Pints With Aquinas - 209: What is God Like? (WARNING: Heavy Philosophy) W/ Fr. Gregory Pine

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

In this episode of Pints with Aquinas, Fr. Gregory Pine and I discuss the "3 Omnis": God's omnipresence, His omniscience and His omnipotence. What do they mean, and what are the common objections to them? In this episode, watch as we: DESTROY Richard Dawkins' argument against God's omniscience and omnipotence Discuss the concept of "Molinism" Talk about Ricky Gervais' comment that "God is in my butthole" (sorry, his words, not mine) Plus, we answer a lot of common questions about the "omnis," like, "If God knows everything, then He knows if I'm going to Hell or not. What can I do about that?" Buckle up, and get ready for an INTENSE theological episode! SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints  Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/    Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd    STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING  Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show.  LINKS  Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pints_w_aquinas/ MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://amzn.to/2MaKf7V Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://amzn.to/2Xf94pC  The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform -- Website - mattfradd.com Facebook - facebook.com/mattfradd/ Twitter - twitter.com/mattfradd

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd 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 omnis. God's omnipresence, his omniscience and his omnipotence. What do they mean? What are some objections to them? Let's see. What do we get into? It was a long and very fun chat. Oh, yeah.

Father Gregory Pine destroys Richard Dawkins' supposed argument. Well, not supposed. It was an argument. It was just a bad one. And Father Gregory shows why. Dawkins has an argument against God's omniscience and omnipotence. He tries to say they conflict in the God delusion. We talk about Molinism and why 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 talk about that. Oh, and we also kind of ask 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 going to 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 a sort of fatalism? So this is a really kind of intense theological episode. So I think you're going to really love it. What do you think?

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to the bonus questions I ask Father Gregory Pine, become a patron at patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. We have a big discussion about how we think coronavirus is going to affect the church, and we got into a lot of interesting things. So you only get access to that part of the interview if you become a patron at patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. Fair enough? Good. Glad you're here. Here's my chat with Father Gregory Pond. I get emails constantly about things that you can do about the bags under your eyes. You don't. I do, I do, yeah.

Yeah. Hopefully almost. You know, are you getting beaten? Yep. 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 Lent's off to a good start. Terrible. Awesome.

Father Gregory Pine, g'day. How are you? I'm doing well, thank you. How are you? Now, you probably looks like that I'm looking over your shoulder, but I'm looking at the good camera. It's very confusing. No, no, I got you. But anyway, how you been? I'm doing well. Let's see. Life in Washington, D.C. 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 getting better. The Diocese of Arlington, you know, opening up the Diocese, Archdiocese of Baltimore,

opening up 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 it's Mystic Institute hustle just proceeds to pay. So we're just trying to figure out ways to have events with people, you know, because, uh, yeah, the technology hustles, it's good. It supplies for a need in a time of pandemic, but people want to be with people. So I'm trying to make that happen. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Our church, our Byzantine church, opened up. We've been having divine liturgy for the last, I'd say, three, yeah, 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. Um, all right. I have many thoughts. It's hard to say though. Okay. So I think the internet is a weird place. Uh, 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. So the internet's like that. it's just like your whole life gets refracted through this bizarro land and so live stream mass you know i could say some things many things what i will say is that i did i i did not watch one nor did i have any desire to nor would i yeah i mean that's basically how I feel. I understand that, you know, pastors... I need to backpedal after you've finished. Continue, and then I'll backpedal. Okay, here we go.

