it threw him for a loop because the way that he needed conceived of God had provided him much comfort in consolation and then he came to discover that it was wrong so he had to begin thinking about God differently and that set off real detachment this sounds like the Mormons who have this bodily concept of God that God has a body yeah III think they I think they take great comfort from that idea and I think this similar thing would happen if they came to agree that God didn't yeah and and I mean like in our case it's it's comforting to think about God having a body and this is kind of setting aside the considerations of the Incarnation which we'll bring back into the conversation but it's comforting to think about God having a body because that seems close it seems near because we often think about material things is more real than immaterial things but actually like when a material thing is I mean by virtue of the fact that it is material it can never be present to us in the way that we want like you I mean everyone's experienced this with their friends like when you have a really close friend or somebody whom you love it's like at times it's like you wanted you want to eat them you're less I want you to be way closer to me than you are right now like you know like you look at a mom who just like wants to cuddle her child to death you know like I could just you know like it's just like I mean look I don't mean to get sexual here but that is absolutely what happens in marriage like you you actually try to eat the other person like I want to kiss you I want to put my mouth on you but I would put my mouth on your mouth which is a really gross thing when you think about it but it's like I want to taste you it's lovely really yeah but but we experienced that both is like a kind of invitation to intimacy but also as it's a failing in our love like we can't abolish that distance we always feel that distance like regardless of what happens I am I and you are you and where I am you will not be and where you are I will not be and that's tough but by virtue of the fact that God does not have a body he can be more present to us than something that does have a body but that requires of us a kind of conceptual therapy like we have to do the work of setting aside our attachment to a anthropomorphize God you know like a and that the word there anthropomorphism just means like to make something out to be more like a man than it ought to be made out like you know so we have to set that aside so that we can kind of be open to the prospect of who God truly is so that way we can welcome him as he presents himself and this doesn't mean that we're getting like Gnostic and all of its like secret hidden knowledge and you need to set aside all images because with the Incarnation the Lord has chosen bodily things as a way to introduce spiritual things so we're not setting aside the body in any way shape or form we're just purifying our understanding of what it what it means to be the triune God so that we can know well and love better so ricky gervais you're familiar with ricky um i heard about a monologue he gave at an awards ceremony where he just devastated people for like ten straight minutes that's all i know it was pretty epic as far as comedians go i think he's probably the greatest stand-up alive right now he made maybe him and Brian Regan but he is absolutely hilarious but self declared atheist very vocal about it and but you know doesn't not very sophisticated you know even worse than than Dawkins is and so when he was asked about why he doesn't believe in God he used this anecdote and this is gonna get us back to omnipresent so and I want you to respond to Ricky Gervais is for us here so he was in class and the teacher said God is everywhere and he said and you can see why this would be funny in a stand-up akan oh yeah easy in my butthole so what's the answer to that question is God in Ricky Gervais sirs butthole nice I love how you mean welcome immediately applicable you set me up with just very very easy questions that I can comport myself admirably you know just kind of stay clean over here so st. Thomas says that God is present to all of creation in three ways so by essence presence and power so the first way we talk about God is giving all things being the next is like all things are transparent to God's gaze so there's nothing that escapes the bounds of his Providence okay and then the last is he gives them agency so he gives those things to act as those things are so maybe setting aside of the concrete particulars of this question you know let's just talk about ricky gervais as a man so god is making him to be mm-hmm you know continually so he hasn't being and and ricky gervais is is taken account of and God's providential design so that even if Ricky Gervais is like kind of departs from the Lord by being crass by denying his existence by potentially leading others away from God yet God has accounted for that and tries to draw him sweetly and strongly back to him in the manner of mercy and then God is you know present in by power God is making ricky gervais Stu act as a human being in a properly human way right so God is not a puppeteer God is not interested in making automata who like worship him automatically because he needs the adulation of so many little robots but God is making him to be as he is so in those three ways God is present to all of creation and let me ask us disgusting question then because it gets to the same point is God inside this Cup so inside that Cup I'm assuming there's like coffee or spirits or water this is sorry Kiko and chai tea well yeah I mean it gets to the same question we want to think God's inside like he's like again we're getting back to this kind of spread out like a gas yeah so so I mean without kind of having to rehash what you just said because maybe you've already answered it if someone would have just say okay God's everywhere is he inside this Cup is there another way you could explain that if I'm suppose I'm five how would you explain that right I'd say that God isn't in this cup like the liquid he's not in the cup as contained within the cup as if God were like a beverage to be poured out but God is present everywhere insofar as he makes those things to be if you were five I would probably talk about it in terms of God's knowing and loving South said God knows the interior of that cup from the dawn of creation God first saw how the interior of that cup would play into your particular story of salvation the from the interior of that cup you would be you know you would have your thirst quenched you would be fortified to worship Him to seek your vocation to glorify Him in your state and what is more God has loved the inside of that Cup for even though it is small nothing has escaped his glance nothing has escaped his Providence and he has accounted for all the you know small delicate details of your life so that by many bonds by