Maverick Philosopher

God as Uniquely Unique

Top o' the Stack

Correctly used, 'unique' is three-way polyvalent. It  can mean that which is one of a kind, that which is necessarily one of a kind, and that which is uniquely unique in that it transcends the kind-instance distinction. 

 

Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

Top o' the Stack. Another deep dive into one of the gnarliest conundra in natural theology.

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

1) Classical theism is untenable if the ED cannot be defeated.

2) The ED can be defeated only if DDS is true.

3) DDS entails the collapse of modal distinctions.

4) Classical theism is inconsistent with the collapse of modal distinctions because, on classical theism, God is metaphysically necessary while the world of creatures is metaphysically contingent. 

If Someone is Walking, is He Necessarily Walking? DDS and Modal Collapse

In an article I am studying by Daniel J. Pedersen and Christopher Lilley, "Divine Simplicity, God's Freedom, and the Supposed Problem of Modal Collapse," (Journal of Reformed Theology 16, 2022, 127-147),  the authors quote Boethius:

. . . if you know that someone is walking, he must necessarily be walking. (Consolation, v. 6)

They then paraphrase and endorse the point as follows:

That is, supposing a man is walking, so long as he is walking, he must necessarily be walking.

This strikes me as interestingly false. Suppose Tom is walking at time t. Surely he might not have been walking at t. So it is not necessarily, but contingently, the case that Tom is walking at t. For although he is actually walking at t, it is possible that he not be walking at t. Of course, a man cannot walk and not walk at the very same time. For that would violate the law of non-contradiction (LNC). But that is not the issue. The issue is whether the following could be true: Tom is walking at t & it is possible that Tom is not walking at t. And of course it could be true.

Boethius, lately quoted, mentioned knowledge. Is my knowing that Tom is walking at t relevant to the question? Right after the sentence quoted, Boethius writes, "For what a man really knows cannot be otherwise than it is known to be."  Suppose I know (with objective certainty) that Tom is walking at t.  Would it follow that Tom is necessarily walking at t? No. Boethius appears to have committed a modal fallacy.  While it it true that 

1) Necessarily (if S knows that p, then p)

it does not follow that

2) If S knows that p, then necessarily p.

To think otherwise is to commit the modal fallacy of confusing the necessity of the consequence (necessitas consequentiae) with the necessity of the consequent (necessitas consequentis).  (1) is true; (2) is false; hence the inferential move is invalid. Most of the propositions we know are contingent. For example, I know that I was born in California, but this is a contingent fact about me.  I might have been born elsewhere. I might not have been born at all. One cannot know what is false, and so it follows that whatever one knows is true; it does not follow, however, that what one knows is necessarily true.  For again, most of what we know is contingently true.  In the patois of 'possible worlds,' most of what we know is true in some but not all possible worlds.

So we can set aside knowledge that a man is walking as a good reason for believing that a man walking is necessarily walking. Back to walking Tom. He cannot walk and not walk at the same time. But if he is walking at a given time, it is possible that he not be walking at that time, which is to say: Tom's walking at t is contingent, not necessary.  Don't confuse possibly (p & ~p) with p & possibly ~p.  Mind the scope of the modal operator.

The authors do not agree. They follow Boethius, Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles I,  67), and other scholastics. While they grant that  it is not absolutely or unconditionally necessary that a man walk, on the ground that there is nothing in the concept human being or the essence human being  to require that an instance of this concept/essence walk, it is hypothetically or conditionally necessary that a particular man walk on condition that he is in fact walking. I will argue against this distinction in a moment. But first:

