# The mystery of the trinity **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 2, 2014, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373 "2014-02-02T20:05:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![hotflungwok](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/edb3f5/32.png) [@hotflungwok](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hotflungwok)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/41 "2014-02-03T17:33:01Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > One thing I have learned, though is that I think ultimately, science and religion are orthogonal systems for determining different kinds of truth. The ideas that science can prove or disprove religion, or that they’re in conflict at all, is a misapplication of one, or more likely, both to try to uncover a truth that it’s not intended to do. I have never understood this idea. What are different kinds of truth? Truth is just something that is true, right? Which truth is science intended to determine, and which truth is religion intended to determine? Science has uncovered lots of truths, but what truth has religion ever found? ---
**Author:** ![yellowjacketcoder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/4bbf92/32.png) [@yellowjacketcoder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowjacketcoder)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/42 "2014-02-03T17:41:50Z")
> [@hotflungwok](#): > > I have never understood this idea. What are different kinds of truth? Truth is just something that is true, right? Which truth is science intended to determine, and which truth is religion intended to determine? Science has uncovered lots of truths, but what truth has religion ever found? There are certainly varying values of “truth” that apply differently to science and religion. For instance, while science can find things like the speed of light, or the chemical makeup of sugar, or the gene transcription process, it doesn’t have any statements to make about ethics or morality. You could argue that things like morality aren’t “truths”, but they are often used that way, as in “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” ---
**Author:** ![Find\_Friends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c37758/32.png) [@Find\_Friends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Find_Friends)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/43 "2014-02-03T18:20:52Z")
> [@FriarTed](#): > > Basically, the Trinity is what the Catholic/Orthodox Church came up with to codify the teachings & experiences \*\*\*of the prophets of Israel \*\*\*& the apostles of Jesus. > > _ **The prophets experienced Yahweh as One Deity, so Above & Beyond Creation & so Holy that a human cannot see Him and live, but yet they would also see & hear a Being, sometimes enthroned, sometimes with Cherubim, Who identified Himself as Yahweh, and they would also feel His Power or Spirit within them.** _ The apostles had Jesus, speaking of Yahweh God as His Father, and yet claiming for Himself various titles & authorities reserved to Yahweh, and also experiencing the Divine Power/Spirit within them. > > The Trinity- Three Persons is One Being/Essence- was how the C/O Church resolved the Oneness & Threeness of the teachings & experiences. The main two contenders with this were Arianism/Monarchism- One Deity the Father Who creates Two Divinities- His Son & His Spirit, and Sabellianism/Modalism- One Deity Who reveals Himself in Three Ways. > > I am a Trinitarism & the best analogy I can come up with is the same as Augustine. God Knows & Loves Godself so intensely that God’s Self-Knowledge (Logos) & Love (Spirit) are Two Additional Persons as much Eternal God as the Father. We experience a similar thing when we have internal discussions with ourselves. A second analogy I use is fire- Conventional fire has light & heat for as long as the fire lasts. The Fire is like the Father with the Light & the Heat like the Son & the Spirit. It ain’t perfect but it beats a Shamrock! (emphasis added) It would have been anathema for the Jewish people by the time of the prophets, for “God” to be anything but one being, right down to a single personality, as opposed to having multiple personalities. Anything short of that would have been considered a form or polytheism, an unreal Gentile concept foreign to faithful Jews. I’m familiar with the traditional heroic gymnastic attempts to force the Trinity into the so-called “Old Testament” and your Trinity-resolved paradox over being able to see “God” and live or not is simply one of many contradictions in that multi-authored volume, the Tanakh. Feeling a “spirit” within oneself goes to the concept of something from “God” comparable to human breath. Beyond that, a “puzzle” is why “God” didn’t do a better job of “revealing” his triple-personhood in the Greek Scriptures. Why did early believers find it necessary to insert a verse about three witnesses in heaven? What little we do have includes the baptism narratives, which are actually better for supporting Adoptionism. And we have plenty of passages that counter one or more aspects of Trintarianism, such as the non-equality of Jesus and “God” in Colossians. > [@](#): > > Why should we expect the Creator of all this to be totally comprehensible & non-paradoxical to our limited minds? That frankly seems like the wrong question to ask, an irrelevancy. Why should we believe in a personal God at all? ---
**Author:** ![Find\_Friends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c37758/32.png) [@Find\_Friends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Find_Friends)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/44 "2014-02-03T18:27:28Z")
… and if we do, why not just go with straight Monotheism? [I missed the edit window.] ---
**Author:** ![Ambivalid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/45 "2014-02-03T18:43:57Z")
I was raised Catholic and that shit about the Trinity never made a lick of sense to me. Still doesn’t. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/46 "2014-02-03T18:52:28Z")
> [@hotflungwok](#): > > I have never understood this idea. What are different kinds of truth? Truth is just something that is true, right? Which truth is science intended to determine, and which truth is religion intended to determine? Science has uncovered lots of truths, but what truth has religion ever found? It’s the notion of [non-overlapping magisteria](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Overlapping_Magisteria). > [@](#): > > **Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)** is a philosophical world view that places religion and science in separate domains of questioning (“magisteria”) in order to avoid one contradicting the other. NOMA hopes to provide an end to the conflict thesis between science and religion by establishing a demarcation. snip! > This is because most proposed gods’ alleged effects on the material world are, of course, material, and can be studied much in the same way that all science really just detects real-world cause and effect relationships. In this sense, critics reject the “non-overlapping” aspect of the two magisteria and conclude that if the two genuinely _didn’t_ overlap, supernatural entities would have no effect on the real world and thus their existence, or not, is a moot point. > > _ **snip!** _ > > Further archaeologists and historians are able to study the religious texts of Christianity and other religions and give findings about how reliable or unreliable these texts are. > > Another critic of NOMA is Thomas Nagel, who is critical of Dawkins, but agrees with him in dismissing the concept.[5] ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/47 "2014-02-03T19:07:14Z")
