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This misunderstands the theology and metaphysics very profoundly.

The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity. Change presupposes imperfection and, therefore the potential for perfection, i.e., full actualization, but God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is pure act with no potential left to actualize. God is fully dynamic, but this is quite different from change. He may appear to change from our temporal perspective as events are distributed in time, but from an eternal perspective, all is actualized, "simultaneous", so to speak.

W.r.t. gradual revelation, that is exactly what Scripture is a record of. A Catholic reading will demonstrate that revelation is in the business of slowly revealing to Man who God is (at least that which cannot be known through unaided reason; quite a bit can be known through reason alone), preparing him for the culmination of public revelation in the Incarnation of the Logos, something foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And furthermore, the Catholic Church recognizes the development of doctrine, which you could call a refinement and deepening of understanding of what has been revealed. I like the analogy to mathematics, even if it is imperfect: all the theorems that follow from a set of axioms are in a sense already in the axioms, and so mathematics is in the business of unpacking them.

However, this gradual revelation and development of doctrine, in order to be authentic, cannot contradict what was known previously, at least to a certain accuracy, if not precision. Of course, here is where people can get tripped up by analogical devices and literal-mindedness. Scripture is written using the idioms, paradigms, and language of the people who wrote it and for whom it was written. That means that some of the language may not agree with strict scientific descriptions of the 21st century. However, when that does occur, you will note that the sense is not the reference: when the Bible speaks of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west in order to communicate some theological truth, it is not making astronomical claims about the sun and the earth. It is using this language as instruments to communicate something, often by analogy. In fact, analogy is essential to theology, something captured in the concept of the analogia entis. Univocal or equivocal approaches to the subject of God have been the source of numerous heresies.

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dctoedt 6 days ago | parent [-]

> The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity.

Is that so? Just because some people can't conceive of a mutable God, it doesn't mean it's impossible by definition. (Quantum mechanics was equally "inconceivable," until it wasn't.)

For the sake of argument, let's assume that God exists. Of course it's not our place to proclaim that God does change — that's above our paygrade, too. But to purport to categorically rule out the possibility is not just Dunning-Kruger arrogance, it's blasphemy.

Our discussion brings to mind chapter 38 of the Book of Job. We can summarize it (profanely) as God's saying to Job, in essence, "Who the f*ck are you to question me?"

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...

	▲	geye1234 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It is, actually, necessary that God can't change. It is not _solely_ an article of Faith, but it's additionally something that someone without the light of Faith can know, although some pretty abstract thinking is required. Most people think of the God of monotheism as a kind of super-angel. They think of Him as omnipotent, eternal, etc etc, but still something that exists in the same way that everything else exists. We say of a stone, a plant, a human being or an angel "it exists", and therefore, they think, we can say the same about God. This is the wrong way of thinking about Him, and it causes a lot of confusion (and it allows the Dawkinistas to put forth puerile arguments like "one god fewer"). It makes existence out to be something that God has, and therefore something that is, in itself, independent of Him. And if something is independent of God, then it would be higher than He is, and be something that He relied on, and that would mean He wouldn't be God. It is instead much better to say that God is Being, and that everything else exists only in a derivative way. Everything else has being, but God is Being. Pantheists and other monists argue that the universe itself is being, and that it can't ultimately change (the appearance of change is an illusion, they say). Their argument, to summarize horribly, is that anything other than being is non-being, and non-being can't do anything, since it doesn't exist. An acorn can't change into a tree, because that would imply that prior to the change the tree "is not", and that which is not can do nothing. The tree must therefore have always existed. Thus all change is an illusion. They're mistaken insofar as they're talking about the visible universe -- change is absolutely real -- but what they say is roughly true for God. He can't change, because there is nothing that is Being apart from Him. Everything outside Him exists only derivitavely. This doesn't imply pantheism, because the things outside Him have real existence, but it is a kind of lesser existence. A rough analogy: Light can't be dark. Other things can share in light without actually being light (noun), but they can't make light be dark. God is Being, and other things can share in his being but can't make Him non-being. Any change in Him would involve His going in some way from non-being to being. But non-being can't do anything, or become being. This is a very rough sketch of why God is immutable. This stuff requires some seriously abstract and non-quantitative thinking and isn't easy. Job 38 doesn't imply that we can know nothing about God, only that we can't fully comprehend Him.