I understand that pastors want to maintain a 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 phenomenologically, when you kneel in front of your television,. 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 just 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, uh, yeah, I think people just, I think people just want to see the Lord. And, uh, 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 am I participants in this? Um, because like watching live sports makes sense to us and we feel a part of that, but watching, watching mass is not, to us and we feel a part of that but watching watching mass is not it's not a live sport it's not a live sport uh 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 live stream mass like do i have to

confess that like i didn't i didn't live stream a mass on sunday and i was like no you do not no but you you have to confess asking me that now no sorry no yeah because i think oftentimes it'll be more fruitful for you to do something else you know like pray the rosary with your family or you're taking the words from my mouth so okay so let me backpedal because 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 television 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 uh you know like your family you want to see your family on 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 of 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 lead my family in prayer. Why would I turn on the television? So we would do these large Akathist to Mary 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 gone too far. I didn't do that. Okay, yeah, just checking. Yeah, I didn't see actually how that how that had any real connection to you worshiping as a family but i'm glad that well i offered i offered the sacrifice on the no no oh i'm gonna get in trouble um you're doing great yeah yeah 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 a convent with 75 men. So we have mass here.

And then we continue to have mass for certain religious communities in the area and things like that. So yeah, it's certainly, it's limited. You know, it's funny as 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 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 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 friaries dominicans live in priories the kind The kind of typical language, yeah, exactly, whoa! The typical language to describe a house of Dominicans is priory. You'll often hear it referred to as that in just common parlance, but

in a lot of the order, they refer to it as a convent, just like the Latin conventum, whatever, you get it coming together. So, yeah, I say that sometimes, but maybe I'm just weird. Well, that's certainly the case, regardless of what. That's why we love you. Yeah, bingo, thanks. So maybe I'm just weird. Well, that's certainly the case, regardless of what. That's why we love you. Yeah, bingo.

Thanks. So I'm pumped to talk about the omnis today. And I want to kind of ease into this because I know, like, you know more than any human should probably on these 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' 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 in 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 God, 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 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 in 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 we do, you know, like stuff that's kind of part of his identity, but less so than his truest identity. And then he goes through all these different ways of qualifying how 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 what a thing could be, but isn't yet. And act is the realization of a thing's 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 6 feet, you know, 4 inches. I'm like 175 pounds. But I am potentially 210 if I let myself go.

I am potentially 210 if I let myself go. And instead of eating a balanced diet and exercising, I just sit in the same place and just consume an incredible amount of calories. I just order Chick-fil-A for breakfast, Chick-fil-A for lunch, Chick-fil-A for dinner, and I get milkshakes every single time. And I make a serious point of having myself conveyed about the house on a litter. I was like, listen, I'm not in the walking business because I got to gain 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.

So 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 will get to that later in the afternoon. God just is pure being. 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 St. Thomas says we call those things good, which we desire, which kind of elicit our appetite. And God is good in 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 omnipotent or omnipotent. And I think like the way that he describes it is that he'll go through that 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 Prima Pars, which, you know, there's some heavy philosophical language in 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 of being, then we can qualify the way we understand God and kind of rule out certain things that aren't the case. Okay, just want to pause a moment to say thank you to our second sponsor. Who is that? You've guessed it.

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I was going to 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, we can't know anything about him. We can't even speak about Him. Aquinas disagrees with that while saying we can't know what He is. So maybe just kind of break down that via negativa for us. Yeah, sure. So that's like a famous text at the beginning of question three of the Prima Pars, where he says, all right, 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 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 going to 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 sang 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, 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 etc., etc., etc. So we're ruling things out when we say those things about God. I'm trying to think of an analogy, and this might be terrible, so please feel free to shoot this down.

But 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, but then I walk in and I see, 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 an ignorant being that came in and it was an intelligent, it wasn't, it wasn't a, like a, an 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. All right. Or the wind blew it open. It's like, well, I live in Washington, D.C. 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. 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 you can't rule it out you know very intelligent dog 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 as to hone in on what it is and then yeah and then you go into your your room and 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. Um, 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're like, you're again, you're honing in, honing in, and then you get to,

this is a bad man. You know, this is a 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 rapina, like rapacity. I think that's the truth. Yeah, St. Thomas describes the difference between robbery and theft.

He's like, one is done in open combat robbery, and theft is done in secret. I just love that. I want to grow up to be a robber. I want to take my guys on. That's awesome. All right. All right. Okay.

