Maverick Philosopher

Some Questions About Divine Simplicity

This recently over the transom:

 

Dear Dr. Vallicella, I'm a reader of your blog, and have really enjoyed much of your work. Since you wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the topic of divine simplicity, I thought I might reach out to you to ask your opinions on some things. I am on an e-mail list with a Christian philosopher who is extremely critical toward the idea and I'd like to know what you think of the following:

 

First, he argues that, while there are some rationally acceptable arguments for divine simplicity, they do not rise to the level of demonstration. Based on some of your recent work, I gather you might agree with this.

 

BV: I do agree.  The doctrine cannot be demonstrated or proven. There are 'good' (rationally acceptable) arguments for the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), but they are not rationally compelling. To my mind this is but a special case of a general thesis: few if any substantive theses in philosophy are demonstrable or provable.

 

It's the second part I'm curious about. Further to his argument is that divine simplicity rests on questionable metaphysical premises, and that many are far too confident in the position given their familiarity with metaphysics. He is exceptionally critical of James Dolezal, saying that consulting him on the topic "is like going to a bike shop to get your car repaired." He believes that, for one to really understand and engage with the ideas, academic training and great philosophical experience is required (which Dolezal may not possess, not having earned his Ph.D. under recognized philosophers). Since you cite Dolezal multiple times in your article, I assume you would disagree with this at least on some level. While I only have undergraduate philosophical training, I am familiar with the debates on the subject, and the metaphysics involved, to have at least some rational justification for my opinions. (The big exception is questions of simplicity and modal logic—I back off when things go into that territory). So, my actual questions: what level of philosophical training (especially official) is necessary to engage in these debates? And is his evaluation of Dolezal in particular correct?

 

BV: Dolezal is competent, and your friend's 'bike shop' comment does nothing to show otherwise.  You don't really need any 'training' other than what you can provide for yourself by careful study of the literature on the topic, assuming you are above average in intelligence and have a strong desire to penetrate the problem. I don't set much store by training and trappings and academic pedigrees. What matters in philosophy is love of truth, intense devotion to her service, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to follow the arguments whither they lead.

 

Second, he has a criticism of simplicity I haven't seen anywhere else. I'll have to summarize it as the paper has not been published.

 

It goes like this: a key premise in the argument for simplicity is that whatever has parts depends on those parts, and so must be composed by something else. God is not dependent/composed by anything else, therefore he must be simple. He questions this idea and puts forward an "individuals first"  account, suggesting that parts are in some cases only definable by the wholes of which they are parts, thus actually making the parts dependent on the whole. He provides two possible examples: the notions of necessity and possibility, which are dependent on each other for their definitions; and the doctrine of the Trinity, where Father, Son, and Spirit are exclusively defined in terms of relations among them. This suggests, he argues, that we can conceive of wholes that have parts, the parts all being mutually dependent upon one another and thus not composed by anything else. And so, God might have parts while not being composed by anything else.

 

What are your thoughts on this idea?

 

BV: One kind of whole can be called compositely complex, while another can be called incompositely complex. A wall of stacked stones is a complex of the first sort: its parts (the stones) can exist without the whole (the wall) existing, and each stone can exist apart from any other. The parts can exist without the whole, but the whole cannot exist without the parts. Such a whole needs an ontological factor, a 'composer' to ground its unity and to distinguish it from a sheer plurality.  The wall is not a sheer manifold, a mere mereological sum of stones, but a unitary entity. It is one entity with many parts. God cannot be complex in this way. For then he would depend for his existence and nature on the logically/ontologically prior existence of his parts including his attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) if these are assayed as 'parts' or ontological constituents of God.  

 

Now your friend's suggestion seems to be that God is an incompositely complex whole of parts.  God has parts, but these parts cannot exist apart from the whole of which they are the parts, and no part can exist apart from any other part. The parts are then mutually dependent and inseparable.

 

I don't think this works.  Consider the 'composition' of essence and existence in a contingent being such as Socrates. The 'parts' -- in an extended sense of the term -- are mutually inseparable. The existence of Socrates cannot itself exist apart from his essence  and the essence of Socrates cannot exist apart from his existence.  And neither can exist apart from Socrates, the composite of the two.  But Socrates is a creature and God transcends all creatures. His absolute transcendence cannot be accommodated  by any scheme that allows God to be in any sense partite, not even if the parts are mutually inseparable.  God's absolute transcendence requires that he be absolutely simple.  God belongs at the fourth level in the following schema:

 

Level I.  Pure manyness or sheer plurality without any real (as opposed to mentally supplied) principle of unity.  Mereological sums. The sum just is its members.

 

Level II. Composite complexity.  A whole of parts the unity of which is contingent, as in the case of the stacked stones. There is one wall composed of many parts, but the parts can exist without the whole. The whole, however, cannot exist without the parts.

 

Level III. Incomposite Complexity.  Wholes the parts of which are mutually inseparable, whether weakly inseparable or strongly inseparable.  Suppose a particular cannot exist without having some properties or other, but needn't have the very properties it in fact has, and (first-order) properties cannot exist without being had by some particulars or other, but not necessarily the particulars that in fact have them.  We then say that particulars and properties are  WEAKLY mutually inseparable.  If, however, particulars cannot exist without having the very properties they have, and these properties cannot exist without being instantiated by the very particulars that instantiate them, then particulars and properties are STRONGLY mutually inseparable.

 

Level IV. Absolute Simplicity. The absolutely simple transcends the distinction between whole and parts.  Whereas in Socrates there is a real distinction between essence and existence despite their strong mutual inseparability, in God there is not even this distinction.

 

In sum, God's absolute transcendence requires absolute simplicity. Your friend's suggestion as you have reported it is stuck at Level III and does not reach Level IV.

A Reader Proposes a Puzzle

This from Cyrus:

Suppose there is a possible world in which only God exists. Further suppose that that world is actual instead of this one. Further suppose divine simplicity. What is the truthmaker for the proposition “God exists, and nothing more” in that world?

If God alone exists, and God is simple, then there are no propositions in that world, and hence no true propositions, and therefore no need for truth-makers.  Too quick?

Updated Divine Simplicity Entry Now Online

I am not entirely happy with it, but the updated version  passed  muster with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy philosophy of religion referees.  If it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me, at least for the time being. The older I get, the higher my standards become. I have revised it twice so far.

If you are invited to submit an entry to SEP, it is not a one-off affair. You will be required to keep up with the literature and revise your entry periodically.

Ed Zalta tells me that my entry is scheduled for its next substantive update on or before Feb 27, 2023.

Van Til on Divine Simplicity and the One and the Many

(Edits added 2/10/19)

Cornelius Van Til rightly distinguishes in God between the unity of singularity and the unity of simplicity.  The first refers to God's numerical oneness. "There is and can be only one God." (The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 31) The second refers to God's absolute simplicity or lack of compositeness: ". . . God is in no sense composed of parts or aspects that existed prior to himself." (ibid.)  Van Til apparently thinks that divine simplicity is a Biblical doctrine inasmuch as he refers us to Jer. 10:10 and 1 John 1:5.  But I find no support for simplicity in these passages whatsoever.  I don't consider that a problem, but I am surprised that anyone would think that a doctrine so Platonic and Plotinian could be found in Scripture.  What surprises me more, however, is the following:

The importance of this doctrine [simplicity] for apologetics may be seen from the fact that the whole problem of philosophy may be summed up in the question of the relation of unity to diversity; the so-called problem of the one and the many receives a definite answer from the doctrine of the simplicity of God." (ibid.)

That's an amazing claim!  First of all, there is no one problem of the One and the Many: many problems come under this rubric. The problem itself is not one one but many!  Here is a partial list of one-many problems:

1) The problem of the thing and it attributes.

A lump of sugar, for example, is one thing with many properties. It is white, sweet, hard, water-soluble, and so on. The thing is not identical to any one of its properties, nor is it identical to each of them, nor to all of them taken together.  For example, the lump is not identical to the set of its properties, and this for a number  of reasons. Sets are abstract entities; a lump of sugar is concrete. The latter is water-soluble, but no set is water-soluble. In addition, the lump is a unity of its properties and not a mere collection of them.  When we try to understand the peculiar unity of a concrete particular, which is not the unity of a set or a mereological sum or any sort of collection, we get into trouble right away.  The tendency is to separate the unifying factor from  the properties needing unification and to reify this unifying factor. Some feel driven to posit a bare particular or bare substratum that supports and unifies the various properties of the thing. The dialectic that leads to such a posit is compelling for some, but anathema to others. The battle goes on and no theory has won the day.

2) The problem of the set and its members.

In an important article, Max Black writes:

Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as "three in one" should be child's play. ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615)

A set in the mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sense is a single item 'over and above' its members. If the six shoes in my closet form a mathematical set, and it is not obvious that they do, then that set is a one-over-many: it is one single item despite its having six distinct members each of which is distinct from the set, and all of which, taken collectively, are distinct from the set.   A set with two or more members is not identical to one of its members, or to each of its members, or to its members taken together, and so the set  is distinct from its members taken together, though not wholly distinct from them: it is after all composed of them and its very identity and existence depends on them.

In the above quotation, Black is suggesting that mathematical sets are contradictory entities: they are both one and many.  A set is one in that it is a single item 'over and above' its members or elements as I have just explained.  It is many in that it is "wholly constituted" by its members. (We leave out of consideration the null set and singleton sets which present problems of their own.)  The sense in which sets are "wholly constituted" by their members can be explained in terms of the Axiom of Extensionality: two sets are numerically the same iff they have the same members and numerically different otherwise. Obviously, nothing can be both one and many at the same time and in the same respect.  So it seems there is a genuine puzzle here.  How remove it?  See here for more.

3. The problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition. 

The problem is to provide a satisfying answer to the following question: In virtue of what do some strings of words attract a truth-value? A truth-valued declarative sentence is more than a list of its constituent words, and (obviously) more than each item on the list. A list of words is neither true nor false. But an assertively uttered declarative sentence is either true or false.   For example,

Tom is tired

when assertively uttered or otherwise appropriately tokened is either true or false. But the list 

Tom, is, tired

is not either true or false. And yet we have the same words in the sentence and in the list in the same order. There is more to the sentence than its words whether these are taken distributively or collectively.  How shall we account for this 'more'?  

There is more to the sentence than the three words of which it is composed.  The sentence is a truth-bearer, but the words are not whether taken singly or collectively. On the other hand, the sentence is not a fourth thing over and above the three words of which it is composed. A contradiction is nigh:  The sentence is and is not the three words.

Some will say that the sentence is true or false in virtue of expressing a proposition that is true or false. On this account, the primary truth-bearer is not the (tokened) sentence, but the proposition it expresses.  Accordingly, the sentence is truth-valued because the proposition is truth-valued.  

But a similar problem arise with the proposition. It too is a complex, not of words, but of senses (on a roughly Fregean theory of propositions). If there is a problem about the unity of a sentence, then there will also be a problem about the unity of the proposition the sentence expresses on a given occasion of its use. What makes a proposition a truth-valued entity as opposed to a mere collection (set, mereological sum, whatever) of its constituents?

4) The problem of the unity of consciousness.

At Theaetetus 184 c,  Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:

Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)

The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, the great Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that Alfred North Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)

Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of (genitivus objectivus) a self-same object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is not just any old kind of unity -- it is not the unity of a collection, even if the members of the collection are immaterial items  -- but a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.  It is a spiritual unity and therefore an apt model of the divine simplicity.

Back to Van Til

He is wrong to suggest that there is only problem of the One and the Many.  The One and the Many is itself both one and many. Whether he is right that it is "the whole problem of philosophy," it is certainly at the center of philosophy. But what could he mean when he claims  that the doctrine of divine simplicity solves the problem?  It is itself one form of the problem.  The problem is one that arises for the discursive intellect, and is perhaps rendered insoluble by the same intellect, namely, the problem of rendering intelligible the unities lately surveyed.

God is the Absolute and as such must be simple.  But divine simplicity is incomprehensible to the creaturely intellect which is discursive and can only think in opposites.  What is actual is possible, however, and what is possible might be such whether or not we can understand how it is possible. So the best I can do in trying to understand what Van Til is saying is as follows. He 'simply' assumes that the God of the Bible is simple and does not trouble himself with the question of how it is possible that he be simple.  Given this assumption,  there is no problem in reality of as to how God can be both one and many.  And if there is no problem in the supreme case of the One and the Many, then there are no problems in any of the lesser cases.

Contingency and Composition

Joe, who describes himself as "a high school student with a passion for philosophy of religion and metaphysics," asked me a long series of  difficult questions. Here is one of them:

After reading [Edward] Feser's Five Proofs, I have had difficulties with the concept of sustaining causes. First, Feser argues  that composites require a sustaining cause in order to "hold them together" or keep them conjoined. But this seems to presuppose that all composite things (be it physical composites or metaphysical composites) are contingent.

 

But why suppose that, necessarily, all composites are contingent? What is incoherent about this:

 

X is a necessary being (i.e. X cannot fail to exist). X has metaphysical parts A, B, and C. Each of A, B, and C are also necessarily instantiated in reality, and the relations between A, B, and C are all necessarily instantiated in reality.

 

Why ought we to rule out this epistemic possibility? This seems to be a necessary being which is composite. It would be a counter-example to the assumption that composition entails contingency (where contingency means can fail to exist).

 

If we take composition broadly enough, composition does not entail contingency.  Consider the set, {1, 3, 5}. Assume that numbers are necessary beings. Then of course the set will also be a necessary being.  Furthermore, the relations that hold between the members of this set hold necessarily. For example, necessarily, 3 < 5, and necessarily, 3 > 1.  So if we think of sets as composite entities, then it is not the case that all composites are contingent.

 

But what Feser is concerned with are material particulars, or material substances, to use the Aristotelian-scholastic jargon, e..g., a horse, a statue, a man.  And of course these cannot be taken to be sets of their metaphysical parts.  If I understand Feser, what he is asking is: what makes a contingent being such as Socrates contingent?  The question is not whether he is contingent, but what makes him contingent. What is the ground of his contingency?  The answer is that Socrates is contingent because he is composite.  Composition or rather compositeness is the ground of contingency. His contingency is explained by his compositeness, in particular, his being a composite of essence and existence. So at the root of contingency is the real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence in finite substances.

 

The claim is not that every composite entity is contingent, but that every contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composite. 

 

Now if a contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composed of essence and existence, then a necessary being, or rather, a necessary being that has its necessity from itself and not from another, is necessary in virtue of its being simple, i.e., absolutely non-partite.  This is how Thomists feel driven to the admittedly strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine of divine simplicity. 

 

If there is to be an ultimate explanation of the existence of contingent beings, this explanation must invoke an entity that is not itself contingent.  The ultimate entity must exist of metaphysical  necessity and have its necessity from itself.  Thomism as I understand it plausibly maintains that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. God is necessary because in God essence and existence are one and the same.

Rationalistic Fideism, Mysterianism, Misology, and Divine Simplicity

I want to thank the perspicacious Lukas Novak for helping me in my endless quest to know myself.  Professor Novak comments:

Is Bill a Gnostic?

Well, I am not sure about the precise meaning of this epithet, but to me Bill appears as a strange amalgam of a rationalist and a fideist. The rationalist comes first and sets up certain rather strict requirements on the contents of faith -- so that everything that does not fit in comes out as "incoherent" or "incomprehensible". Then, entre fideist and says that we nevertheless are still justified in believing these contents because we can justifiably assume that our intellect is so incompetent.

To me, this puts too much confidence in our reason in the first stage and too little in the last. It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction etc. in a given particular case. In this, he seems to be putting way too much confidence in his reasonings. The overall, habitual outcome of this is, however, the exact opposite: a significantly diminished confidence in the competence of our intellect as such. (This reminds me of the mechanism of how "misology" is generated, in Plato's Phaedo.)

We were discussing ecclesiology and the Incarnation, but at the moment I am revising my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  Divine Simplicity entry, so I want to shift over to this topic since similar structural patterns emerge.  What follows is a section I will add to the entry, one on a recent paper by Eleonore Stump of St. Louis University. Professor Stump is a distinguished Aquinas scholar and defender of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS).

4.4 Stump's Quantum Metaphysics

Like Dolezal, Eleonore Stump thinks of God as self-subsistent Being (esse). If God is absolutely simple, and not just simple in the uncontroversial sense of lacking material parts, then God must be self-subsistent Being. God is at once both Being and something that is. He has to be both. If he were Being (esse) but not a being (id quod est), he could not enter into causal relations. He could not do anything such as create the world, intervene in its operations, or interact with human persons. Such a God would be "religiously pernicious." (Stump 2016, 199) Indeed, if God were Being but not a being, then one could not sensibly maintain that God exists. For if Being is other than every being, then Being is not. (It is instructive to note that Martin Heidegger, the famous critic of onto-theology, who holds to the "ontological difference" of Being (Sein) from every being (Seiendes) ends up assimilating Being to Nothing (Nichts).) On the other hand, if God were a being among beings who merely has Being but is not (identically) Being, then he would not be absolutely transcendent, worthy of worship, or ineffable. Such a God would be "comfortingly familiar" but "discomfiting anthropomorphic." (Miller 1996, 3)

The problem, of course, is to explain how God can be both Being and something that is. This is unintelligible to the discursive intellect. Either Being is other than beings or it is not. If Being is other than beings, then Being cannot be. If Being just is beings taken collectively, then God is a being among beings and not the absolute reality. To the discursive intellect the notion of self-subsistent Being is contradictory. One response to the contradiction is simply to deny divine simplicity. That is a reasonable response, no doubt. But might it not also be reasonable to admit that there are things that human reason cannot understand, and that one of these things is the divine nature? "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) As I read Stump, she, like Dolezal, makes a mysterian move, and she, like Dolezal (2011, 210, fn 55), invokes wave-particle duality. We cannot understand how light can be both a wave phenomenon and also particulate in nature, and yet it is both:

What kind of thing is it which has to be understood both as a wave and as a particle? We do not know. That is, we do not know the quid est of light. [. . .] Analogously, we can ask: What kind of thing is it which can be both esse and id quod est? We do not know. The idea of simplicity is that at the ultimate metaphysical foundation of reality is something that has to be understood as esse —but also as id quo est. We do not know what this kind of thing is either. (Stump 2016, 202)

Stump, E., 2016, “Simplicity and Aquinas's Quantum Metaphysics” in Gerhard Krieger, ed. Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles im Mittelalter: Rezeption und Transformation, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 191–210.

Dolezal, J. E., 2011, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications.

Miller, B., 1996, A Most Unlikely God, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Now for my apologia.

Novak's characterization of me as both a rationalist and a fideist is basically accurate.  And yes, the rationalist comes first with exacting requirements. Let me try to illustrate this with DDS.  God is the absolute reality, a stupendously rich reality who transcends creatures not only in his properties, but also in his mode of property-possession, mode of existence, mode of necessity, and mode of uniqueness. God is uniquely unique. Such a being cannot be a being among beings. He is uniquely unique in that he alone is self-subsistent Being. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.

One can reason cogently to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the conclusion is apparently self-contradictory.  The verbal formula does not express a proposition that the discursive intellect can 'process' or 'compute.' It is unintelligible to said intellect.  For the proposition the formula expresses appears to be self-contradictory. Stump agrees as do the opponents of DDS.

Now there are three ways to proceed. 

1) We can conclude, as many distinguished theists do, that the apparent contradictions are real and that God is not absolutely simple, that DDS is a 'mistake.'  See Hasker, William, 2016, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 699-725.  For Hasker, DDS involves category mistakes, logical failures, and a dehumanization of God.  (One mistake Hasker himself makes is to think that a defender of DDS can only tread the via negativa and must end up embracing radical agnosticism about the nature of God. Stump has some interesting things to say in rebuttal of this notion. See Stump 2016, 195-198.)

In short: God is not reasonably believed to be simple.

2) A second way is the mysterian way.  The conjunction of God is esse and God is id quod est is an apparent contradiction.  But it is not a real contradiction. Characteristic of the mysterian of my stripe is the further claim that the structure of the discursive intellect makes it impossible for us to see that the contradiction is merely apparent.

In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple despite the ineliminable apparent contradictions that this entails because, as Stump puts it, "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) To put the point more generally, it is reasonable to confess the infirmity of human reason with respect to certain questions, and unreasonable to place an uncritical faith in its power and reach.  This is especially unreasonable for those who accept the Fall of man and the noetic consequences of sin.

Besides, if God is not a being among beings, then one might expect the discursive intellect to entangle itself in contradictions when it tries to think the Absolute Reality.  God, as Being itself, cannot be subsumed under any extant category of beings. 

3) A third way is by maintaining that the apparent contradictions can be shown to be merely apparent by the resources of the discursive intellect. In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple, and all considerations to the contrary can be shown to rest on errors and failures to make certain distinction.

What is my argument against (3)? Simply that the attempts to defuse the contradictions fail, and not just by my lights.  Almost all philosophers, theists and atheists alike, judge the notion of a simple God to be contradictory.

What is my argument against (1)? Essentially that those who take this line do not appreciate the radical transcendence of God. This point has been argued most forcefully by Barry Miller (1996).  Theists who reject divine simplicity end up with an anthropomorphic view of God.

As for Novak's charge of misology or hatred of reason and argument, I plead innocent. One who appreciates the limits of reason, and indeed the infirmity of reason as we find it in ourselves here below, cannot be fairly accused of misology. Otherwise, Kant would be a misologist.  I will turn the table on my friend by humbly suggesting that his doxastic security needs sometimes get the better of him causing him to affirm as objectively certain what is not at all objectively certain, but certain only to him.  For example he thinks it is epistemically certain that there are substances. I disagree.

But I want to confess to one charge. Lukas writes, "It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction, etc."  It may be that I am too zealous in my hunt for aporiai.  But I am deeply impressed by the deep, protracted, and indeed interminable disagreement of philosophers through the ages over every substantive question.  My working hypothesis for the metaphilosophy book I am trying to finish is that the core problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble by us.  And then I try to figure out what philosophy can and should be if that is the case, whether it should end in mystical silence -- that is where Aquinas ended up! -- or fuel a Pyrrhonian re-insertion into the quotidian and a living of life adoxastos, or give way to religious faith, or something else.

God, Simplicity, Freedom, and Two Senses of 'Contingency'

Fr. Aidan Kimel wants me to comment on his recent series of posts about divine simplicity, freedom, and the contingency of creation. In the third of his entries, he provides the following quotation:

As Matthew Levering puts it: “God could be God without creatures, and so his willing of creatures cannot have the absolute necessity that his willing of himself has” (Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, p. 103). That is the fact of the case, as it were. Granted the making of the world by a simple, immutable, and eternal Deity, we have no choice but to accept the apparent aporia:

Indeed, there is no ‘moment’ in God’s eternity in which he does not will all that he wills; there is no God ‘prior’ to God’s will to create. In this sense, God can be said to will necessarily everything that he wills. The potency or possibility stems not from God’s will, but from the contingent nature of the finite things willed; they do not and cannot determine the divine will. (Levering, p. 103)

The problem is to understand how the following  propositions can all be true:

1) There is no absolute necessity that God create: "God could be God without creatures."

2) God created (better: ongoingly creates and sustains) the universe we inhabit.

3) God, being simple or metaphysically incomposite, is devoid of potency-act composition and unexercised powers: God is pure act.

4) The universe we inhabit, and indeed any universe God creates, is modally contingent: it does not exist of metaphysical necessity.

The problem, in brief, is to understand how a universe that is the product of a divine act of willing that is necessary (given God's simplicity) can yet be contingent. Levering's answer does not help at all. In fact, he seems to be confusing two senses of contingency when he says that "the contingent nature of the finite things willed" does not determine the divine will.  That's right, it doesn't and for the simple reason that the finite things willed depend entirely on the divine will and are in this sense contingent upon the divine will; but this is not the relevant sense of 'contingency.' Let me explain.

In the modal sense, a contingent item is one that is possible to be and possible not to be, as Aquinas says somewhere. In 'possible worlds' jargon, x is modally contingent =_df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds.  

