The Evangelical Universalist Forum

A new paper in TheoLogica by Dale Tuggy

Not the absolute final draft, but as close as you can get without purchasing the mag.

Stimulating!! Some new words are coined - “polydeist’” for example.

You can dowload the pdf:

revistatheologica.com/index.php/ … /view/9/11

He’s rather overstating the confusion – I know for a fact several of the authors he cites in the introduction go far beyond the short quotes he provides to detail what they mean, being well aware of the cultural ranges of meaning, within and between various cultures, of “god” and related terms. No professional scholar I’ve ever read thinks monotheism only refers to the number of beings which might be called “god” (although theoretically that could be a meaning, too).

Considering that he doesn’t even try to put a noun next to “three” in his description of Christian Trinitarianism, I could make what I expect is a pretty accurate guess as to why he’s promoting more confusion in the ranks than actually exists. (A guess weighed farther by who posted a link to the paper. :wink: )

Either he’s highly ignorant of why God, with a capital G, is treated that way in English, compared to “god” with a lowercase g, within the purview of the philosophical and religious development of Western Civilization (in which case he shouldn’t be writing academic papers on the topic), or he’s intentionally salting the Pepsi in order to introduce straw man problems. Of course “God” as a proper name/title in that cultural context admits of conceptual analysis. If it doesn’t, then neither does the English word “god” without capitalization; I could assert (not even an argument really) very similarly, that its usage scope is so broad that it arguably (but with no actual argument) does not admit of conceptual analysis and then move along. That would be equally nonsensical, not only in relation to the actual history and status quo of the term, but in principle: these words don’t exist in a conceptual vacuum, which is exactly why someone could even try to pretend they’re too narrow (or broad) to admit of a conceptual analysis. If they couldn’t admit of conceptual analysis, neither could someone analyze them conceptually enough to give a reader of the language any idea of what’s being denied (or rather refused) for conceptual analysis!

Even Sdfhj, a gibberish I just made up now by plopping my fingers on keys, admits of enough conceptual analysis for someone to understand what it means for that group of letters to be a gibberish I just made up now by plopping my fingers on keys, and so also why not much more conceptually can be expected from it – except also as a comparative example of the concept I’m critiquing here. Those letters aren’t only a random accident generated with no purpose; and even if they were, my judgment about that status would still count as conceptually analyzing them to determine accurate facts and truth claims about that set.

So we have an author who intends to read between the lines about the conceptual meanings behind words, and his first evidence is an inability or willful refusal to talk about conceptual meanings of words that have a strong history of conceptual meaning, and to pretend that other authors are irresponsibly throwing the same words around without taking the time to explain what they mean by them – when anyone who knows the authors will know this demonstrably isn’t true. After this, to continue paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, why need anyone attend ever again to anything this person says?

He has started out with a shell game; I have better things, and also far more entertaining games, to be spending my time on, than seeing whether my inductive expectation from past experience is that he will continue with his shell game (even though induction isn’t a perfect predictor of future trends).

Nonetheless, putting JP sarcasm and vitriol aside, I recommend the article for its clarity and for organizing the somewhat ambiguous God-talk floating around.

And as for not taking Tuggy seriously in the future - go read his website, Trinities.com, make up your own mind. You’re as smart as JP.

Jason, you did a disservice to the people here, imo.

Went to that dot.com and got this message… The domain you searched is for sale
If you are interested, please send an email to premiumgenerics [at] aol.com

Then realised you meant… trinities.org/blog/ :ugeek: :smiley:

Thanks davo…heat of the moment and all that… :smiley:

Dave, is the link to ‘Logisa’ ? Davo’s link is to something different.

The link in my opening post is the correct one - it goes to TheoLogica website. The article is “On Counting Gods”.
Contrary to Jason, it’s very good.

The site I got the link from was Trinities.org, which is excellent and well worth reading for the philosophically minded layperson. Like me.

Here it is:

revistatheologica.com/index.php/ … /view/9/11

Note that while Dave’s original link is correct, it goes to a page where I only saw a small download link in (if I recall correctly) the upper-right corner. That’s how to get the pdf.

I went there on my Win 8.1 Surface Pro, with updated Firefox, so I don’t think there was an OS/browser problem. But I mention this in case someone else finds apparently no article at the link – it’s there.

Edited to add: while I doubt there was an OS/browser problem, there may have been a security problem (I mean in the sense of my Surface’s antivirus program being set too stringently); because when I took my old MacOS and its fan-update Firefox engine there to download the text from from the original link to my ‘work’ computer (to archive it for later), the text of the pdf loaded up in its own central window on the page no problem. Anyway, whether it loads for someone else or not the hyperlink to download the pdf is still in the upper right. :nerd:

Dave is of course welcome to explain why my critique, of the first couple of pages as a shell-game, is wrong. :mrgreen: And I will reiterate here that just because the first few pages are cheating hard, doesn’t mean the rest of the article, or some substantial part later, won’t be solid gold. Rob Bell’s Love Wins comes to mind; I found the final chapters to be far superior to the first half. But I also repeatedly said I wouldn’t blame anyone for not getting that far after the opening experience. (I even poke some fun at my own novel along the same line, when talking about it!)

When someone can’t tell or doesn’t care what the first few pages are doing, however, then I still have no reason yet to believe the remaining material and procedure will be better. I may get around to it later, but I have other projects to be doing.

I clicked the link with Windows 10 and Google Chrome (both latest updates). It gives me an option, on the website - to download a PDF file.

The link should go to this page, where you can read or download the pdf. I’m using Chrome, Randy, and i get this every time I click on the link:


Jason, I could not understand your critique. I understood what Tuggy was saying, and it was straight-forward. But I do thank you for being honest about not reading the bulk of the article. :smiley:

For the skittish among us - be not afraid, the Trinity is mentioned, I think, twice, and then a couple of times in the bibliography. The paper is not a diatribe against Trinitarians, though Tuggy makes a couple of very brief critiques in the context of what he is presenting. it’s fair.

That’s what I get also, Dave. With the option to download the PDF - on the top right. I also think Google Chrome, has a build in PDF reader. Of course, if folks are using Microsoft Edge or Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari or some obscure browser, they might not have the same options.

Thanks Randy. I just tried Edge, and the link opened just as in Chrome.

It’s a small download for those that want/need to download.

<keep this quiet, ok? Here is a link to the just-posted podcast of Dale giving the talk - just hit the little arrow to the left of the brown box.
trinities.org/blog/podcast-164-on-counting-gods/ >

QUIET, PLEASE. THIS MEANS YOU!. DAVID WANTS TO KEEP THIS QUIET :exclamation: :laughing:

I HOPE I HELPED GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS “QUIETLY”, DAVE :exclamation: :laughing:

<you got it, Randy>