many tethers he might draw you to himself not because he needs you but he knows that he has made you to love him that you are to be filled in loving him so yes God is in a certain sense in the cup he is giving it being he is making it to act it is transparent to his gaze and it is all taken account of by his knowledge in his love fair enough so that's a good answer so while father Gregory pine doesn't know what is in this Cup God certainly does well well here's another question then because it sounds like saying God is fully present wherever we might go and we read the about this in the Psalms you know where can I where can I escape your presence if I go to the heights descend to the depths there you are so you want to say that God is fully present in all creation mm-hmm okay so next question is if he's fully present everywhere how is he or is he more fully present in the Eucharist if he's everywhere why can't I just eat this cracker and what can that be the same as eating the Eucharist right the man makes an excellent point so same time when he talked about the presence of God he adds to these three ways in which God is present and he says in the elect or in those who are justified by grace God dwells as in a temple so here it's helpful to talk about the missions of the Most Blessed Trinity so you know in the heart of God the Father begets the son and the father and the son breathe forth the Holy Spirit and those movements those processions in the heart of God are the principles of God's sending his son and his holy spirit into the world so we call those missions and you can think about like the visible mission of the Sun is the incarnation the visible missions of the Holy Spirit are his coming you know descending as a dove at the baptism as being present in the cloud at the Transfiguration his being breathed forth on the apostles in the upper room at the end of the Gospel of John and his descending is tongues of fire in acts 2 at Pentecost so we see the Sun sent we see the Holy Spirit sent but to these visible missions there are accompanying invisible missions and in the case of the Holy Spirit God sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts with the gift of grace okay so God is present to those who love him and are loved by him in the life of Grace in peculiar fashion so this like gives us a kind of analogy for thinking about how God is present in the Eucharist because God makes himself present to creation in in a differentiated way so he's present to all things we said in essence presents power but he's present to those to the just in this peculiar fashion and he's present in the Eucharist in yet more peculiar fashion because there he is contained both substantially and sacramentally so sacramentally just means he's contained under the mode of a sign so at the mass you know you have the double consecration the bread the wine become the body in the blood they're divided so as to signify that the body and blood of the Lord were divided on the cross right so it makes the cross present what is more the bread is made of many grains the wine is made of many grapes so out of many one so they signify the unity of the body of Christ and so they make that present and third and finally they are kind of like common food and drink their nourishment and so they they nourish the people of God so you know like by giving grace so they signify something of the past namely the passion something of the future namely the unity of the body of Christ and something of the present the grace and virtue which they convey so their you know the Eucharist makes God present sacramentally under the form of sign and give the very thing which they signify but also substantially in as much as the Lord reigns gloriously in heaven you know resurrected but he is contained under the appearance of bread and wine substantially okay so he's made substantially present on the altar so when when the priest this is my body the bread becomes the body of the Lord Jesus Christ which is locally present in heaven alone but is made substantially in sacramentally present on the altar so God intensifies you could talk about his presence in that place so you can think about like holy places like Church sanctuaries or pilgrimage sites you feel that God is operating in this place in peculiar fashion and with grace he's operating a peculiar fashion but the Eucharist he is operating in the yet most excellent fashion because he is there substantially and sacramentally a little long sorry but I think that's a really good answer okay why don't we move on to God's omniscience he's being all-knowing before we kind of get into the weeds of this I want to kind of throw a couple of questions / objections at you something that question I get very often I think a lot of people have is okay so if God knows all future events with certainty then he knows whether or not I am going to be saved or go to hell and if he can't be wrong about the knowledge he now has then my fate is sealed so shouldn't this just lead to fatalism if I don't really have a choice yeah that's an excellent question and it's one that um so yeah we've mentioned before I work for the to miss again stitute we have this program called Aquinas 101 and people sign up and you get emails with vids and people often send questions we have like a little ask a friar feature and they send questions to ask about like what's the deal with this or what's the deal with that and a lot of people have asked this question so a lot of people are asking this question are disturbed by this question want an answer to this question so the answer that I'm going to give is not wholly satisfactory so it's not going to be like all right let me just listen in right now real closely because at the end of the next three and a half minutes I'll be entirely satisfied and feeling 100% worshipful it's not gonna be wholly satisfactory but it's it's it'll give you some principles to think about it alright so same time it says that God causes necessary things to happen necessarily and contingent things we could say free things to happen freely so God is so powerful God's causality is so rich that not only does he cause the thing to be but he causes it to and causes it to act in the way proper to what it is so you know rocks fall to the surface of the earth by a kind of gravity you know there's no real choosing in that plants turn their leaves towards the Sun and photosynthesize by kind of natural disposition there's no real thinking to that animals they flee from their predators by kind of instinct you know there's there's kind of there's like an animal thought to that but it's it's something that's basically at work in their members irrespective of whether or not they choose to do so but in our case we are uniquely capable among material creation of understanding what our end is and choosing whether or not we pursue it so we can know our end as an end and we can pursue our end as an end and