So we can't know what God is, but we can come to know certain things about him by ruling 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 this show. Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. I don't know what order you want to take them in, but before we even really kind of delve into any of them, can you just give us a brief synopsis? What do they mean in English and what do they mean in general? Yeah, sure. So I guess the way that St. Thomas would treat them would be omnipresence, omniscience, and then omnipotence. Because omnipresence is a matter of being, omniscience is a matter of knowing, and omnipotence is a matter of willing. So I think that makes 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. 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. No. But it is to say that God's knowledge and giving of being to 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. All right, that's good. So let's, instead of asking you right off the bat to explain omnipresence, let me ask you a different question. How do people, including faithful Catholics, usually misunderstand what omnipresence means? What are their false beliefs about omnipresence? Right. So I think that a kind of... Sometimes people will talk about it as if it were pantheism or panentheism. 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 associate 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 and the world. The two are just kind of coterminous. And then panentheism 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 outworking of the nature of God. So what we're saying here is not that. 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 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 gives that to be, and he gives that to act, and he makes you to be as you are, and to know and to love as you do, but you aren't God in the strict sense. So I think that's a helpful way to put it around at the outset. 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 the universe like a physical thing, like a gas. Okay. That'd be, yeah, that'd be wild. Yeah. So what would you say to that? Yeah.

So 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. Because 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 if we think about it in those terms, we're always going to 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.

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 were. 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 as 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 in human flesh in the incarnation. He gives us the sacraments to which we can lay hold. He 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 something to worship. Okay, so 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's spread throughout the universe like a sort of gas. How is God everywhere? What does that mean? 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 when 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 things that are in this, you know, 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, technology. Computers, cameras, the Archangel Raphael, 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 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 the gift of being, so long as the thing is. So someone might say, though, that sounds okay, maybe, when it comes to stegosauruses, 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 Nikon, 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 which things, you know, like you can think about it in terms of what they come from. And those things that they come from could have been or could not have been and yet are so when we talk about cameras the end 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 a substance or way that you are a substance but it's if if not a substance it's composed of substances and those substances need to be, but they only can be in a way that is shared in God's being, as it were. So it's 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 God creates all things to be, and he continues to hold them in being. Because I don't have sufficient explanation for the fact that I am. It's like, hey, why do you exist? Well, it's like, I got this bod here, and I got this soul that's kind of taking my bod to and fro.

It's like, no, but your bod could not have been. You could have gotten, well, whatever, who cares? But it also could have been otherwise. It could have been better, or it could have been worse, or it could have been this You could have gotten, well, whatever, who cares? But it also could have been otherwise. Like it could have been better or 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 Sheed has this cool illustration in Theology for Beginners.

Yes, I know what you're going to say. Oh, perfect, nice. So he's talking about how you think of a carpenter who makes a piece of furniture, 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 it continues to last by virtue of the fact that it's composed of wood, and that wood 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 of 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 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 Pine? 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?

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 uh can act wherever in the universe yeah that was a terrible way of putting it i'm sorry he's he's yeah you you say it better for me please no that's great um so actually saint thomas asked the question of whether so in one sense yes in another sense no so like saint augustine asked the question of whether—so in one sense, yes, and in another sense, no. So like St. Augustine asked the question of whether God is like a world soul, like animating the world. So he says, no, 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 locate the soul in one particular part of the body. It's not like the pineal gland, which Descartes talked about, nor is it 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, okay, that thing is living. And so we reason from that to the fact that there is a soul animating it because it is animate. And so too, 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 we're not going to make like a judgment as to like, you know, like, you know, is it more in the head? Is it more in 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 active being. and the active being is associated with the form and 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 sort of covers everything. And so he's everywhere in the way that, yeah, you think of your body being different places. Yeah, 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 as like conceptual therapy. So we have these notions aboutma, and this is a bigger point, but you can think about it as 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 in need of 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 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 use of the language itself. So it's kind of like analytic, as it were. That's not his principal preoccupation. He's really more just concerned 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 Cashion where he talks about this monk