In the dependency sense, x is dependently contingent =_df there is  some y such that (i) x is not identical to y; (ii) necessarily, if x exists, then y exists; (iii) y is in some sense the ground or source of x's existence. 

It is important to see that an item can be (a) modally contingent without being dependently contingent, and (b) dependently contingent without being modally contingent.

Ad (a). If the universe is a brute fact, as Russell (in effect) stated in his famous BBC debate with Copleston, then the universe exists, exists modally contingently, but has no cause or explanation of its existence.  If the universe is a brute fact, then of course it does not depend on God for its existence.  Its existence is a factum brutum without cause or explanation. It is contingent, but not contingent upon anything. It is modally but not dependently contingent.

Ad (b). Not all necessary beings are "created equal."  That is because one of them, God, is not created at all. The others are creatures, at least for Aquinas. (A creature is anything that is created by God.) The number 7 serves as an example, as does the proposition that 7 is prime.  That proposition is a necessary being. (If it weren't it could not be necessarily true.)  But it has its necessity "from another," namely, from God, whereas God has his necessity "from himself."  The doctor angelicus himself makes this distinction.

These so-called 'abstract objects' -- not the best terminology but the going terminology -- are creatures, and, insofar forth, dependent on God, and therefore contingent upon God, and therefore (by my above definition), dependently contingent. They are dependently contingent but modally necessary. 

Now let's apply the distinction to our problem. The problem, again, is this: How can the product of a necessary creating be contingent? One might think to solve the problem as follows.  God necessarily creates, but what he creates is nonetheless contingent because  what he creates is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment. But this is no solution because it involves an equivocation on 'contingent.'

The problem is: How can the product of a modally necessary creating be modally contingent? 

Think of it this way. (I assume that the reader is en rapport with 'possible worlds' talk.) If God is simple, and he creates U in one world, then he creates U in all worlds. But then U exists in every world, in which case U is necessary. But U is contingent, hence not necessary. Therefore, either God does not exist or God is not simple, or U is not a divine creation.  

Fr. Kimel wanted me to comment on his posts. One comment is that they are top-heavy with quotations.  Quote less, argue and analyze more.

Now I would like the good padre to tell me whether he agrees with me.  I think he just might inasmuch as he speaks of an aporia.  We have good reasons to believe that God is simple, and we have good reasons to believe that the created universe is modally contingent. Suppose both propositions are true. Then they must be logically consistent.  But we cannot understand how they could both be true. So what do we do?

One way out is to jettison the divine simplicity. (But then we end having to say that God is a being among beings and neither I nor Kimel will countenance that, and for good reasons.) A second way is by denying that the created universe is contingent, either by maintaining that it is necessary or by denying that there is any real modality, that all (non-deontic) modality is epistemic.  The second way leads to a load of difficulties.

A third way is by arguing that there is no inconsistency. But I have argued that there is both above and in other recent posts dealing with the dreaded 'modal collapse.'  And it seems to me that my argumentation is cogent.

Well suppose it is. And suppose that the relevant propositions are all true. There is yet another way out. We can go mysterian.  The problem is a genuine aporia. It is insoluble by us. God is simple; he freely created our universe; it is modally contingent.  How is this possible? The answer is beyond our ken. It is a mystery.

Now if Fr. Kimel is maintaining something like this, then we agree.

Corrigendum (9/25). A reader points out, correctly, that in the above graphic the gentleman on the left is not Fr. Copleston, but A. J. Ayer.

Divine Simplicity, Modal Collapse, and a Powers Theory of Modality

This is the third in a series on whether the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) entails modal collapse (MC). #1 is here and #2 here. Most of us hold that not everything possible is actual, and that not everything actual is necessary. I will assume that most of us are right. A doctrine entails modal collapse if it entails that, for every x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  

In God's Powers and Modality: A Response to Mullins on Modal Collapse (no bibliographical information provided, date, or author's name, but presumably by someone named 'Lenow') we read:

Our problem is not with the notion that God has created the world; it is with the fear that we will be forced by divine simplicity to say that God has created the world necessarily. 

[. . .]

I believe that the recent work of Barbara Vetter offers an account of potentiality and modal grounding capable not only of resisting modal collapse, but of doing so along the traditional Thomist lines Mullins rejects as incoherent. Vetter presents us with the theoretical resources needed to affirm divine simplicity without forcing a breakdown in our modal language, and thus allows us to avoid being cornered into asserting that God creates necessarily or that all creaturely events occur necessarily.

We shall see.

What Vetter calls the “standard conception” of a dispositionalist account of modality runs roughly as follows. Objects possess dispositional properties: a vase, for example, possesses the property of fragility; an electron possesses the property of repelling other particles with a negative charge; I have the ability to learn how to play the violin. (3)

I am well-disposed (pun intended) toward this sort of view. 

I am seated now, but I might not have been. I might have been standing now or in some other bodily posture. What makes this true? What is the ontological ground of the (real, non-epistemic) possibility of my not being seated now?  As useful as possible worlds talk is for rendering modal concepts and relations graphic, it is of no use for the answering of this question if we take an abstractist line on possible worlds as sanity requires that we do. On the other hand, David Lewis' concretist approach is, if I may be blunt, just crazy. 

The best answer invokes my presently unexercised ability to adopt a physical posture other than that of the seated posture, to stand up for example.  Ultimately, the ground of real modality is in the powers, abilities, capacities, dispositions, potencies, tendencies, and the like of the things the modal statements are about.

The typical wine glass is fragile: it is disposed to shatter if struck with moderate force. Fragility is a stock example of a dispositional property.  But fragility comes in degrees.  Think of a spectrum of breakability from the most easily breakable items all the way up to items that are breakable only with great difficulty such as rocks and metal bolts and steel beams. We do not apply 'fragile' to things like steel beams, but they too are breakable. 

Yet Vetter is most interested in the property that characterizes all the objects on
this spectrum: the possibility of being broken, the manifestation that she takes to
individuate this property. This modal property that extends from one end of this spectrum
to the other she calls a potentiality—in this case, the potentiality of a thing’s being
breakable.(4)

Now let's see if Vetter's power theory of modality solves our problem.  The problem can be put as follows without possible worlds jargon. There is a tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom.  

1) If God is simple, then he is pure act (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentials. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be.  Given that God is simple, there can be no real distinction in him between potency and act. This is necessarily true  because God exists of metaphysical necessity and is essentially pure act.

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a  different universe, or no universe at all. Had he created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  In that case he would not be pure act: he would harbor an unactualized potential.

The dyad is logically inconsistent. What I called a tension looks to be a contradiction. If (1) is true, then it is impossible that God have unexercised powers such as the never-exercised power to create.  But if (2) is true, it is possible that God have unexercised powers. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

If we hold to (1), then we must reject (2). The upshot is modal collapse. For given that God willed our universe with a will that is automatically efficacious, both the willing and the willed are necessary. And so the existence of Socrates is necessary and the same goes for his being  married to Xanthippe and his being the teacher of Plato, etc.

To what work can we put Vetter’s theory in forestalling the threat of modal collapse? Consider God’s will, using Vetter’s language, as an intrinsic maximal first-order potentiality to will God’s own infinite goodness as the ultimate and perfect end of the divine nature. Let me take each descriptor in turn. First, this potentiality is intrinsic, because it does not depend upon any external circumstances for its manifestation and is not possessed jointly. Second, it is maximal, because God cannot fail to manifest this potentiality. As Vetter argued, something is maximally breakable if it is not possible for it not to break—it will break under any circumstances. Similarly, the willing of God’s goodness as end is a potentiality that can be possessed in degrees: rocks do not seem to possess it at all, demons possess it only to the extent that their wills remain a corrupted version of their original unvitiated creation, humans possess it to a greater extent in that the possibility of redemption remains open to them, angels possess it in the highest created degree as a gift from God; yet God “possesses” this potentiality in qualitatively different fashion, possessing it maximally because it is identical with God’s nature—God cannot fail to will God’s goodness. Third, this is a potentiality simpliciter—that is, a first order iterated potentiality, rather than as a potentiality to acquire some other potentiality; the doctrine of divine simplicity removes the possibility of any such composition. Finally, to avoid the threat of modal collapse, this must be a multi-track potentiality, multiply realizable (as are most potentialities); in effect, this means that God is capable of willing God’s goodness in multiple ways, but that no one instance of such willing is any more or any fuller a manifestation of this potentiality than any other such willing. Defenders of divine simplicity typically hold that God’s life is itself full and infinite goodness, lacking nothing.[ . . .] Consequently, had God willed to exist without creation, God would not have willed a lesser goodness than God has willed in creating the world; similarly, had God willed the creation of a different world, God would not have willed a lesser (or greater) goodness than God has willed in creating this one. Each of these acts of willing would have produced different effects, to be sure—but in each case, the potentiality manifested is the same, the potentiality to will God’s infinite goodness as ultimate end.

What is the argument here? It is none too clear.  But one key notion is that of a maximal potentiality. A maximal potentiality is one that cannot fail to be manifested.  An example of a non-maximal potentiality is that of a wine glass to break into discrete pieces when dropped onto a hard surface or struck. That disposition need never be manifested. (Imagine that the glass ceases to exist by being melted down, or maybe God simply annihilates it.) Or think of all the abilities that people have but never develop.

Breakability looks to be a candidate for the office of maximal potentiality. It cannot fail to be manifested. "As Vetter argued, something is maximally breakable if it is not possible for it not to break—it will break under any circumstances." This is a strange formulation. It is true that some things are such that they must eventually break down. But this is not to say that they will break under any circumstances. But let that pass.

Consider now God's power to will his own goodness. We may grant that this is a power that cannot fail to be exercised or manifested. Since it is not possible for God not to exercise this power, it is no threat at all to the divine simplicity. There is no real distinction between God and his willing his own goodness. God's willing his own goodness just is his power to will his own goodness.  This power is plainly compatible with God's being pure act.

But how does this avoid modal collapse?  

Finally, to avoid the threat of modal collapse, this must be a multi-track potentiality, multiply realizable (as are most potentialities); in effect, this means that God is capable of willing God’s goodness in multiple ways, but that no one instance of such willing is any more or any fuller a manifestation of this potentiality than any other such willing.

The second key idea, then, is that of the multiple realizability of liabilities and potentialities and such. I am not now actually sick, but I am liable to get sick, or I have the potential to get sick, in many different ways.  I can get sick from bad food, or polluted water, or a virus can attack me, etc.  My liability to get sick is multiply realizable. The same goes for active powers and abilities.  My power to express myself is realizable in different ways, in writing, in speech, in different languages, using sign language etc. 

God's power to will his own goodness is realizable by creating our universe, some other universe, or no universe at all. So it too is multiply realizable. Fine, but how does this solve the problem? 

Suppose I will to buy whisky. I go to the liquor story and say, "I want whisky!"  The proprietor says, "Very well, sir, would you like bourbon or scotch or rye or Irish?"  If I insist that I just want whisky, I will learn that whisky is not to be had. One cannot buy or drink whisky without buying or drinking either bourbon or scotch or rye or Irish or . . . .

It is the same with God. He cannot will his own goodness 'in general'; he must will it in some specific way, by willing to create this universe or that universe or no universe.

But then we are back to our problem. For whatever he does, whether he creates or not, is necessary and we have modal collapse.  The modal collapse that we all agree is in the simple God spreads to everything else.

As far as I can see, Lenow's response to Mullins fails.

UPDATE (9/4). Joe Lenow writes,

Hi Bill—I am Spartacus. Thanks for engaging the paper. 

 

This is a version of the argument from a conference presentation a couple of years ago; hadn't realized that the conference papers were public view. I've got a much more carefully worked-out version of the argument presently under review; please find it attached. I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on it!

 

Best wishes,

 

Joe Lenow

Resident Assistant Professor of Theology

Creighton University

I will have to study Professor Lenow's latest version. It cannot be reproduced or discussed here, of course, since it is under review.

From the Mailbag: Modality and Perfection

Daniel C. writes,

A quick remark on your recent possible worlds post. 

You only mention it in  passing but one thing possible worlds talk surely does throw into sharp relief is the issue of the modality of modal statements i.e. if a certain proposition is possibly true is it necessarily possibly true or merely possibly possibly true? To the best of my knowledge most pre-modern metaphysicians simply presumed the truth of the Brouwer axiom (Leibniz and Scotus) or of S5. Far be it from me to challenge these venerable principles but as far as I know very few thought of disputing them before the question could be phrased in terms of accessibility relations between worlds.

Your general point is important and correct: possible worlds talk allows for the rigorous formulation of questions about the modal status of modal statements, which in turn hinges on accessibility relations between worlds.  But I hope you are not suggesting that the Brouwer axiom is the same as the characteristic S5 axiom. I am not a logician, but my understanding is that they are not.

 

Brouwer Axiom: p --> Nec Poss p. That is to say, if a proposition is true, then it is necessarily possibly true.

 

Characteristic S5 axiom: Poss p --> Nec Poss p. That is, if a proposition is possibly true, then it is necessarily possibly true.

Also: On the contrary, I say that God's status as a necessary being follows from His perfection rather than simplicity (although the former may entail the latter as Anselm certainly thought).

I take it that a perfect being is one that possesses all perfections. The Plantingian gloss on 'perfection' seems good enough: a perfection is a great-making property. So a perfect being is one that possesses all great-making properties and the maximal degree of those great-making properties that admit of degrees. 

Now A. Plantinga famously denies the divine simplicity while upholding the divine perfection. I take it we all agree that God is a necessary being.  That than which no greater can be conceived cannot be a mere contingent being. But what makes a necessary being greater than a contingent being? On a possible worlds approach, it will presumably be the fact that a being that exists in all worlds is greater than one that exists in some but not all worlds. It is a matter of quantity of worlds.

But then I will press the question: what makes it the case that God exists in all possible worlds?  What grounds this fact? My answer: the divine simplicity, which implies the identity in God of essence and existence.  Divine perfection is not enough. For God could be perfect in Plantinga's sense while harboring a real internal difference between essence and existence. But this leaves open the question as to why God is necessary.

If you say that God is necessary because he exists in all worlds, then you give a bad answer. It is true that God exists necessarily iff all world-propositions say he exists. But it doesn't follow that God is necessary because all world-propositions say he exists. It is the other way around: he exists according to every world-proposition because he is necessary!

Mundane example. Am I seated because the proposition BV is seated is true? No. The proposition is true because I am seated. The truth-maker is what makes the truth true; it is 'bass ackwards' to say that truths make states of affairs exist.  

Same with God. It is the divine necessity that makes it true that God exists in (i.e., according to) every possible world, and not the other way around. But to be necessary in the unique way that God is necessary, a way he does not share with garden-variety necessary beings such as the number 9 and the set of prime numbers, God must be metaphysically simple.

More on Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse

This entry continues my ruminations on whether the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) entails modal collapse (MC). The commenters in the earlier thread gave me no reason to think that DDS does not entail MC. But one of them sent me to Christopher Tomaszewski's paper which is worth reading and deserves a response.

Tomaszewski presents one of R. T. Mullins' arguments as follows:

1) Necessarily, God exists.
2) God is identical to God’s act of creation.
Therefore
3) Necessarily, God’s act of creation exists.

Tomaszewski claims that above argument is invalid and for the same reason that the following argument is invalid:

7) Necessarily, God exists.
8) God is identical to the Creator.
Therefore
9) Necessarily, the Creator exists.

Now the second argument is clearly invalid. It takes us from true premises to a false conclusion. God exists in every possible world. But in only some worlds does he instantiate the role of Creator. So it is not the case that the Creator exists in every possible world.

Some find the Leibnizian patois of 'possible worlds' puzzling. I don't need it. The point can be made without it, as follows. God exists of metaphysical necessity. But he does not create of metaphysical necessity: creation is a contingent act. Therefore, it is not the case that, necessarily, God is the Creator. Had he created nothing, he would exist without being Creator.

So the second of the two arguments is invalid. Now if the first argument has the same logical form as the second, then it too will be invalid.  But the first argument does not have the same logical form as the second.

The form of the first is:

Necessarily, for some x, x = a.
a = b.
ergo
Necessarily, for some x, x = b.

Clearly, this argument-form is valid, whence it follows that any argument having this form is valid. I am assuming that the individual constants 'a' and 'b' are Kripkean rigid designators: they denote the same object in every possible world in which the object exists.  I am also assuming Kripke's Necessity of Identity principle: For any x, y if x = y, then necessarily, x = y.  By instantiation, if a = b, then necessarily a = b. Now if necessarily a exists, and a cannot exist without being identical to b, then necessarily b exists.

Contra Tomaszewski, the arguments have different forms. The first instantiates a valid form and is therefore valid while the second instantiates an invalid form and is therefore invalid.

I expect someone to object that (2) above -- God is identical to God’s act of creation -- is not an instance of the logical form a = b, where the terms flanking the identity sign are Kripkean rigid designators. But I say they are; indeed they are strongly rigid designators.  A rigid designator is a term that picks out the same item in every possible world in which the item exists. A strongly rigid designator is a term that picks out the same item in every possible world, period.  Thus the designatum of a strongly rigid designator is a necessary being.

My claim, then, is that (2) is a statement of identity and that  'God' and 'God's act of creation' in (2) are both strongly rigid designators. My claim is entailed by DDS which says, among other things, that there is no real distinction in God between agent and action.  So if God is identical to his act of creating our universe, and God exists in every possible world, then the creation of our universe occurs in every possible world, which in turn entails modal collapse.

Tomaszevski has an interesting response (pp. 7-8):

While God’s act is indeed intrinsic (and therefore identical) to Him, “God’s act of creation” designates that act, not how it is in itself, but by way of its contingent effects. That is, whether “God’s act of creation” designates God’s act depends on the existence of a creation which is contingent, and so the designation is not rigid. And since the designation is not rigid, the identity statement is not necessary, as it must be in order to validate the argument from modal collapse. 

This response begs the question. For it assumes that the effect of the divine act of creation is contingent. But that is precisely the question!  If you just assume -- as we all want to assume --  that creation is contingent, then of course there is no modal collapse. The issue, however, is whether one can adhere to that assumption while holding fast to DDS.  Besides, the second sentence in the above quotation makes little or no sense. The act of creation is individuated by the object of creation (our universe, say, in all its detail); an act of divine creation is nothing without its object.  

Am I assuming what I need to prove (and thus begging the question) when I insist that (2) above is necessarily true and thus that the first argument is valid?  No, I am merely unpacking what DDS implies.  

My conclusion is that Tomszevski has clarified the problem for us, but he has not refuted the above argument from DDS to MC. 

Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse

Fr. Aidan Kimel would like me to discuss  the question whether the doctrine of divine simplicity entails the collapse of modal distinctions.  I am happy to take a crack at it.  I take my cue from a passage in a paper Fr. Kimel kindly sent me.  In "Simply Impossible: A Case Against Divine Simplicity" (Journal of Reformed Theology 7, 2013, 181-203), R. T. Mullins asks (footnote omitted):

Could God have refrained from creating the universe? If God is free then it seems that the answer is obviously ‘yes.’ He could have existed alone. Yet, God did create the universe. If there is a possible world in which God exists alone, God is not simple. He eternally has unactualized potential for He cannot undo His act of creation. He could cease to sustain the universe in existence, but that would not undo His act of creating. One could avoid this problem by allowing for a modal collapse. One could say that everything is absolutely necessary. Necessarily, there is only one possible world—this world. Necessarily, God must exist with creation. There is no other possibility. God must create the universe that we inhabit, and everything must occur exactly as it in fact does. There is no such thing as contingency when one allows a modal collapse. (195-196)

The foregoing suggests to me one version of the problem.  There is a tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom.

1) If God is simple, then he is purely actual (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentials. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be. This is true in every possible world because God exists in every possible world and is pure act in every possible world.

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. Had he created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised. In those possible worlds in which God freely refrains from creating, God has unexercised powers. 

The dyad seems logically inconsistent. If (1) is true, then there is no possible world in which God has  unexercised powers. But if (2) is true, there is at least one possible world in which God has unexercised powers. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

There are two main ways to solve an aporetic polyad. One is to show that the inconsistency alleged is at best apparent, but not real.  The other way is by rejection of one of the limbs. I take the dyad to be inconsistent.

Many if not most theists, and almost all Protestants, will simply (pun intended) deny the divine simplicity.  I myself think there are good reasons for embracing the latter.  To put it in a cavalier, bloggity-blog way: God is the Absolute, and no decent absolute worth its salt can be a being among beings. We have it on good authority that God is Being itself self-subsisting.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Platonic, Plotinian, Augustinian, Aquinian, Athenian. It can be shown that simplicity is logical fallout if God is Being itself.  So it seems I must deny (2) and deny that God could have refrained from creating.  But this seems to lead to modal collapse. How so?

Modal Collapse

We have modal collapse just when the following proposition is true: For any x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  This implies that nothing is merely possible; nothing is contingent; nothing is impossible.  If nothing is merely possible, then there are no merely possible worlds, which implies that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world, which cannot fail to be actual, and is therefore necessary.

(The collapse is on the extensional, not the intensional or notional plane: the modal words retain their distinctive senses.)

Suppose divine simplicity entails modal collapse (modal Spinozism). So what? What is so bad about the latter?  Well, it comports none too well with God's sovereignty. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he cannot be under a metaphysical necessity to create. Connected with this is the fact that if God must create, then his aseity would seem to be compromised. He cannot be wholly from himself, a se, if his existence necessarily requires a realm of creatures.  Finally, creaturely (libertarian) freedom would go by the boards if reality is one big block of Spinozistic necessity.

An Aporia?

It seems that the proponent of divine simplicity faces a nasty problem.  At the moment, I see no solution.

The aporetician in me is open to the thought that what we have here is a genuine aporia, a conceptual impasse, a puzzle  that we cannot solve. God must be simple to be God; the modal distinctions are based in reality; we cannot see how both limbs of the dyad can be true and so must see them as contradictory.   

It could be like this: the limbs are both true, but our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us to understand how they could both be true.  Mysterianism may be the way to go.  This shouldn't trouble a theologian too much. After all, Trinity, Incarnation, etc. are mysteries in the end, are they not?  Of course, I am not suggesting the doctrine of divine simplicity can be found in the Bible. 

Later I will evaluate an attempt to solve the problem via an approach to real modality via potentialities and dispositions.  

References to relevant literature appreciated. By the end of the year I have to update my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Divine Simplicity entry.  

Divine Simplicity and Property Instances

A reader has some questions prompted by his reading of my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic. He has three, but for now I will discuss only the first, and indeed only the first three sentences of the first.

1) You write near the end: "God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience." I thought it was that God is identical to God's omniscience, not omniscience per se. Do these statements amount to the same thing? If not, that seems to weaken the analogy with tropes, I think. 

My reader points us to an exceedingly vexing question. I have discussed this in some detail in my review article on William E. Mann's God, Modality, and Morality in Faith and Philosophy (vol. 33, no. 3, July 2016, pp. 374-381) and so I will begin by reproducing that material here and adding such modifications as now seem necessary:

 

Divine Simplicity

At the center of Mann's approach to God is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). But as Mann wryly observes, “The DDS is not the sort of doctrine that commands everyone's immediate assent.” (260) It is no surprise then that the articulation, defense, and application of the doctrine is a recurrent theme of most of the first thirteen essays. Since DDS is the organizing theme of the collection, a critical look at Mann's defense of it is in order.

One of the entailments of the classical doctrine of divine simplicity is that God is what he has. (Augustine, The City of God, XI, 10.) Thus God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. And similarly for the other divine attributes. The Platonic flavor of this is unmistakable. God is not an all-knowing being, but All-knowing-ness itself; not a good being, or even a maximally good being, but Goodness itself; not a wise being or the wisest of beings, but Wisdom itself. Neither is God a being among beings, an ens among entia, but ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being. To our ordinary way of thinking this sounds like so much nonsense: how could anything be identical to its attributes? It seems obvious that something that has properties is eo ipso distinct from them. But on another way of thinking, DDS makes a good deal of sense. How could God, the absolute, self-sufficient reality, be just one more wise individual even if the wisest? God is better thought of as the source of all wisdom, as Wisdom itself in its prime instance. Otherwise, God would be dependent on something other than himself for his wisdom, namely, the property of being wise.