the whole like dignity and grandeur of being a human person is that we are free and when we talk about freedom oftentimes we think about it as a capacity to opt for different things you know you got the a option you got the B option you got the C option like I could choose to become a saint I could you know settle for being a Wall Street broker or I could you know like do crack cocaine you like hmm these are very tempting options and you think that you're free to the extent that you have these options but the way that freedom is classically conceived is a power for the good and that one becomes more and more free to the extent that he actualizes this power to be fixed in the good so that person is most free who beholds the face of God in heaven he does not have other options and yet he is fully alive and fully engaged and the very thing for which he was made so God gives us the dignity and grandeur of being able to know her and as an end and to choose it as an end and when he makes us to be and makes us to act he makes us to act in precisely this way so though he may know how all of our decisions will play out we do not and we are free to choose for the good that lies in store and what is more God is giving us grace so that we would respond generously to that call invocation so there's like a 20th century Dominican who says that at every moment of every day God is giving to even the most hardened sinner at least the grace sufficient to pray so God is always prompting he's always goading and if we go to heaven it spike predestinated grace if we go to hell it's by our choice so you are free in the sense that you are empowered for the good god is supplying you with what you need to choose the good but he is supply you in such a way that it actually be your choice so just because it is known to God does not mean that it is fated for us because he makes us to act as human beings how does this differ from Mullen ISM and why presumably do you reject Mullen ISM right so in in the modernist understanding you have this this kind of middle knowledge so it's I'm I'm springing these sort of sophisticated theological systems upon you without warning no that's great I love it let's let's let's go so in Molen ISM there's you know it's common to talk about God's knowledge in two main ways and then Molina said a third way of talking about God's knowledge but they call middle knowledge so before the prior in the posterior and in middle knowledge basically God has insight into how you will respond if he offers you grace and then he judges whether or not to give you grace based on how you will respond so the problem with this is that God ends up being passive or receptive so it ends up being the human the human being who initiates the life of grace because you know like he's God is making the judgment based on how generously you will respond whether or not you will consent and cooperate and so it's like alright there's some native excellence here to which God is then responding in his choice as to whether or not he will give the grace but this is to do violence to God's initiation in the act and in the giving of grace and a lot of Dominicans would argue that this type of thinking has been you know it's been corrected by some early church councils like second orange for instance right so we do not give ourselves the beginning of faith nor do we give ourselves the beginning of grace rather we rely upon God to do that now mind you when you consent and cooperate with some Grace's then then you can kind of expect that further Grace's will be given but your consent and cooperation does not force God's hand right so God is not responding to us or reacting to us God is you know sovereign in charge he's giving generously so the kind of classic Augustinian or two mystic position tries to hold that off hold off that notion and and and kind of claim the initiation or claim the instigation for god good okay fair enough I just thanks well done um okay here's here's another question well this actually let me quote Dawkins from The God Delusion in page 101 at least in my book he says this and here he's basically making an argument for atheism based on the in coherence of the concept of God right he says incidentally it does not escape the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible if God is omniscient he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence but that means he can't change his mind about his intervention which means he is not omnipotent whatsoever yeah Dawkins just just a slim thug gee I say okay so it's changing one's mind to perfection that's the question right because when we talk about God being omnipotent and we were talking about being omniscient the more fundamental category is perfection is God perfect and the answer is yes he lacks nothing proper to his nature he exhausts all that there is a being and so like for him to change his mind is a kind of incoherent notion because to what would he change it or from what would he change it was he like oh I conceived of this thing here but turns out I was wrong and so now I'm gonna get better okay then he wasn't God to begin with as we understand him in the classic tradition or he could be like you know what I was holding to these high ideals but now I can see that um these guys really just aren't up to the task so I will accommodate myself and just and just have worse ideas so that way they can think that like we're all kind of throwing in together in this general muck and mire of deficient existence like no that's insane it would cease to be God so like when we're talking about God we're talking about him in terms of perfection so the changing of one's mind is not a perfection you know to have like a vacillating or you know like mercurial nature is a weakness right or it's something proper to what it means to be us so we are the type of beings that like you know we learn we grow we progress and that's part of what it means for us to mature and to become wholly ourselves but that's baked in because you know like you're born with a blank slate and you're growing a human culture and then you you know acquire certain virtuous perfections and then you hope for the best you know unto ages of Ages but God is is not the way that we are right so I think it's to anthropomorphize again to ask of God like peculiarly human perfections which have some limitation baked in because God is not limited in the way that we are limited so we should not expect of him to be limited and therefore deem him imperfect because he does not have the limitations which we associate with our human experience okay that's an excellent answer if God knew from all eternity that he was going to create the world and this kind of might get to what you just said there how is creation a free act it seems as if he literally couldn't have decided either to created or or not to create it because I don't know it just seems like it was always going to be so how is