Jesus is not God

Pro's contradiction and self-refutationThroughout this debate, Pro and I have been basing our arguments on the Bible as if the Bible were the authoritative word of God. In the first round, I said that I took Pro to be arguing from this point of view, and in his reply, he said, "In this matter we should approach from a scriptual point of view."But now he has contradicted himself. I made an argument from John 1:3 that Jesus is uncreated, and I made an argument from John 1:1 and Isaiah 44:24 that Jesus is YHWH. Pro's response is to reject the authority of John 1:1-3. He claims that because Jesus didn't write John 1:1-3 that it's therefore not evidence of Jesus divinity. He goes on to say that the synoptic gospels and John's gospels cannot both be historically accurate.So Pro is essentially denying the authority of Scripture. In doing so, he is undermining all of his arguments. All of his arguments are based on scripture, and Jesus didn't write any of them! Even the words of Jesus found in the gospels were written by the authors of those gospels, so if Pro wants to doubt the authority of the authors of the gospels, then that throws everything into question that they attributed to Jesus.So not only has Pro contradicted himself (by subscribing to the authority of the Bible through most of this debate, then rejecting it), but he has made a self-refuting argument. His argument against the authority of Scripture undermines all of his scriptural arguments since they all depend on the authority of scripture.The mysteriousness of the TrinityPro quotesd both A.W. Tozer and Cyril Richardson as saying the Trinity is hard to understand. Pro does not explain how this works out as an argument against the Trinity. Just because something is mysterious and hard to understand doesn't mean it isn't true. After all, Richard Feynman once said that "Nobody understands quantum mechanics,"[1] yet Coleman Miller, professor of Astronomy at the University of Maryland, says that "Quantum mechanics is the most successful quantitative theory ever produced."[2] Clearly, something doesn't have to be comprehensible to be true.Despite being hard to conceptualize, the Trinity is not hard to define. And it's not hard to prove from the scriptures, either. If these three points are true, then the Trinity is true because the Trinity follows deductively from these points:1. There is one and only one God.2. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.3. The Father is not the same person as the Son, the Son is not the same person as the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the same person as the Father.From 1 and 2, it follows that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same God. From that and 3, it follows that the one God is a tri-personal being. In other words, there is one God who is three distinct persons. That's the doctrine of the Trinity in a nutshell. You don't need to be able to conceptualize it to know that it's true and to clearly define it.So Pro's argument from the confusion of the Trinity is fallacious. It doesn't follow that the doctrine of the Trinity is false.The term, Trinity, is not found in the BiblePro repeats this argument and doesn't add anthing new. I already responded to this argument, explaining why it was fallacious, and Pro didn't interact with my refutation, so that refutation stands.A couple of arguments already responded toPro cites Acts 2:21-22 where it says Jesus was accredited by God and that God did miracles through him, and he concludes "From this statement is is clear that Jesus is not God."Later, he cites John 5:30 in which Jesus says he does nothing on his authority, and that he seeks the will of the one who sent him rather than his own will. From this, Con concludes that Jesus is subordinate to God and cannot therefore be God.But I have already responded to this type of argument. Since, under the Trinity, both the Father and the Son are God, the fact that the Son submits to the Father does not mean the Son is not God. The only way you can use these passages to prove Jesus is not God is if you assume that God is only one person. So these arguments are question-begging since whether God is one person is the issue under dispute, and I maintain he is three persons.The Father is greater than IPro originally used this to prove that Jesus is not God. I responded by explaining two different senses in which one person can be greater than another and explained that in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father and Son are ontologically equal, but not equal in authority. I used the relationship between an officer and an enlisted person as an analogy to explain this distinction.Pro responded by saying the example "makes no sense" because it indicates that Jesus and God are the same substance. Although I think Jesus and God are the same substance, that was not the point of the analogy. He also claims that the example belittles the attributes of God since God is omnipotent and uncreated. Again, I'm not sure how he thinks that follows. It doesn't seem to me that Pro offered much of a refutation of my point. It's a pretty modest point. The point is simply that the Father and Son can be co-equal ontologically without being co-equal in authority, so the fact that Jesus said "The Father is greater than I" does not amount to argument against the deity of Jesus.The bread of life discourseIn an earlier round, Pro attempted to argue that Jesus was not God on the basis that Jesus missed an opportunity to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. I responded by showing that Jesus often spoke cryptically, and I pointed to the bread of life discourse as an example where Jesus let people walk away with a misunderstanding rather than explain himself to them.In this last round, Pro responded by saying it was not logical for Jesus' hearers to accept that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life since Jesus had said elsewhere that they must keep his commandments to have eternal life. But that doesn't address my point. The people clearly took Jesus to mean they should actually eat his flesh and drink his blood. That's what caused them to walk away. Jesus could've easily explained his meaning, but he didn't. So the fact that Jesus doesn't always explain himself in detail is no argument against the Trinity.ConclusionPro has raised a number of arguments against the deity of Jesus. Almost all of them commit the fallacy of begging the question since they assume that God is only one person and that only the Father is God. Pro attempted to patch up these short-comings by giving specific arguments meant to refute the Trinity and show that God is only one person. But I have refuted all of these arguments.I gave three arguments for the deity of Jesus: (1) an argument that Jesus is explicitly called God in Scripture, (2) An argument that Jesus is the uncreated creator, and (3) an argument showing that Jesus is YHWH.Pro completely ignored that first argument throughout the debate. Since it stands unrefuted, Pro has failed to establish the resolve.Pro attempted to prove that Jesus was created by pointing out scriptures he takes to mean Jesus was created, but I explained why those scriptures do not show that Jesus was created. Then Pro made the self-refuting argument that since Jesus didn't write John 1:1-3 that it cannot be invoked to prove the deity of Jesus. But that argument failed because it undermined every other argument he made from scripture since none of scripture was written by Jesus.Pro partially responded to my third argument since I used John 1:1 to show that Jesus was with God in creation, and Pro rejects John 1:1. However, I also used Colossians 1:15ff to show that Jesus was involved in creation, so Pro has left this argument unrefuted.Thank you for coming to tonight's debate. NOTES[1] http://bouman.chem.georgetown.edu...;[2] http://www.astro.umd.edu...