As Mann points out, however, the Platonic approach as we find it is the Augustinian and Anselmian accounts of DDS leads to difficulties a couple of which are as follows:

D1. If God = wisdom, and God = life, then wisdom = life. But wisdom and life are not even extensionally equivalent, let alone identical. If Tom is alive, it doesn't follow that Tom is wise. (23)

D2. If God is wisdom, and Socrates is wise by participating in wisdom, then Socrates is wise by participating in God. But this smacks of heresy. No creature participates in God. (23)

Property Instances

Enter property instances. It is one thing to say that God is wisdom, quite another to say that God is God's wisdom. God's wisdom is an example of a property instance. And similarly for the other divine attributes. God is not identical to life; God is identical to his life. Suppose we say that God = God's wisdom, and God = God's life. It would then follow that God's wisdom = God's life, but not that God = wisdom or that wisdom = life.

So if we construe identity with properties as identity with property instances, then we can evade both of (D1) and (D2). Mann's idea, then, is that the identity claims made within DDS should be taken as Deity-instance identities (e.g., God is his omniscience) and as instance-instance identities (e.g., God's omniscience is God's omnipotence), but not as Deity-property identities (e.g., God is omniscience) or as property-property identities (e.g., omniscience is omnipotence). Support for Mann's approach is readily available in the texts of the doctor angelicus. (24) Aquinas says things like, Deus est sua bonitas, "God is his goodness."

But what exactly is a property instance? If the concrete individual Socrates instantiates the abstract property wisdom, then two further putative items come into consideration. One is the (Chisholmian-Plantingian as opposed to Bergmannian-Armstrongian) state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. Such items are abstract, i.e., not in space or time. The other is the property instance, the wisdom of Socrates. Mann rightly holds that they are distinct. All abstract states of affairs exist, but only some of them obtain or are actual. By contrast, all property instances are actual: they cannot exist without being actual. The wisdom of Socrates is a particular, an unrepeatable item, just as Socrates is, and the wisdom of Socrates is concrete (in space and/or time) just as Socrates is. If we admit property instances into our ontology, then the above two difficulties can be circumvented. Or so Mann maintains.

Could a Person be a Property Instance?

But then other problems loom. One is this. If the F-ness of God = God, if, for example, the wisdom of God = God, then God is a property instance. But God is a person. From the frying pan into the fire? How could a person be a property instance? The problem displayed as an inconsistent triad:

a. God is a property instance.

b. God is a person.

c. No person is a property instance.

Mann solves the triad by denying (c). (37) Some persons are property instances. Indeed, Mann argues that every person is a property instance because everything is a property instance. (38) God is a person and therefore a property instance. If you object that persons are concrete while property instances are abstract, Mann's response is that both are concrete. (37) To be concrete is to be in space and/or time. Socrates is concrete in this sense, but so is his being sunburned.

If you object that persons are substances and thus independent items while property instances are not substances but dependent on substances, Mann's response will be that the point holds for accidental property instances but not for essential property instances. Socrates may lose his wisdom but he cannot lose his humanity. Now all of God's properties are essential: God is essentially omniscient, omnipotent, etc. So it seems to Mann that "the omniscience of God is not any more dependent on God than God is on the omniscience of God: should either cease to be, the other would also." (37)

This is scarcely compelling: x can depend on y even if both are necessary beings. Both the set whose sole member is the number 7 and the number 7 itself are necessary beings, but the set depends on its member both for its existence and its necessity, and not vice versa. Closer to home, Aquinas held that some necessary beings have their necessity from another while one has its necessity in itself. I should think that the omniscience of God is dependent on God, and not vice versa. Mann's view, however, is not unreasonable. Intuitions vary.

Mann's argument for the thesis that everything is a property instance involves the notion of a rich property. The rich property of an individual x is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all and only the essential and accidental properties, some of them temporally indexed, instantiated by x throughout x's career. (38) Mann tells us that for anything whatsoever there is a corresponding rich property. From this he concludes that "everything is a property instance of some rich property or other." (38) It follows that every person is a property instance. The argument seems to be this:

A. For every concrete individual x, there is a corresponding rich property R. Therefore,

B. For every concrete individual x, x is a property instance of some rich property or other. Therefore,

C. For every concrete individual x, if x is a person, then x is a property instance.

I am having difficulty understanding this argument. The move from (A) to (B) smacks of a non sequitur absent some auxiliary premise. I grant arguendo that for each concrete individual x there is a corresponding rich property R. And I grant that there are property instances. Thus I grant that, in addition to Socrates and wisdom, there is the wisdom of Socrates. Recall that this property instance is not to be confused with the abstract state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. From what I have granted it follows that for each x there is the rich property instance, the R-ness of x. But how is it supposed to follow that everything is a property instance? Everything instantiates properties, and in this sense everything is an instance of properties; but this is not to say that everything is a property instance. Socrates instantiates a rich property, and so is an instance of a property, but it doesn't follow that Socrates is a property instance. Something is missing in Mann's argument. Either that, or I am missing something.

There is of course no chance that Professor Mann is confusing being an instance of a property with being a property instance. If a instantiates F-ness, then a is an instance of the property F-ness; but a is not a property instance as philosophers use this phrase: the F-ness of a is a property instance. So what do we have to add to Mann's argument for it to generate the conclusion that every concrete individual is a property instance? How do we validate the inferential move from (A) to (B)? Let 'Rs' stand for Socrates' rich property. We have to add the claim that there is nothing one could point to that could distinguish Socrates from the property instance generated when Socrates instantiates Rs. Rich property instances are a special case of property instances. Socrates cannot be identical to his wisdom because he can exist even if his wisdom does not exist. And he cannot be identical to his humanity because there is more to Socrates that his humanity, even though he cannot exist wthout it. But since Socrates' rich property instance includes all his property instances, why can't Socrates be identical to this rich property instance? And so Mann's thought seems to be that there is nothing that could distinguish Socrates from his rich property instance. So they are identical. And likewise for every other individual. But I think this is mistaken. Consequently, I think it is a mistake to hold that every person is a property instance. I give three arguments.

Rich Properties and Haecceity Properties

Socrates can exist without his rich property; ergo, he can exist without his rich property instance; ergo, Socrates cannot be a rich property instance or any property instance. The truth of the initial premise is fallout from the definition of 'rich property.' The R of x is a conjunctive property each conjunct of which is a property of x. Thus Socrates' rich property includes (has as a conjunct) the property of being married to Xanthippe. But Socrates might not have had that property, whence it follows that he might not have had R. (If R has C as a conjunct, then necessarily R has C as a conjunct, which implies that R cannot be what it is without having exactly the conjuncts it in fact has. An analog of mereological essentialism holds for conjunctive properties.) And because Socrates might not have had R, he might not have had the property instance of R. So Socrates cannot be identical to this property instance.

What Mann needs is not a rich property, but an haecceity property: one that individuates Socrates across every possible world in which he exists. His rich property, by contrast, individuates him in only the actual world. In different worlds, Socrates has different rich properties. And in different worlds, Socrates has different rich property instances. It follows that Socrates cannot be identical to, or even necessarily equivalent to, any rich property instance. An haecceity property, however, is a property Socrates has in every world in which he exists, and which he alone has in every world in which he exists. Now if there are such haecceity properties as identity-with-Socrates, then perhaps we can say that Socrates is identical to a property instance, namely, the identity-with-Socrates of Socrates. Unfortunately, there are no haecceity properties as I and others have argued.¹ So I conclude that concrete individuals cannot be identified with property instances, whence follows the perhaps obvious proposition that no person is a property instance, not God, not me, not Socrates.

The Revenge of Max Black

Suppose we revisit Max Black's indiscernible iron spheres. There are exactly two of them, and nothing else, and they share all monadic and relational properties. (Thus both are made of iron and each is ten meters from an iron sphere.) There are no properties to distinguish them, and of course there are no haecceity properties. So the rich property of the one is the same as the rich property of the other. It follows that the rich property instance of the one is identical to the rich property instance of the other. But there are two spheres, not one. It follows that neither sphere is identical to its rich property instance. So again I conclude that individuals are not rich property instances.

If you tell me that the property instances are numerically distinct because the spheres are numerically distinct, then you presuppose that individuals are not rich property instances. You presuppose a distinction between an individual and its rich property instance. This second argument assumes that Black's world is metaphysically possible and thus that the Identity of Indiscernibles is not metaphysically necessary. A reasonable assumption!

The Revenge of Josiah Royce

Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin. Now it is a fact that I love myself. But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of properties, then I should love Phil equally. For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do. But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil. Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go. I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have. I prefer myself and love myself just because I am myself. My Being exceeds my being a rich property instance.

This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties. For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other. This would make no sense if the Being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties. In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual. And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual. Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.

Classical theism is a personalism: God is a person and we, as made in the image and likeness of God, are also persons. God keeps us in existence by knowing us and loving us. God is absolutely unique and each of us is unique as, and only as, the object of divine love. The divine love penetrates to the very ipseity and haecceity of me and my indiscernible twin, Phil. God loves us as individuals, as essentially unique (Josiah Royce). But this is not possible if we are reducible to rich property instances. I detect a tension between the personalism of classical theism and the view that persons are property instances.

The Dialectic in Review

One of the entailments of DDS is that God is identical to his attributes, such defining properties as omniscience, omnipotence, etc. This view has its difficulties, so Mann takes a different tack: God is identical to his property instances. This implies that God is a property instance. But God is a person and it is not clear how a person could be a property instance. Mann takes the bull by the horns by boldly arguing that every concrete individual is a property instance -- a rich property instance -- and that therefore every person is a property instance, including God. The argument was found to be uncompelling for the three reasons given. Mann's problems stem from an attempt to adhere to a non-constituent ontology in explication of a doctrine that was developed within, and presumably only makes sense within, a constituent ontology. Too much indebted to A. Plantinga's important but wrong-headed critique of DDS in Does God Have a Nature?, Mann thinks that a shift to property instances will save the day while remaining within Plantinga's nonconstituent ontological framework.² But God can no more be identical to a concrete property instance than he can to an abstract property.

1 William F. Vallicella, A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, pp. 99-104. See also Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012, pp. 86-87.  See my review article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161.

2 See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “Divine Simplicity,” section 3.

 

Returning to My Reader's Question 

 

The question was whether, on DDS, God is identical to his omni-attributes or to instances of his omni-attributes. For example, is God identical to omniscience or to his omniscience?

 

My answer to that is there is trouble whichever way you go. Either you face difficulties (D1) and (D2) above, or you take the property-instance line, which I have just argued is also unacceptable. 

 

How Can a Simple God Know Contingent Truths?

Chris M writes, 

If God simply is his act of existence, and if his existence is necessary, how can God have knowledge of contingent truths? What I mean is that it is possible for God to do other than he does (say not create, or create different things.) If he did differently - say, if the world didn't exist - his knowledge would be different in content. Yet God is supposed to be a single act of being, purely simple and identical across all possible worlds. God's essence just is his act of necessary existence, knowing and willing. It seems God's knowledge of contingents thus is an accident in him. But God can have no accidents. How then can he, as actus purus and necessary existence, have properties (such as knowing x or willing x) which he may not have had ?

That  is a clear statement of the difficulty.  As I see it, the problem is essentially one of solving the following aporetic tetrad:

1) God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2) God knows some contingent truths.

3) Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4) God exists necessarily.

The classical theist, Aquinas for example, is surely committed to (1), (2), and (4). The third limb of the tetrad, however, is extremely plausible. And yet the four propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

 

For example, it is contingently true that Socrates published nothing and contingently true that God knows this truth.  He presumably knows it in virtue of being in some internal mental state such as a belief state or some state analogous to it. But this state, while contingent, is intrinsic to God.  The divine simplicity, however, requires that there be nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.  Since God exists necessarily, as per (4), the belief state exists necessarily, which contradicts the fact that it must exist contingently.

 

I discuss this problem here, and in nearby posts in the Divine Simplicity category. 

Mental Act Nominalism with an Application to Divine Simplicity

This entry continues a discussion with Dan M. begun here.  

Before we get to the main event, a terminological quibble.  A view that denies some category of entity I would call eliminativist, not nominalist. I say this because one can be a nominalist about properties without denying their existence. Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. Tom is red and ripe and juicy and other things besides.  It is a Moorean fact, I would say, that Tom has properties, and that, in general, things have properties.  After all, Tom is red and ripe, etc. It's a datum, a given, a starting point.  A sensible question is not whether there are properties, but what they are. Of course there are properties. What is controversial is whether they are universals or particulars, mind-dependent or mind-independent, immanent or transcendent, constituents or not of the things that have them, etc.

Still, there are those parsimonious souls who deny that there are properties. They accept predicates such as 'red' and 'ripe' but deny that in extralinguistic reality there are properties corresponding to these or to any predicates.  These people are called  extreme nominalists.  It's a lunatic position in my view valuable only as a foil for the development of a saner view.  But moderate nominalism is not a lunatic view. This is the view that there are properties all right; it's just that properties are not universals, but particulars, trope theory being one way of cashing out this view.  My Trope category goes into more detail on this.

The present point, however, is simply this: a moderate nominalist about properties does not deny the existence of properties.  So my suggestion is that if you are out to deny some category K of entity (i.e., deny of a putative category that it has members) then you should label your position as eliminativist about Ks, not nominalist about Ks.  Dan is an eliminativist about mental acts, not a nominalist about them.

But this is a merely terminological point.  Having made it, I will now irenically acquiesce in Dan's terminology for the space of this post.  Dan writes with admirable clarity:

As you explain my proposal (I'll call it "Mental Act Nominalism" or "MAN"), an ontological assay of propositional attitudes will only turn up two entities, the agent and the proposition. The agent's having the relevant attitude (e.g., belief, doubt) to the proposition is not itself construed as an additional entity. You say that this view is committed to "a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction."

[. . .]

Turning to your concern. You suggest that "such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among" various propositional attitudes (belief, doubt, etc.). And after discussing some examples, you say they provide "phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts." And you add: "The differences among [various attitudes] will then be act-differences, differences in the type of mental acts."

The gist of my reply is that we can perhaps account for the differences you speak of without committing ourselves to the existence of the relevant mental acts/states.

Consider these two situations:

(A) Dan wonders whether Bill owns cats.

(B) Dan believes that Bill owns cats.

(We may suppose there was a time lapse between them.) What should the ontological assays of (A) and (B) include? As you described MAN, its ontological assays of propositional attitudes deliver just two entities, the relevant agent and proposition. So on this approach, we get these two assays:

(A Assay 1) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 1) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats.

These assays fail to differentiate situations A and B. However, it's not clear to me that MAN has to be implemented in this way. Consider these alternative assays:

(A Assay 2) Dan, the relation wondering whether, the proposition Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 2) Dan, the relation believing that, the proposition Bill owns cats.

These assays do differentiate A and B, by virtue of the different relations. I think MAN is prima facie compatible with these assays, since the main aim of MAN is not to deny the existence of propositional attitude relations per se, but to deny the existence of mental acts or states consisting in the agent's having the relevant attitude. So, MAN must reject, for example, these assays:

(A Assay 3) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats, the state Dan's wondering whether Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 3) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats, the state Dan's believing that Bill owns cats.

So perhaps we can be realists about propositional attitude relations, but nominalists about propositional attitude states (of affairs). The former would give us a robust basis to differentiate different kinds of propositional attitudes, while the latter would preserve MAN.

BV: The issue is now one of deciding which tripartite assay to accept, mine, or Dan's.  Where I have mental acts or states, he has relations. Mental acts are datable particulars, where a particular is an unrepeatable item.  Dan's relations are, I take it, universals, where a universal is a repeatable item. 

Suppose that Dan, who has not seen his elderly neighbor Sam come out of his house in a week, fears that he is dead. What does the world have to contain for 'Dan fears that Sam is dead' to be true?  Suppose that it contains Dan, the relation fears that, and the proposition Sam is dead, but not the mental act, state, or event of Dan's fearing that Sam is dead.  Then I will point out that Dan, the relation fears that, and the proposition Sam is dead can all three exist without it being the case that Dan fears that Sam is dead.  The collection of these three items does not suffice as truthmaker for the sentence in question.

This is the case even if the relation in question is an immanent universal, that is, one that cannot exist instantiated. It could be that Dan exists, the proposition Sam is dead exists, and the relation fears that exists in virtue of being instantiated by the pair (Pam, the proposition Hillary is sad.)  It is possible that all three of these items exist and 'Dan fears that Sam is dead' is false.

We need something to tie together the three items in question.  On my tripartite analysis it is the mental act that ties them together. So I am arguing that we cannot get by without positing something like the particular Dan's fearing that Sam is dead.

How can a simple God know contingent truths, such as Bill owns cats? On the version of MAN that accepts bona fide relations, we say: God bears the relation believing that to the proposition Bill owns cats. There are just three entities to which this situation commits us: God, the relation, and the proposition. There is no state (construed as a bona fide entity) of God's believing that Bill owns cats.

BV: But if S bears R to p, this implies that R is instantiated by the ordered pair (S, p), and that this relation-instantiation is a state or state of affairs or event.  It is clearly something in addition to its constituents inasmuch as it is their truthmaking togetherness. And this bring us back to our original difficulty of explaining how a simple God can know contingent truths.

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Again on Divine Simplicity and God's Knowledge of Contingent Truths

Again on Divine Simplicity and God's Knowledge of Contingent Truths

This entry continues yesterday's discussion.  The question was: How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths?  Here again is yesterday's aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

I briefly discussed, without endorsing, an externalist way of rejecting (3). Reader Dan M. has a different idea for rejecting (3):

. . . a kind of nominalism about mental acts or states.

To illustrate, consider this truth: (A) Bill is sitting. Because 'Bill' is a singular term denoting a man, (A)'s truth implies the existence of at least one item. But there's disagreement about whether (A) implies the existence of other items. A property realist might say: (A) implies the existence of a property, sitting-ness. An event or state realist might say: (A) implies the existence of an event or state, Bill's sitting. But a nominalist may say: no, an item (e.g. Bill) can be a certain way (e.g. sitting), without that consisting in (or otherwise committing us to) the existence of any further items (such as a property of sitting, or a state or event of Bill's sitting).

Bringing in God's knowledge, we can say: (B) God knows that Bill has two cats. Someone who accepts proposition 3 might say: (B) implies the existence of an item intrinsic to God, namely a particular state of knowledge. If I understand you on knowledge externalism, that sort of response takes issue with 'intrinsic'. On the alternative view I'm entertaining, we take issue with 'item' instead. We say: there is no item of God's knowing that Bill has two cats. Just as Bill can sit without there being a state of Bill's sitting (construed as a bona fide item), God can know that something is the case without there being a state of God's knowing it (construed as a bona fide item).

Very interesting!

The suggestion, to put it generally, is that if a subject S believes/knows/wants/desires (etc.) that p, a correct ontological assay of the situation will not turn up anything in addition to S and p.  Thus there is no need to posit any such item as the state (or state of affairs or fact or event) of S's believing/knowing/wanting/desiring that p.  So on Dan's proposal, if 'God knows that Bill has two cats' is true, this truth does not commit us ontologically to the state (state of affairs, fact, event) of God's knowing that Bill has two cats.

In Cartesian terms, there is an ego and a cogitatum, but no cogitatio. This amounts to a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction.

Well, why not?  One reason off the top of my head is that such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among believing, doubting, suspending judgment, wanting, desiring, willing, imagining, remembering, etc.

One and the same proposition, that Bill has two cats, is known by me, believed but not known by my loyal and trusting readers, doubted by a doubting Thomas or two, suspended by Seldom Seen Slim the Skeptic who takes no position on the weighty question of the extent of my feline involvement, remembered by last year's house guests, etc.  Indeed, one and the same subject can take up different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

Suppose a neighbor tells me there's a mountain lion in my backyard. I begin by doubting the proposition, suspecting my neighbor of confusing a mountain lion with a bobcat, but then, seeing the critter with my own eyes, I advance to believing and perhaps even to knowing.  So one and the same subject can take up two or more different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

These examples are phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts, particular mental occurrences or episodes such as Bill's seeing here and now that there is a mountain lion in his backyard. The differences among believing, knowing, doubting, desiring, remembering, etc. will then be act-differences, differences in the types of mental acts. 

How would a resolute denier of mental acts account for these differences?  Will he shunt all the differences onto propositional contents?  Will he theorize that there are memorial, imaginal, dubitable, desiderative, etc. propositional contents?  Good luck with that.

Suppose that S goes from doubting that p to believing that p. The denier of mental acts would have to redescribe the situation as one in which there are two propositions, call them a dub-prop and a cred-prop, with awareness of the first followed by awareness of the second.  How could one display these two propositions? Dubitably, there is a mountain lion on the backyard and Credibly, there is a mountain lion in the back yard? 

Perhaps such a theory can be worked out plausibly. But it makes little sense to me.

And so we are brought back to our problem: How can a simple God know contingent truths? 

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Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

Theophilus inquires,

I've been researching the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) recently and I've had a hard time figuring something out. On DDS, is it the case that God is identical with his thoughts? Surely on the view (as you say in your SEP article) God is identical with his omniscience. But does that also mean he is identical with the content of that attribute? 

I would appreciate your input on this question, and your SEP article has given me a lot to think about.

The good news for Theophilus is that he has stumbled onto a serious problem. The bad news is that there is no really satisfactory solution known to me.

 

On DDS, God is identical to his attributes. Omniscience is one of the divine attributes; ergo God is identical to omniscience. This seems to imply that God is identical to the mental states in which his omniscience is articulated.  But a good lot of what God knows is contingent, for example, that I am the author of the SEP entry in question. Someone else might have been the author of that encyclopedia entry, not to mention the fact that there might not have been any such entry, or any such encyclopedia.

 

If we think of knowledge as a propositional attitude, and if this holds for God as well as for us, then there are many contingently true propositions with respect to which God is in corresponding contingent mental states. For if it is contingent that p, then it is contingent that God is in the state of knowing that p. Thus God is contingently in the state -- call it S -- of knowing that there is such an on-line publication as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

 

But how can God be identical to S?  This, I take it, is the question that vexes Theophilus.  He is right to be vexed.  How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths? 

The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

The plausibility of (3) may be appreciated as follows.  Whatever else knowledge is, it is plausibly regarded as a species of true belief.  A belief is an intrinsic state of a subject.  Moreover, beliefs are individuated by their contents: beliefs or believings with different contents are different beliefs or believings.  It cannot be that one and the same act of believing has different contents at different times or in different possible worlds. 

That the tetrad is inconsistent can be seen as follows.  Suppose God, who knows everything there is to be known,  knows some contingent truth t.  He knows, for example, that I have two cats.  It follows from (3) that there is some item intrinsic to God such as a belief state whereby God knows t.  Given (1), this state, as intrinsic to God, is not distinct from God.  Given (4), the state whereby God knows t exists necessarily.  For, necessarily, if x = y, and x is a necessary being, then y is a necessary being. But then t is necessarily true.  This contradicts (2) according to which t is contingent.

Opponents of the divine simplicity will turn the tetrad into an argument against (1).  They will argue from the conjunction of (2) & (3) & (4) to the negation of (1). The classical theist, however, accepts (1), (2), and (4).  If he is to solve the tetrad, he needs to find a way to reject (3). He needs to find a way to reject the idea that when a knower knows something, there is, intrinsic to the knower, some mediating item that is individuated by the object known.

So consider an externalist conception of knowledge.  I see a cat and seeing it I know it -- that it is and what it is.  Now the cat is not in my head; but it could be in my mind on an externalist theory of mind.  My awareness of the cat somehow 'bodily' includes the cat, the whole cat, all 25 lbs of him, fur, dander, and all.  Knowledge is immediate, not mediated by sense data, representations, mental acts, occurrent believings, or any other sort of epistemic intermediary or deputy.  Seeing a cat, I see the cat itself directly, not indirectly via some other items that I see directly such as an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan ontological guise, a Meinongian incomplete object, or any other sort of merely intentional object. On this sort of scheme, the mind is not a container, hence has no contents in the strict sense of this term.  The mind is directly at the things themselves.