Modal collapse and DDS

Why is this so interesting? One reason is because it is relevant to the problem of modal collapse that bedevils classical theism. (Classical theists, by definition, are committed to the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS).)  Here is (one aspect of) the problem in brief compass. God exists of absolute metaphysical (broadly logical) necessity. The ground or source of this necessity is the divine simplicity. On DDS there are no distinctions in God, hence no distinction between God and his creating of our (presumably) contingent universe U.  Since God is omnipotent, his creating of U ex nihilo is efficacious: he cannot fail to 'pull off' what he intends. It is presumably also deterministic: divine efficient agent-causation of U is not probabilistic or 'chancy.'  It would seem to follow that God, his free creating of U, and U itself are all three absolutely necessary.  Now everything is either God or created by God, including so-called abstract  objects. It follows that everything is absolutely necessary and thus that nothing is contingent.  The distinction between necessity and contingency collapses.  The senses of the modal terms, no doubt, remain intact and distinct on the intensional plane; the collapse occurs on the extensional plane. Hence the dreaded modal collapse. This is unacceptable if you believe, as most classical theists do, that creation is contingent, both the action of creating and its effect, the ensemble of creatures. (Note the process-product ambiguity of 'creation.') A separate problem in the immediate vicinity, one that I will not discuss here, concerns whether the contingency of creation requires a libertarian model of divine free agency. 

A response via the distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity

One among several responses to the threatened collapse of the contingent into the necessary is to say that there is no modal collapse, no reduction of everything to absolute necessity,  because, while God is absolutely necessary, his creatures are not absolutely but only hypothetically necessary.  This distinction is supposed to avert the collapse. I do not believe that this distinction, despite its distinguished pedigree, stands up to close scrutiny.  Let me explain.

If a thing exists necessarily, one may reasonably ask about the ground or source of its necessary existence. In the case of God, if there is such a ground, it would have to be God himself in his ontological simplicity. God is necessary in se, in himself, and not ab alio, from another. This is because God does not and indeed cannot derive his existence from another. In the case of so-called abstract objects such as the number 9 or the set {7, 9} the ground of necessary existence is in God. For abstracta are creatures: they derive their existence from God. Or at least this is a reasonable thing to say. Accordingly, abstracta are necessary ab alio, from another. Given that they too are creatures, they cannot exist in themselves, but are dependent on God for their existence. You might even say that they are hypothetically or conditionally necessary in that they exist only on condition that God create them, and this despite the fact that abstracta exist 'in all possible worlds' in the Leibniz-derived patois of 'possible worlds.' If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then abstract entities would not exist either, and this regardless of the fact that they 'exist in all possible worlds' just as God does.  There is no harm in speaking of abstracta as hypothetically necessary if all this means is that abstracta are necessary beings that are dependent on God for their existence. There is no harm as long as it is realized that God and the number 9, for example, are necessary in the very same sense with the difference being that God exists unconditionally whereas the number exists conditionally or dependently ('hypothetically').  But then there are not two kinds of necessity, absolute and hypothetical, as the authors seem to think, but one kind only, with however two different sources or grounds of the existence of those items that enjoy this one kind of necessity (absolute metaphysical necessity). By my lights, one must distinguish between the question whether a thing exists dependently or independently from the question whether the thing exists necessarily or contingently.  The two distinctions 'cut perpendicular' to each other. Accordingly, God exists independently and necessarily; abstracta exist dependently and necessarily; poor Socrates exists dependently and contingently.  What holds for Socrates holds for every sublunary creature, every concrete item in space and time that is created by God.  If the universe of sublunary items just exists, brute-factually, as Bertrand Russell maintained in his BBC debate with Fr. Copleston, then Socrates exists contingently but not dependently. If a thing is modally contingent, it does not follow straightaway that it is dependent on ('contingent upon') anything.  On my view, then, modal collapse remains a formidable threat to DDS and thus to classical theism which, by definition, includes DDS.  

What our authors want to say, however,  is not merely that abstracta enjoy hypothetical necessity, but that all creatures, including material creatures in time and space, enjoy this "kind" (the authors' word) of necessity. But this is the Boethian mistake all over again. If Tom is walking at t, it does not follow that he is necessarily walking at t. Likewise, if Tom is being sustained in his existence by divine action at t, it does not follow that Tom necessarily exists at t. No, our man contingently exists at t. For God could decide at t or right before to 'pull the plug' on Tom (or on the entire universe of which he is a part) in which case Tom, who had been in existence moments before, would become nothing. Despite God's ongoing creative sustenance of Tom moment by moment, at each moment he remains possibly nonexistent, which is to say, contingent. (To understand what I just wrote, you have to understand that 'possibly' is to be taken ontologically, not epistemically.)

