This entry is an offshoot of the earlier discussion of classical theism and its difference from theistic personalism. These labels have the meaning here than they had in that earlier discussion. Classical theism is committed to all three of the following:
1) God is simple.
2) God freely created the world in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.
3) There is no absolute necessity that God create our world or any world.
Theistic personalists hold that these three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. If they are logically inconsistent, then at least one of them must be either rejected or modified. The theistic personalist will reject (1) on the ground that God is a person and that no person is simple. This the classical theist will refuse to do on the basis of reasons he finds compelling. So refusing, he must find a way to turn aside the accusation of inconsistency.
Well, why should the triad be thought inconsistent? Here's why. If God is simple, then he is purely actual. If purely actual, then he harbors no potencies or unrealized powers. His power, which is manifested in his creating of the world (the totality of creatures), could then not have gone unrealized. He could not have refrained from creating. If so, his power to create had to be realized, in which case God's creating of the world (the totality of created items) is necessary, not contingent. It is the necessary action of a necessarily existent agent, and is thus absolutely, as opposed to conditionally necessary. But then it follows that the world exists necessarily and not contingently. This is a consequence that cannot be countenanced by the classical theist. For it conflicts with the divine aseity which is an entailment of the divine simplicity, which is a plank in the classical platform. If God is a se, then he is under no necessity to create. If God is a se, then he is wholly self-sufficient and fully actual whether or not he creates anything.
Can this reasoning be evaded? I will conclude this entry by considering and rejecting one evasive stratagem. Nathan Greeley writes,
. . . to say that God's activity of knowing and willing exist necessarily is not to say that created objects of his knowing and willing must also exist necessarily. As long as these created objects are considered really distinct from the acts by which they are known and willed, then the objects in themselves, need not have the same modal status as these acts. [. . .] God, one can then say, necessarily knows and necessarily wills in an absolute manner, but at least some of the particular objects of his knowledge are contingent. ("Divine Simplicity: A Reply to Philosophical Objections" in The Lord is One: Reclaiming Divine Simplicity, eds. Minich and Kamel, Davenant Press, 2019, p. 237, emphasis added.)
The idea here is that what God necessarily creates, and thus could not have failed to create, can nevertheless be contingent, i.e., possibly nonexistent. As far as I can see, there is only way this could be true. Suppose that God's creating of a thing simultaneously releases it into ontological independence. The divine creative act makes the thing exist, but once it exists, it exists on its own, 'by its own power' without divine assistance. In other words, when God creates a thing, he creates it in such a way that its existence, moment by moment, does not depend on God's ongoing creative sustenance after the initial creative action. If this is the nature of creation, then the created entity could very well be contingent despite the creative act's being necessary. For the created entity to exist in the first place it is necessary that God create it, but after he does so the entity exists contingently. On this scheme, there is creatio originans (originating creation), but no creatio continuans (continuing creation). This allows what is originally caused to exist to be contingent.
Unfortunately, this understanding of creation is foreign to classical theism. On classical theism, creation is both originating and continuing. What's more, classical theism need not insist on the reality of this distinction. For even if the world (the created realm) has an infinite past and always existed, it could nonetheless have creaturely status. If that were the case, then there would be no real distinction between originating and continuing creation. If, on the other hand, the world had a beginning in time, then, on classical theism, it still needs to be kept in being moment by moment.
I conclude that the stratagem proposed by Greeley above does not allow the proponent of divine simplicity to evade the conclusion that, if the simple God creates, then the product of his creative act necessarily exists.
Next stop: modal collapse.
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