If this externalism is coherent, then then we can say of God's knowledge that it does not involve any intrinsic states of God that would be different were God to know different things than he does know.  For example, God knows that I have two cats.  That I have two cats is an actual, but contingent fact.  If God's knowledge of this fact were mediated by an item intrinsic to God, a mental act say, an item individuated by its accusative, then given the divine simplicity, this item could not be distinct from God with the consequence that the act and its accusative would be necessary.  This consequence is blocked if there is nothing intrinsic to God whereby he knows that I have two cats.

I don't find externalism plausible, so I am left with an impasse.  I cannot see how God can exist without being ontologically simple. So I cannot reject (1). And of course I cannot solve or rather dissolve the problem by disposing of the presupposition that God exists. As for (2), I am not about to deny that there are contingent truths or that God knows contingent truths. As for (4), if God is simple, then surely he is a necessary being.  A being that is its existence cannot not exist.

 

Few philosophers will follow me to the conclusion that our tetrad is a genuine aporia.  Most theists will cheerfully deny (1). A few will deny (4) which implies the denial of (1). Atheists will dismiss the whole discussion as an empty academic exercise  since it is plain to them that there is no God. A few brave souls will deny (2) either by denying that there are contingent truths or that God knows them. And then there are those who will deny (3).  This I should think is the best way to go if there is a way forward.

 

Could we go mysterian on this? The limbs of the tetrad are each of them true, and so collectively consistent; it is just that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

 

REFERENCE: W. Matthews Grant, "Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, July 2012, pp. 254-274.

  

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How Could a Simple God be a Person?

The Worthy Opponent writes,

And how is the view of divine simplicity and consequent unintelligibility consistent with the view of God as a person? A person has a mind whose thoughts and feelings are distinct and successive. As Hume (1711–76) argued, a being who is simple has ‘no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or in a word, is no mind at all’.ⁱ Yet God is obviously a person, according to Plantinga and othersⁱⁱ. Then he is obviously not simple. 

i^ Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by Richard Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980, part 4.

ii^ Does God Have a Nature? Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980. See Eleanor Stump on the same. ‘We can say ‘you’ to God’. God is a particular, with a mind and a will. ‘We can say ‘you’ to one another, and say ‘you’ to God’.

This is a very hard nut to crack. The problem cannot be solved, in my opinion, by simply denying the divine simplicity. For there is a very powerful argument for it.  As I say elsewhere:

I believe a case can be made, pace Alvin Plantinga and other theistic deniers of divine simplicity, that to deny the absolute ontological simplicity of God is to deny theism itself.  For what we mean by 'God' is an absolute reality, something metaphysically ultimate, "that than which no greater can be conceived." (Anselm)   Now an absolute reality cannot depend for its existence or nature or value upon anything distinct from itself.  It must be from itself alone, or a se.  Nothing could count as divine, or worthy of worship, or be an object of our ultimate concern, or be maximally great, if it lacked the property of aseity.  But the divine aseity, once it is granted, seems straightaway to entail the divine simplicity, as Aquinas argues in ST.  For if God is not dependent on anything else for his existence, nature, and value, then God is not a whole of parts, for a whole of parts depends on its parts to be and to be what it is.  So if God is a se, then he is not a composite being, but a simple being.  This implies that in God there is no real distinction between: existence and essence, form and matter, act and potency, individual and attribute, attribute and attribute.   In sum, if God is God, then God is simple.  To deny the simplicity of God is to deny the existence of God.  It is therefore possible for an atheist to argue:  Nothing can be ontologically simple, therefore, God cannot exist.

A theist who denies divine simplicity might conceivably be taxed with idolatry inasmuch as he sets up something as God that falls short of the exacting requirements of deity.  The divine transcendence would seem to require that God cannot be a being among beings, but must in some sense be Being itself . (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens:  God is not an existent but self-subsisting Existence itself.)  On the other hand, a theist who affirms divine simplicity can be taxed, and has been taxed, with incoherence.  As an aporetician first and foremost, I seek to lay bare the problem in all its complexity under suspension of the natural urge for a quick solution.

In sum, God must be simple to be God.  On the other hand, there can no denying of the force of the Opponent's objection. It has two prongs: the notion of a simple being is unintelligible; no person is simple.  But God is a person. This cannot be denied either.  We appear to be nailed to the cross of the following aporetic triad:

A.God is a person.
B. No person is simple.
C. God is simple.

The classical theist accepts all three propositions. But they are inconsistent.  Some theists will argue that the inconsistency is merely apparent.  I don't believe that this can be compellingly established, and neither does the Opponent.  He thinks the inconsistency real and so concludes that God is not simple.   This makes sense, of course, but it is not quite satisfactory, ignoring as it does the powerful arguments for divine simplicity.  God can be neither an impersonal absolute nor a personal non-absolute.  The Opponent ends up with the view that God is a personal non-absolute.

I myself am inclined to adopt a mysterian 'solution' according to which we accept all three propositions while confessing that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

If we have good reason to believe that p is true, and good reason to believe that q  is true, then we have good reason to believe that p and q are logically consistent (with each other) despite an absence of understanding as to how they could be mutually consistent. What is actual is possible whether or not one can render intelligible how it is possible.  For example, motion is actual, hence possible, despite my inability in the teeth of Zenonian considerations to understand how it is possible. Many similar examples could be given.

And so a mysterian move suggests itself:  We are justified in maintaining both that God is simple and that God is a person despite the fact that after protracted effort we cannot make logical sense of this conjunction.  The fact that the conjunction  -- God is simple & God is a person -- appears to us, and perhaps even necessarily appears to us, given irremediable cognitive limitations on our part, to be or rather entail  an explicit  logical contradiction is not a good reason to reject the conjunction.  The mysterian is not a dialetheist: he does not claim that there are true contradictions. Like the rest of us, the mysterian eschews them like the plague.  His point is rather that a proposition's non-episodic and chronic seeming to be a contradiction does not suffice for its rejection.  For it may well be that certain truths are inaccessible to us due to our mental limitations and defects, and that among these truths are some that appear to us only in the guise of contradictions, and must so appear.

Compare the mind-body problem. Many are inclined to say that that in us which thinks is the brain. But the brain is wholly material, and matter can't think. No physical state as physical states are understood by physics has semantic content and is directed to an object.  Colin McGinn suggests that our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from understanding how the limbs of this apparent contradiction can all be true.  How the brain thinks is thus a mystery.  I am not endorsing McGinn's materialist mysterianism but suggesting that a mysterian approach to theological topics may be the best we can do. Besides divine simplicity, Trinity, Incarnation, and Real Presence are all arguably impervious to understanding by the discursive intellect.  We just cannot see how they could be logically possible.

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Existence and Divine Simplicity: A Stroll Along the Via Negativa with Maimonides

Here is an important passage from Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80:

It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause: its existence is an element superadded to its essence. But as regards a being whose existence is not due to any cause -- God alone is that being, for His existence, as we have said, is absolute -- existence and essence are perfectly identical; He is not a substance to which existence is joined as an accident, as an additional element. His existence is always absolute, and has never been a new element or an accident in Him. Consequently God exists without possessing the attribute of existence. Similarly He lives, without possessing the attribute of life; knows, without possessing the attribute of knowledge; is omnipotent without possessing the attribute of omnipotence; is wise, without possessing the attribute of wisdom: all this reduces itself to one and the same entity; there is no plurality in Him, as will be shown.

God is the Absolute.  As such, he is radically other than creatures.  God is not just another thing that exists and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.  He differs from creatures in his mode of existence, his mode of property-possession, his mode of necessity, and his mode of uniqueness.  See the following recent posts: God is Uniquely Unique and The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being Theology.

Existence accedes to creatures; it is accidental to them.  As Maimonides says, existence is "superadded to their essence."  This implies a real composition of essence and existence in creatures.  But in God there can be no such composition.  God does not have existence; he is his existence.  As Maimonides puts it, "God exists without possessing the attribute of existence."  And similarly for properties such as wisdom and omniscience, etc.  God is wise without possessing the attribute of wisdom.

That is a hard saying.  Does it make sense?  And what sense does it make?

First we need to understand what is being maintained.  There are those who will say that there are no properties/attributes but that nonetheless there are true predications.  This is the position of the extreme nominalist.  Accordingly, 'Socrates is wise' is true but there is nothing in reality picked out by the predicate 'wise' or '___wise' that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the individual.  There are predicates but no properties. That is to say: 'Wise' is correctly predicated of Socrates despite the fact that there is nothing in reality that Socrates instantiates or otherwise has in virtue of which Socrates is wise.  

This is not what Maimonides is saying.  He is not denying that there are properties/attributes.  I take him to be saying two things. First, God does not have or possess his attributes.  He does not have them by standing in a relation of instantiation to them, nor does he have them as ontological 'parts.'  Second, none of the divine attributes is an attribute of creatures.

As for the first point, God does not have his attributes; he is (identically) them.  God is radically One.  His unity is so 'tight' as to disallow any internal composition or stucturation.  And his absoluteness disallows his standing in relation to any properties or factors distinct from him on which he would be dependent for his nature or existence.  Thus God does not have existence and wisdom; he is existence and wisdom.  The second point, I think, follows from the first:  the wisdom of Socrates cannot be the same attribute as the wisdom of God.  

On the semantic plane, the two occurrences of the predicate 'wise' in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' cannot have the same sense. For if they have the same sense, then they pick out the same property; but there cannot be one and the same property of wisdom shared by God and Socrates given that God, but not Socrates, is identical to wisdom.  Therefore there is no univocity across the two sentences with respect to the predicate.  As I read Maimonides, he holds that 'wise' is equivocal in its human and divine uses.

Maimonides and his fellow travellers on the via negativa  are radical foes of even the most sophisticated forms of anthropomorphism.   Socrates is powerful.  The anthropomorphizer says that God too is powerful and in the very same sense; it is just that whereas the philosopher's power is limited, God's power is maximal.  Someone who thinks along these lines is placing God and Socrates on the same scale or order, when God, if absolute and truly transcendent, is "trans-ordinal" to borrow word from Henri Dumery.  What the anthropomorphizer does is take some of the attributes of humans  and think of God as having those very same attributes.  

But if we go the Maimonides route, what do we do with a sentence such as 'God is powerful'?  Must we say that it is nonsense?  We know what it means to say that Socrates is powerful.  But what could it mean to say that God is powerful if the predicate is equivocal across 'Socrates is powerful' and 'God is powerful'?  Note also that the subject-predicate form of 'God is powerful' implies a distinction in its truth maker between God and one of his attributes -- in violation of the divine simplicity.  How can we think or talk about the simple Absolute if all our thinking and talking must have  subject-predicate form (or relational or other forms that require distinctions not applicable to the simple God)?

One response would be to bite the bullet and admit that sentences like 'God is powerful' are, and must remain, strictly nonsensical to the discursive intellect.  But this nonsense is not mere gibberish, but a Higher Nonsense, an heuristic nonsense whose function is to point us beyond the limits of the discursive intellect while we are operating within it.  From the SEP entry:

As severe as Maimonides' position is, even this is not enough. Although negation is preferable to affirmation, even negation is objectionable to the degree that it introduces complexity: God is neither this nor that. What then? Maimonides' reply (GP 1.58) is that ultimately any kind of verbal expression fails us. Rather than provide a precise metaphysical account of the nature of God, the purpose of theological discourse is heuristic: to “conduct the mind toward the utmost reach that man may attain in the apprehension of Him.” Theological language is important to the degree that it eliminates error and sets us along the path of recognizing God's transcendence. Unless one could speak about God, she could easily fall into the trap of thinking that God is corporeal. But in the end, the only thing it reveals is that God is beyond the reach of any subject/predicate proposition. Thus GP 1.59:

Know that when you make an affirmation ascribing another thing to Him, you become more remote from Him in two respects: one of them is that everything You affirm is a perfection only with reference to us, And the other is that He does not possess a thing other than His essence …

Citing Psalm 65, Maimonides concludes that the highest form of praise we can give God is silence. 

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God as Uniquely Unique

 I hit upon 'uniquely unique' the other day as an apt predicate of God.  But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient.

To be unique is to be one of a kind.  It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique.  So at a bare minimum, God must be the one and only instance of the divine kind.  (This kind could be thought of as the conjunction of the divine attributes.) Beyond that, it will be allowed that whatever counts as God must be essentially unique: nothing that just happens to be uniquely of the divine kind could count as God.  What's more, it will be allowed that nothing counts as God that is not a necessary being. Putting these three allowances together, I say that God is not just essentially, but necessarily unique.  (In the patois of 'possible worlds,' God is unique in every possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every possible world.)

But some of us want to go further still.  We want to say that God is uniquely unique.  His uniqueness extends to his mode of being unique.  He is unique in a way that no other thing is unique.  Suppose there is more than one necessarily unique being.  The necessarily unique God would then be just one of many necessarily unique beings.  In that case he would not be uniquely unique. He would share the property of being necessarily unique with other items.  (Fregean propositions and other platonica are epistemically possible candidates.)

But then something greater could be conceived, namely, a being that transcends the distinction between kind and instance in terms of which uniqueness is ordinarily defined.  If I asked someone such as Plantinga wherein resides the divine uniqueness, he would presumably say that it resides in the fact that the there is one and only one possible instance of the divine nature: this nature exists in every world and God instantiates it in every world.  But then God is just another necessarily unique necessary being.  

A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework  applicable to everything other than God.  So it must transcend the distinction between kind and instance.  In a truly transcendent God there cannot be real distinctions of any kind and thus no real distinction between kind and instance, nature and individual having the nature.

Now if God transcends the distinction between instance and kind/nature, and is uniquely unique, unique in a way that no other being is or could be unique, then that is equivalent to maintaining that God is ontologically simple.

But why think that God is ontologically simple and uniquely unique?  Here is where the paths diverge.

Some of us feel impelled to say that a God worth his salt cannot be anything other than the absolute reality, the Absolute.  So God cannot be relative to anything or dependent on anything or immanent to anything as he would be if he were just one more being among beings.  For then he would be immanent to what I earlier called the Discursive Framework.  It is rather the case that God transcends this framework.  If God is the absolute, then he must be simple; otherwise he would depend on properties distinct from himself to be what he is.  

Again, if God is the absolute, then he cannot be one of many; he must be the ONE that makes possible the one and the many.  As such he transcends the Discursive Framework in which the one opposes the many.  The ONE, however, is the ONE of both the one and many.  It cannot be brought  into opposition to anything.  

"But such a God as you are describing is ineffable!  I want a God that that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God  that is a Thou to my I."

What you want is to stop short at a highest finite object, when the religious-metaphysical quest is animated by dissatisfaction with every finite thing.  The truly religious quester is a nihilist with respect to every finite object.  A God worthy of our highest quest must be absolute, simple, transcendent, and ineffable.

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Univocity.  There is an absolute reality.  We can speak of it literally and sometimes truly using predicates of ordinary language that retain in their metaphysical use the very same sense they have in their mundane use.  For example, we can say of Socrates that he exists, and using 'exists' in the very same sense we can say of God that he exists.  Accordingly, 'exists' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is a sameness in mode of Being: God and Socrates exist in the very same way.  No doubt God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exist contingently; but this is a mere different in modal status, not a difference in mode of Being.  It is the difference between existing in all possible worlds and existing in some, but not all, possible worlds.

And the same holds for non-existential predicates such as 'wise.' We can say of Socrates that he is wise, and using 'wise' in the very same sense we can say of God that he is wise.  Accordingly, 'wise' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is sameness in mode of property-possession: God and Socrates both have wisdom by instantiating it.

Analogicity.  Theological language is literal, but analogical.  I won't discuss this view now.

Negative Theology.  The absolute reality is beyond all our concepts. God is utterly transcendent, radically other. Nothing can be truly predicated of God as he is in himself, not even that he exists, or does not.  The problem with this approach is that it threatens to render theological language unintelligible.

So why not adopt the Univocity View?  Is there any good reason not to adopt it?

I think there is a good reason, namely, that the UV implies that God is a being among beings; that God as absolute reality cannot be a being among beings;  ergo, etc.  

But what does it mean to say that God is a being among beings?  As I see it, to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God is no exception to the logical and ontological principles (pertaining to properties, property-possession, existence, modality, etc.) that govern anything that can be said to exist.  It is to say that God fits the ontological or general-metaphysical schema that everything else fits. It is to say that God is ontologically on a par with other beings despite the attributes (omniscience, etc.) that set him apart from other beings and indeed render him unique among beings. To spell it out.  If God is a being among beings, then:

a.  Properties. Some properties are such that God and creatures share them.  Consider the property of being a self.  For present purposes we may accept Dale's definition: "a being capable of consciousness, with intelligence, will, and the ability to intentionally act."  God is a self, but so is Socrates.  Both are selves in the very same sense of 'self.'  'Self' is being used univocally (not equivocally and not analogically) in 'God is a self' and 'Socrates is a self' just as 'wise' is being used univocally in 'God is wise' and 'Socrates is wise,' and so on.

Some are  uncomfortable with talk of properties and seem to prefer talk of concepts.  Well then, I can put my present point by saying that some concepts are such as to be common to both God and creatures, the concept self being one example.

b. Property-possession. God has properties in the same way that creatures do.  My first point was that there are some properties that both God and creatures share; my present point is a different one about property-possession: the having of these shared properties is the same in the divine and creaturely cases.  Both God and Socrates instantiate the property of being a self, where first-level instantiation is an asymmetrical relation or non-relational tie that connects individuals and properties construed as mind-independent universals.

The point could be put conceptualistically as follows.  Both God and Socrates fall under the concept self, where falling under is an asymmetrical relation that connects individuals and concepts construed as mind-dependent universals. 

c. Existence. God is in the same way that creatures are.  Given that God exists and that Socrates exists, it does not follow that they exist in the same way.  Or so I maintain.  But part of what it means to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God and Socrates do exist in the very same way.  Whatever it is for an item to exist, there is only one way for an item to exist, and God and Socrates exist in that very same way. For example, if what it is for x to exist is for x to be identical to some y, then this holds both for God and Socrates.

d. It follows from (a) and (b) taken together that God is really distinct from his properties, and that his properties are really distinct from one another.  God is in this respect no different from Socrates. Really distinct: distinct in reality, apart from our mental operations.  (What is really distinct need not be capable of separate existence.)  And both items have their properties by instantiating them.

e. It follows from (c) that God is really distinct from his existence (just as Socrates is really distinct from his existence) and that God is really distinct from existence (just as Socrates is distinct from existence). 

f. It follows from (d) and (e) taken together that God is not ontologically simple.  Contrapositively, if God is ontologically simple, then God is not a being among beings as I am using this phrase.  It is therefore no surprise that Dale Tuggy ansd other evangelical Christians reject divine simplicity whereas I am inclined to accept it.  See my SEP entry for more on this.

To conclude, my argument against the Univocity View is as follows: 

A. If the UV is true, then God is a being among beings in the sense explained.
B. If God is a being among beings, then God is not ontologically simple.
C. An absolute being must be ontologically simple.
D. God is the absolute being.
Ergo
E. God is ontologically simple.
Ergo
F. God is not a being among beings.
Ergo
G. The Univocity View is not true.

So I reject the UV.  If the other two views are also rationally rejectable, then we have an aporia, which, I suggest, is what we have. We are at an impasse, as usual in philosophy.  

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William Lane Craig Responds to David Bentley Hart and Edward Feser

A tip of the hat to Karl White for alerting me to this YouTube video that runs about 20 minutes.  Professor Craig explains, with characteristic lucidity, why he does not accept the doctrine of divine simplicity and its entailments. 

See my divine simplicity category and my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic.

One of the deep issues here is whether or not Christianity was early on infected by Hellenism, or whether Greek thought, far from being a foreign intrusion, is intrinsic to Christianity.  I side with David Bentley Hart on this question.  In The Lively God of Robert Jensen, Hart writes,

. . . it is arguable that “Hellenism” is already an intrinsic dimension of the New Testament itself and that some kind of “Platonism” is inseparable from the Christian faith. In short, many theologians view the development of Christian metaphysics over the millennium and a half leading to the Reformation as perfectly in keeping with the testimony of Scripture, and “Hellenized” Christianity as the special work of the Holy Spirit—with which no baptized Christian may safely break. To such theologians, the alliance struck in much modern dogmatics between theology and German idealism is a far greater source of concern than any imagined “Greek captivity” of the Church.

.............................................................

UPDATE (4/16):  Ed Feser's detailed rejoinder to Craig is here wherein the former  makes a number of clarifying comments and rebuts some outright misrepresentations on Craig's part.

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Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

I reviewed A Most Unlikely God in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review (vol. XXXVIII, no. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 614-617).  Prof. N.M.L Nathan  expressed an interest in reading it, so here it is.

A Most Unlikely God: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Nature of God. By Barry Miller. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, viii + 175 pp. $27.00.

This is the sequel to Professor Miller's From Existence to God: A Contemporary Philosophical Argument (Routledge, 1992). (See my review in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXVII, no. 3, Summer 1993, pp. 390-394.) In that book he presents a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God that does not rely on the principle of sufficient reason in any of its forms. A central upshot of that argument is that God as uncaused cause of the universe must be Subsistent Existence, i.e., a being not distinct from its existence. The notion that anything whatever could be non-distinct from its existence is of course an exasperatingly difficult one, and is rejected as incoherent by many, along with the doctrine of divine simplicity of which it is an integral part. An ontologically simple God is a most unlikely God since he is one in whom there is no real distinction between form and matter, act and potency, essence and existence, or individual and attribute. Since Miller's theistic argument terminates in the affirmation of a simple God, it is essential to his overall project to show the coherence of the very idea of a simple God and to rebut the numerous objections that have been brought against it. That is the task of the book under review.

Chapter 1 contrasts Miller's approach with the 'perfect-being theology' of the Anselmians. For the latter, God's perfection is construed as his possession of a maximally consistent set of great-making properties or perfections. Omnipotence is an example of a great-making property, and is taken by Anselmians as the logical maximum of a property that can be had by creatures. Thus Socrates is powerful, but God is maximally powerful. Miller rejects this approach to divine perfection in that it implies that such terms as 'powerful,' 'knowing,' 'loving,' etc., can be used univocally of God and creatures. (p. 2) On the Anselmian approach, the gulf between God and creatures is not an absolute divide, and thus God on this approach fails to be absolutely transcendent. The God of the Anselmians is thus "discomfitingly anthropomorphic." (p. 3)

Miller's alternative is to think of the greatest F not as a maximum or limit simpliciter in an ordered series of Fs, but as the limit case of such a series. (p. 4) Whereas the limit simpliciter of an F is an F, the limit case of an F is not an F. Consider, for example, the series: 3-place predicable, 2-place predicable, 1-place predicable. Since a predicable (e.g.,'___is wise') must have at least one place if it is to be a predicable, a 1-place predicable is a limit simpliciter of the ordered series of predicables. Although talk of zero-place predicables comes naturally, as when we speak of a proposition as a zero-place  predicable, a zero-place predicable is no more a predicable than negative growth is growth. 'Zero-place' is thus an alienans adjective like 'negative' in 'negative growth' and 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' Zero-place predicable is thus not a limit simpliciter of the series in question, but a limit case of this series: it is not a member of the series of which it is the limit case. It nevertheless stands in some relation to the members of the series inasmuch as they and the way they are ordered point to this limit case. (p. 8)

The idea, then, is that God's power is not the maximum or limit simpliciter of an ordered series of instances of power, but the limit case instance of power. This implies that God's power is not an instance of power any more than a zero-place predicable is a predicable. No doubt this will shock the Anselmians, but in mitigation it can be said that God's power, though not an instance of power, is that to which the ordered series of power-instances points, and is therefore something to which the members of that series stand in a definite relation.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 engage the problem of how it could be that God is his existence. If sense can be made of this identity, the problem of how God can be identical with his non- existential properties should present no special difficulty. The story begins with Socrates who is spectacularly distinct from his existence. Of course, Socrates can be distinct from his existence only if there is some sense in which existence is a property of him. Since Frege, Russell and their epigones deny this, holding instead that existence is always a property of concepts or propositional functions, Miller devotes Chapter 2 to showing that there are first-level uses of '___exists'  and thus that existence is a first-level property of contingent individuals. Miller makes a strong, and to this reviewer's mind convincing, case for this view.