If I am told that Tom and the rest of the denizens of the sublunary are not modally contingent,  but hypothetically necessary, I will repeat my point that there is no such  modality as hypothetical necessity. The notion is an illicit amalgam that elides the distinction between existence and modality. Everything that exists is either necessary or contingent. And everything that exists either exists dependently or independently. Hypothetical necessity is a misbegotten notion.

Linguistically, the qualifier 'hypothetical' in 'hypothetical necessity' is an alienans adjective, one the shifts ('alienates,' 'others') the sense of 'necessity. In this respect it is like 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack.' A deciduous tree cannot fail to be a tree; an apparent heat attack, however, may fail to be a heart attack.  'Hypothetical necessity' is  unlike 'deciduous tree' and very much like 'apparent heart attack.' Some heart attacks are merely apparent while others  are apparent and real. (And still others, of course, are real but not apparent.) Similarly, some necessary beings are hypothetical in that they depend for their existence on God; other necessary beings are absolute in that they do not depend on anything.

One mistake is to think that the number 9, e.g., is only hypothetically necessary because dependent on God for its existence. No, it is just as modally necessary as God.  Another mistake is to think that if some creatures are non-contingent, then all creatures are, including the denizens of the sublunary, in plain English, those that are material, temporal, and spatial. Socrates -- our representative sublunary critter -- is a modally contingent being despite his creaturely  status.   A third mistake is to think that, because divine productive causation ex nihilo necessitates its effect, that the effect is thereby rendered modally necessary. This mistake is structurally analogous to the logical mistake of confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent.  Whatever God brings into existence out of nothing cannot fail to exist, but that is not to say that the effect of the bringing-into-existence is modally necessary. No, it remains modally contingent, just as modally contingent as the divine action. If you say that the divine action is absolutely necessary, then of course the effect is modally necessary. But then you have nolens volens accepted modal collapse!

In sum, there is no evading the modal collapse objection to DDS by distinguishing between absolute and hypothetical necessity, and this for the reason that there is no such modality as hypothetical necessity. The phrase 'hypothetical necessity' can only mean that certain entities that are modally necessary, the inmates of what Plantinga has called the "Platonic menagerie," are nevertheless  dependent on God for their existence.  

If God is Simple, How can the World be Contingent?

This entry is an offshoot of the earlier discussion of classical theism and its difference from theistic personalism. These labels have the meaning here than they had in that earlier discussion. Classical theism is committed to all three of the following:

1) God is simple.

2) God freely created the world in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.

3) There is no absolute necessity that God create our world or any world.

Theistic personalists hold that these three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  If they are logically inconsistent, then at least one of them must be either rejected or modified. The theistic personalist will reject (1) on the ground that God is a person and that no person is simple.  This the classical theist will refuse to do on the basis of reasons he finds compelling. So refusing, he must find a way to turn aside the accusation of inconsistency.

Well, why should the triad be thought inconsistent? Here's why. If God is simple, then he is purely actual. If purely actual, then he harbors no potencies or unrealized powers. His power, which is manifested in his creating of the world (the totality of creatures), could then not have gone unrealized. He could not have refrained from creating. If so, his power to create had to be realized, in which case God's creating of the world (the totality of created items)  is necessary, not contingent. It is the necessary action of a necessarily existent agent, and is thus absolutely, as opposed to conditionally necessary. But then it follows that the world exists necessarily and not contingently. This is a consequence that cannot be countenanced by the classical theist. For it  conflicts with the divine aseity which is an entailment  of the divine simplicity, which is a plank in the classical platform. If God is a se, then he is under no necessity to create.  If God is a se, then he is wholly self-sufficient and fully actual whether or not he creates anything.