he free yeah again this this gets back to the question of freedom like what does it mean to be free and I think a lot of people picture it as if it were free won't you're not free unless you can say no to a thing yeah okay which is not you know the fullest sense of freedom I mean it's an element of our experience of human freedom but I think it contains again some imperfections from which we need to purify the concept if we're going to describe it of God so for instance what do we mean by freedom well freedom is is an act of the will what does it mean to have a will well so already st. Thomas makes them some sweet clarifications when he's talking about God's will so for us when we desire something it's because we lack it okay so like we act out of need oftentimes so yeah I mean Sigmund Freud when he talked about human language he says language is just like need pointing I named this thing because I need it and I want my caretaker to supply it for me right so so when we desire something when we have an appetite for something it's because we recognize it as a good and we're gonna assimilate it in some way maybe we're going to eat it or drink it or you know enjoy whatever sexual intercourse with it so as to propagate species so that's I mean that's like a crass way to talk about it but I talked about buttholes you've pretty much got free-range so so for us appetite always entails some kind of deficiency we're moving towards those things which we lack but in God such is not the case so we already have to purify the notion of God's having a will from the limitations which we experience in our own you know life of choosing so so the most basic sense of appetite is just the spontaneous movement towards a thing that one understands so you have a mind with which to know and when you train that mind on an object it begets a movement of the heart towards the object and in God the movement of the heart towards that object isn't out of any need it's just a kind of spontaneous movement of the Godhead in the case of God to the Godhead because what does he think of he thinks of himself because he exhausts all that there is of being so all that he could potentially think of is within the immediate purview of himself so God is his being he is his existing right so he is his intellect he is his act of thinking he is the object of his thinking and with that comes a whole kind of cycle of willing as well and so God in knowing himself knows all of the ways in which his being can be shared in or participated in by created things and to some of those notions you know he can joins his will to create and mind you he knows when that will happen from his eternity he knows that he will create time with the choice to create those things but for him it's not a matter of like okay there are options and I should exercise some and not exercise others because for him it's not a matter of like maximizing potential because he could have created the world in a variety of different ways he created this way because in his unsearchable wisdom he deemed it fitting he deemed it suitable he deemed it an excellent way by which to manifest his love so that things that he did create could partake thereof and return to him on to the praise of his glory so that yeah I guess those are just some kind of like basic ground clearing distinctions so as to yeah just get away from limitations and our understanding of choice and willing let's ask some kind of lightning round questions here yeah it does does God know how many Tyrannosaurus rexes existed yes does God know whether all be in hell or not yes does God know whether I will drop this pen or not yes do you know okay so I just dropped it so you're telling me God knew from all eternity that I was to drop that pen this gets us back to a previous question but if you want to take another shot at it feel free or if you just want to say I've already answered that dufus you can say that too but okay so if God knew from all eternity that I was going to drop that pen how was I free in my choice to drop the pen or not sure that's a great question and I think it's worth revisiting and I don't think you're a doofus so yes score double score so why how are you still free because you as a human being have an intellect and a will your intellect is created for what is universally true and as a result of which it cannot be sated by any limited true thing you have a will which is only sated by the universally good and so it is not you know put to rest by any one limited good thing and so whenever you approach an action or a moral object of any sort the dropping of the pen or the retaining of the pen in your hand it is good under some aspects and it is less than good under other aspects because on the one hand it's good because you're like I'm gonna use this example so as to illustrate a point about freewill and I'm in the business of pedagogy so this is a good thing but on the other hand I want to show that I am free and so I could stay my hand because that's the thing that they would expect less and as a result of which I want to show myself so you know like blah blah so there's there's good things attached to both and so you are inclined more to one then to the other by virtue of your formation you know like where you were born who your parents were whether your a rule breaker or a rule follower you know like what you're trying to teach your kids right now what you did in your last episode all those things play into your decision but it but at the basic the most kind of like basic and fundamental level you are not constrained by either choice because you can choose whether or not and you can choose under which aspect to see the situation and in choosing you choose how you will see the next situation it's all part of an ongoing moral story of your development as a human person and you're like kind of maturity as an agent and so yeah you are free to choose because God has literally put your life in your hands and though he knows what you will do his knowledge thereof is not the operative principle of your choice the operative principle of your choice is your knowing and loving so then does my choice affect God's knowledge if I'm truly free and could have chose to hold the pen in my hand would God have God would have presumably known that from all eternity so in that sense am I the cause of God's knowledge so I think it's good to think about God's knowledge is coming through your hand rather than meeting your hand from the other side so God knows insofar as he gives you to be he gives you to act he gives being to the act and he gives being to what issues from the act so God knows it as giving it being so he is in and insofar as he gives it's being he is its creator and he has searching knowledge of what in those acts can be described as being but he knows them as effectuated through your choice so the fact of they'r being the fruit of your choice is baked into his knowledge not that he