But given that existence is a first-level property, it does not follow straightaway that it is a real (non-Cambridge) property. One is tempted to wonder what existence could 'add' to Socrates, and tempted to conclude that it could 'add' nothing and thus that existence is a Cambridge property. But so to conclude would be to labor under a false assumption as to how an individual is related to its existence. Chapter 3 argues that Socrates is not related to his existence in the way he is related to his wisdom. His wisdom inheres in him as subject; but it makes no sense to think of his existence as inhering in him as subject: "Socrates' existence could not inhere in him unless there was a sense in which he himself was real logically prior to his existence." (p. 30) And there is no such sense, as Miller goes on to argue. Plantinga's haecceities come in for a drubbing (pp. 31-32), and in general it is plausibly argued that individuals are inconceivable before they exist. That is, before Socrates came to exist, there were no de re possibilities involving him.

So although Socrates individuates his existence, i.e., makes his instance of existence distinct from every other such instance, Socrates cannot actualize his existence in the way he actualizes his wisdom: Socrates is logically posterior to his existence in respect of actuality. (p. 33) This seems right: Socrates' existence is what 'makes' him exist. But how can Socrates be logically posterior to his existence in respect of actuality and also logically prior to his existence in respect of individuation?

This question has an answer if Socrates is related to his existence, not as subject to what inheres in it, but as bound to what it bounds. A bound is logically posterior to what it bounds in respect of actuality, but logically prior in respect of individuation. Consider two blocks of ice cut from the same larger block. The two blocks are individuated by their bounding surfaces, which are logically posterior in respect of actuality to the blocks they bound. Bounds are parasitic on what they bound. But the bounding surfaces are logically prior in respect of individuation to the blocks they bound. This is a creative, if not wholly unproblematic, solution to what I am convinced is a genuine problem, namely, the problem of how existence can belong to an individual without being related to it as to a subject.

We are now in a position to understand the notion of Subsistent Existence as an identity of limit cases (Ch 4). Having seen that Socrates is the bound rather than the subject of his instance of existence, we form the notions of the limit case instance of existence and of the limit case bound of existence. "The notion of Subsistent Existence, then, is the notion of the entity which is jointly and identically the limit case instance of existence and the limit case bound of existence." (67) But doesn't this amount to the self-contradictory claim that some bound of existence is identical with the instance of existence which it bounds? No, because 'limit case' is an alienans adjective; a limit case bound of existence is not a bound at all, nor is a limit case instance of existence an instance of existence.

The rest of the book is an elaboration of this basic idea. Chapter 5 shows how God can be identical with his non-existential properties. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the bearing of the simplicity doctrine on divine cognition, willing, and causation. Chapter 8 addresses the possibility of literal talk about a simple God. Miller attempts to show that on the limit case account of God's simplicity, "...absolute transcendence does not entail total ineffability..." (p. 154) Chapter 9 concludes the work.

There are some minor errors in the book, one of which should be mentioned. On p. 1, n. 1, Miller ascribes to Alvin Plantinga the view that God has no nature. This is a mistake, as Miller readily conceded when I pointed it out to him in correspondence. Plantinga of course holds that God has a nature; what he denies is that God is identical with his nature.

Minor errors aside, this work is the best defense of the divine simplicity to date. Anyone who thinks that this doctrine is obviously incoherent or easily dismissed should read this book -- and think again.

Related articles

A Question About God and Existence

Again on 'God + World = God'

Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself

A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before:  "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?"  This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite.  I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment.  Now if our desire is infinite, then it is arguable that only a truly infinite object could satisfy it, and that such an object cannot be a being among beings, not even a being supreme among beings, but must be an absolute reality, that is, God as Being itself.  To put it another way, the ultimate good for man cannot be a good thing among good things, not even the best of all good things, but must be Goodness itself.  Anything less would be a sort of high-class idol.  So let's start with an analysis of idolatry.

I

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite?

That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never fully satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

For thinkers of this stripe,  all desire is ultimately desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But our deluded desire does not understand this.  Our deluded desire is played for a fool by the trinkets and bagatelles of this fleeting world.  It thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry.

Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of virgin A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for virgin  B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.

So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date):

You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.

There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.

Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not an absolute good exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.

II

Suppose you accept what I just wrote about desire being infinite and ultimately unsatisfiable by any finite object.  Would this show that God cannot be a being among beings?  Not obviously!  The supreme being theists could agree that infinite desire is ultimately satisfiable only by an infinite object, but that the omni-qualified supreme being fills the bill.  Furthermore, they could argue, plausibly, that talk of Goodness itself and Being itself, which imply the divine simplicity, is just incoherent to the discursive intellect.  To which one response is: so much the worse for the discursive intellect.  The ultimate goal is attainable only by transcending it.

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World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation'

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

A Question About God and Existence

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?

This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.

 

First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence.  It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.

 

This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple.  In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has.  Thus he has his existence by being his existence.  Why must God be simple?  Because he is the absolute reality.  If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol.  The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute.  It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness. 

 

Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept.  Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common.  If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist.  But this violates the divine aseity.

 

Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.

 

Objection:  "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."

 

Reply:   The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing.  But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.

 

The picture is this.  Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist.  If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist.  So Existence itself exists.  It is identical to God.  God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God.  God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent.  God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.

 

In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates.  (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.)  God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.

 

Objection:  "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress.  If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation.  If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in.  But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."

 

Response:  The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist.  Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.

 

There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity.  This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God.  In every other case, existence is not self-identity.  No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

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Again on 'God + World = God'

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

Again on 'God + World = God'

The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position?  Let's consider both sides of the question.

A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.

Consider two possible scenarios.  In the first, God alone exists.  In the second, God exists and creates a world.  On a classical view of God, according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible.  There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  Clearly, the scenarios are different.  But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios.  For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios.  Therefore,it is not the case that God + World = God.

To extend the argument:

If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else?   If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else?  How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself?  Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?

After all, it is evident to the senses (though not self-evident, cf. Descartes' Dream Argument) that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing.  Nor it is a dream or an illusion.  Clearly, it is 'better known' that this material world of multiplicity exists than that God exists.  But suppose God does exist.  Then both the world (creatures) and God exist.  Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone?

B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.

Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being.  For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct,  then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this  totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.

So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence.  To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy.  I am standing before a mirror looking at my image.  How many men?  One, not two.  I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man.  An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man.  And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists.  I exist and my image exists.  Both exist, but in different ways.  I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist.  Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture.  (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.) 

It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image.  (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.)  Now we cannot say that the seen man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not.  But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man.   There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an an objective genitive.

Man and image both exist.  Yet there is an important difference.  I say it is a difference in mode of existence.  The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property.  This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.

So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence. 

Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man.  This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it.  If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image  = Man.

Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it. 

C. Aporetic Conclusion

The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling.  But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling.  If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong.  One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being.  But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong.  In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.

I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.

My interim conclusion is aporetic:  both positions on our question are reasonably maintained.  They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.

I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.

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Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

Atheism and Ontological Simplicity: A Retraction and a Repair

Chad McIntosh spotted the sloppiness in something I posted the other day.  A retraction is in order. And then a repair.

A Retraction

I wrote,

The simple atheist -- to give him a name -- cannot countenance anything as God that is not ontologically simple.  That is, he buys all the arguments classical theists give for the divine simplicity.  It is just that he finds the notion of an ontologically simple being incoherent.  He accepts, among others, all of Plantinga's arguments on the latter score.  His signature argument runs as follows:

1. If God exists, then God is simple.
2. Nothing is or can be simple.
Therefore
3. God does not exist.

First of all, one could be a simple atheist (simplicity atheist) as I have defined him without holding that nothing is ontologically simple.  Surely there is nothing in the nature of atheism to require that an atheist eschew every ontologically simple item.  And the same goes for the character I called the ontic theist, Dale Tuggy being an example of one.  Surely there is nothing in the nature of ontic theism, according to which God is not ontologically simple, to require that an ontic theist eschew every ontologically simple item. 

Second, while Alvin Plantinga does argue against the divine simplicity in Does God Have a Nature? (Marquette UP, 1980)  he does not (as I recall without checking) argue that nothing is ontologically simple.

There is no little irony in my sloppiness inasmuch as in my SEP entry on the divine simplicity I adduce tropes as ontologically simple items to soften up readers for the divine simplicity:

We have surveyed some but not all of the problems DDS faces, and have considered some of the ways of addressing them. We conclude by noting a parallel between the simplicity of God and the simplicity of a popular contemporary philosophical posit: tropes.

Tropes are ontologically simple entities. On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on one version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a second theory). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ Thus a redness trope is red , but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness. In this respect it is like God who is what he has. God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. Just as there is no distinction between God and his omniscience, there is no distinction in a redness trope between the trope and its redness. And just as the simple God is not a particular exemplifying universals, a trope is not a particular exemplifying a universal. In both cases we have a particular that is also a property, a subject of predication that is also a predicable entity, where the predicable entity is predicated of itself. Given that God is omniscience, he is predicable of himself. Given that a redness trope is a redness, it is predicable of itself. An important difference, of course, is that whereas God is unique, tropes are not: there is and can be only one God, but there are many redness tropes.

Not only is each trope identical to the property it has, in each trope there is an identity of essence and existence. A trope is neither a bare particular nor an uninstantiated property. It is a property-instance, an indissoluble unity of a property and itself as instance of itself. As property, it is an essence; as instance, it is the existence of that essence. Because it is simple, essence and existence are identical in it. Tropes are thus necessary beings (beings whose very possibility entails their actuality) as they must be if they are to serve as the ontological building blocks of everything else (on the dominant one-category version of trope theory). In the necessity of their existence, tropes resemble God.

If one can bring oneself to countenance tropes, then one cannot object to the simple God on the ground that (i) nothing can be identical to its properties, or (ii) in nothing are essence and existence identical. For tropes are counterexamples to (i) and (ii).

A Repair

Matters are quickly set right if I 'simply' ascribe to the simplicity atheist the following less committal argument:

1. If God exists, then God is simple.
2*. God cannot be simple.
Therefore
3. God does not exist.

To the ontic theist we may ascribe:

2*. God cannot be simple.
~3. God exists.
Therefore
~1. It is not the case that if God exists, then God is simple.

Question 1: Has anyone ever argued along the lines of the simplicity atheist?  Have I stumbled upon a new argument here? 

Question 2:  Can you think of any non-divine ontologically simple items other than tropes?

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Evil as it Appears to Theists and Atheists

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The Simple Atheist, the Classical Theist, and the Ontic Theist

The simple atheist -- to give him a name -- cannot countenance anything as God that is not ontologically simple.  That is, he buys all the arguments classical theists give for the divine simplicity.  It is just that he finds the notion of an ontologically simple being incoherent.  He accepts, among others, all of Plantinga's arguments on the latter score.  His signature argument runs as follows:

1. If God exists, then God is simple.
2. Nothing is or can be simple.
Therefore
3. God does not exist.

The classical theist makes a modus ponens of the above modus tollens, arguing:

1. If God exists, then God is simple.
~3. God exists.
Therefore
~2. Something is and can be simple.

The ontic theist -- to give him a name -- holds that God is a being among beings.  He argues:

2. Nothing is or can be simple.
~3. God exists.
Therefore
~1. It is not the case that if God exists, then God is simple.

Correction issued here.

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God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

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Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

The following entry draws heavily upon W. Matthews Grant, "Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, July 2012, pp. 254-274.

It also bears upon my discussion with Professor Dale Tuggy.  He holds that God is a being among beings.  I deny that God is a being among beings, holding instead that God is Being itself.  This is not to deny that God is; but it does entail affirming that God is in a radically unique way distinct from the way creatures are.  We can call this radically unique way or mode of Being, simplicity.  So my denial, and Dale's affirmation, that God is a being among beings is logically equivalent to my affirming, and Dale's denying, the doctrine of divine simplicity.

A particularly vexing problem for defenders of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is to explain how an ontologically simple God could know contingent truths.

The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

The plausibility of (3) may be appreciated as follows.  Whatever else knowledge is, it is plausibly regarded as a species of true belief.  A belief is an intrinsic state of a subject.  Moreover, beliefs are individuated by their contents: beliefs or believings with different contents are different beliefs or believings.  It cannot be that one and the same act of believing has different contents at different times or in different possible worlds. 

That the tetrad is inconsistent can be seen as follows.  Suppose God, who knows everything there is to be known,  knows some contingent truth t.  He knows, for example, that I have two cats.  It follows from (3) that there is some item intrinsic to God such as a belief state whereby God knows t.  Given (1), this state, as intrinsic to God, is not distinct from God.  Given (4), the state whereby God knows t exists necessarily.  But then t is necessarily true.  This contradicts (2) according to which t is contingent.

Opponents of the divine simplicity will turn the tetrad into an argument against (1).  They will argue from the conjunction of (2) & (3) & (4) to the negation of (1). The classical theist, however, accepts (1), (2), and (4).  If he is to solve the tetrad, he needs to find a way to reject (3). He needs to find a way to reject the idea that when a knower knows something, there is, intrinsic to the knower, some mediating item that is individuated by the object known.

So consider an externalist conception of knowledge.  I see a cat and seeing it I know it -- that it is and what it is.  Now the cat is not in my head; but it could be in my mind on an externalist theory of mind.  My awareness of the cat somehow 'bodily' includes the cat, the whole cat, all 25 lbs of him, fur, dander, and all.  Knowledge is immediate, not mediated by sense data, representations, mental acts, occurrent believings, or any other sort of epistemic intermediary or deputy.  Seeing a cat, I see the cat itself directly, not indirectly via some other items that I see directly such as an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan ontological guise, a Meinongian incomplete object, or any other sort of merely intentional object. On this sort of scheme, the mind is not a container, hence has no contents in the strict sense of this term.  The mind is directly at the things themselves.

If this externalism is coherent, then then we can say of God's knowledge that it does not involve any intrinsic states of God that would be different were God to know different things than he does know.  For example, God knows that I have two cats.  That I have two cats is an actual, but contingent fact.  If God's knowledge of this fact were mediated by an item intrinsic to God, a mental act say, an item individuated by its accusative, then given the divine simplicity, this item could not be distinct from God with the consequence that the act and its accusative would be necessary.  This consequence is blocked if there is nothing intrinsic to God whereby he knows that I have two cats.

We will have to take a closer look at externalism.  But if it is coherent, then the aporetic tetrad can be solved by rejecting (3).

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Maimonides on Existence as an Accident and on Divine Simplicity

I'm on a bit of a Jewish jag at the moment, in part under the influence of my Jewish friend Peter who turned me on to Soloveitchik.  But Peter should labor under no false expectation that he will convert me to any version of Judaism; it is more likely that I shall get him out on the Rio Salado on a truck tire inner tube  whereupon  I shall baptize him in nomine Patris et Fillii, et Spiritus Sancti, and indeed by full immersion, not by the 'watered down' Roman rite.

Joking aside, here is an interesting passage from Moses Maimonides (The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80) which is related to my ongoing conversation with Dale Tuggy, the Protestant theistic personalist:

It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause: its existence is an element superadded to its essence. But as regards a being whose existence is not due to any cause -- God alone is that being, for His existence, as we have said, is absolute -- existence and essence are perfectly identical; He is not a substance to which existence is joined as an accident, as an additional element. His existence is always absolute, and has never been a new element or an accident in Him. Consequently God exists without possessing the attribute of existence. Similarly He lives, without possessing the attribute of life; knows, without possessing the attribute of knowledge; is omnipotent without possessing the attribute of omnipotence; is wise, without possessing the attribute of wisdom: all this reduces itself to one and the same entity; there is no plurality in Him, as will be shown.

Question:  Could existence be an accident of all things that are due to some cause?  And if it is not an accident, is it essential to them?

Max, a cat of my acquaintance, exists and exists contingently:  there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist.  His nonexistence is broadly logically possible.  So one may be tempted to say that existence is to Max as accident to substance.  One may be tempted to say that existence is accidental to Max.  In general, the temptation is to say that existence is an accidental property of contingent beings, and that this accidentality is what makes them contingent.

But this can't be right.  On a standard definition, if P is an accidental property of x, then x can exist without P.  So if existence were an accidental property of Max, then, Max could exist without existing.  Contradiction.

Ought we conclude that existence is an essential property of Max?  If P is an essential property of x, then x cannot exist without P.  So if existence were an essential property of Max, then Max cannot exist without existing.  The consequent of the conditional is true, but tautologically so. 

From this one can infer either that (i) Max is a necessary being (because he has existence essentially) or that (ii) existence construed as an essential property is not the genuine article.  Now Max is surely not a necessary being.  It is true that if he exists, then he exists, but from this one cannot validly infer that he exists.  Suppose existence is a first-level property.  Then it would makes sense to say that existence is an essential property of everything.  (Plantinga says this.) After all, in every possible world in which Max exists, he exists!  But all this shows is that existence construed as an essential property is not gen-u-ine, pound-the-table existence.  Gen-u-ine existence, the only kind I care to have truck with, is existence that makes a thing be or exist, and, to be sure: outside the mind, outside language and its logic, outside its causes, outside of nothing.  With a quasi-poetic, Heideggerian flourish: existence is that which establishes a thing in its Aufstand gegen das Nichts, its insurrection against Nothingness.

We ought to conclude  that existence is neither accidental to a contingent thing, nor essential to it.  No contingent thing is such that existence follows from its essence.  And no contingent thing is such that its contingency can be understood by thinking of its existence as an accidental property of it.  The contingency of Max's being sleepy can be understood in terms of his instantiation of an accidental property; but the contingency of his very existence cannot be so understood.

If every first-level property is either accidental or essential, then existence is not a first-level-property.  But, as I have argued many times, it does not follow that existence is a second-level property.  The Fregean tradition went off the rails: existence cannot be a second-level property.  Instantiation is a second-level property, but not existence. And of course it cannot be a second-level property if one takes the real distinction seriously, this being a distinction between essence and existence 'in' the thing or 'at' the thing.

Where does this leave us?  Max exists.  Pace Russell, saying that Max exists is NOT like saying that Max is numerous.  'Exists,' unlike 'numerous,' has a legitimate first-level use.   So existence belongs to Max.  It belongs to him without being a property of him.  One argument has already been sketched.  To put it explicitly:  Every first-level property is either essential or accidental; Existence is neither an essential nor an accidental first-level property; ergo, Existence is not a first-level property.

Existence belongs to Max without being a property of him.  How is existence 'related' to Max if it is not a property of him? 

My existence book essays an answer, but it too has its difficulties.

Existence is one hard nut to crack.

Related articles

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Does the Divine Transcendence Require that God not be a Being among Beings?

Herewith, a second response to Aidan Kimel.  He writes,

The claim that God is a being among beings is immediately ruled out, so it seems to me, by the classical understanding of divine transcendence: if all beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One, then this One cannot be classified as one of them, as sharing a world with them. To think of God as a being would thus represent nothing less than a return to paganism. We would be back at Mt Carmel with Elijah and the priests of Ba’al.

I myself incline to the view that the divine transcendence entails that God cannot be a being among beings. But I do not see in the passage above a good argument for the view to which I incline.  Fr. Kimel's argument appears to be this:

1. All beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.

Therefore

2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.

This argument is valid in point of logical form — the conclusion follows from the premise — but the premise is false.  If all beings have been created ex nihilo by the self-existent One, then, given that the One cannot create itself, it follows that the One does not exist and thus cannot be self-existent.  The premise is self-refuting.

But let us be charitable.  Perhaps what Fr. Kimel intends is the following argument:

1*. All beings other than the self-existent One have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.

Therefore

2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.

The premise is now true, but the conclusion does not follow — or at least it is not clear how the conclusion is supposed to follow.  Why cannot it be like this?  God, the self-existent One, creates beings distinct from himself.  These beings 'now' (either temporally or logically) form with God a collection of beings.  So although God has all sorts of properties that make him the supreme being such as omniscience, and the rest of the omni-attributes, he remains a being among beings.

It is a simple point of logic that one can give a bad argument for a true conclusion.  This is what Fr. Kimel does above.  I agree with his conclusion, but I reject his reasoning as confused.  He in effect confuses the two arguments displayed.  The first is valid with a false premise; the second is invalid with a true premise. 

Related articles

God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Is it Obvious that God is not a Being Among Beings?

Is it Obvious that God is not a Being Among Beings?

At his weblog Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Aidan Kimel references the discussion Dale Tuggy and I are having about whether God is a being among beings, or Being itself. Fr. Kimel writes,

That God, as conceived by Christians (and I’m not really interested in any other God), is not a being among beings is so utterly obvious to me that I honestly do not know how to argue against it. One of the very first theology books I read back in the 70s was He Who Is by Eric Lionel Mascall. When I look back now on my theological development since then, I have come to realize how profoundly he influenced my understanding of God, even though it was decades later before I read even a little Aquinas. My paperback copy of the book is filled with underlining (ditto for my copy of Existence and Analogy). Here’s one passage that I underlined:

We cannot lump together in one genus God and everything else, as if the word “being” applied to them all in precisely the same sense, and then pick out God as the supreme one. For if God is the Supreme Being, in the sense in which Christian theology uses the term, “being” as applied to him is not just one more instance of what “being” means when applied to anything else. So far from being just one item, albeit the supreme one, in a class of beings, he is the source from which their being is derived; he is not in their class but above it. … In the technical term, when we apply to God a term which is normally used of other beings, we are using it not univocally but analogically; for he is not just one member of a class with them, but their ground and archetype. (p. 9)

Although I incline to the view that God is not a being among beings, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is so.  We all agree that God is the source of the Being or existence of everything other than God. What exists other than God exists because God has created it, and would not exist if God had not created it. So far, so good.  But how is it supposed to follow that God is not a being among beings?  How is it supposed to follow that God is not a being in the very same sense in which Socrates is a being?  I think my friends Dale Tuggy and Alan Rhoda  -- theistic personalists to slap a label on them -- are on solid ground here.  They could reply to Fr. Kimel that the following is a non sequitur:

1. Everything other than God has been created by God ex nihilo and so depends on God for its very existence.

Therefore

2. 'Exists' in 'God exists' and 'Socrates exists' cannot be taken in the precisely the same (univocal) sense.

Dale and Alan might plausibly maintain that while (1) is true, (2) does not follow because the negation of (2) is consistent with (1).  The theistic personalist might reasonably insist that 'exists' in both of the above occurrences has exactly the same sense -- this is a semantic point -- and that the corresponding ontological point holds as well, namely, that God and Socrates exist in the very same way.

So we are in need of some supplemental premise to mediate a valid transition from (1) to (2). Note that Mascall above uses the phrase "ground and archetype."  I think Dale and Alan could be brought to accept the term 'ground' as in 'ultimate metaphysical real-ground or first cause.'  Surely God is that.  But archetype? Here Dale and Alan might reasonably balk at this Plato talk.  'Archetype' suggests that God is more than an efficient cause, but a formal cause as well, something like a Platonic Form. (I recall a passage wherein Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, form of all forms.)  Now if God is something like a Platonic Form, then the relation of creatures and creator is something like Platonic participation (methexis): Socrates, a being, an ens, is  by participating in the divine Being or To Be (esse). The Latin ens is the present participle  of the Latin infinitive esse (to be), and this linguistic relation suggests the metaphysical relation of participation.