Can this reasoning be evaded?  I will conclude this entry by considering and rejecting one evasive stratagem.  Nathan Greeley writes,

. . . to say that God's activity of knowing and willing exist necessarily is not to say that created objects of his knowing and willing must also exist necessarily. As long as these created objects are considered really distinct from the acts by which they are known and willed, then the objects in themselves, need not have the same modal status as these acts. [. . .] God, one can then say, necessarily knows and necessarily wills  in an absolute manner, but at least some of the particular objects of his knowledge are contingent. ("Divine Simplicity: A Reply to Philosophical Objections" in The Lord is One: Reclaiming Divine Simplicity, eds. Minich and Kamel, Davenant Press, 2019, p. 237, emphasis added.)

The idea here is that what God necessarily creates, and thus could not have failed to create, can nevertheless be contingent, i.e., possibly nonexistent. As far as I can see, there is only way this could be true. Suppose that God's creating of a thing simultaneously releases it into ontological independence.  The divine creative act makes the thing exist, but once it exists, it exists on its own, 'by its own power' without divine assistance.  In other words, when God creates a thing, he creates it in such a way that its existence, moment by moment, does not depend on God's ongoing creative sustenance after the initial creative action. If this is the nature of creation, then the created entity could very well be contingent despite the creative act's being necessary. For the created entity to exist in the first place it is necessary that God create it, but after he does so the entity exists contingently. On this scheme, there is creatio originans (originating creation), but no creatio continuans (continuing creation). This allows what is originally caused to exist to be contingent.

Unfortunately, this understanding of creation is foreign to classical theism. On classical theism, creation is both originating and continuing. What's more, classical theism need not insist on the reality of this distinction. For even if the world (the created realm) has an infinite past and always existed, it could nonetheless have creaturely status. If that were the case, then there would be no real distinction between originating and continuing creation. If, on the other hand, the world had a beginning in time, then, on classical theism, it still needs to be kept in being moment by moment. 

I conclude that the stratagem proposed by Greeley above does not allow the proponent of divine simplicity to evade the conclusion that, if the simple God creates, then the product of his creative act necessarily exists. 

Next stop: modal collapse.

Theistic Personalism versus Classical Theism: Response to Roger Pouivet

Professor Roger Pouivet (Université de Lorraine, France) recently subscribed to my Substack series. I wrote to thank him and to request a copy of his Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology Does to Classical Theism. He replied promptly and I dove into his article. It proved to be stimulating and I thank him for writing it. Herewith, some comments and questions.

1) Theistic personalism is the view that God is a person and that therefore the relations between God and human creatures are interpersonal. Pouivet argues against this view, taking the classical line of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Maimonides, and Thomas  according to which God is ontologically simple and thus identical to his attributes. (See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Divine Simplicity, for details, motivation, criticisms, and references to current literature.*) The simple God of classical theism is wholly devoid of complexity and composition. The distinctions that apply to creatures do not apply to God. Among them: form-matter, act-potency, essence-existence, and individual-attribute. I would add to the list contingency-necessity as standardly understood.  Aquinas held that some necessary beings have their necessity ab alio, i.e., from God, whereas God has his necessity in se. The former are creatures because they depend on God for their existence.  (A creature is simply anything created by God.) The contingency-necessity ab alio distinction does not apply to God. God is therefore uniquely necessary as he is uniquely unique: he is not a necessary being among necessary beings. This is why, on classical theism, the divine necessity is not properly represented, or fully captured, if you say merely that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds as theistic personalists such as Alvin Plantinga will say. They think of God as a necessary being among necessary beings.

2) The main question, however, is whether the classical God, the simple God, could be a person. That depends on what a person is taken to be. For Pouivet, no person can be simple: no person is identical to its attributes. It follows straightaway that the simple God cannot be a person.  That's one argument.  Second, no person is immutable: people change mentally and physically. Whatever changes is in time. To put the point precisely, it is metaphysically impossible that anything undergo intrinsic (non-relational) change unless it is in time. (The eternal God, outside of time, could presumably 'undergo' relational change as when I start and stop thinking about him and his attributes.) So persons are mutable and in time and are thus non-eternal). But the simple God is both intrinsically immutable and eternal. It follows that the simple God cannot be a person.

