The Armchair Thomist

 I decided to interrogate Catholic Answers's AI "Justin" about the relationship between the Church's general teaching on the knowledge of Universal Salvation and the teaching on the sole mission and end of the Church by giving it a three-premise argument, as you'll see below. A part of me wanted to do this because of Trent Horn's recent video on Universalism that I found very poor. Unsurprisingly, Justin wound up in a contradiction it could not get out of. It is clear that the AI is not programmed for objective analysis, but to defend what it perceives to be as mainstream Catholic doctrine at all costs, even at the cost of a formal contradiction. I've posted some of the transcript here. Read to your heart's content, as I even went longer than what is posted below though ultimately in vain. I also am aware AI is not perfect and can contradict itself, but generally, ChatGPT will concede fully to its contradiction, while Justin will not admit its failure,...

     As I haven't written or recorded anything in over a year, something I've done before, I figured I would post my brief critique on a section in Aquinas's writings on predestination. Philosophically, I'm still fairly Thomistic, but I have been having issues with Aquinas' theology. This post may in fact be the first of a series of critiques of not only massa damnata , viz., the view that the majority of mankind is damned forever, but of a certain traditional Western understanding of damnation in general that I have come to find unsatisfactory. Enough of the detour; let's get into the topic.        To begin, in Article 7 on the question of Predestination in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas poses the question of whether the number of the predestined is certain. The hypothetical objector in Objection 3 supposes that, in the works of nature, good is found in the majority of things, so if the number of the predestined are fixed, then ...

     Among the variety of views on the nature of hell and damnation, annihilationism is certainly a minority. However, I have seen somewhat of a rise in its popularity, along with universalism, presumably due to moral dissatisfaction with the eternity of hell and the theodicies for that view. For those who are unfamiliar, annihilationism, broadly speaking, is the view that the damned will eventually be annihilated. This contrasts with universalism in which everyone is saved (or eventually saved if the view allows for temporary damnation) and with the view that the damned exist forever.     There are indeed simpler refutations of annihilationism than that which I will present here, specifically ones from the immortality of the intellectual soul and God's justice (see Grenier), but the argument here is one that came about through sudden epiphany and is, from what I can tell, a novel line of reasoning.     Before I begin, I have some preliminary remarks. ...

     While reading Existence and the Existent  by 20th Century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, which is an amazing book covering the depth of esse  in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the author put forth quite a beautiful line of reasoning for the nihilistic entailments of atheism. That form of reasoning is not novel nor particular to Maritain, but it is Maritain's particular formulation that struck me as profound. I say "line of reasoning" over "argument" because it is written more as a stream of consciousness as opposed to providing justification and defenses for premises, so this presentation may not even be what Maritain himself would agree with or what he was trying to say; it is only an interpretation with some of my own insights. If the reader wishes to see the original prose, I would implore them to purchase the book.    Maritain first begins with the fact that the human subject knows in an objective manner, i.e., by objectizing the subje...

     The Nature-Grace debate may not be something a non-Christian is familiar with, but in short, it is a long-standing debate in Christian theology as to how God's grace (some actuality in relation to the capacity for holiness given to creatures as a free gift directly from God) relates to the natures (the essences of things understood as principles of the scope of a thing's activities) of creatures. The debate, as least from what I have seen, focuses on whether the giving of God's (salvific) grace to creatures satisfies a natural appetite in the creature or a supernatural appetite in the creature (and thus whether the appetite for God is a natural or supernatural appetite), the degree to which God is obligated to Himself to provide creatures with (salvific) grace, and whether the beatific vision (the experience of God's essence and the final end of Man) is a natural end or supernatural end.      Here I have whipped up a few arguments for the position that...

    A s the integrated substances that humans are (an example of this integrity is between our intellects which can move our bodies to certain ends and our bodies which can influence what objects we conceptualize, where this mind-body interaction would be expected in an integrated and unified substance), the intellect and body share certain qualities as being apart of that same substance. Here is one quality that they share: just as one can condition their body to be physically healthy, to form new reflexes, to get used to a poison through repetition, or to get used to a certain kind of food such that the bodily appetites are directed toward that food and opposed to others, the same can be said of the intellect, that it can be conditioned in a similar way to be habitually inclined toward certain objects as opposed to others. Now, the intellect's proper and principle object is intelligible being as such , which entails that the passive intellect stands in potency to the re...