who espoused what was later called as the anthropomorphite 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, it was really devastating for him, right? So it threw him for a loop, because the way that he conceived of God had provided him much comfort and consolation, and then he came to discover that it was wrong. So he had to begin thinking about God differently, and that involved real detachment. This sounds like the Mormons who have this bodily concept of God, that God has a body. I think they take great comfort from that idea, and I think a similar thing would happen if they came to agree that God didn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in our case, 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 as more real than immaterial things. we often think about material things as more real than immaterial things. But actually like when, 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 want to, you want to eat them. You're like, I want you to be way closer to me than you are right now. Like, uh, you know, like you look at a mom who just like wants to cuddle her child to death. I could just... Look, I don't mean to get sexual here,

but that is absolutely what happens in marriage. You actually try to eat the other person. I want to kiss you. I want to put my mouth on your body. I want to 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 we experience that both as 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 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 an anthropomorphic God. And 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 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 um 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 10 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. It may be him and Brian Regan, but he is absolutely hilarious. But a self-declared atheist, very vocal about it. But, you know, not very sophisticated, even worse than Dawkins is.

And so when he was asked about why he doesn't believe in God, he used this anecdote, and this is going to get us back to omnipresence, and I want you to respond to Ricky Gervais 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 act, oh yeah, is he in my butthole? So what's the answer to that question is God in Ricky Gervais as butthole nice I love how you're welcome immediately applicable you set me up with just very very easy questions that I can comport

myself admirably you know and 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 talked 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 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, you know, continually, so he is in being. And Ricky Gervais is taken account of in God's providential design,

so that even if Ricky Gervais 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 to him by power. God is making Ricky Gervais to act as a human being in a properly human way. So God is not a puppeteer. God is not interested in making automata who 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 that includes Ricky Gervais. Let me ask a less 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. Sure, sure. Nice. I'm rocking some chai tea over here. Sorry, keep going. Chai tea over here so this is sorry keep going chai tea go go go well i mean it gets to the same question we we 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 kind of yeah so so i mean without kind of having to rehash what you just said because maybe you've

already answered it if someone were to just say, okay, God's everywhere. Is he inside this cup? Is there another way you could explain that? If I 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. So I would say God knows the interior of that cup. From the dawn of creation, God foresaw how the interior of that cup would play into your particular story of salvation. That from the interior of that cup, 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 fulfilled 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 and 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, here's another question then. So it sounds like you're saying God is fully present wherever we might go. And we read about this in the Psalms. You know, 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. Okay, so next question is, if He's fully present everywhere, how is He, or is He, more fully present in the Eucharist?

Boom. If He's everywhere, why can't I just eat this cracker, and why can't that be the same as eating the Eucharist? Right. The man makes an excellent point. So St. Thomas, when he talks 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 here it's helpful to talk about the missions of the Most Blessed Trinity. So 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 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 Son is the incarnation. The visible missions of the Holy Spirit are his coming, you know, descending as a dove at the baptism, his 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 as tongues of fire in Acts 2 at Pentecost.

So we see the Son 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 a differentiated way. So he's present to all things, we said, in essence, presence, 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 and 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 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 um so you know like by by giving grace so they signify

something of the past namely the passion 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 the Eucharist makes God present sacramentally under the form of sign and give the very thing which they signify, but also substantially inasmuch 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 the priest says, 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 and 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 in peculiar fashion, but with 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 basic idea. 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 slash objections at you. A 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, so yeah, we've mentioned before, I work for the Thomistica Institute. We have this program called Aquinas 101,

and people sign up and you get emails with vids and people will 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? 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 going to be wholly satisfactory, but it'll give you some principles to think about it. All right. So St. Thomas 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 act, 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 kind of, there's like an animal thought to that, but 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're like, Hmm, these are very tempting options. Um, and you, 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 in the very thing for which he was made. So God gives us the dignity and grandeur of being able to know our end 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 and vocation. 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's by God's predestinating 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 supplying 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 Molinism, and why presumably do you reject Molinism? Right. So in the Molinist understanding, you have this kind of middle knowledge.

