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 ...

     In light of today's Scripture readings, I have decided to share my thoughts on what it means to fear the Lord and particularly how it is relevant to the beginning of wisdom. Usually, "fear" is not taken to refer to an emotional state of distress, worry, or anxiety toward something but rather a reverence toward the thing as we might revere our parents. However, although reverence may play a large factor in the fear of the Lord, I do not see fear and reverence as convertible. Fear, it seems to me, is reverence with a specific condition, i.e., fear is reverence toward a thing because of its standing toward the fearful insofar as the fearful might receive punishment from the feared. It is a recognition of one's own standing or relationship to the feared.     Why is this the beginning of wisdom? To tell an anecdote, I have, for most of my life, been commended for my moral character and commitment to higher principles than the average person, and have been told t...