> [@hotflungwok](#): > > I have never understood this idea. What are different kinds of truth? Truth is just something that is true, right? Which truth is science intended to determine, and which truth is religion intended to determine? Science has uncovered lots of truths, but what truth has religion ever found? The simplest explanation I can give is that science explores the “how” whereas philosophy and religion explore the “why”. For example, science can more or less explain everything about how we got here, from the briefest of moments after the Big Bang, the formation of our solar system, evolution, etc. But science doesn’t give us a purpose. For the religious, they have that to give them purpose. Even for the non-religious, they draw their purpose from some philosophy. But there’s no objectively scientifically observeable reason that we’re here. Or for an imperfect analogy, let’s imagine the birth of a child. The biology from conception to birth is well understood. Imagine ourselves, humanity, as that child. Science can tell us all about that biology, it can even tell us who our parents are and that they had sex (well, in most cases), but what it can’t tell us is why our parents had us. Maybe they’re a couple and really wanted children or maybe the child was an accident, maybe it was a one-night stand in a drunken stupor. The way to learn about that, isn’t by looking in a biology text book, it’s to ask our parents. By the same token, asking your parents about the biology, may or may not be the right answer, but the better way to answer that is by looking in a biology text book. This sort of division exists in many other areas as well, not just why we’re here. Morality is a good example. Now, science can tell us that, more or less, given a particular moral goal what the result may be. That is, if we assert that minimizing suffering and saving lives are laudible moral goals, then science may be able to help us find ways to maxmize those, but the basis for why those are laudable goals exists in the realm of philosophy and religion. Sure, as humans we overwhelmingly agree with those, and many other basic moral goals, so we tend to take for granted that they’re object, but science isn’t about “good” and “bad”. The laws of physics don’t care whether humanity reaches some utopian society or we wipe eachother out in a nuclear holocaust, they’ll keep working exactly the same way they always have regardless. So, that’s what’s meant by them being in search of different truths. But, perhaps a better way of summing it up would be in a line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “Archaeology is the search for fact… not truth. If it’s truth you’re looking for, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.” ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/48 "2014-02-03T19:11:43Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > The simplest explanation I can give is that science explores the “how” whereas philosophy and religion explore the “why”. I would change that to > [@](#): > > …and religion _assumes_ the “why” without either evidence or consensus. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/49 "2014-02-03T19:32:27Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > I would change that to For certain religions, perhaps even many, that may be true. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that as a blanket generalization. There are some religions, more common in the East, that are about discovering why rather than simply asserting it. Regardless, this is why I made a point to include philosophy as, even for the non-religious, the “why” is at least in that realm, and not in the realm of science. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/50 "2014-02-03T19:39:41Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It’s the notion of [non-overlapping magisteria](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Overlapping_Magisteria). BrainGlutton, let’s leave the ‘quoting almost all of a page from another site’ thing behind us, shall we? That was a bit much. No warning issued. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/51 "2014-02-03T19:42:25Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > BrainGlutton, let’s leave the ‘quoting almost all of a page from another site’ thing behind us, shall we? That was a bit much. > > No warning issued. Well, it’s all copyleft material, and I didn’t think it ran to tldr level, but I take note. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/52 "2014-02-03T19:46:18Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > For certain religions, perhaps even many, that may be true. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that as a blanket generalization. There are some religions, more common in the East, that are about discovering why rather than simply asserting it. Regardless, this is why I made a point to include philosophy as, even for the non-religious, the “why” is at least in that realm, and not in the realm of science. And I deliberately disregarded the “philosophy” part of the quote because this thread isn’t really about philosophy, and trying to zip-tie the former to the latter does no favor to the former and lends an unearned respectability to the latter. When the answers given are “God did it”, “God wants it” and “Mysterious are the ways of God”, then the “exploring” is over and done with…if it ever existed at all. ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/53 "2014-02-03T20:05:29Z")