I'm springing these sort of sophisticated theological systems upon you without warning. these sort of sophisticated theological systems upon you without warning. No, it's great. I love it. Let's go. So in Molinism, it's common to talk about God's knowledge in two main ways, and then Molinists add a third way of talking about God's knowledge, which they call middle knowledge, so before the prior and 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 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, all right, 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 graces, then you can kind of expect that further graces 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 sovereign in charge. He's giving generously. So the kind of classic Augustinian or Thomistic position tries to hold that off, hold off that notion, and kind of claim the initiation or claim the instigation for God. Good. Okay. Fair enough. Righteous. Thanks. Well done. Okay. Here's another question. Well, this actually, let me quote Dawkins from The God Delusion. Let's do it. In page 101, at least in my book, he says this. And here he's basically making an argument for atheism based on the incoherence of the concept of God, right? He says, incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. 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. Boom. What say you? Dawkins, just a slim thug G. What would I say?

Okay. So is changing one's mind a perfection? That's the question. Right. Because when we talk about God being omnipotent and we're talking about him 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 of being. And so 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 going to 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 these guys really just aren't up to the task. So I will accommodate myself and just have worse ideas. So that way they can think that we're all kind of thrown in together in this general muck and mire of deficient existence.

Like, no, that's insane. He would cease to be God. So when we're talking about God, we're talking about him in terms of perfection. So when we're talking about God, we're talking about him in terms of perfection. So the changing of his mind is not a perfection. To have a vacillating or 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 we learn, we grow, we progress, and that's part of what it means for us to mature and to become holy ourselves. But that's baked in because, you know, like you're born with a blank slate and you grow in 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 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? 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 create it 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 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, 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 an act of the will. What does it mean to have a will? Well, so already, St. Thomas makes 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. I mean, Sigmund Freud, when he talks about human language, he says language is just like need 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 going to 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 the 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 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 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 conjoins 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 the things that he did create could partake thereof and return to him unto the praise of his glory. So 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. Does God know how many Tyrannosaurus Rexes existed? Yes. Does God know whether I'll

be in hell or not? Yes. Does God know whether I will drop this pen or not? Yes. Does God know whether I'll be in hell or not? Yes. Does God know whether I will drop this pen or not? Yes. Do you? No. 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 doofus, 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. I think it's worth revisiting, and I don't think you're a doofus. So, yeah, score, double score. So 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 stated 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 going to use this example so as to illustrate a point about free will, 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 – like blah, blah, blah. So there's good things attached to both. as a result of which I want to show myself, you know, like blah, blah, blah. So there's, there's good things attached to both. And so you're inclined more to one than to the other by virtue of your formation, you know, like where you were born, who your parents were, whether you're a rule breaker or 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 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 your 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, 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 as 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. And insofar as he gives its 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 are 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 Fradd from South Australia.

I find that really hard to understand. More than that. I haven't even come up with a way to make that make sense in my head. Okay. Yeah. Should I keep talking? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, it's also difficult sometimes when you're trying to host an interview and trying to ask the right questions and also trying to do this. But I feel like if you and I were just legit having a beer,

I'd be 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 up? 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, 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 um you know some of its some of its grammar some of its dialectic and some of its rhetoric you know he's just he's just stringing together sentences he has a basic idea of the thing but

he's also like mildly concerned that he not look dumb in front of other people right and 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 um so like so he's not going to communicate these concepts in all of their luminous clarity because he doesn't understand them in all their luminous clarity he's just kind of gesturing towards it i mean 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 God's immateriality It's just really really hard for us to conceive of what it means to be God because we're not and he so far exceeds us that St. Thomas says we're closer to like flies than we are to God. Hmm So there's that like it's just it's just hard to concede like if you've ever read that book flatland I forget. Yeah, gosh, it's fantastic. It's sweet. He was an Anglican priest who wrote that, I think.