c) For Pouivet, "A person is a being with an essentially mental life made up of mental states such as thoughts (mental representations) or desires." (p. 3) It seems to follow from this definition that if God is not and cannot be a person, then he cannot have a mental life with thoughts, desires and intentions. But then I will ask Professor Pouivet how, on his view, we can makes sense of the divine omniscience. Classical theism does not exclude omniscience as a divine attribute. But to know is to be in a mental state. So it would seem that God must either possess mental states or something analogous to mental states. Granted, the archetypal intellect's knowing is very different from our ectypal knowing: God knows the object by creating it; we do not. There cannot, however, be an equivocation on 'knows' in 'God knows' and 'Socrates knows' even if there is no univocity of sense. But I found no mention of analogy in Pouivet's article.

The problem also arises with respect to the divine will. Pouivet rightly points out that for Aquinas the simplicity doctrine entails that there is nothing potential in God, that God is actus purus.  (7) He then takes aim at Swinburne's view that God is a "superlative person" who is perfectly free, all-powerful, and omniscient. Pouivet objects to Swinburne:

But this has nothing to do with God as pure act . . . . In this [Thomist] tradition, God is not described as a being with intentional power . . . . For theistic personalists, the notion of intentional power is however directly linked to the idea of conscious experience which is also characteristic of human beings. The result is a deeply anthropomorphic account of God. (7-8)

A question for Professor Pouivet: can classical theism do justice to the notion that God freely created the world? It seems to me that there is a tension between divine simplicity (upheld by classical theists) and divine freedom (upheld by theistic personalists) and that Judeo-Christian theism is committed to both. 

1) If God is simple, then he is purely actual (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentialities. 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.  As a necessary being, God exists in every possible world, and as a simple being, he is devoid of act-potency composition in every world in which he exists. 

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. This implies that any universe God creates contingently exists.

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. Had God created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  Had God created a different universe than the one he did create, then his power to create our universe would also have gone unexercised. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

In nuce, the problem is to explain how it can be true both that God is simple and that the universe which God created ex nihilo is contingent.  Clearly, the classical theist wants to uphold both. What is unclear, however, is whether he can uphold both.

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. 

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.  But how then avoid modal collapse?

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.  Modal collapse ushers in what I call call modal Spinozism. 

(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 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.

______________________

*Curiously, just yesterday the SEP editors informed me that an updated version is due from me by the end of February, 2023. Readers apprised of the latest literature are encouraged to contact me with their references.) 

Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Divine Simplicity

Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but only alphabetically.) Here is footnote 3:

Catholic philosophers have often said not that God’s existence is a consequence of his nature but that his existence and his nature are identical. This doctrine is one of the many implications of the more general “doctrine of Divine Simplicity”, according to which phrases like ‘God’s power’, ‘God’s wisdom’, ‘God’s love’, ‘God’s nature’ and ‘God’s existence’ all denote one and the same thing, namely the Divine Substance – that is, God, God himself, God full stop. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity, however, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute (for present purposes, “Aristotelianism”). From the point of view of a Platonist like myself, the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is wrong simply because it presupposes Aristotelianism, and Aristotelianism is false.

Here is Dominik's question:

Where does that idea come from? [The idea that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology.] Seriously, I don't understand. It might be disputable whether we can reconcile Plotinus' understanding of the way the One exists with a Thomistic view about God, but divine simplicity is a core pillar of (Neo-)Platonist arguments, e.g. the argument from composition. As said, perhaps the identification of God with existence is a newer concept due to development by philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, but prima facie I think formulating the dispute the way van Inwagen does, muddies the water. Divine Simplicity mustn't be identified with an explicitly Thomistic formulation, this just undersells the disputes the doctrine has historically surrounded [undersells the disputes that have historically surrounded the doctrine].