Re: Why did early believers find it necessary to insert a verse about three witnesses in heaven? Because the Holy Spirit inspired them to do it? I think the Comma Johanneum faithfully reflects the teaching of the apostles, whether or not it was in the original text or added later, but even without the Comma, Matthew 28:19 is an implicit statement of the Trinity. Re: It would have been anathema for the Jewish people by the time of the prophets, for “God” to be anything but one being, right down to a single personality, as opposed to having multiple personalities. Anything short of that would have been considered a form or polytheism, an unreal Gentile concept foreign to faithful Jews. Correct. I’m not Jewish, though, I’m Christian, so why should it matter to me whether the Trinity is alien to the Jewish conception of God? Of course it is. I think the Jewish conception of God (strict monotheism) is wrong, so it doesn’t matter to me. Re: And I deliberately disregarded the “philosophy” part of the quote because this thread isn’t really about philosophy Actually, I’d say (with Swinburne) that you can at least come close to Trinitarian doctrine on the basis of pure reason, without getting into revelation at all. If we start with the perfect being view of God (=God is a perfect being), then He has to be a loving God, and for him to be really, genuinely perfect, He has to be a loving God _necessarily_, i.e. under every conceivable set of circumstances. If the nature of God is perfect love, then what did He love before the universe was created? Or alternatively, what _would_ he love if there were no other beings around? If it’s true that the nature of God is love, then there has to be a community of persons in the Godhead, i.e. there has to be at least two divine Persons (here, the Father and the Son). And for the love between the Father and the Son to be fruitful, we must postulate that it gives rise to a third Person (the Holy Spirit). ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/54 "2014-02-03T20:39:45Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#): > > I think the Jewish conception of God (strict monotheism) is wrong, so it doesn’t matter to me. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the God of the Old Testament never bothered to correct the Jews in their misapprehension? I mean, He exacted all sorts of punishments for a wide variety of different transgressions (the Deluge being the most extreme), and yet He never made the slightest attempt to correct this glaring error about His fundamental nature … . ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/55 "2014-02-03T21:00:02Z")
I understand why the trinity concept was invented. If you have Jesus be all-God, all the time, his sacrifice, already rather hard to explain away, becomes even more incoherent. If you have Jesus be just a dude, he is no longer perfect and is, well, just a dude. So he needs to be something else. Personally, I think having two gods who were not entirely on track would have made more sense. Yahweh demanding a sacrifice, and Jesus showing up and saying “Take me!” without Yahweh’s orchestration would be a much more powerful statement about the nature of the salvation. But they didn’t ask me. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2014, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/56 "2014-02-03T21:20:54Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#): > > Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the God of the Old Testament never bothered to correct the Jews in their misapprehension? I mean, He exacted all sorts of punishments for a wide variety of different transgressions (the Deluge being the most extreme), and yet He never made the slightest attempt to correct this glaring error about His fundamental nature … . ‘So the First Commandment is: _Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me._ And the second rule of Fight Club is: _ **Thou. Shalt. Have. No. Other. Gods. Before. Me.** _ I simply cannot stress that enough. Like, even before I get to the part about how you shouldn’t murder each other, I want to make sure we’re absolutely clear on the part about monotheism, which, again, is really the top priority here. If someone tells you about mighty Vulcan, the nephew of King Neptune, you just smack him in the mouth, okay? They start yammering on about divine Horus, son of Osiris, son of Ra, or whatever, pick up a fist-sized rock. Are we all on the same page? Great. Okay, this is where I would mention an exception to the rule, if there was one; pay attention, now; here it comes: doop de doop de doo.’ ---
**Author:** ![BrightNShiny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@BrightNShiny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrightNShiny)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2014, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/57 "2014-02-04T12:11:47Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#): > > Re: but that it is illogical, self contradictory. It is not just atheists who think so, either. Ask a Muslim, or a Jew. > > Muslims and Jews are wrong about the nature of God, I don’t know how to say it any plainer than that. And the statement “God is Love” is meaningless if you postulate a non-Trinitarian God. If God is Love, than who was He loving before creation existed? Man, this is like anti-PR for Christianity. Aren’t you supposed to be trying to convert people rather than driving them away? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2014, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/58 "2014-02-04T12:49:07Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#): > > If the nature of God is perfect love, then what did He love before the universe was created? Or alternatively, what _would_ he love if there were no other beings around? Himself. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2014, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/59 "2014-02-04T12:53:38Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Himself. Or alternately, whoever or whatever he was doing before he created this universe. ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2014, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373/60 "2014-02-04T12:59:48Z")
> [@FriarTed](#): > > I always took the Son not knowing the time of the Second Coming to be a matter of that moment. While He was in mortal flesh, Jesus didn’t know the time of His Return, but upon His Resurrection, He once more accessed His Omniscience. > > I certainly don’t think in the past 1980+ years, Jesus has been asking “So, Dad, how soon now?” If Matthew was correct in quoting Jesus the second coming had come while some of them standing there listening to him was really a quote of Jesus. The Bible says nothing about that, or the end of the world in that generation. I would think Jesus was misquoted or Matthew still believed, so the church decided it didn’t mean Generation as it does today even though Matthew also used the word generation as we do today. But one believes as they wish. It would seem rather strange that God would wait several hundreds of years to make people of every generation think this is the one! Of course many have died and although Jesus is also quoted as saying no one knows the day or the hour he didn’t mean 2 thousand years later. I would not tell my children , or their offspring to look out for a terrible war that would destroy all mankind in several thousand years or more. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-mystery-of-the-trinity/680373.md?page=4)