Nice. Yeah, but it's like a kind of exercise in this type of conceptual leap. You can't conceive of life in 3D if you're accustomed to living life in 2D. God lives in 18,000D. He lives in infinite D, but whatever. That's a stupid example. You just 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 Matthew McConaughey is gesturing to Murph through a – like what the heck? And love is – and it's awesome. It's beautiful. But 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 most recent slam jam flick didn't. So 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. OK, so the so the guy doesn't understand the thing is bigger than the compass of our minds. 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. It's going to try its best. It's going to gesture. It's going to point, but it's always going to fail to capture it. Like this, like the French talk about like le mot juste. I'm like, I'm always in search of like the perfect word with the right ambivalence, you know, but like, 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. Because 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 may have just answered that very well, and I'm just not understanding it. But 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 where you'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 so in this let's just i mean be honest

i'm a mystic hack i just repeat what he says but when saint 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? That's right. It seems manifestly to be the case that we are free. And so we start with that as a kind of arch datum, the way that St. Thomas 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 live your life in epistemological criteria. It's like, I'd just 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. You see? Yeah, no, no, I get it. But that's good, though.

I mean, like 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 don't experience 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 because I experience myself being free. So, okay, so I can grant that. At least you've solved one half of the puzzle there. That's what you just did there, which is assuring.

Yeah. Reassuring. 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 seem to be contradictions, but it's those contradictions that we should probe. And we need to be content with the fact that some days we'll come away from those contradictions and say, I don't quite understand. But that's the whole point of faith-seeking understanding. And granted, to an atheist, 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 something broader, there's something bigger, there's something deeper, there's something wider than just the inquiry of one human mind. And so to say, I don't understand, it can never be the final judgment on

something, because it, yeah, it just has a tendency to be like well mechatistical i'm thinking of a cardinal john henry newman's idea of uh what's it what's he called what's he called that the illative sense the illative 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 austral 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 garner through my own experience, but in which I'm justified in having. And I think something similar happens with God.

Yeah, no, I think, 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. And now, mind you, 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 countersigns as well. But there are quite a few signs. You know, this is where we talk about the signs of credibility, right, or the preambula fide, that there are things that are available to reason that seem to testify the fact 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 and say, okay 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 um this still resonates throughout the world and throughout the centuries in such a way as 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 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 could think of, we could kind of accumulate examples, right? We talk about 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 scripture is 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 kind of designs of the sacred inspired author, who is a person of a time and place addressing people of a time and place, and 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 Hebraic hyperbole. So yeah,

I think that that's just like, I don't know, like a basic thing. We could talk more about it, but that's my idea. Yeah, well, I mean, Aquinas addresses this directly. I don't know where. I remember reading it where somebody brings up this very thing. Maybe it had to do with the question was asked whether God had a body, and he makes the same point you did. Okay. Yes. Prima Pars, in the Prima Pars question one,

in that introductory word about sacra doctrina, he asked about the interpretation of Scripture in one of the later articles. I don't remember which. I think there are like 10 articles in that question, but it's like whatever. But he talks about the way in which scripture reveals and he talks about metaphor sweet sweet sweet hey how you doing you need a break you doing okay i'm feeling groovy man all right i'm cruising well then let's tackle omnipotence bingo ready omnipotency the idea that god is all powerful so smarty pants if if if god is all-powerful. So, smarty pants,

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 where God's like a shadow dude with a shadow mind doing shadow games. Like, what would it mean for God to manipulate a rock?

So we have in 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, you know, like putting force on the rock, which is equal to or exceeding the force which the, you know, gravity exerts on the rock leading it to the center of the, you know, the center or surface of the earth. So 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,

right? Okay, good, He's not all powerful. Next question, I'm just showing you. 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 as one type of cause among a mix of other types of cause. You know, like this rock exerts 32 newtons of force, you know, down towards the center of the earth. Can God supply the requisite 37 newtons of force? Like, 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 mark against him being all-powerful. It rather, the problem's not with his all-powerfulness, but the question, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, I mean, like, what it's trying to say is, like, okay, either God can make, you know, like, so if God can lift the thing, then he hasn't made a rock too heavy for him to lift, 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 in his power by virtue of the fact that he can't lift it. But in the very description of the wordplay is an inherent or a kind of intrinsic contradiction because it just misconceives of the nature of God's agency.