is learning from you but he knows them as kind of earmarked as the free choice of one Matt Fred from South Australia I find that really hard to understand more than that I like I haven't I haven't even come up with a way to make that make sense in my head okay yes keep talking no no no no no I mean you know it's also difficult sometimes when you're trying to like a host an interview and trying to ask the right questions and also trying to do this but like I feel like if I you and I were just like legit having a B I'm like that just sounds like maybe that's not true and when we say things like the unsearchable depths of God's wisdom maybe that's just like flowery talk to cover up something that's actually a contradiction yeah I like it yeah what's so let's go no I mean I mean that's that could be the case I mean so you have a number of factors that that make it difficult to understand one like the person explaining it in this podcast episode you know like let's be honest like he doesn't really know what he's talking about like he kind of does but he kind of doesn't and you know some of its some of its grammar or some of its dialectic and some of its rhetoric you know he's just he's just stirring any other sentences he has a basic idea of the thing but he's also like mildly concerned that he not looked dumb in for other other people I'm so like if he's like yeah I actually don't really know this that well he's not he's not going to admit it you know except tangentially or ironically as a commentary upon it so like so he's not going to communicate these concepts in all of their luminous clarity because he doesn't understand them and all the woman is clarity he's just kind of gesturing towards it I mean this theoretical person whom we're discovering in this example and then there's the fact of our like again we're Idol makers so we want everything we want to conceive of everything after a material form and that's fine you know that's totally fine because this is our nature so when we get to the limits of our understanding oftentimes we find out that like our concepts just break up against the shoals of gods immateriality it's just really really hard for us to conceive of what it means to be God because we're not and he's so far exceeds us that st. Thomas says we're closer to like flies then we already got hmm so there's that like it's just it's just hard to conceal like if you've ever read that book flatland I forget yeah gosh it's fantastic it's sweet but it's like it was at an Anglican priest who wrote that I think nice yeah but it's like it's like a kind of exercise in this type of conceptual leap like you can't you can't conceive of life in 3d if you're accustomed to living life in 2d and look for I mean god lives in like 18,000 D I mean he lives in infinity but that's a stupid example you get what I'm saying I mean yeah you watch the movie interstellar and you're like wait tesseract we're talking about like fourth and fifth dimensions and then you know Matthew McConaughey is gesturing to Murph through a like what the heck and love is a and it's awesome it's beautiful but it's the cut it's the type of thing that inspires really cool conversation afterwards because it forces you to broaden your mind in a way that like Marvel's you know most recent Slam Jam flick didn't like what we're doing right now is an exercise in watching good cinema I mean it's like a similar feeling so there's yeah okay so the so the guy doesn't understand the thing is bigger than the compass of our minds and there's also the fact that like human language is it's just limited in its in its capacity to convey the truth itself you know it's just gonna it's gonna limp along its gonna try its best it's gonna gesture it's gonna point but it's always going to fail to capture it like this like the French talk about like lumo juste I'm like I'm always in search of like the perfect wood with the right than valence you know but like you you'll never get it it'll always be on the tip of your tongue and that's just part of what it means to be Christian yeah if you like had the perfect speech for it you would be either a beast or a demigod and I think both of those are scary options no that's interesting like I think the objection to that from the kind of atheistic perspective is look this is a meaningful question and you you may have just answered that very well and I'm just not understanding it but you know it's a meaningful question and if you can't answer it and then appeal to the fact that God is mysterious this is essentially a sort of God of the gaps argument we're like well I mean God's bigger than us and language and all that and I think for some Christians they kind of get a little nervous they're like okay maybe this isn't true then if we can't understand this but then I also see your point that if you could give like a one-liner that helps me know whether God's omniscience forfeits my free will or not then I probably haven't understood it very well or at all yeah I mean like okay so in this let's just I mean be honest I'm going to Mystic hack I just repeat what he says but when st. Thomas gives a defense of free will what does he say he says like if there weren't free will it wouldn't make sense for us to make commands or prohibitions it wouldn't make sense for us to like express gratitude or to counsel or exhort people like Chesterton extends that logic and he says it just wouldn't make sense to say please pass the salt nor would it make sense to say thank you for the ketchup you know so free will is baked into our experience of human life and what is a philosopher to do but to like unpack his experience of human life necessary seems manifestly to be the case that we are free and so we start with that is a kind of arch datum the way that same timer starts in the first way with the fact that like motion is evident to the senses he doesn't prove the fact that our senses aren't deceived because he's not interested in that question because if you start down that road it's just so hard to like live your life and epistemological Christ yeah rather be living and observing rather than proving that one can live and observe fair enough so someone could kind of agree with you then we have free will but then the question on the table is God might not be omniscient then if I can't get an answer to that question again do you see yeah that's good though I mean that like I I agree like some of these things are sort of self-evident to us the fact that you exist even though I've never saw your mind I hadn't experienced your thoughts but I accept that you exist I accept that the country Yemen exists though I've never been there and so on I've never accessed these things and so I accept that I free will in a you know because I experienced myself being free so okay so I can grant that at least you've solved one half of the puzzle there like that's what you just did there which is which is assuring yeah reassuring