Now if God is something like a Platonic Form, then he is the Being of creatures.  But God also is.  Now if God is Being (esse) and God is, then God is self-subsistent Being, ipsum esse subsistens.  That is, God is Being (esse) and being (ens).  Both! But then it follows that God is not a being among beings, a being on a par with other beings.  Why not?  Well, the other beings, creatures, are not identical to their Being (esse) whereas God is the being that is also Being.  In God and God alone, esse and ens 'coalesce' if you will: they are one in reality; they are not really distinct ever though we perhaps cannot think of them except as distinct.  In Socrates, however, esse and ens are really distinct, distinct in reality, outside the mind.

As St. Augustine says, "God is what he has."  So God has Being by being (identical to) Being.  

God cannot be a being because that implies that he is just one of an actual or possible plurality of beings. God is rather the being who is also Being.  God is Being or Existence (Deus est esse), and Existence itself exists.  This is why in my book I speak of Existence as the Paradigm Existent.  

Thus we have at least two ways of Being, the creaturely way and the divine way.  But they are connected: creatures participate in divine Being.  Thus we have an analogia entis, not an aequivocatio entis.

Now what could Dale and Alan say in rebuttal of this?  They could say that there is no justification, scriptural or philosophical, for thinking of God as an archetype, to use Mascall's word.  Thomists typically invoke Exodus 3:14, "I am who am" which suggests to some of us that God is referring to himself as Being itself.  In conversation, Dale told me he rejects this reading and said (if I understood him) that the Hebrew just means that God is telling Moses that he is and will remain constant.  Dale and Alan could say that the God of the Bible is nothing like a Platonic Form.

Conclusions

1. It is not obvious that God is not a being among beings. (Contra Fr. Kimel)

2. It is not obvious that God is a being among beings. (Contra Drs. Tuggy and Rhoda)

3. In general, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." (Hilary Putnam)  Leastways, not in philosophy.

4. For Dale and Alan, God is a being among beings in the precise sense I attached to that phrase in my first post in this series.  They are mistaken if they think that can show that God is not a being among beings by making such obvious points as that God creates everything distinct from himself or that God is unique or that God has properties that nothing else has, or that God is a metaphysically necessary being, etc.  Those sorts of points are logically consistent with God's being a being among beings.

5.  'Being among beings' is a technical phrase; it doesn't mean whatever one wants it to mean.  Nor is it a 'dirty' or pejorative phrase.  It is not a 'kosher' move in a philosophical discussion, once a term or phrase has been defined, to ignore the definition and use it in some other sense.

6.  The question whether God is a being among beings or rather ipsum esse subsistens is a very difficult one with no easy answer.

7.  The question cannot be answered apart from a deep-going inquiry into general metaphysics.  One has to tackle head-on such questions as What is existence? What are properties?  What is property-possession? What is creation?  What is the difference between primary and secondary causation and how are they related?  and plenty of others besides.

8.  It may well be that the problem whether or not God is being among beings is insoluble, a genuine aporia, and that the arguments on both sides cancel out. 

Related articles

God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Aquinas and Why the New Atheists are Right

Divine Simplicity, the Formal Distinction, and the Real Distinction

If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct.  (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111)  I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis)  and how it differs from the real distinction (distinctio realis).  This will be the cynosure of my interest in this post.

There appear to be two ways of construing 'real distinction.'  On the first construal, the real distinction is plainly different from the formal distinction.   On a second construal, it is not so clear what the difference is.  I have no worked-out view.  In this entry I am merely trying to understand the difference between these two sorts of distinction and how they bear upon the divine simplicity, though I will not say anything more about the latter in this installment.

First Construal of 'Real Distinction'

On the first construal, the real distinction is to be understood in terms of separability.  But 'separable' has several senses.  Here are my definitions of the relevant senses.  I am not trying to exposit Thomas or any scholastic.  I am merely trying to get to the truth of the matter.

D1. Individuals x, y are mutually separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that x exist without y, and y exist without x.

Example. The separability of my eyeglasses and my head is mutual: each can (in a number of different senses of 'can' including the broadly logical sense) exist without the other. This distinction is called real because it has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality.  It is not a merely verbal distinction like that between 'eyeglasses' and 'spectacles.' 

D2. Properties F, G are mutually separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that F be instantiated by x without G being instantiated by x, and vice versa.

Example. Socrates is both seated and speaking.  But he is possibly such as to be the one without the other, and the other without the one.  He can sit without speaking, and speak without sitting.  The properties of being seated and speaking, though co-instantiated by Socrates, are mutually separable. Of course, this does not imply that these properties can exist uninstantiated. 

D3. Individuals x, y are unilaterally separable =_df  it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair x, y  exist without the other, but not the other without the one.

Example. A (primary) substance S and one of its accidents A.  Both are individuals, unrepeatables. But while A cannot exist without S, S can exist without A.  Second example.  Consider a fetus prior to viability.  It is not an accident of the mother, but a substance in its own right.  Yet it cannot exist apart from the mother, while the mother can exist apart from it.  So what we seem to have here are two individuals that are unilaterally separable.

D4. Properties F, G are unilaterally separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair F, G be instantiated by x without the other being instantiated, but not the other without the one.

Example.   Suppose Socrates is on his feet, running.  His being on his feet and his running are unilaterally separable in that he can be on his feet wthout running, but he cannot be running without being on his feet.

D5.  Items (whether individuals or properties) I, J are weakly separable =_df I, J are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.

On the first construal of 'real distinction,' it comes to this:

D6. Items (whether individuals or properties), I, J are really distinct =_df I, J are weakly separable.

My impression is that when Scotists speak of the real distinction they mean something identical to or very close to my (D6).  Real distinctness is weak separability.  Two items, whether individuals or properties, are really distinct if and only if they are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.  According to Alan B. Wolter ("The Formal Distinction" in John Duns Scotus, 1265-1965, eds. Ryan and Bonansea, CUA Press, 1965, pp. 45-60),

In the works of Aquinas, for example, the term ['real distinction'] seems to have two basically different meanings, only one of which corresponds to the usage of Scotus, Ockham, or Suarez.  For the latter, the real  distinction is that which exists between individuals, be they substances or some individual accident or property.  It invariably implies the possibility of separating one really distinct thing from another to the extent that one of the two at least may exist apart from the other. (p. 46)

Second Construal of 'Real Distinction'

On a Thomist view, my essence and my existence are not really distinct on the first construal of 'real distinction' because they are mutually inseparable: neither can be without the other.  This strikes me as entirely reasonable.  My individual essence is nothing without existence, and there are no cases of pure existence.  I am not now and never have been an existence-less essence, nor a bit of essence-less existence. And yet Thomists refer to the distinction between (indvidual) essence and existence in finite concrete individuals as a real distinction.  So 'real distinction' must have a second basic meaning, one that does not require that really distinct items be either mutually or unilaterally separable.  What is this second basic meaning?  And how does it differ from the Scotistic formal distinction?

Seeking an answer to the first question, I turn to Feser's manual  where, on p. 74, we read:

But separability is not the only mark of a real distinction.  Another is contrariety of the concepts under which things fall . . . .  For example, being material and being immaterial obviously exclude one another, so that there must be a real distinction between a material thing and an immaterial thing.  A third mark sometimes suggested is efficient causality . . . .

In this passage, Feser seems to be saying that there is one disinction called the real distinction, but that it has more than one mark.  He does not appear to be maintaining that 'real distinction' has two different meanings, one that requires separability and another that does not.  On the next page, however, Feser makes a distinction between a "real physical distinction" and a "real metaphysical distinction" where the former requires separability but the latter does not.  He goes on to say that for Scotus and Suarez a necessary condition of any  real distinction in created things is that the items distinguished be separable: "a distinction is real only when it entails separability." (75)

The Formal Distinction

I asked: "What is the second basic meaning of 'real distinction'?"  The answer I glean from Feser is that the second meaning is real metaphysical distinction, a distinction that does not require separability.  Now for my second question: How does this real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction?  According to Cross, "the formal distinction is the kind of distinction that obtains between (inseparable) properties on the assumption that nominalism about properties is false." (108)  Feser describes it as a third and intermediate kind of disinction that is neither logical nor real. (75)  Both what Cross and Feser say comport well with my understanding of the formal distinction.

Consider the distinction between a man's animality and his rationality.  They are clearly distinct because there are animals that are not rational, and there are rational beings that are not animals.  It is also clear that the distinction is not purely logical: the distinction is not generated by our thinking or speaking, but has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic  reality.  Is it then a real distinction?  Not if such a distinction entails separability.  For it is not broadly logically possible that the rationality of Socrates exist without his animality, or his animality without his rationality.  Anything that is both animal and rational is essentially both animal and rational.  (Whereas it is not the case that anything that is both sitting and speaking is essentially both sitting and speaking.)   So the Scotist, for whom the reality of a real distinction entails separability,  says that what we have here is a formal distinction, a distinction between two 'formalities,' animality and rationality, that are really inseparable but formally distinct.

My second question, again, is this:  How does the real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction?  In both cases, the distinction is not purely logical, i.e., a mere distinctio rationis.  So in both cases the distinction has a basis in reality.  Further, in both cases there is no separability of the terms of the distinction.  Socrates cannot be rational without being an animal, and he cannot be an animal without being rational.  Similarly, he cannot exist without having an essence, and he cannot have an essence without existing.

So what is the difference between the real metaphysical distinction (that Feser distinguishes from the real physical distinction) and the formal distinction?  If I understand Feser, his view is that the formal distinction collapses into the virtual distinction, which is a logical distinction, hence not a real distinction, whereas the real metaphysical distinction is a real distinction despite its not requiring separability.  But what is the virtual distinction?

The Virtual Distinction

Feser tells us that a logical distinction is virtual "when it has some foundation in reality." (73)  A virtual distinction is a logical distinction that is more than a merely verbal distinction.  He gives the example of a man's nature which, despite its being one thing, can be viewed under two aspects, the aspect of rationality and the aspect of animality.  The distinction between the two aspects is not real but virtual.  The virtual distinction thus appears to be identical to the formal distinction. 

Accordingly, the difference between the real metaphysical distinction and the formal distinction is that the first is real despite its not entailing separability while the second is logical despite having a foundation in reality.  I hope I will be forgiven for not discerning a genuine difference between these two kinds of distinction.  Feser suggests that the difference may only be a matter of emphasis, with the Thomist emphasizing the logical side of the virtual/formal distinction and the Scotist emphasizing the real side. (76)

Should we then irenically conclude that the metaphysical real distinction of the Thomists (or, to be cautious, of Feser the Thomist) is the same as the formal distinction of (some of) the Scotists?

Essence and Existence Again

I am afraid that matters are much messier.  Suppose you agree that essence and existence in Socrates are neither mutually nor unilaterally separable.  Suppose you also agree that Socrates is a contingent being: he exists (speaking tenselessly) but there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist.  The second supposition implies that Socates does not exist just by virtue of his essence:  his existence does not follow from his nature.  Nor is his existence identical to his essence or nature, as it is in the ontologically simple God.  So they must be distinct in reality.  But -- and here comes trouble -- this real distinction in Socrates as between his essence and his existence cannot be a distinction between inseparable aspects.  Animality and rationality are inseparable aspects of Socrates' nature; but essence and existence cannot be inseparable aspects of him.  If they were inseparable, then Socrates would exist by his every nature or essence.  This seems to imply that  the metaphysical real distinction is not the same as the formal distinction.  For the metaphysical real distinction between essence and existence requires separability of essence and existence in creatures.

Aporetic Conclusion

It looks like we are in a pickle.  We got to the conclusion that the real metaphysical distinction is the same as the formal distinction.  But now we see that they cannot be the same.  Some may not 'relish' it, but the 'pickle' can be savored as an aporetic polyad:

1. Socrates is a metaphysically contingent being.

2. Metaphysical contingency entails weak separability (as defined above) of essence and existence.

3. Nothing is such that its essence and existence are weakly separable.

The triad is logically inconsistent. 

Solution by (1)-denial.  One cannot of course maintain that Socrates is metaphysically necessary.   But one could deny the presupposition upon which (1) rests, namely, the constituent-ontological assumption that Socrates is compounded of essence and existence.  On a relation ontology, essence-existence composition makes no sense. 

Solution by (2)-denial.  One could try to show that contingency has an explanation that does not require weak separability of essence and existence.

Solution by (3)-denial.   One could argue that the individual essence of Socrates can be wthout being exemplified along the lines of Plantinga's haecceity properties. 

Each of these putative solutions brings trouble of its own.

Related articles

Existence Neither Accidental Nor Essential

God, Simplicity, and Tropes

A reader asks,

In your Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy divine simplicity article you draw a helpful  comparison toward the end between trope theory and divine simplicity. However it left me wondering in what way the claim that 1) God is simple differs from the claim that 2) God is just a trope of divinity?

Excellent question.  But can I answer it?  Here is what I said in the SEP entry:

Tropes are ontologically simple entities. On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on one version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a second theory). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness. In this respect it is like God who is what he has. God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. Just as there is no distinction between God and his omniscience, there is no distinction in a redness trope between the trope and its redness. And just as the simple God is not a particular exemplifying universals, a trope is not a particular exemplifying a universal. In both cases we have a particular that is also a property, a subject of predication that is also a predicable entity, where the predicable entity is predicated of itself. Given that God is omniscience, he is predicable of himself. Given that a redness trope is a redness, it is predicable of itself. An important difference, of course, is that whereas God is unique, tropes are not: there is and can be only one God, but there are many redness tropes.

Not only is each trope identical to the property it has, in each trope there is an identity of essence and existence. A trope is neither a bare particular nor an uninstantiated property. It is a property-instance, an indissoluble unity of a property and itself as instance of itself. As property, it is an essence, as instance, it is the existence of that essence. Because it is simple, essence and existence are identical in it. Tropes are thus necessary beings (beings whose very possibility entails their actuality) as they must be if they are to serve as the ontological building blocks of everything else (on the dominant one-category version of trope theory). In the necessity of their existence, tropes resemble God.

If one can bring oneself to countenance tropes, then one cannot object to the simple God on the ground that (i) nothing can be identical to its properties, or (ii) in nothing are essence and existence identical. For tropes are counterexamples to (i) and (ii).

In the SEP article I was merely trying to "to soften up the contemporary reader for the possible coherence of DDS . . . by adducing some garden variety examples of contemporary philosophical posits that are ontologically simple in one or more of the ways in which God is said to be simple."  I was not suggesting that God is a divinity trope.

But perhaps this suggestion can be developed.  Perhaps God can be usefully viewed as analogous to a trope, as a divinity trope. One thing is clear and must be borne in mind.  God is a stupendously rich reality, the ne plus ultra of absoluteness, transcendence, and alterity.  He cannot easily be brought within the human conceptual horizon.  If you are not thinking of God in these terms, you are probably thinking like an atheist, as if God is just one more being among beings. God, however, is nothing like that famous piece of (hypothetical) space junk, Russell's teapot. 

Given the divine transcendence and absoluteness, one cannot expect God to fit easily into any presupposed ontological framework  developed for the purpose of understanding 'sublunary' items.  God is not a trope among tropes any more than he is a substance among substances or a concrete particular among concrete particulars. Two points. First, there are indefinitely many redness tropes, but there cannot be indefinitely many divinity tropes.  If God is a trope, then he is an absolutely unique trope.  Second, no concrete 'sublunary' item is identical to a single trope.  (I trust my astute readers understand my use of 'sublunary' here.) Many tropes enter into the constitution of any ordinary particular.  But if God is a trope he must be absolutely unitary, enfolding all of his reality in his radical unity. So 'trope' needs some analogical stretching to fit the divine reality.

To answer the reader's question, God cannot be a trope among  tropes.  But an analogical extension of the trope conception in the direction of deity may be worth pursuing.

Related articles

What Exactly is an Ontological Constituent?

E. J. Lowe on the Distinction Between Constituent and Relational Ontology

Reply to Ken Hochstetter on Divine Simplicity

Relational Ontology, Constituent Ontology, and Divine Simplicity

Tropes

Donald Cary Williams

Radde-Gallwitz on Divine Simplicity

Relational Ontology, Constituent Ontology, and Divine Simplicity

A Sketch of the Difference between Two Ontological Styles

What it is for a thing to have a property?  Ostrich nominalism aside, it is a Moorean fact that things have properties, but the nature of the having is a philosophical problem.  The ordinary language 'have' does not wear it correct ontological analysis on its sleeve.  My cup is blue.  Does the cup have the property of being blue by standing in a relation to it -- the relation of  exemplification -- or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent? The root issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff calls, rather infelicitously, "relation ontologists" (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts.

C-ontologists maintain that (i) ordinary particulars have such parts in addition to their commonsense parts; (ii) that among these ontological parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular; and (iii) that the particular has (some of) its properties by having them as proper parts.  R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts.  Of course, R-ontologists do not deny that (most) ordinary particulars have commonsense parts.

Drawing on some graphic images from D. M. Armstrong, we can say that for C-ontologists ordinary particulars are "layer cakes" while for R-ontologists they are "blobs."  'Blob' conveys the idea that ordinary particulars lack ontological structure in addition  to such commonsense structure as spatial structure.

The distinction between these two styles of ontology or two approaches to ontology is not entirely clear, but, I think, clear enough.  To take an example, is the blueness of my blue coffee cup an abstract object off in a platonic or quasi-platonic realm apart and only related to the cup I drink from by the external asymmetrical relation of exemplification?  That, I take it, is van Inwagen's view.  I find it hard to swallow.  After all, I see (with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) the blueness at the cup, where the cup is. Phenomenologically, I see (some) properties.  So some properties are literally visible.  No abstract objects (as PvI and others influenced by Quine  use 'abstract objects') are literally visible.  Ergo, some properties are not abstract objects.  

Here is a second argument.  Some properties are either wholly or partially located at the places where the things that have the properties are located.  No abstract objects are either wholly or partially located at the places where the things that have the properties are located.  Therefore, some properties are not abstract objects.  So I am inclined to say that the blueness of my cup is in some unmereological and hard-to-explain sense an ontological proper part or constituent of the cup.  It is obviously not the whole of the cup since the cup has other properties.  Ordinary particulars are not ontologically structureless 'blobs.' 

Needless to say, these two quick little arguments do not decide the matter in favor of C-ontology.  And the  other arguments I could add won't decide the matter either.  But taken cumulatively these arguments give one good reason to reject R-ontology.

It is also worth observing that an ontological constituent needn't be a property.  Gustav Bergmann's bare particulars and Armstrong's thin particulars are ontological constituents of ordinary or 'thick' particulars but they are not properties of those particulars.  The materia signata of the Thomists is a constituent of material particulars, but not a property of such particulars.  So, C-ontology is not just a thesis about properties and how they are had by the things that have them.

So much for ontological background.  For more on the two ontological approaches, see my article, "Constituent versus Relational Ontology," Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, vol. 10, no, 1, 2013, pp. 99-115.  Now  what relevance does this have for the classically theist doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)?  But first:  What is DDS?

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

To put it as 'simply' as possible, DDS is the thesis that God is without (proper) parts.  (If you want to say that God is an improper part of himself, I'll let that slide.)  Being without parts, God is without composition of any sort.  It is obvious that God is not a region of space, nor does he occupy a region of space.  So he cannot have spatial or material parts. If God is eternal, then he cannot have temporal parts.  (And if there are no temporal parts, then God cannot have them even if he is everlasting or omnitemporal.)  But he also lacks ontological parts.  So the divine attributes cannot be different parts of him in the way that my attributes can be different parts of me on a C-ontology.  We can put this by saying that in God there is no real distinction between him and his omni-attributes. He is each attribute, which implies that each attribute is every other attribute.  Indeed, there is no distinction in God  between God and any of his intrinsic properties.  (Each omni-attribute is an intrinsic property, but not conversely.)  What's more, there can be no distinction in God between essence and existence, form and matter, act and potency.   Since God is in no way composite, he is simple.

And why must God be simple?  Because he is absolute, and nothing absolute can be depend for its existence or nature on anything distinct from it.  An absolute is what it has.  It cannot be compounded of anything that is not absolute or dependent on anything that is not absolute.  Why must God be absolute?  Because anything less would not be God, a worship-worthy being.  These answers are quick and catechetical, but I must invoke my blogospheric privilege and move one.

Plantinga's Critique Misses the Mark

Perhaps the best-known attack on the coherence of DDS is that of A. Plantinga in his Does God Have a Nature?  The attack fails because  Plantinga foists on the DDS an R-ontology that is  foreign to the thought of DDS defenders.  If properties are abstract objects, and God is a concrete particular, then of course it would be incoherent to maintain that God and omnsicience are one and the same.  For if omniscience is a property, and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are causally inert, then the identification of God and omniscience would either render God causally inert -- which would contradict his being concrete -- or it would render omniscience causally active -- in contradiction to its being abstract.  More simply, if you think of concreta and abstracta as denizens of radically disjoint realms, as R-ontologists do, then it would be something like a Rylean category mistake to maintain that God is identical to his properties.

More simply still, if God is causally active and no property is causally active (or passive for that matter), would it not be supremely stupid to assert that there is no distinction in reality between God and his properties?  Could Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Avicenna, et al. have been that stupid?  I don't think so.  Aquinas was as little Quinean in his understanding of abstracta as Quine was Aquinian.  Philosophical theologians under the spell of Quine such as Plantinga and van Inwagen are not well situated to understand such tenets of classical theism as DDS.

It is obvious, then, that DDS is incoherent when read in the light of R-ontology.  It is also uncharitable in excelsis to read Aquinas et al. in that light because so reading them makes nonsense of what they say.

Does C-ontology Help with Coherence?

One of the entailments of DDS is that God does not exemplify his nature; he just is his nature. We have seen that this makes no coherent sense on (any version of) R-ontology. But it does make coherent sense on (some versions of) C-ontology. For if God is purely actual with no admixture of potency, wholly immaterial, and free of accidents, then what is left for God to be but his nature? To understand this, one must bear in mind that the divine nature is absolutely unique. As such it is not repeatable: it is not a universal. It is therefore unrepeatable, a particular. What is to prevent it from being identical to God and from being causally active?

If you say that God is an instance of a multiply exemplifiable  divine nature, they you are simply reverting to R-ontology and failing to take in the point I just made. God cannot be an instance of a kind, else he would depend on that kind to be what he is.  God transcends the distinction between instance and kind.  And if you persist in thinking that natures are causally inert abstract objects, then you are simply refusing to think in C-ontological terms.

If you say that I beg the question against the denier of DDS when I say that God transcends the instance-kind distinction, then you miss the point.  The concern here is not whether DDS is true or whether there are non-question-begging arguments for it; the concern is whether it makes coherent sense as opposed to being quickly dismissable as guilty of a category mistake.

Another objection one might make is that the divine nature is not simple but complex, and that if God is his nature, then God is complex too. For Plantinga, the nature of a thing is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are those properties the thing exemplifies in every possible world in which it exists. On this approach, the divine nature is 'cobbled together' or constructed out of God's essential properties. But then the divine nature is logically and ontologically posterior to those properties. Clearly, no defender of DDS will think of natures in the Plantingian way. He will think of the divine nature as logically and ontologically prior to the properties, and of the properties as manifestations of that unitary nature, a nature the radical unity of which cannot be made sense of on Plantinga's approach.

There are other problematic entailments of DDS.  One is that in God, nature and existence are one and the same. On an R-ontology, this makes no coherent sense.  But it can be made sense on a C-ontological approach.  A fit topic for a separate post.

 

Related articles

Constituent Ontology Versus Relational Ontology and an Argument Against the Latter

What Exactly is an Ontological Constituent?

Properties as Parts: More on Constituent Ontology

Reply to Ken Hochstetter on Divine Simplicity

E. J. Lowe on the Distinction Between Constituent and Relational Ontology

Reply to Ken Hochstetter on Divine Simplicity

Ken Hochstetter of the College of Southern Nevada kindly sent me some comments on my SEP Divine Simplicity entry.  They are thoughtful and challenging and deserve a careful reply.  My remarks are in blue.  I have added some subheadings.

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Bleg: Divine Simplicity

The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by July 2nd.   Written in 2006, it has been revised once, in 2010.  This will be the third revision.  If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them.  In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.