It misconceives of the nature of God's – as a cause. And also of the creative power of God. God is causing the thing to be and to act as a rock, which is to say 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 I'm just being like silly at this point. But yeah, it's just like, 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 when I talked, it's like when you talk to your two-year-old or your four-year-old. 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 goes, ah, stupid kid. That's not a stick. It's an antenna. And he says, what's an antenna? And he went, yeah, you're right. It's a stick. I've heard another comedian who talks about like children's line of questions. And it's like, you know, can we go outside and play today? It's like,

no. Why? Well, because it's, it's raining. Why? Oh, it's because, you know, like the sun shines and it likes, you know, water and it like evaporates and it condenses and clouds and it precipitates over a landmass and then you know it's just rain why well because like you know the way the atmosphere works and the position of the sun and the earth you know like and he's like why and the guy just breaks down at the end he goes because some things are and some things aren't to borrow a phrase from uh Harris, at some point you've hit bedrock. 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 because he's not all powerful, but because a square circle isn't anything. God can't create another God for him to worship. So I think 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 and I think Lewis said this somewhere maybe in the problem of pain just because you add to the beginning of a sentence can God it doesn't make your question necessarily intelligible

if I say can God purple oven toaster gremlin 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 god is creating or interacting with um 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 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 God, it's like question 25, and there he's basically just, he's trying to consider whether God, you know, like whether God could 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 kind of basic trajectory of his musings. All right. Well, let's wrap this up with a sort of pastoral sort of implication. What does it what does it mean kind of in my life as a Christian to know that God is omnipresent? to know that God is omnipresent, well, let's just drop the Latin, to know that He's 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 a great passage to which we can return is Matthew 6, 27-34. 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, they neither toil nor spin. It's Solomon and all of his glory is not arrayed as these. Or consider the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap, and nor do 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 an exhortation to entrustment or to abandonment to God. The day is evil. Let the day's

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 mouth. But God is asking of 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 we're agitated, you know, like the surface of an agitated lake, we do so less well and imperfectly. And so like the basis of our being at peace, the basis of our being given unto God and ceding our claim to anxiety, it's a metaphysical point. Metaphysics is mysticism, right? It's to say that God knows, that God loves, that God sees and is present, and that should afford us some consolation, not because of 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, Ledley. Dig. All right. 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 Aquinas 101 live. So we're going deeper on Aquinas 101 vids. You'll watch a couple of vids like before the event starts. And then at 8 p.m., one of the speakers from the Aquinas 101 series

give like a little lecture and then have an extended time for Q&A. So that way you can deepen in, you know, kind of dig deeper on that. Have these been live streams on YouTube or what? Yeah, exactly. How's that going? It's going well. Yeah, learning how to tech is hilarious. Digital encoders, man, what a rodeo. Yeah so much stress it's it's something that's especially stressful about

never mind who cares nobody cares about that um but um yeah so quarantine lectures going well aquinas 101 is still a thing and then the other big deal is um so godsplaining is the podcast of handful of friars of the province of saint 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 Lectio Divinas for Lent and Easter, like quarantine Lectio Divinas to prepare for the Sunday readings. We're collaborating with the Sisters of Life,

so we will have kind of released a Pentecost retreat that we'll have started on Pentecost, and you can listen to at your leisure. So four Dominican friars and three Sisters of Life. Oh, man, beautiful. Yeah, it's rock steady. Just talking about the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. So that should be, that should be illuminating. Um, Father James's last line in his lecture is that's the Holy Spirit blowing through your mind. I was just like, um, so yeah. Okay. So just Thomistic Institute, people should type into YouTube. I'll put some links below, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Thomistic Institute. People should type into YouTube. I'll put some links below. Yeah, Thomistic 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. All right, 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 got to 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 Horn, Scott Hahn, Steve Ray. You name it. If I've done an interview with them, you should be able to find it there. All right. So here's Patreon.

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