the way so father Thomas Joseph taught me Christology and grace and he just talked about it like he says you circumscribe the mystery so you say like this is true and this is true and this is true and this is true and this is true and that gives you a kind of certitude of tendency that if these things are all true and we have to hold them together and there seemed to be contradictions but that like it's those contradictions that we should probe and we need to be content with the fact that some days will come away from this contradictions and say I don't quite understand but that's the whole point of faith seeking understanding and granted you know to an atheist at faith seeking understanding is going to look like wishful thinking but to the Christian believer in the context of a church which has philosophical and theological and mystical experiences of these mysteries as both you know inquired into but also suffered there's there's something broader there's something bigger there's something deeper there's something wider than just the inquiry inquiry of one human mind and so to say I don't understand it can never be the final judgement on something because it yeah it just has a tendency to be like well Mika testicle I'm thinking of a card or John Henry Newman z' idea of what it's a quits he called what do you call that the illative a lot of sense yeah yeah so the idea that and we're kind of going a little far afield here sorry about that but this idea that okay so I don't actually know the shape of Australia you know or the USA I've never actually personally walked along and marked it all out but I do have maps and I do have you know what people tell me and all of these things sort of add up to me having a certainty that I myself can't Ghana through my own experience but in which I'm justified in having I think something similar happens with God yeah no I think yeah right I was like yeah at a certain point Newman talks about how he couldn't keep himself out of the church because the evidence just kept stacking up mmm and I mind you there's there's evidence to the contrary in as much as you know Christians can sometimes be bad people or we make certain decisions which expose us to ridicule or potentially cause scandal you know so there's there's counters there's counter signs as well but there are quite a few sign you know this is where we talk about the signs of credibility right or the pre ambulette a that there are things that are available to reason that seem to testify the fact that that something's going on here and at least merits consideration even if we ultimately do dismiss it you have to pause for a second say okay the claim here is that you know the second of the Most Holy Trinity took human flesh was born suffered died rose to deliver us from our sins that we might live with the most you know the Most High God unto ages of Ages that's like a huge claim and that's a claim that no other religion is making so while historically there are many things about the Christian tradition that are ugly this still resonates throughout the world and throughout the centuries in such a ways to command the attention of those who would turn to it so something like that amen okay so regarding omniscience let me just say one more point I could see somebody saying you know all of this philosophical mumbo jumbo that you've got yourself kind of trapped in is blinding you from what the Bible clearly teaches and this would have to do with God's omnipresence omniscience and omnipotence that we read things about God in Scripture that seem to indicate the opposite why not just take the Bible prima-facie than this very complicated system Thomas Aquinas or whoever came up with one example would be from Hosea chapter 4 verse 6 where God says my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because you have rejected knowledge I also will reject you from being my priest since you have forgotten the law of God I also will forget your children so someone might ask if God's omniscient how can he forget and you can think of we could kind of accumulate examples right we took like God's right hand seeing God's back all these sorts of things yeah sure so there obviously there are different ways to read scripture different people read scripture in different ways but I think a good way to learn how to read scriptures to read scripture with the Christian tradition and from an early stage in the Christian tradition Scripture is read not just prima-facie but sometimes it's read metaphorically sometimes it's read analogically sometimes it's read parabolically so one has to be attentive to the literary genre in which the text is communicating and specifically to the the kind of designs of the sacred inspired author who is a person of a time and place addressing people of a time in place and that's that has to be taken account of and that's like the whole point of the historical critical method which can sometimes be used poorly but you know you see like benedict xvi it can sometimes be used to great benefit so i think that you know the interpretation of scripture is something that is conducted within the life of the church and that it uses the best scientific methods as concern form genre source redaction all of these different things and that we have to put in the work to understand what is intended and what is communicated so that way we have greater access to the God who is being revealed therein and with things like that I think you have you know like the right hand of the Lord I think what we're describing there is metaphorical with the Lord not forgetting I think what you have is a kind of a break hyperbole so yeah I think I think that that's just like I don't know like a basic thing we can talk more about it but that's my idea yeah well I mean I mean Aquinas addresses this directly I don't know where I remember reading it where somebody brings up this very thing you know maybe I had to do when the question was asked where that God had a body and he P makes the same point you did okay yes pre-report in the DiPrima parts question one in that like introductory word about soccer doctrina he asked about the interpretation of Scripture and one of the later articles I remember which I think they're like 10 articles in that question but it's like whatever he talked about the way in which scripture reveals and he talked about metaphor sweet sweet sweet hey how you doing you need a break you're doing okay I'm feeling groovy man all right moms cruising well then let's tackle omnipotence finger really omnipotency the idea that God is all-powerful so smarty pants if if God is all-powerful can he create a rock so heavy that even he can't lift it yeah it's awesome so here again man we need some more conceptual therapy so what does that even mean you got to ask yourself like what does that even mean what does it mean to say that God lifts rocks so already we're like talking about God after the manner of