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Related articles

Could God and the Universe be Equally Real?

A Misunderstanding Of Divine Simplicity

The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by July 2nd.   Written in 2006, it has been revised once, in 2010.  This will be the third revision.  If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them.  In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.

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Is Divine Simplicity Compatible with Creaturely Freedom?

I pose a problem, offer without endorsing a solution, and then evaluate Paul Manata's objection to the solution.

Suppose a creaturely agent freely performs an action A.  He files his tax return, say, by the April 15th deadline.  Suppose that the freedom involved is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" (to borrow Kant's derisive phrase) but the robust freedom that implies both that the agent is the unsourced source of the action and that the agent could have done otherwise.  The performance of A makes true a number of contingent propositions, all of them known by God in his omniscience.  Now if S knows that p, and p is contingent, then S's knowing that p is an accidental (as opposed to essential) property of S.  If God is omniscient, then he knows every (non-indexical) truth, including every contingent truth. It seems to follow that God has at least as many accidental properties as there are contingent truths.  Surely some of these are not properties with which God could be identical, as the simplicity doctrine  requires. 

Consider  the property of  knowing that Tom freely files his tax return on April 14th, 2014.  Assuming that Tom actually performs the action in question, this property is an intrinsic  property contingently had by God.  (A property can be intrinsic without being accidental.)  If God were identical to this property, then he could not be a se.  For if God were identical to the property, then God would be dependent on something -- Tom's libertarianly free action -- that is external to God and beyond his control.  Now anything that compromises the divine aseity will compromise the divine simplicity, the latter being an entailment of  the former.  So it seems that an omniscient God cannot be simple if there are free creaturely agents.

 The problem is expressible as an aporetic triad:

1. Every free agent is a libertarianly-free (L-free) agent.

2. God is ontologically simple (where simplicity is an entailment of aseity and vice versa).

3. There are contingent items of divine all-knowledge that do not (wholly) depend on divine creation, but do (partially) depend on creaturely freedom.

Each limb of the above triad has a strong, though not irresistible, claim on a classical theist's acceptance.   As for (1), if God is L-free, as he must be on classical theism, then it is reasonable to maintain that every free agent is L-free.  For if  'could have done otherwise' is an essential ingredient in the analysis of 'Agent A freely performs action X,' then it is highly plausible to maintain that this is so whether the agent is God or Socrates.  Otherwise, 'free' will means something different in the two cases.  Furthermore, if man is made in the image and likeness of God, then surely part of what this means is that man is a spiritual being who is libertarianly free just as God is.  If a man is a deterministic system, then one wonders in what sense man is in the image of God. 

As for (2), some reasons were given earlier for  thinking that a theism that understands itself must uphold God's ontological simplicity inasmuch as it is implied by the divine aseity. 

An example of (3) is Oswald's shooting of Kennedy.   The act was freely performed by Oswald, and the proposition that records it is a contingent truth known by God in his omniscience.

But although each of (1)-(3) is plausibly maintained and is typically maintained by theists who uphold the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), they cannot all be true.  Therein resides the problem.  Any two limbs imply the negation of the third.  Thus:  (1) & (3) --> ~(2); (1) & (2) --> ~(3); (2) & (3) --> ~(1). 

To illustrate, let us consider how (1) and (3), taken together, entail the negation of (2).  Being omniscient, God knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy.   But Oswald's L-freedom precludes us from saying that God's knowledge of this contingent fact depends solely on the divine will.  For it also depends on Oswald's L-free authorship of his evil deed, an authorship that God cannot prevent or override once he has created L-free agents.  But this is inconsistent with the divine aseity.  For to say that God is a se is to say that God is not dependent on anything distinct from himself for his existence or intrinsic properties.   But God has the property of being such that he knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy, and his having this property depends on something outside of God's control, namely, Oswald's L-free choice.  In this way the divine aseity is compromised, and with it the divine simplicity.

It seems, then, that our aporetic triad is an inconsistent triad.  The problem it represents can be solved by denying either (1) or (2) or (3).  Since (3) cannot be plausibly denied, this leaves (1) and (2).  Some will deny the divine simplicity.  But an upholder of the divine simplicity has the option of denying (1) and maintaining that, while God is L-free, creaturely agents are free only in a compatibilist sense.  If creaturely agents are C-free, but not L-free, then Oswald could not have done otherwise, and it is possible for the upholder of divine simplicity to say that that Oswald's C-free choice is no more a threat to the divine aseity than the fact that God knows the contingent truth that creaturely agents exist.  The latter is not a threat to the divine aseity because the existence of creaturely agents derives from God in a way that Oswald's L-free choice does not derive from God. 

The proposal, then, is that we abandon (1) and maintain instead that only God is L-free, creatures being all of them C-free.  And this despite the reasons adduced for accepting (1), reasons that are admittedly not absolutely compelling.  But Paul Manata, in an e-mail, raises an objection to the proposed solution:

I was wondering what you think about this argument that such a solution might not be possible. It goes like this:

Libertarian free will = Incompatibilism + someone is free (does a free action)

Compatibilism = determinism is true in some world w, and someone is free (does a free action) in w.

Incompatibilism = there does not exist a world, w, where determinism is true in w and someone is free (does a free act) in w.

With this quick set up, we can see that compatibilism and incompatibilism contradict each other (the former is scoped by '<>' and the later scoped by '~<>').

 

Thus, to affirm both <>(S is free in some w and determinism is true in w) and ~<>(S is free in some w and determinism is true in w) is not possible. But that is what the solution affirms, i.e., it affirms incompatibilism by affirming that God has LFW and it affirms compatibilism by affirming we have compatibilism freedom.

 

This was quick and there's more to say, but that's the gist of the idea. Thoughts?

 

The essence of Manata's criticism is that the above proposal issues in a contradiction inasmuch as it implies that incompatibilism and compatibilism are consistent, when they are obviously inconsistent.  For if God is L-free, then, given that God is a necessary being, God is L-free in every world, whence it follows (given Manata's definition of libertarian free will) that incompatibilism is true in every world.  But this is inconsistent with the claim that there is a world (such as the actual world) in which compatibilism is true.

 

This is a worthy and thought-provoking objection but perhaps it can be side-stepped if we  bear the following points in mind.  God is a supernatural agent.  As such, he is no part of the natural order.  He is rather the transcendent creator of that order.  Not being part of the natural order, he is not subject to nature's determinism if nature is deterministic.  Nor is God subject to nature's indeterminism if nature is indeterministic.  It follows that God's freedom is neither compatible with determinism nor incompatible with determinism.  Since God is transcendent of nature, the alternative does not arise for him.  Only creaturely freedom faces this alternative. 

 

Given the foregoing, we may define LFW as follows:

 

An agent X is libertarianly free =df X is the agent-cause of some of its actions.

 

This definition is neutral as between supernatural and natural agents.  Now suppose nature is deterministic and every creaturely agent is subject to this determinism.  Then the only way a creature could be free would be in the compatibilist sense.

 

The claim that free creatures are C-free seems logically consistent with the claim that God alone is L-free.

Related articles

A Misunderstanding Of Divine Simplicity

Could God and the Universe be Equally Real?

Dolezal on Divine Simplicity: Does He Make a Mysterian Move?

A Misunderstanding Of Divine Simplicity

London Karl refers me to this piece by Stephen H. Webb in which we read (emphases added):

I recently reviewed Hart’s new book, The Experience of God, at First Things. Hart defends three basic points: First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided). Second, this consensus was shared by nearly all the world’s oldest religions. Third, this consensus is crucial for the Christian faith. It is, in fact, the only way to make sense of God, and thus it is fundamental for everything that Christians believe and say about the divine.

The first bolded passage is inaccurate.  On traditional theism God is of course immaterial, and is maintained to be such by all traditional theists.  But the doctrine of divine simplicity is not identical to the claim that God is immaterial, a claim rejected by many traditional theists.  The simplicity doctrine entails the immateriality doctrine, but not vice versa.  Thus the simplicity doctrine says more than the immateriality doctrine.  If God is simple, then God has and can have no (proper) parts, hence has and can have no material parts; a simple God is therefore an immaterial God given that every material thing is partite, actually or potentially.  But an immaterial God needn't be simple.  The simplicity doctrine implies that there are no real distinctions among:

• God and his existence
• God and his attributes
• Any divine attribute and any other one
• Existence and nature in God: God doesn't have, he is, his nature.
• Potency and act in God:  God is actus purus.
• Matter and form in God: God is forma formarum.

Consider God and the attribute of omniscience.  According to the simplicity doctrine, God does not exemplify omniscience; he is (identical to) omniscience.  And the same holds for all the divine attributes.  For each such attribute A, God does not have (exemplify) A; he is (identical to) A. 

Someone who holds that God is immaterial, however, holds that God has no material parts (and also no spatial parts, and no temporal parts if there are temporal parts).  One can hold this consistently with holding that God is disinct from his attributes as he must be if he exemplifies them, exemplification either  being or being very much like a dyadic asymmetrical relation. 

But what if one were a constituent ontologist who thought that the attributes of a thing are parts thereof (in some suitably extended, non-mereological sense of 'part')?  Then too the simplicity doctrine would not be identical to the immateriality doctrine. For immateriality has to do with a lack of material parts while simplicity has to do with a lack of material and 'ontological' parts such as attributes.

As for the second bolded passage, it is certainly false.  Webb needs to read Plantinga and Swinburne.

Related articles

Does God Give His Existence Meaning?

A Review of Barry Miller's From Existence to God

What Exactly is an Ontological Constituent?

Could God and the Universe be Equally Real?

Sudduth, Simplicity, and the Plotinian One

De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the 'Is' of Composition

Dolezal on Divine Simplicity: Does He Make a Mysterian Move?

Dr. James Dolezal kindly sent me a copy of his very recent book, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).  Herewith, some quick notes and commentary based on a partial reading. 

1.  God is an absolute, or rather the absolute.  That is a non-negotiable starting point for both of us.  To uphold the divine absoluteness, however, it is necessary to think of God as ontologically simple, as devoid of metaphysical complexity and composition.  For if God is absolute, then he cannot depend on anything else for his existence or nature.  It follows that God cannot be an instance of his attributes but must be them; nor can he be an existent among existents: he must be his existence and existence itself.  Indeed, God as absolute must be ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsisting Existence.  These are hard sayings and sharp heads, Plantinga being one of them, find them incoherent.  For details and a bit of a response to Plantinga, I refer you to my Stanford Encyclopedia article.  Note also that an absolute cannot be lacking anything or in need of developing itself: it is, eternally, all that it can be.  This implies that there is no act/potency distinction in God, no unrealized powers or potentialities.  In the classical phrase, God is actus purus, pure act, wholly actual.  Dolezal puts it very well when he writes, "The consideration of God as ipsum esse subsistens and actus purus is crucial for any confession of God's absolute existence." (214)

2. But to uphold the divine absoluteness, it is also necessary that God be libertarianly free in his production of creatures.  For suppose there is something in the divine nature that necessitates God's creation.  Then God would depend on the world to be himself and to be fully actual.  He would need what is other than himself to actualize himself.  This entanglement with the relative would compromise the divine absoluteness.  God would need the world as much as the world needs God.  Each would require the other to be what it is.  (210)

3.  So God must be both simple and free to be absolute.  But it is very difficult to understand how a simple being could be free in the unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense.    If God is simple, then he is pure act in which case he is devoid of unrealized powers, potentialities or possibilities.  To act freely, however is to act in such a way that one (unconditionally) could have done otherwise, which implies unrealized possibilities.  Now Dolezal's view if I have understood him -- and he can correct me in the ComBox if I am wrong -- is that it is not only difficult to reconcile simplicity and freedom, but impossible for us, at least in our present state.  "Though we discover strong reasons for confessing both simplicity and freedom in God, we cannot form an isomorphically adequate notion of how this is the case." (210)  In footnote 55 on the same page, Dolezal brings up wave-particle duality: light behaves both like a particle and like a wave.  We have good reason to believe that it is both despite the difficulty or impossibility of understanding  how it could be both.  On the basis of the quotation and the footnote I hope that Dolezal will forgive me for pinning the label 'mysterian' on him, at least with respect to the simplicity-freedom problem which is only one subproblem within the the divine simplicity constellation.

 4. I grant that if we have good reason to believe that p is true, and good reason to believe that q  is true, then we have good reason to believe that p and q are logically  consistent (with each other) despite an absence of understanding as to how they could be mutually consistent. What is actual is possible whether or not one can render intelligible how it is possible.  To give an example of my own, motion is actual, hence possible, despite my inability in the teeth of Zenonian considerations to understand how it is possible. Many similar examples could be given.

And so a mysterian move suggests itself:  We are justified in maintaining both that God is simple and that God is free despite the fact that after protracted effort we cannot make logical sense of this conjunction.  The fact that the conjunction  -- God is simple & God is free -- appears to us, and perhaps even necessarily appears to us, given irremediable cognitive limitations on our part, to be or rather entail  an explicit  logical contradiction is not a good reason to reject the conjunction.  The mysterian is not a dialetheist: he does not claim that there are true contradictions. Like the rest of us, the mysterian eschews them like the plague.  His point is rather that a proposition's non-episodic and chronic seeming to be a contradiction does not suffice for its rejection.  For it may well be that certain truths are inaccesible to us due to our mental limitations and defects, and that among these truths are some that appear to us only in the guise of contradictions, and must so appear.

Of course, Dolezal's  mysterian move cannot be reasonably made unless the extant attempts (by Barry Miller, Eleonore Stump, Brian Davies, et al.)  to reconcile simplicity and freedom are failures.  Since I agree with Dolezal that they are, I grant him this.

5.  So what are some possible questions/reservations?

First, if  a (conjunctive) proposition's seeming, after careful and repeated scrutiny, to be or entail an explicit logical contradiction is not sufficient evidence of its being a contradiction, what would be?  To put it another way, my inability to explain how it could be true both that p and that q does seem to be pretty good evidence that p and q are not both true.  Now  I said above that the actual is possible whether or not I can explain how it's possible.  Granted, but if I cannot explain the how, doubt is cast on the actuality.

How adjudicate between these opposing lines of argument:  A:  Because X is actual, X  is possible, whether or not anyone can explain how it is possible! B:  Because no one can explain how it is possible, it is not possible, and therefore not actual!

Second,  if all extant attempts to reconcile simplicity and freedom fail, it does not follow that there isn't a solution right over the horizon.  How can a mysterian rule out the possibiity of a future solution?  The mysterian seems committed to saying that it is impossible (at least in this life) that there be a solution.  How can he be sure of this?

Third,  if a proposition appears under careful scrutiny to be or entail a contradiction, then is there even a proposition before the mind?  If you require for my salvation that I believe that God is one and God is three, what exactly are you demanding that I believe?  Before I can affirm a proposition as true I must understand it, but how can I affirm as true a proposition that appears necessarily false?  Such a 'proposition' is arguably not a proposition at all.  (This requires development, of course . . . Richard Cartwright's Trinity paper will help you see what I am getting at.))

Sudduth, Simplicity, and the Plotinian One

Dave Lull has once again pointed me to a fascinating post, Michael Sudduth Follows His Monad Back to Vaishnava Vedanta. Excerpt:

A major problem with Scholasticism is the innate desire that all men have to participate directly and ontologically in their God. We all want that real connection. Sudduth explains, “I pondered this experience for several minutes, while at the same time continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God”.

The fact is Van Tilism and Scholasticism, its Grandfather, can never give man real and ontological connection because like the fools they were, they tried to take the Ultimate Principle of Plotinus and the Pagans and somehow get a Christian worldview out of it with their theory of Absolute Divine Simplicity. This leaves only a pagan ecstatic trance state for Christian men to seek in their attempts to connect to their creator. Thus Sudduth, was in my opinion, simply following his monad back to its Pagan source. He is being consistent. Sudduth says, “I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna.” Notice he doesn’t say, “through Lord Krishna” but “as” Lord Krishna. In Plotinus’ construction hierarchies of being emanated from the One which represent levels of composition , and at each hierarchy was an intermediary. In different versions of this metaphysical construction, the gods are intermediaries on this chain of being. As one move up the chain of being one becomes ontologically identified with the intermediary. Sudduth says, “Since this time I have experienced Krishna’s presence in the air, mountains, ocean, trees, cows, and equally within myself. I experience Him in the outer and inner worlds, and my heart is regularly filled with serenity and bliss.” You see on his view, God is in the state of mind not the proposition.

In conclusion, I commend Sudduth for his logical consistency. When will the rest of the Scholastic Reformed have the courage to do the same? My Scholastic reader, Sudduth is taking Absolute Divine Simplicity to its logical end. I have two options for you.

1. Follow Sudduth

2. Leave Scholastic Neoplatonism for Gordon Clark’s Scripturalism: An absolute Triad: Three ontologically distinct persons; three distinct complex-non-simple eternal divine minds who find their hypostatic origin in the person of the Father.

I'd love to comment, but I have a dentist appointment.  Man does not live by bread alone, but without bread and the properly maintained tools of mastication, no philosophy gets done, leastways, not here below.

Afternoon Update:  I now have time to hazard some brief and off-the-cuff bloggity-blog commentary. 

Earlier in the post, the author writes, "Once someone believes that truth and God cannot be found in a proposition, but in a psychological state, truth by definition becomes something subjective and arbitrary." The full flavor of this no doubt escapes me since I haven't read Van Til or Gordon Clark.   Not that surprising given my background, which is Roman Catholic, though as 'Maverick Philosopher' suggests, I aim to follow the arguments where they lead, roaming over the intellectual landscape bare of a brand,  and free of institutional tie-downs  and dogmatic ballast.  The lack of the latter may cause my vessel to capsize, but it's a risk I knowingly run. 

But speaking for myself, and not for Sudduth, though I expect he will agree with me, I do not understand how anyone could think that the ultimate truth or God (who is arguably the ultimate truth) could be found in a proposition or a body of propositions. Doctrine surely cannot be of paramount importance in religion.  That is a bare assertion, so far, and on this occasion I cannot do much to support it. But I should think that doctrine is but a "necessary makeshift" (to borrow a phrase from F. H. Bradley) to help us in our  "Ascent to the Absolute" (to borrow the title of a book by my teacher  J. N. Findlay).  The name-dropping gives me away and indicates that I nail my colors to the mast of experience in religion over doctrine. (Practice is also important, but that's a separate topic.)

Thoughts lead to thoughts and more thoughts and never beyond the circle of  thoughts.  But I should like to experience the THINKER behind the thoughts, which thinker can no doubt be thought about but can never be reduced to a thought or proposition.  Philosophy operates on the discursive plane, cannot do otherwise, and so is limited, which is why we need religion which in my view, and perhaps in Sudduths', is completed in mystical experience.

The path to the ultimate subject that cannot be objectified, but is both transcendentally  and ontologically the condition of all objectivity, is an inner path.  I needn't leave my own tradition and make the journey to the East  to find support.  I find it in Augustine:  Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas .  "Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. The truth resides in man's interiority."  The way to God is through the self.  The way is not by way of propositions or thoughts or doctrines, and certainly not by fighting over doctrines or condemning the other guy to hell for holding a different doctrine, or a doctrine that plays down the importance of doctrine.

The ultimate truth is not propositional truth, which is merely representational, nor the ontic true of things represented, but the ontological truth of God. (This tripartition can be found in both Heidegger and in Thomas.)   Now if I find God, but not "in a proposition," but by experience (in fitful glimpses as if through a glass darkly here below, in the visio beata yonder) does it follow that that I have merely realized "an arbitrary and subjective psychological  state"?  That is a false alternative.  Not that I wish to deny that some mystical experiences are nonveridical and misleading.  Humans are subject to deception and self-deception in all areas of life.

There is also the matter of the divine simplicity.  Here I will just baldly state that a God worthy of worship must be an absolute,  and that no decent absolute can be anything other than ontologically simple.  For more, I refer you to my Stanford Encylopedia article and the divine simplicity category of this weblog.

This is hotly contested, of course.  Athens and Jerusalem are in tension, and you can see that my ties to Athens -- and to Benares! -- are strong and unbreakable.  There are deep, deep issues here.  I am not a master of them; they master me.  One issue has to do with the role of reason and the power of reason.  While confessing reason's infirmity, as I have on many occasions in these pages, I must also admit that it is a god-like faculty in us and part of what the imago Dei must consist in -- and this despite what I have said about the discursive path being non-ultimate.

I grant that the Fall has (not just had) noetic consequences: our reason is weaker than it would be in a prelapsarian state.  But we need it to protect us from blind dogmatism, fundamentalism and the forms of idolatry and superstition that reside within religion herself such as bibliolatry and ecclesiolatry.

We should not paper over the deep tensions within Christianity but live them in the hope that an honest confrontation with them will lead to deeper insight.

And a little Christian charity can't be a bad idea either, especially towards such 'apostates' as Michael Sudduth.

Divine Simplicity and Whether Existence is a First-Level Property

A London reader, Rob Hoveman, kindly sent me Howard Robinson's "Can We Make Sense of the Idea that God's Existence is Identical to His Essence" (in Reason, Faith and History: Philosophical Essays for Paul Helm, ed. M. W. F. Stone, Ashgate 2008, pp. 127-143).  This post will comment on the gist of section 4 of Robinson's article, entitled 'Existence is Not a Property.'

One major implication of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that in God essence and existence are the same.  My Stanford Encyclopedia article on DDS will fill you in on some of the details.  A number of objections can be brought against DDS.  Here only one will be considered, namely, the objection that existence cannot be a first-level property, a property of individuals.

The objection might go like this.  If in God, an individual, essence and existence are identical, then existence must be a first-level property of God.  But existence cannot be a first-level property.  Therefore, essence and existence cannot be identical in God.

This objection is only as good as the Fregean theory according to which existence is a property of concepts only.  Without explaining why distinguished thinkers have been persuaded of its truth, let me give just one reason why it cannot be right.  The theory says that existence is the property of being instantiated. An affirmative general existential such as  'Horses exist,' then, does not predicate existence of individual horses; it predicates instantiation of the concept horse.  And a negative general existential such as  'Mermaids do not exist'  does not predicate anything of individual mermaids -- after all, there aren't any -- it denies that the concept mermaid has any instances.

To see what is wrong with the theory, note first that instantiation is a relation, a dyadic asymmetrical relation.  We can of course speak of the property of being instantiated but only so long as it is understood that this is a relational property, one parasitic upon the relation of instantiation.  Therefore, if a first-level concept C is instantiated, then there is some individual x such that  x instantiates C.  It would be nonsense to say that C is instantiated while adding that there is nothing that instantiates it.  That would be like saying that Tom is married but there is no one to whom he is married.  Just as 'Tom is married' is elliptical for 'Tom is married to someone,' 'C is instantiated' is elliptiucal for 'C is instaniated by some individual.'

Now either x exists or it does not. 

Suppose it does not.  Then we have instantiation without existence.  If so, then existence cannot be instantiation.   For example, let C be the concept winged horse and let x be Pegasus.  The latter instantiates the former since Pegasus is a winged horse.   But Pegasus does not exist.  So existence cannot be the second-level property of instantiation if we allow nonexistent objects to serve as instances of concepts. 

Now suppose that x exists.  Then the theory is circular: it presupposes and does not eliminate first-level existence. The concept blogging philosopher is instantiated by me, but only because I possess first-level existence.  One cannot coherently maintain that my existence consists in my instantiating that concept or any concept for the simple reason that (first-level) existence is what makes it possible for me to instantiate any concept in the first place.

If what we are after is a  metaphysical theory of what it is for an individual to exist, then Frege's theory in  all its variants (the Russellian variant, the Quinean variant, . . .)  is wholly untenable.  I demonstrate this in painful detail in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer, 2002, Chapter 4.  Robinson, p. 133, is on to the problem, and makes the following intriguing suggestion: "But there is a way of taking the second order analysis which is not incompatible with regarding 'exists' as a first order predicate, and that can be approached by treating existence as a monadic property of concepts." (133)

The idea is that, rather than being a relational property of concepts, as on the Fregean theory, existence is a nonrelational property of concepts.  If this could be made to work, it would defuse the circularity objection I just sketched.  For the objection exploits the fact that instantiation is a dyadic  relation. 

