clement of alexandria post

src/posts/many-sources-many-streams.md

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+Many sources, many streams; one water, one ocean. Philosophy, contemplation, and revelation all lead to the One Truth, God revealed in the flesh and the spirit, our one Lord Jesus Christ. Philosophy builds the structure for faith and love to flow -- the bedrock and banks of the river for the living waters of Christ to move through us. Defending the trust we place in Him is possible through the rigorous toolkit that philosophy provies. Especially today where skepticism of God is commonplace, yet massive ignorance of the principles of logic hold people enslaved to slogans and catchphrases, it is increasingly imporatnt to be able to swiftly and deftly break down these feeble yet slippery attacks on our faith.
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+Just the other day I was engaged in such an exchange online. Someone claimed that an omnipotent divinity is logically impossible because it would mean that it could do inherently impossible things, such as make a right triangle for which a^2 + b^2 !== c^2. This is essentially a rehash of the old quip about whether God could make a rock so large even He couldn't move it. Now, if our minds have been honed by the forge of philosophy, we will immediately see that this is either a gap in basic understanding of how syllogisms work or purely sophistical manipulation of language. What's going on here is a shifting of the terms halfway through:
+1. Take a right triangle, i.e. the squares of its two smaller sides add up to the square of its hypotenuse
+2. Now imagine that God makes the squares of its two smaller sides not add up to the square of its hypotenuse <-- This makes it no longer a right triangle by definition
+3. Look! God made a right triangle that...isn't a right triangle? <-- Wrong
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+The game is an old sophistic trick found in Plato's Euthydemus: take a term, let its definition be stated so vaguely (or not at all) such that no one notices what's coming next, change an essential aspect of the definition -- and then, with a flourish of the wrist, declare your shocking conclusion!
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+The issue here is simple once you, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, insist on clear definitions: if the sum of the squares of a triangle's sides don't add up to the square of its hypotenuse, that simply means that this triangle is not a right triangle. This hypothetical triangle that doesn't fit the Pythagorean theoreem simply doesn't fit the definition of a right triangle. So it is not that God "cannot" do this in the sense of lacking an ability to do something; God is not lacking the pwoer to do something that is nonsense, because by making such a change, we are no longer talking about the same thing.
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+Can God make black itself be white? This as coherent as asking whether:
+- a lamp can be Tuesday's cousin
+- you can draw a four-sided triangle
+- you can be a married bachelor
+- the color red weighs 5.5kg or 3.4kg
+- an even number could not be divisible by 2
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+That these questions are nonsense is clear to anyone with common sense; *why* they are nonsense is even clearer if you have engaged with the works of Plato and Aristotle.
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+While faith is not reducible to logic, most of the arguments against God's existence can be dismissed with a clear exposition rooted in Aristotelian logic. To wit, Aristotle himself demonstrates this with his arguments for the prime mover, the source of all creation.
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