a material thing not necessarily he could lift it with his mind couldn't he right his mind which is like you know us kind of like taking the next step we're gods like a shadow dude or the shadow mind doing shadow games like what is what would it mean for God to manipulate a rock so we have our minds like a really big rock and then we have in our minds it being like lifted or moved from the surface of the earth like to above the surface of the earth all right cool so by what type of agency would that happen in the ordinary course it's by some other thing a you know you know like putting force on the rock which is equal to or exceeding the force which the rut you know gravity exerts on the rock leading it to the center of the circle the center or surface of the earth so can God can God make a rock so big that he cannot supply sufficient force for it to tend in the opposite trajectory yes that's the question the answer is no okay good he's not all-powerful next question I'm sure no because what you have there is like a kind of language trick and then you try to prove from the language trick that God is not who people think him to be but it misconceives the nature of God from the outset right so again it's thinking about God is one type of cause among a mix of other types of cause you know like this Rock exerts 32 Newton's of you know down towards the center of the earth can God's apply the requisite 37 Newton's of force like you oh like what does that even mean yeah I can think of another way it's kind of incoherent because you're essentially asking can a being with infinite lifting power create something that he can't lift well that would have to be more than infinite in weight and more than infinite is a sort of combination of words that equal nonsense and God can't do nonsense and his inability to do nonsense you know isn't a isn't a mark against him being all-powerful it rather the problems not with his or powerfulness but the question may be yeah yeah so I think I mean like what is trying to say is like okay either God can me you know like so if God can lift the thing then he hasn't made a rock too heavy for him to live so he's limited in his power like he can't make that particular rock but then if God can't lift the thing then he is limited his power by virtue of the fact that he can't lift it but like in the very description of the the word play isn't inherent or like a kind of intrinsic contradiction because it just misconceives of the nature of God's agency it misconceives in the nature of God's you know as a cause and and also of like the creative power of God like God is causing the thing to be and to act as a rock which is to say like it exerts a force of gravity it resists being broken up it has its own kind of material integrity but yeah it's like I don't know maybe maybe I'm just being like silly at this point whoo but yeah it's just like it's it's the kind of question that you shouldn't start answering because then you just it's not that you get trapped you just get exhausted it's like what I talk it's like when you talk to your two-year-old or your four-year-old Jim Jim Gaffigan has that joke he said he's walking down the road and his son says he points at an antenna on the car and he says hey dad look a stick and Jim Gaffigan a stupid kid that's not a stick it's an antenna and he says what's an antenna anyway yeah you're right it's a stick like children's line of questions and it's like you know can we go outside and play today it's like you know why well because it's it's raining why I was because you know like the Sun shines and like in water and like evaporates and the condenses in clouds and it precipitates over a landmass and you know right why well because like you know the way the atmosphere works and the position of the Sun the earth sir you know I can I think he's like why and the guy just breaks down at the end he goes because some things are and some things hard to borrow a phrase from Sam Harris at some point you've hit bedrock what is it no you hit metaphysical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question there you go quoting atheists here well and I think it's also important to point out too that like God's being all-powerful doesn't mean the ability to do what contradicts his nature or to do what's absurd so yeah God can't create a square circle but not because he's not all-powerful but because the square circle isn't anything God can't create another God for him to worship so I think might like a quick way to kind of diffuse this question is to ask somebody well what do you think omnipotence means and if you say the ability to do anything the answer is yeah but a square circle isn't something yeah and I think it Lewis said this somewhere maybe in the problem of pain he said you know just because you add to the beginning of a sentence can God it doesn't make necessary or question necessarily intelligible you know if I say can God purple oven toaster gremlin the the answer is no but that doesn't mean God's not all-powerful yeah that's it well then how would you say what does it mean to say God is all-powerful so that God can do all that accords with his nature and the nature of the thing that if God is creating or interacting with so that it can be conceived of as a metaphysical possibility which is beyond a logical possibility right so it can be conceived as a as a metaphysical possibility that God can do those things so yeah st. Thomas asked about the power of God it's like at the end of the section on the one guys like question 25 and there he's basically just he's trying to consider whether it got you know like whether God can improve upon what he did or you know like specifically why God did what he did and there you have just some helpful distinctions like God isn't about the work of optimization you know God isn't about growing his business as quickly as possible God isn't about you know the work of having the best like bureaucratic managerial structure to things you know so as to most quickly disseminate information I could have done any number of things but he did the things that he did and our work is to like figure out why rather than question that so it's to appreciate what's on offer and you know it's I suppose it can be helpful to do thought experiments about what he could have done but that's not nearly as interesting as what he did do because what he did do has being in a thicker sense I think that's I mean that's the kind of basic trajectory of his musings alright let's wrap this up with a sort of pastoral sort of implication what is it what does it mean kind of in in my life as a Christian to know that God is omnipresent well let's just drop the Latin to know that he's uh in all places and in all times that he's all-powerful and that he's all-knowing what does that mean for me so I think that like a great passage to which we can return is Matthew 6 27 through 34 so right there in the Sermon on the Mount