1) Kowalski is right  that the ontological simplicity of the Absolute is at the core of Platonism and Ne0-Platonism. The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, and the God of Aquinas are all ontologically simple.  The theology of Aquinas quite obviously incorporates this neo-Platonic element, along with other elements, some of which do not comport well with the neo-Platonic element.  No Absolute worth its salt can fail to be simple, and the God of Aquinas is the Absolute in his system. For Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Literally translated, God is self-subsisting To Be.  Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that this God concept teeters on the brink of unintelligibility.  But it is defensible as a Grenzbegriff, a boundary or limit  concept. See The Concept GOD as Limit Concept.

 

God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  In this respect God is like the One of Plotinus. There is no Many in which the One is a member.  The ONE is not one of many. Similarly, in Aquinas there is no totality of beings in which God is a member.  God is not one being among many. He is utterly transcendent like the One of Plotinus and the Good of Plato. And yet, God is not other than every being, every ens, for he himself is. If God were other than every being, then he would be other than himself, which is impossible. This distinguishes the God of Aquinas from Heidegger's Being. For Heidegger, das Sein ist kein Seiendes, Being is other than every being, everything that is. For Aquinas, Gott oder das Sein ist selbst seiend, God or Being is himself being. Or, as I say in my existence book, The Paradigm Existent, the Unifier, is not a being (which would imply that it is a being among beings), but the being, the one and only being (ens) that is identical to its Being (esse) .  That is indeed one of the entailments of DDS: there is no real distinction in God as between God and Being and between God and his Being.

 

2) As for Peter van Inwagen, he, like so many hard-core analytic types, uses 'Platonism' and related expressions in a loose and historically uninformed way.  He calls himself a Platonist but he certainly does not accept 'into his ontology' -- as these types say -- Platonic Forms or Ideas (eide), Platonic participation (methexis) of phenomenal particulars in Forms, and the rest of the conceptual machinery which naturally within Plato's system implies levels/grades of Being and modes of Being which Dominik, as a German speaker, can understand as Seinsweisen or Seinsmodi. In the essay in question, van Inwagen comes out unequivocally against modes of Being.  (I employ the majuscule 'B' in 'Being' so as to mark the crucial distinction between Being and beings, esse et ens/entia, das Sein und das Seiende. Observing that distinction is initium sapientiae in ontology.)

 

Van Inwagen's main man is Willard van Orman Quine who contributed to the misuse of the good old word 'abstract' with his talk of 'abstract objects.' So-called abstract objects are not products of abstraction.  Van Inwagen buys into this lapse from traditional usage along with his colleague Alvin Plantinga. Accordingly, there are properties, but they are 'abstract objects' which exist just as robustly (or just as anemically) as 'concrete objects.' So-called abstract objects are, besides being outside of space and time, causally inert.  So it is no surprise that Plantinga and van Inwagen reject the DDS claim that God is identical to each of his omni-attributes or essential properties.  To their way of thinking, that identity claim makes of God a causally inert abstract object, which of course God, as causa prima, cannot be.

 

3) When van Inwagen says that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute, what he says is true inasmuch as said ontology is a constituent ontology (C-ontology). This is what he, as a self-styled 'Platonist' objects to. I explain C-ontology in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on DDS.  See section 3. Here is part of what I say in that section:

Since a Plantinga-type approach to ontology rules out DDS from the outset, no sophisticated adherent of the doctrine will adopt such an approach. The DDS defender will embrace an ontology that accommodates an ontologically simple being. Indeed, as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991) notes, classical proponents of DDS such as Aquinas had a radically different ontological style, one that allowed for the coherent conceivability of DDS. They did not think of individuals as related to their properties as to abstracta external to them, but as having properties as ontological constituents. They, and some atheist contemporaries as well, think in terms of a “constituent ontology” as opposed to what Wolterstorff calls a “relation ontology” or what might be called a “nonconstituent ontology”. Bundle theories are contemporary examples of constituent ontology. If properties are assayed as tropes and a concrete particular as a bundle of tropes, then these tropes or abstract particulars are parts of concrete particulars when suitably bundled. Properties so assayed are brought from Plato’s heaven to earth. The togetherness or compresence of tropes in a trope bundle is not formal identity but a kind of contingent sameness. Thus a redness trope and a sweetness trope in an apple are not identical but contingently compresent as parts of the same whole. A model such as this allows for an extrapolation to a necessary compresence of the divine attributes in the case of God. Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval proponents of DDS, is of course an Aristotelian, not a trope theorist. But he too is a constituent ontologist. Form and matter, act and potency, and essence and existence are constituents of primary substances. Essence and existence in sublunary substances such as Socrates are really distinct but inseparably together. Their unity is contingent. This model permits an extrapolation to the case of a being in which essence and existence are necessarily together or compresent. Constituent ontology, as murky as it must remain on a sketch such as this, at least provides a framework in which DDS is somewhat intelligible as opposed to a Plantinga-style framework on which DDS remains wholly unintelligible. The arguments for DDS amount to arguments against the nonconstituent ontological framework.

