Dr Joshua Rasmussen

• Personal Website: (https://joshualrasmussen.com/)

• Worldview Design: "Get equipped to build your worldview at https://worldview-design.com/"

Book

•  Joshua Rasmussen, Who Are You, Really? : A Philosopher's Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons, IVP Academic (2023)

Items mentioned in / relevant to the conversation

• TMR 229 : Dr Joshua Rasmussen : How Reason Can Lead to God

• TMR 087 : Dr Angus Menuge : On Libertarian Free Will

• GW Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, Hackett Publishing Company (1989)

• William Hasker, The Emergent Self, Cornell University Press (1999)

• William A Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, Ashgate Science and Religion, Routledge (2014)

• Daniel C Dennett, "Quining qualia", in Consciousness in Contemporary Science, Oxford University Press (1988)
  

• Bernardo Kastrup, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality, Iff Books (2019)

Email Exchange

Here is the after-show email exchange between Josh and I. As I said at the end of the programme, I felt that I hadn't quite managed to put into words what I was thinking about the Trinity in relation to the ideas explored in the conversation. So I carried on thinking about it over dinner after the interview, and—no doubt inspired by the cauliflower cheese (which was really very good that night)—I emailed Josh and we had the following back and forth.

JC: "Many thanks! BTW, I can't stop wondering about that "Trinity" question. Could it be resolved through seeing the Persons of God as deeper, permanently differentiated aspects of the fundamental substance. I guess it's basically a kind of Barth-style "mode of being" that I have in mind. Using my analogy of the hard drive, could we say that the hard drive is eternally composed of three states of the same substance? (To use the popular imagery, maybe it's a weird hard drive made of water, ice and steam!) In that case, those Persons would be eternal, equal and fully open to each other, whereas I (as a created partition) would be finite,
dependent and relatively closed (in terms of my access to God's own consciousness)."

JR: "The trinity is a vexing topic, and I have my own questions about it. But I like your illustration (a lot), and relates to a way I've tended to think of things (reminds me of Michael Rea's account of the Trinity). Also, this distinction may be handy (and relates to your thought): there is a difference between grounding distinctions in personas via God's *nature* vs. via God's creative *will*. This distinction was suggested to me by Christian philosopher, Joshua Sijuawade, with an article on the Trinity here: https://philarchive.org/archive/SIJBTM. Since this came up in our discussion, feel free to share any of these notes or references in the show notes if you think that would be appropriate and helpful. The conversation was definitely among my favorites. You clearly have a deep understanding of the topic, and I loved how you concretized things, too, for the audience—such a gift. Thanks again!"

JC: "Oh good, I'm glad my thoughts make some sense! Yes, I've had many conversations with Jehovah's Witnesses about the Trinity over the years, and I've always found it hard to articulate satisfactorily. Thanks for the article; it doesn't look like a breeze, but it looks fascinating—I'll see how far I get! Thanks, yes, especially if I keep that part of the conversation in which we touch on Trinitarian matters, I would like to share the essence of these email exchanges with listeners... Many thanks for your kind words! In return let me say thank you for your humility and willingness to make very difficult ideas accessible to "ordinary" people. As you know, not all academics are good at that! You are, and I very much admire you for that, and your inspiring work. Many thanks again!"

Acknowledgements

• Podcast theme music: Chillout Me by Antony Raijekov from Jazz U album (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

• In accordance with the conditions of the above licence TMR wishes to state that the fact that these creative materials appear in TMR productions should in no way be understood as implying that its creators endorse anything produced by TMR.

• Slide show image (below) Copyright © Mark Campbell, all rights reserved, adapted and used here with kind permission.