at the end of the sixth chapter when he says consider the lilies of the field and neither toil nor spin it's Solomon and all of his glory is not a rate as these or consider the birds of the air they neither sow nor reap and norther they gather into barns and yet you know they are richly provided for and the whole point of it is to say that we ought not worry not just like don't be anxious but literally like it's a it's an exhortation to entrustment or to abandonment to God the days evil let the days evil be sufficient for the day you know seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all of these things will be added unto you so God knows and God loves God sees and he has a plan and our lives are part of that plan and we do best when we are cognizant of and given to that plan we operate better as secondary causes or instrumental causes in his plan when we're not worrying about it or rebelling against it but when we're entering into it willingly and lovingly and that can be a really perilous thing because we want to exercise control and we want to be certain of everything that you know flows from our pen or issues from our mouths but God is asking us simply to be given to him and when we are at peace interiorly we reflect more perfectly the rays of God's divine light but when were agitated you know like the surface of an agitated lake we do so less well and imperfectly and so like our the basis of our being at peace the basis of our being given unto God and and and ceding our claim to anxiety is is it's a metaphysical point you know like metaphysics is mysticism right it's it's to say that God knows that God loves that God sees and is present and that should afford us some consolation not not because of you know the fancy words but because this is what God is making known in Scripture and that it's something that can really shape our hearts and direct our gaze to him with greater confidence and trust beautiful amen brother Ben all right let's do a shout out for TI and whatever other podcasts and fantastic things you've been involved in lately dig alright so what's going on the TI hustle so we're doing these quarantine lectures so you know different Dominicans and lay professors from the Dominican House of studies giving lectures on Tuesday and Thursday nights and then you got questions and answers you can join on zoom' YouTube Facebook and then we're doing like a Qantas one-on-one live so we're going deeper on a Qantas one-on-one vids you'll watch a couple of idiots tarts and then at 8:00 p.m. one of the speakers from the Aquinas 101 series give it like a little lecture and then have an extended time for Q&A so that way you can deepen in dig dig deeper on that have these been live streams on YouTube exactly it's gone well yeah Lauri oh that is hilarious digital encoders man what a rodeo yeah so much stress it's it's something that's especially stressful about nevermind who cares nobody cares about that but yeah so quarantine lecture is going well Qantas won't want to steal a thing and then the other big deal is so God's planning is the podcast of handful of friars of the province of st. Joseph Dominican friars and that's just like a kind of Catholic miscellany all things Catholic so 30 minutes a week we've been doing on Lexi o Davina's for Lent and Easter like quarantine Lexi o to Venus to prepare for the Sunday readings were collaborating with the sisters of life so we will have kind of released a pentecost retreat that will have started on pentecost and you can listen to at your leisure so for Dominican friars and three sisters of life oh man beautiful yes Rocksteady just talking about the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit so that should be that should be illumining father James's last line in his lecture is that's the Holy Spirit blowing through your mind I was just like so yeah okay so just two mystic Institute people should type into YouTube I'll put some links below but yeah it's a mystic Institute or Aquinas 101 you'll see the stuff quarantine lectures Aquinas 101 and then God's planning you can find those episodes on YouTube and yeah you can stream that through any podcast app good man well thanks for being here now don't go anywhere right now because I've got some questions I want to ask you for our patreon segment excellent okay thank you very much for being here I hope you got a lot out of that discussion just a reminder if you want to get the rest of the discussion where me and father Gregory Pine discuss coronavirus how that will affect the church all you gotta do is become a patron and you'll get access to the post-show wrap up not just of this video but all the other post-show wrap ups that I've done with Peter Kreeft Trent Horne Scott Hahn Steve Ray you name it if I've done an interview of them that you should be able to find it there all right so here's patreon here's what it looks like patreon.com slash matt fred right now we are doing a couple of massive projects that we will probably be telling you about very soon one I can tell you about is our pints with aquinas espanol channel okay we are paying professional voice actors to dub dub plants with aquinas clips so that we can better reach out to our spanish-speaking community that's costing money other things we're doing a costing money a lot of money you've probably noticed the improvement in the camera these sorts of things so if you want to join this online community at patreon.com slash Matt Fred you're welcome to come here I'm not gonna tell you what you get you can just come and look at it for yourself they're all listed here you get a bunch of free stuff in return when you become a supporter not the least of gifts is this beautiful pints with Aquinas beer stein whoo come on come on autofocus let's see let's see if I can get that to work no it's not working it's almost like my lens tired and it no longer wishes this is the greatest beer stein no nay greatest drinking vessel I think ben shapiro has some bloody thing doesn't he some tumblr tumblr that's nice this was handmade one at a time in the United States by one person you see this here someone hand-painted that inside tumblr so patreon.com slash mat Fred thanks for being here do us a favor and subscribe and if you've liked this show please do share it it really does help bye

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 29,568

Rating: 4.9470201 out of 5

Keywords: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, God's presence, all-knowing God, god is everywhere, jesus christ, catholicism, christianity, christian theology, philosophy, catholic theology, dominican theology, dominican catholic, Fr. Gregory Pine, Matt Fradd, Pints with Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Scott Hahn, Bishop Robert Barron, Word on Fire, Chris Stephanick, Leah Darrow, Steubenville Conferences, Life Teen

Id: KPW-g1VIrxQ

Length: 86min 12sec (5172 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020