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 ...

     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...