[jswelker]

I find the Nicene Creed to be a major stumbling block as a person of Christian faith with a background in formal philosophy. Rather than accepting the inherent paradoxes in Christ's message, it attempts to shoehorn it together using the philosophical swiss army knife of the era, Neoplatonism.

As a result, now Christian orthodoxy is saddled with neoplatonic philosophical vestigial baggage in the term "consubstantial", which means Christians are wedded to and forced to defend a hard metaphysical realism. This comes out hard in Augustine and later medieval Christians. (See Anselm, Aquinas, etc)

They described the faith using the intellectual tools of their era, and now those artifacts are hard-coded into the faith. It would be like if the Nicene fathers were in the early 20th century and described the faith in terms of Theosophy and branded all non Theosophists heretics forever.

[throw0101a]

> I find the Nicene Creed to be a major stumbling block as a person of Christian faith with a background in formal philosophy.

And yet intellects like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas did not: what do you 'know' that they did not, or vice versa?

Also, are you aware of the encyclical Fides et ratio ("Faith and Reason")?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_et_ratio

> Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2).

* https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

Further, in your "formal philosophy" studies, how much of logic and proofs did you study?

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...

[jswelker]

I'll ignore your ad hominems there.

I am not saying I _know_ anything. Rather, I am disappointed in the incredible hubris and overconfidence shown by the Church fathers, not in terms of their faith but in terms of their certainty in the intellectual tools they had available and the extent to which those fumbling tools describe a God who in their own telling is infinite.

Yes I have read large portions of the Summa, Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, Origen, and others, and I am fairly confident in saying that if you strip away the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and their followers, many of the arguments laid out by the patristics become tautologies at best and semantically meaningless at worst.

I am not saying I know what the answers are. Just that we need more humility than what was shown by a church council convened by--checks notes-- a power hungry and opportunistic Roman dictator.

[lvass]

We definitely need more humility. For starters, not to casually dismiss beliefs held by millennia due to some artifacts without even specifying them.

[jswelker]

Good idea! I haven't and won't. Now read me the original text of Anselm's ontological argument and explain it in modern English without falling back to ancient philosophical gibberish like "substance" and "potentiality".

[dctoedt]

> Further, in your "formal philosophy" studies, how much of logic and proofs did you study?

Logic and proof only get you so far — IIRC, lots of math-based cosmological conjectures don't survive confrontation with observations from the real world. Cf. my favorite proof-texts:

- Rom. 1.20: "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." (Emphasis mine.)

- 1 Thess. 5:21: "Test all things; hold fast to that which is good."

- Deut. 18:22: "If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed."