TikTok Atheists Debunk The Trinity

[00:00:00]Yes, mate.

[00:00:02]>> There's nothing logically contradictory about me deciding that the evidence supports the argument of God.

[00:00:07]>> you the logical contradiction in your specific God. The logical contradiction in your specific God is that it's impossible for something to to exist outside of space and time. And also, you're a Catholic, which means you obviously believe in the Trinity. The Trinity is a logical contradiction.

[00:00:25]>> Also, how is it How is it a contradiction?

[00:00:27]>> Law of identity The law of identity is broken.

[00:00:31]>> All right, so we're back with another video, guys. So, today we have Dr. Blitz and Deconstruction Zone. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with these two people. They're on TikTok a lot debating God. And these two guys have no clue what they're ever talking about. And I was sent this video, so let's go over it. Here, Deconstruction Zone and Dr. Blitz say that the Trinity is a logical contradiction.

[00:00:56]Nice. We got a physicist and a TikTok debater. I don't know what this guy is.

[00:01:03]Just an atheist TikTok debater. Claiming that the the Trinity is a logical contradiction, so let's get into it.

[00:01:08]>> How many persons are there?

[00:01:10]>> Three.

[00:01:11]>> Okay. So, um so, there are three persons, which means that the Father is not the same as the Son.

[00:01:19]>> Not the same person.

[00:01:22]>> Well, yeah, but they're not identical, right?

[00:01:25]>> Identical in what regard?

[00:01:28]>> That they share all properties.

[00:01:32]>> They do share the same properties.

[00:01:34]>> Nope. Then they're identical.

[00:01:37]>> Apparently, the Trinity breaks the law of identity. And then we have Dr. Blitz here asking if the Father is not the same as the Son. Now, notice how he doesn't qualify same what. He just says not the same as the Son.

[00:01:52]And what you're going to see here is something that's very common, not just in atheist discourse, but in Muslim discourse, where they tend to use informal language as if it commits you to a particular formalization, namely a specific formalization, where all the Trinitarian statements are formalized as identity statements, primitive identity statements to be exact, with- without ever explicitly stating that's what they're doing.

[00:02:19]>> Well, yeah, but they're not identical, right?

[00:02:23]>> Identical in what regard?

[00:02:25]>> That they share all properties.

[00:02:29]>> They do share the same properties.

[00:02:32]>> Nope.

[00:02:32]>> Then they're identical.

[00:02:34]>> Dr. Blitz here says the same in that they share all properties. So, he switched he switched from an informal use of same or identical suddenly to a specific formalization he has in mind, where he says where he's using identity or he's translating identity into identity as formal identity, meaning logical identity, specifically primitive identity again. And he's saying, "Well, if they're identical or if they're the same, then they share all the same properties." The Christian correctly responds by saying, "Well, identical in respect to what?" Cuz they do share all properties in respect to the essence.

[00:03:14]They don't share properties in respect to the person. And Dr. Blitz is trying to do the slight of hand. Again, guys, you got to recognize when people are doing this because this is very common.

[00:03:25]Nothing in logic forces you just by saying X and Y are identical or me and, you know, you are identical, nothing about logic forces me to formalize that in any specific way. It's a formalization decision. It's a choice.

[00:03:43]Now, why is Dr. Blitz choosing to formalize it in that way? Well, because you derive a contradiction considering you are formalizing it as primitive identity when you have, you know, the Father is identical to God, the Son is identical to God, and then you say they're not each other, you get a contradiction because of transitivity.

[00:04:02]And so, the Christian here clearly is not speaking about formal systems. And that's how most people speak about identity when we use the term identity.

[00:04:10]You know, the majority of people are not familiar with what a diagonal is, you know, in logic or a set of ordered pairs, you know, they most people don't know what that is. And so, the Christian is speaking informally. Dr. Blitz does this slight of hand where he pushes it into formal language and he says, "Oh, if you're saying identity, that means they share all the same properties." Well, that's true if you're using formal primitive identity, but the Christian has not said that. Matter of fact, he's very explicitly said that he's not talking about identity simpliciter in any regard. He's referring to sameness as it relates to person or essence.

[00:04:50]>> That's a good point.

[00:04:54]>> Okay. Yeah, so that doesn't mean it applies to essence. It means it applies to person.

[00:04:59]>> It also applies the transitive property, too.

[00:05:01]>> Essence, you're using >> Notice how suddenly they've all kind of become logicians, pseudo logicians, I guess. You got the third guy talking about, "Well, it defies the transitive property." Well, the transitive property is in relation to, you know, formal language, formal systems.

[00:05:16]Uh you know, A relates to B, B relates to C, that means A has a relation to C.

[00:05:22]Um in terms of transitivity identity, you just put identity in there and you get A is equal to B, B is equal to C, then A is equal to C.

[00:05:29]Well, what's required of that is that you're speaking about some particular theory, some particular formalization, but the Christian has not hinted towards that in any regard. I mean, Dr. Blitz has said, "Well, in what other sense are you using identity?" Well, he's referring to an informal sense of sameness as it relates to a particular, you know, category or kind of thing or relation. He has not hinted towards any formal notion and nowhere in this were they speaking about, you know, building formalizations or models such that we're trying to deal with formal consistency.

[00:06:05]So, it's really, you know, it's it's very common, again guys, for people, Muslims and atheists, to suddenly switch from an informal you know, statement like, you know, God uh Jesus is God and Jesus is identical to God to Jesus is identical as a particular formalization where you use primitive identity to express that informal language expression. Obviously, the Christian does not believe that you can collapse the Father into the Son.

[00:06:34]So, we're not going to formalize it that way even if we were speaking formally.

[00:06:39]>> Essence defies the transitive property, too.

[00:06:42]>> Essence you're using wrong. Essence requires two other essential properties.

[00:06:47]So, if they don't have identical essen- If they don't If they don't have identical essential properties, then they're not one in essence.

[00:06:56]>> Yeah, but that's that's not how I'm defining essence here. Essence is referred to be oneness.

[00:07:04]>> The problem with the Trinity >> You have Deconstruction Zone saying, "Well, that's not what an essence is. An essence is just a set of essential properties." False.

[00:07:12]Essential properties can be necessary in so far as requiring an object to be classified in a particular kind of thing, right? For example, to be God or to be in the the sort of God, it can be true that you have to have the omni properties necessarily. It doesn't therefore follow that what makes God God or what makes an essence itself is a set of essential properties. That is not Aristotelianism. That is not classical Trinitarian metaphysics, and he's trying to correct him on something by using modern analytic language, bundle theory, trope theory, type language. Probably because he chat GPT'd or Googled AI, the first thing that popped up when he looked up what is an essence. Again, guys, an essence is not a set of properties or is not just a set of properties. Properties do not define what an essence is.

[00:08:09]>> What makes The problem with the Trinity is is basically this, and we can just summarize it cuz it sounds like you want to go. It's that the way that we count things is by counting difference, right?

[00:08:19]So, when we say that there are three apples on the counter, what we mean is that even though they have a lot of things in common, they're different cuz they're in different places, right? Or maybe they were picked from the tree at different times. Whatever it is, there are three of them and they have differences. They're not identical in every way. So, we count three of them.

[00:08:32]If you then want to say that there's one God, then that means that the three things that are different to make them three different persons are not present when you're trying to count them as gods. So, it seems like you either have three gods and three persons or one God and one person. It doesn't seem like you can have both.

[00:08:50]>> It's a category error cuz yes, there are distinctions between the personhood.

[00:08:54]Uh for instance, like there's a son, there's a father, there's the Holy Spirit. The Son is uh >> Yeah, so they're so they're different persons.

[00:09:02]>> Yeah, different persons. So, there is a distinction there.

[00:09:04]>> So, it sounds like they're different gods.

[00:09:06]>> You got three gods.

[00:09:07]>> No, because when you're talking about >> Here you have another example of this classical counting method nonsense that people have been going around. I mean, this guy literally said the way we count things is we count by difference. That's nowhere standard in literature. They literally just made that up on the spot.

[00:09:23]I think what he wants to say is that if there's property difference, that there's two distinct objects.

[00:09:28]Okay, but there's property difference in relation to whatever kind of thing you're counting, right? So, what he wants to say is that using the indiscernibles of identity, that if there's property difference, then there's two distinct objects.

[00:09:42]Again, he's trying to force this into a formal issue, even though he never explicitly said that, and he probably doesn't even know what that means.

[00:09:49]But, it's also not true in the sense of global difference or any sort of predicate. Standardly in Leibniz's law, it is not taken to be to be the case that any differing predicate allows there to be two distinct things. For example, we normally exclude things like, you know, modal predicates or belief, you know, states, something like that, like Lois Lane believes Clark Kent is or Clark Kent can't fly, but she believes Superman can fly. Although Superman is identical to Clark Kent, there's a failure of substitution. So, difference is not just sufficient in order to say that there's two separate objects, right? Because you have failure of substitution.

[00:10:39]Again, the classical example of this is we say Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent can fly. Lois Lane or can't fly. Lois Lane believes Superman can fly, right? We predicate that belief state of the object, but what normally happens is that you have logicians, other people say that actually that doesn't qualify as a true property.

[00:11:04]And so, what counts as a property is going to be in question. It's not just any difference globally speaking.

[00:11:13]So, he says there's different persons, each person is the God. So, it sounds like there's three gods. Well, that's just a confusion. Maybe if you rephrase it saying something like each person is the one God or each person possesses the same single divine essence, then it's already stipulated that there's one divine essence. So, it no longer sounds like there's three gods cuz you've just stipulated that there's a single divine essence. And what we mean when we say that there's, you know, three persons or three divine persons, we're saying there's three persons in the Trinity of whom all share the one essence. And that's what we mean when we say there's one god.

[00:11:51]If he won't phrase it that way because it doesn't support his argument or his rhetorical tactics when he's trying to confuse this Christian, but the Christian super proud of him correctly delineates between, you know, difference in properties as it relates to the persons and sameness in properties as it relates to divinity or the divine essence. Also, notice how he was at first talking about a formal issue and then he switched to it sounds like there's three gods. And this is the issue with these debates, conversations, whatever, is that when you have people who aren't familiar with logic like these atheists or theology like these atheists, you get them constantly slipping between formal issues and informal issues. When you say there's a transitivity issue or when you say there's identity and that they share all the same properties and you're referring to the indiscernibles of identity, you're speaking of something formal, right? You're speaking of formal logic.

[00:12:45]You're speaking of entailments giving a particular formalization. But he then switches from that into saying it sounds like there's three gods based on how we normally count. But he went from normally counting as indiscernibles of identity, which is you know, you can formalize that in second-order logic or you can have that as an axiom schema built into identity as it standardly is.

[00:13:07]But he moves from that into saying, "Oh, how we normally count, you know, it just sounds like there's three gods." Well, sounding like something is three gods is very different from saying logically entails that there's a contradiction or logically entails that there's three gods. And if you don't remember, it's this started off this whole like logical problem started off by them saying there's a contradiction. There's a logical problem. But now he's just saying, well, it just sounds like there's three gods. Well, they're all over the place. There's