But if existence is to be construed as a monadic (nonrelational) property of concepts, then concepts cannot be understood as Frege understands them.  For Frege, concepts are functions and no function is an ontological constituent of its value for a given argument or an ontological constituent of any argument.  For example, the propositional function expressed by the the predicate '___is wise' has True as its value for Socrates as argument.  But this function is not a constituent of the True.  Nor is it a constituent of Socrates.  And for Frege there are no truthmaking concrete states of affairs having ontological constituents.

For Robinson's suggestion to have a chance, concepts must be understood as ontological constituents of individuals like Socrates.  Accordingly,

Existence is not simply a property of the individual, in the ordinary sense; it is more a metaphysical component of it, along with form or essence. So the monadic property of the concept -- its instantiation -- is the same as the existence of the individual. (134)

Essence and existence are thus ontological constituents or metaphysical components of contingent individuals.  This is definitely an improvement over the Fregean view inasmuch as it preserves the strong intuition, or rather datum,  that existence belongs to individuals.  But this Thomistic view has its own problems.  It is difficult to understand how existence could be a proper part of an existing thing as the Thomistic analysis implies.   After all, it is the whole of Socrates that exists, Socrates together with all his spatial parts, temporal parts (if any), and ontological 'parts.'    As pertaining to the whole of the existing thing, its existence cannot be identified with one part to the exclusion of others.  For this  reason, in my book I took the line that the existence of an individual is not one of its constituents, but the unity of all its constituents.

Dawkins, Divine Simplicity and The New York Times

Gary Gutting in his NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, links to my recently revised Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the divine simplicity.  I'll wager that this is the first time there has ever been a reference to the doctrine in question in the Grey Lady's pages.  Thanks to Keith Burgess-Jackson for the heads-up.

The Truthmaker Theory of Predication and Divine Simplicity

In this post I first try to get clear about the truthmaker theory of predication proposed by Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey E. Brower in their A Theistic Argument Against Platonism.  I then try to understand how it solves a certain problem in the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). Finally, I raise a question about the authors' solution.

The truthmaker theory of predication is a rival to the following theory of predication which, with a little inaccuracy, we can label 'Platonistic' so as to have a handy label:

P: The truth of all true predications, or at least of all true predications of the form "a is F", is to be explained in terms of a subject and an exemplifiable (however exemplifiables are themselves to be conceived). (p. 7)

This post will not address the authors' impressive theistic argument  against P.  For present purposes we can assume that it is sound the better to evaluate the alternative which  Bergmann and Brower put  as follows:

P*: The truth of all 

true predications, or at least of all true predications of the form "a is F", is to be explained in terms of truthmakers. (p. 25)

To appreciate how the two theories differ, consider the proposition expressed by the true essential predication, 'God is divine.'  The Platonistic theory explains the truth of this proposition in terms of the subject God and the exemplifiable, the property of being divine.  The proposition is true because the subject exemplifies the property.  By contrast, the truthmaker theory of predication explains the proposition's truth in terms of its truthmaker.  Three questions:  What is a truthmaker?  What is the truthmaker of the proposition *God is divine*?  What exactly is the difference between P and P*? The authors offer the following as a "partial analysis" of the notion of a truthmaker:

TM: If an entity E is a truthmaker for a predication P, then 'E exists' entails the truth expressed by P. (p. 22)

From TM and the fact that 'God is divine' is an essential predication it can be inferred that the truthmaker of this truth is God himself.  For 'God exists' entails the truth expressed by 'God is divine.'  This is because there is no possible world in which God exists and the proposition in question is not true.  Thus God himself suffices as truthmaker for 'God is divine,' and there is no need for an exemplifiable entity or a concrete state of affairs (the subject's exemplifying of the exemplifiable entity.) This allows us to appreciate the difference between the Platonistic and the truthmaker theories of predication.  The first, but not the second, requires that the explanation of a truth's being true invoke a subject and an exemplifiable.  On the truthmaker theory it is not the case that every predication is such that its explanation requires the positing of a subject and an exemplifiable.  The subjects of all essential predications of the form a is F suffice as truthmakers of the propositions expressed by these predications.

In the case of such accidental predications as 'Tom is tired,' the truthmaker cannot be Tom by himself, as the authors appreciate. (p. 26)  Neither Tom nor Tom's existence nor *Tom exists* necessitates the truth of 'Tom is tired.'  On one approach, the truthmaker of true accidental predications is a concrete state of affairs.  On another, the truthmaker is a trope.  I think it follows that P is a special case of P*.  I don't find the authors stating this but it seems to be a clear implication of what they do say.  According to the truthmaker theory of predication, the truth of every true affirmative monadic predication, whether essential or accidental, is explained by a truthmaker, an entity which can belong to any ontological category.  The Platonistic theory is the special case in which the truthmaker either is or involves an exemplifiable.  (A special case of this is the case in which the truthmaker is a concrete state of affairs.)  The truthmaker theory is more general because it allows for truthmakers that neither are nor involve exemplifiables.

Application to Divine Simplicity

One of the entailments of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that there is no distinction between God and his attributes.  Thus God is (identical to) his goodness, his power, etc.  We have discussed the motivation for this doctrine in earlier posts.  But how could an individual be identical to its attributes or properties? If God is identical to one of his properties, such as the property of being divine, then it follows that he is a property or exemplifiable -- which is absurd.  It is absurd because God is a person and persons are not exemplifiable entities.  But if the truthmaker theory of predication is correct, then there is a way to make coherent sense of the notion that God is identical to his nature, goodness, power, wisdom, and other such attributes.

Consider 'God is his omnipotence.'  If the abstract singular term 'God's omnipotence' is taken to refer to a property, then we get the unacceptable consequence that God is identical to a property.  Proponents of the truthmaker theory of predication, however, can maintain that the referents of abstract singular terms are truthmakers.  Accordingly, 'God's omnipotence'  and 'God's divinity' refer respectively to the truthmakers of 'God is omnipotent' and 'God is divine' respectively.  Because both of these predications are essential, the truthmaker of both is God himself.  To say that God is identical to his omnipotence is to say that the referent of 'God' is identical to the referent of 'God's omnipotence.'  And that amounts to the unproblematic claim that God is identical to God.

A Question

The authors have shown us a way to demonstrate the coherence of 'God is identical to his divinity'  assuming we are prepared to accept P* and TM.   But I wonder whether their demonstration 'proves too much.'  Consider the parallel but presumably incoherent  'Socrates is identical to his humanity.'  We now must ask whether the strategy that works in the case of God also works in the case of Socrates.  If it does, then the radical difference between God and creature, which is part of the motivation for DDS, will not have been  properly accommodated.

The authors will grant that Socrates is truthmaker enough for (the propositions expressed by) all essential predications about him.  Thus Socrates himself makes true 'Socrates is human' by TM.  Because they hold P* they will grant that no exemplifiable need  be invoked to explain 'Socrates is human.'  We needn't say that this is true because Socrates exemplifies the property of being human; we can say that it is true because 'Socrates' and 'Socrates humanity' have the same referent, namely Socrates. But then does it not follow that Socrates is ontologically simple, at least in respect of such essential predicates as 'human,' 'rational,' and the like?  Does it not follow that Socrates is identical to his humanity, his rationality, animality, etc.?  Rhetorical questions aside, I am arguing as follows:

a. Socrates  is the truthmaker of 'Socrates is human' and like essential predications.  (From TM)

b. Socrates is the referent of both 'Socrates' and 'Socrates' humanity.' (From P*)  Therefore:

c. Socrates is identical to Socrates' humanity. (From b) 

But we surely do not want to say that Socrates is identical to his humanity, rationality, etc.  which would imply that his humanity, rationality,etc. are identical to one another.  Socrates, unlike God, is a metaphysically composite being.  So something appears to have gone wrong.  The Bergmann-Brower approach appears to 'prove too much.'  Their approach seems to imply what is false, namely, that both God and Socrates are ontologically simple  in respect of their essential attributes.

Troubles With Truthmaking: The Truthmaker and Veritas Sequitur Esse Principles

Some recent attempts (by G. Oppy, J. Brower, A. Pruss and perhaps others) at making sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) have invoked the truthmaker principle (TMP).  I made heavy use of TMP in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence  (Kluwer 2002), though not in defense of DDS. Being a self-critical sort, I am now re-examining the case for TMP.  Note that acceptance of TMP does not straightaway commit one to acceptance of any particular category of entity as truthmakers such as concrete states of affairs.  One could accept TMP and hold that truthmakers are tropes.  And there are other possibilities. So before we can address the truthmaker defense of DDS we must (i) argue for TMP and then (ii) decide on what can and cannot function as truthmakers.  In this post I consider some of what can be said for and against truthmaking in general. It looks like we might be in for a long series of posts on this fascinating but difficult topic.

Divine Simplicity and Truthmakers: Notes on Brower

1. One of the entailments of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that God is identical to: God's omniscience, God's omnipotence, and in general God's X-ness, where 'X' ranges over the divine attributes.  And it is easy to see that if God = God's F-ness, and God = God's G-ness, then (by transitivity of identity) God's F-ness = God's G-ness.  I suggest that we use 'divine attribute' to refer to those properties of God that are both essential and intrinsic.  The problem, of course, is to make sense of these identities given the fact that, prima facie, they do not make sense.  The pattern is the same as with Trinity and Incarnation.  These doctrines imply identities which, on the face of it, beggar understanding.  It thus falls to the philosopher of religion to try to render coherent that which, on the face of it, is incoherent.

2. One of the questions that arise when we try to make sense of DDS concerns which category of entity such phrases as 'God's omniscience' pick out.  One possibility is that such phrases pick out properties, whether universal (multiply exemplifiable) properties or particular (not multiply exemplifiable) properties, also known as tropes. But this leads to trouble as Brower points out.  For if God is identical either to omniscience or to his omniscience, then God is identical to a property -- which sounds absurd: how can God, a person, be a property?  Properties are predicable entities, but God is an individual and so not predicable.  Properties are exemplifiable entities (whether multiply or non-multiply); but God is an individual and so not exemplifiable.  Properties are abstract (causally inert)  whereas God is concrete (causally active/passive).  No property is a person, but God is a person.  No property creates or knows or loves.  These are some hastily sketched reasons for thinking that God cannot be identical to his properties.

3. Jeffrey E. Brower forwards an interesting proposal.  He suggests that such phrases as 'God's nature,' 'God's goodness' and 'God's power' refer to "entities of a broadly functional type -- namely, truthmakers." (Simplicity and Aseity, sec. 2)  The idea is that 'God's omniscience' refers to the trruthmaker of 'God is omniscient' or perhaps to the truthmaker of the proposition expressed by 'God is omniscient.'  If (Fregean) propositions are the primary truthbearers, then (tokenings of) declarative sentences that express such propositions can be said to be secondary truthbearers.  I trust that it is clear that truthbearers and truthmakers are not to be confused.  One key difference is that while some truthbearers are are false, no truthmaker is false.  Truth and falsity are properties of certain representations (propositions, declarative sentences, beliefs, judgments, etc.)  whereas truthmakers are the ontological grounds of some true truthbearers.  If I understand Brower's view, it is not only that truthmakers are neither true nor false -- every TM theorist will hold this -- but also that truthmakers are not at all proposition-like.  By contrast, I follow D. M. Arstrong in holding that truthmakers must have a proposition-like structure.  But more on this in a moment.

4. Roughly, a truthmaker is whatever plays a certain role or performs a certain function; it is whatever makes true a true truthbearer.  The 'truthmaker intuition' -- which I share with Brower -- is that a sentence such as 'Tom is blogging' cannot just be true; there is need of some worldly entity to 'make' it true, to serve as the ontological ground of its truth, to 'verify' it in an ontological, not epistemological, sense of this term.  To say that some or all truthbearers need truthmakers is not yet to specify which sort of entity plays the truthmaker role.  Among philosophers who accept the need for truthmakers there is disagreement about the ontological category to which they belong. 

 Brower says rather incautiously that the functional characterization of truthmakers "places no restriction on the specific nature or ontological category to which a truthmaker can belong." (sec 2.1)  That can't be right.  Surely there are some restrictions.  For one thing, a truthmaker cannot be a Fregean proposition for the simple reason that such items are among the items made true by truthmakers.  And the same goes for declarative sentences, beliefs, and judgments.  My belief that the cat is asleep is either true or false and as such is a truthbearer.  It is in need of a truthmaker but is not itself one.  Of course, the fact of my believing that the cat is asleep can serve as truthmaker for the sentence ' BV now believes that the cat is asleep'  if concrete facts are admitted as truthmakers -- but that is something else again.  So not just anything can be a truthmaker.  Charitably interpreted, what Brower is telling us is that TM theorists are allowed some ontological latitude when it comes to specifying which category of entity is fit to play the truthmaker role. 

5. Let us note that if a true Fregean proposition p entails a Fregean proposition q, then one could say that the first 'makes true' the second.  And so one could speak of the first as a 'truthmaker' of the second.  But this is not what is meant  by 'truthmaking' in these discussions despite the fact that p broadly logically necessitates q.   What is intended is a relation of broadly logical necessitation that connects a nonpropositional entity (but on some theories a proposition-like entity) to a propositional entity, or more precisely, to an entity that can serves as the bearer or vehicle of a truth-value.  As I see it, the entailment relation and the truthmaking relation are species of broadly logical necessitation; but truthmaking is not entailment.  Entailment will never get you 'outside the circle of propositions'; but that is exactly what truthmaking is supposed to do.  A truthmaker is an ontological, not propositional or representational truth-ground.  Philosophers who are attracted to truthmakers typically have a realist sense that certain of our representations need to be anchored in reality.

Brower sees it a little differently.  He would agree with me that entailment and truthmaking cannot be identical, but he thinks of it as "a form of broadly logical necessitation or entailment" and says that entailment is necessary but not sufficient for truthmaking. (Sec. 2.1)  So Brower seems to be maintaining that while there is more to truthmaking than entailment, every truthmaker entails the truth it makes true.  But this makes little or no sense.  Entailment is a relation defined on propositions.  If x entails y, then you can be sure that x and y are propositions or at least proposition-like entities, whether these be sentences or judgments or beliefs or even concrete states of affairs such as the fact of (not the fact that) Peter's being tired, which concrete fact contains Peter himself as constituent, warts and all.  But for Brower, as we will see in a moment, concrete individuals such as Socrates, entities that are neither propositions nor proposition-like, can serve as truthmakers.  As far as I can see, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails a proposition.  It makes no sense because entailment is defined in terms of truth, and no individual can be true or false.  To say that p entails q is to say that it is impossible that p be true and q false.  Since it makes no sense to say of an individual that it is true, it makes no sense to say of an individual that it entails a proposition.  So truthmaking cannot be a type or species of entailment if individuals are truthmakers.

6.  But setting aside for the moment the above worry, if it makes sense to say that God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient,' and if 'God's omniscience' refers to this truthmaker, then it will be clear how God can be identical to God's omniscience.  For then 'God is identical to his omniscience' is no more problematic than 'God is God.' It will also be clear how God's omniscience can be identical to God's omnipotence. 

7.  But can it really be this easy to show that DDS is coherent? Although I agree with Brower that some truthbearers need truthmakers, I don't see how truthmakers could be ontologically structureless individuals or 'blobs' as opposed to 'layer-cakes' in Armstrong's terminology.  By 'ontologically structureless' I mean lacking in propositional or proposition-like structure.  Consider the following true intrinsic essential predicative sentences: 'Socrates is human,' 'Socrates is an animal,' Socrates is a material object,' 'Socrates exists,' and 'Socrates is self-identical.'  (It is not obvious that 'Socrates exists' is an essential predication inasmuch as Socrates exists contingently, but let's not enter into this thorny thicket just now.)

Brower's claim is that in each of these cases (which parallel the true intrinsic essential predications of divine attributes) the truthmaker is the concrete individual Socrates himself.  Thus Socrates is the truthmaker of 'Socrates is human' just as God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient.'  Unfortunately, no individual lacking propositional or proposition-like structure can serve as a truthmaker as I argued in #5 above.  Just as it makes no sense to say that Socrates is true, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails the proposition expressed by 'Socrates is human.' 

There is more to say, but tomorrow's another day.  Time to punch the clock.

Is Divine Simplicity Consistent With Contingent Divine Knowledge?

The day before yesterday, I sketched the problem mentioned in the title.  Today I offer a more rigorous presentation of the problem and examine a solution.  The problem can be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1. Every free agent is a libertarianly-free (L-free) agent.

2. God is ontologically simple (where simplicity is an entailment of aseity and vice versa).

3. There are contingent items of divine knowledge that do not depend on divine creation, but do depend on creaturely freedom.

Each limb of the above triad has a strong, though not irresistible, claim on a classical theist's acceptance.   As for (1), if God is L-free, as he must be on classical theism, then it is reasonable to maintain that every free agent is L-free.  For if  'could have done otherwise' is an essential ingredient in the analysis of 'Agent A freely performs action X,' then it is highly plausible to maintain that this is so whether the agent is God or Socrates.  Otherwise, 'free' will mean something different in the two cases.  As for (2), some reasons were given earlier for  thinking that a theism that understands itself must uphold God's ontological simplicity inasmuch as it is implied by the divine aseity.  An example of (3) is Oswald's shooting of Kennedy.   The act was freely performed by Oswald, and the proposition that records it is a contingent truth known by God in his omniscience.

But although each of (1)-(3) is plausibly maintained and is typically maintained by theists who uphold the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), they cannot all be true.  Therein resides the problem.  Any two limbs imply the negation of the third.  Thus:  (1) & (3) --> ~(2); (1) & (2) --> ~(3); (2) & (3) --> ~(1). 

To illustrate, let us consider how (1) and (3), taken together, entail the negation of (2).  Being omniscient, God knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy.   But Oswald's L-freedom precludes us from saying that God's knowledge of this contingent fact depends solely on the divine will.  For it also depends on Oswald's L-free authorship of his evil deed, an authorship that God cannot prevent or override once he has created L-free agents.  But this is inconsistent with the divine aseity.  For to say that God is a se is to say that God is not dependent on anything distinct from himself.  But God has the the property of being such that he knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy, and his having this property depends on something outside of God's control, namely, Oswald's L-free choice.  In this way the divine aseity is compromised, and with it the divine simplicity.

It seems, then, that our aporetic triad is an inconsistent triad.  The problem it represents can be solved by denying either (1) or (2) or (3).  Since (3) cannot be plausibly denied, this leaves (1) and (2).  Some will deny the divine simplicity.  But an upholder of the divine simplicity has the option of denying (1) and maintaining that, while God is L-free, creaturely agents are free only in a compatibilist sense.  If creaturely agents are C-free, but not L-free, then Oswald could not have done otherwise, and it is possible for the upholder of divine simplicity to say that that Oswald's C-free choice is no more a threat to the divine aseity than the fact that God knows the contingent truth that creaturely agents exist.  The latter is not a threat to the divine aseity because the existence of creaturely agents derives from God in a way that Oswald's L-free choice does not derive from God. 

See Jeffrey E. Brower, Simplicity and Aseity, for this sort of solution.  I cannot see that the solution is entirely satisfactory, but it is worth considering.

The Aporetics of Divine Simplicity

Thomist27 e-mails: 

Thank you first of all for a spectacular blog. I discovered Maverick Philosopher a few years ago and have been reading it regularly ever since. Through your blog, I learned that you wrote the SEP's article on divine simplicity, among similar things; I think, then, that you are qualified to answer my questions.  My questions concern divine simplicity and divine knowledge, two nuts that I've lately been making every effort to crack. First, do you think that theism can be salvaged without absolute divine simplicity? I know that there are many theists who don't believe that God is simple, but is such a concept of Deity coherent? I believe a case can be made, pace Alvin Plantinga and other theistic deniers of divine simplicity, that to deny the absolute ontological simplicity of God is to deny theism itself.  For what we mean by 'God' is an absolute reality, something metaphysically ultimate, "that than which no greater can be conceived." (Anselm)   Now an absolute reality cannot depend for its existence or nature or value upon anything distinct from itself.  It must be from itself alone, or a se.  Nothing could count as divine, or worthy of worship, or be an object of our ultimate concern, or be maximally great, if it lacked the property of aseity.  But the divine aseity, once it is granted, seems straightaway to entail the divine simplicity, as Aquinas argues in ST.  For if God is not dependent on anything else for his existence, nature, and value, then God is not a whole of parts, for a whole of parts depends on its parts to be and to be what it is.  So if God is a se, then he is not a composite being, but a simple being.  This implies that in God there is no real distinction between: existence and essence, form and matter, act and potency, individual and attribute, attribute and attribute.   In sum, if God is God, then God is simple.  To deny the simplicity of God is to deny the existence of God.  It is therefore possible for an atheist to argue:  Nothing can be ontologically simple, therefore, God cannot exist. A theist who denies divine simplicity might conceivably be taxed with idolatry inasmuch as he sets up something as God that falls short of the exacting requirements of deity.  The divine transcendence would seem to require that God cannot be a being among beings, but must in some sense be Being itself . (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens:  God is not an existent but self-subsisting Existence itself.)  On the other hand, a theist who affirms divine simplicity can be taxed, and has been taxed, with incoherence.  As an aporetician first and foremost, I seek to lay bare the problem in all its complexity under suspension of the natural urge for a quick solution. Second, if my understanding is correct, then according to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God has no intrinsic accidents. How is that compatible with divine freedom? I know it's trite, but I haven't seen a good answer to the question of how God could have properties such as having created mankind or having declined to create elves without their being just as necessary to Him as His benevolence and omnipotence (especially if He is what He does). This is indeed a problem. On classical theism, God is libertarianly free: although he exists in every metaphysically possible world, he does not create in every such world, and he creates different things in the different worlds in which he does create.  Thus the following are accidental properties of God:  the property of creating something-or-other, and the property of creating human beings.  But surely God cannot be identical to these properties as the simplicity doctrine seems to require.  It cannot be inscribed into the very nature of God that he create Socrates given that he freely creates Socrates.  Some writers have attempted to solve this problem, but I don't know of a good solution. Even if there's a solution to that problem, what's to be said about God's knowledge? Isn't His knowledge an intrinsic property of His? But, since the truth of a proposition like the planet Mars exists is contingent, isn't God's knowing it an accidental property, and, furthermore, an intrinsic accidental property? Well, this too is a problem.  If S knows that p, and p is contingent, then S's knowing that p is an accidental (as opposed to essential) property of S.  Now if God is omniscient, then he knows every (non-indexical) truth, including every contingent truth. It seems to follow that God has at least as many accidental properties as there are contingent truths.  Surely these are not properties with which God could be identical, as the simplicity doctrine seems to require.  Now there must be some contingent truths in consequence of the divine freedom; but this is hard to square with the divine simplicity.  And if it is in fact the case that God's knowledge is the cause of things, then how are we to understand His knowledge of the free actions of creatures? I know that God is supposed to be the final cause of these actions, as well as their ultimate efficient cause, but the issue is still unclear to me. This is also a problem.  The simplicity doctrine implies that God is identical to what he knows. It follows that what he knows cannot vary from world to world.   In the actual world A, Oswald shoots Kennedy at time t.  If that was a libertarianly free action, then there is a world W in which Oswald does not shoot Kennedy at t.  Since God exists in very world, and  knows what happens in every world, he knows that in A, Oswald shoots Kennedy at t and in W that Oswald does not shoot Kennedy at t. But this contradicts the simplicity doctrine, according to which what God knows does not vary from world to world.  The simplicity doctrine thus appears to collide both with divine and human freedom. I sincerely look forward to your addressing these questions. Thank you in advance for your consideration of these weighty matters. I have addressed them, but not solved them.  Solutions have been proffered, but they give rise to problems of their own -- something to be pursued in future posts.

Bleg: Divine Simplicity

The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by March 20th.  Written in 2006, it needs revision.  If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them.  In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.