| Your examples attempt to break the chain of "aboutness" between meta-levels of statements. But there's a crucial distinction your argument misses: "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense" isn't merely describing properties of statements like your examples do (word counts, colors). Instead, it's making a universal claim about POSSIBILITY itself, specifically, the impossibility of defensive true statements about God. This raises a key question: What makes defensive truth claims about God impossible? This impossibility must stem from something about God's nature itself. Otherwise, what grounds the impossibility? Your examples all involve contingent properties: 1) Book word counts are contingent features of books 2) color(X) = color(Y) involves contingent properties of objects But the original statement makes a necessary claim about what kinds of truth claims about God are possible at all. This is fundamentally different because: 1) It rules out ALL possible defensive true statements about God
2) The basis for this universal impossibility must lie in God's nature
3) Therefore it necessarily makes a claim about God, not just about statements This is why property inheritance examples don't apply here. The statement isn't claiming properties transfer between levels, it's making a universal claim about possibility itself that necessarily involves both statements about God AND God's nature. While you've shown that descriptive properties don't transfer between meta-levels, this doesn't address the key issue: a claim about what statements about God are possible must ultimately be grounded in God's nature itself. |
Ah, so you're saying that the original statement "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense" (call this statement "O") is self-defeating not because it applies to itself, but because it applies to one of its (lower-order) premises (call it "P"), which is itself about God? This is different than your original argument "The statement itself is a claim about God" but we can go with this as well.
I think your new argument relies on that premise P being made "from a posture of defense," otherwise O doesn't apply. I don't see any evidence of this being the case, so I don't think your argument is correct.
In other words, two conditions need to be satisifed for P to apply to a given assertion:
1) The statement must be about God.
2) The statement must be made from a posture of defense.
P doesn't satisfy (1) and O doesn't (have to) satisfy (2). Am I wrong, or what am I missing here?