Combox open. I invite Dominik to tell me whether I have answered his question to his satisfaction.

God and Existence: How Related?

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.  In this one case, the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication coalesce. 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.  If God is God, then God exists. (Bonaventura) 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.

Divine Simplicity and Incarnation

This from a reader:

Jordan Daniel Wood . . . affirms that God does not have possibilities within himself to actualize and thus the Incarnation—God becoming a human being—must in some way [be] actual prior to its historical event; God does not become a human being but in some way already is a human being . . . .

Very interesting.

The simple God is actus purus. Purely actual, he embodies no unrealized powers or unactualized potentialities.  He is, eternally, all that he can be.  We think of the Incarnation, however, as a contingent event.  In the patois of 'possible worlds':  The triune God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds, but the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human in only some of them. The following argument suggests itself:

1) The Word became flesh and dwellt among us.

2) The Word's becoming flesh is a contingent event.

3) There is no contingency and no becoming in any of the three divine persons: the Word cannot become flesh, that is, assume human nature.

Therefore

4) The Word (Logos, Second Person) had a divine and human nature from all eternity.

How could a classical Christian trinitarian theist rebut this argument? (Part of being a classical Christian theist is accepting the divine simplicity.)

On God's Not Falling Under Concepts

Fr. Deinhammer tells us,  ". . . Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. . . ." "God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable. . . ."

Edward the Logician sent me an e-mail in which he forwards a stock objection:

Who is it who is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable? Either ‘he’ tells us, or not. If so, the proposition is false. If not, the proposition is incoherent.

I appreciate that you are quoting the person who wrote to you, but my aporia stands.

Ed's aporetic point can be summed up as follows. Talk of God as inconceivable is either false or meaningless. If the person who claims that God is inconceivable is operating with some concept of God, then the claim is meaningful but false. If, on the other hand, the person is operating with no concept of God, then saying that God is inconceivable is no better than saying that X is inconceivable, which says nothing and is therefore meaningless. (X is inconceivable is at best a propositional function, not a proposition, hence neither true nor false. To make a proposition out of it you must either bind the free variable 'x' with a quantifier or else substitute a proper name for 'x.')

A Response to the Objection

Suppose we make a distinction between those concepts that can capture the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe). Thus the concept cube captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully.   The concept heliotropic plant captures, partially,  the essence of those plants which exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun.

Now the concept God cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For in God essence and existence are one, and there is no ordinary concept of existence.  (The existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized.) Again, in God there is no real distinction between God and his nature, whereas no ordinary concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God.

There is, then, a tolerably clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God.  The concept God is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts. It is the concept of something that lies at the outer limits of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept God is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.

If this is right, then there is a way between the horns of the above dilemma. But of course it needs further elaboration and explanation.

Divine Simplicity and Divine Comprehensibility

From a reader, who is responding to God as Uniquely Unique:

An objection I recently heard to the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) that is novel as far as I can tell. Goes like this:  if DDS is true, God is unlike anything in our human experience, not having parts. We cannot comprehend God on DDS because he has no parts to comprehend apart from the whole; we can't comprehend the whole of God, and he doesn't have parts to comprehend, so we can't comprehend him at all. This is unacceptable at least on the Abrahamic faiths, which state we can comprehend some things about God, just not fully. Thoughts?

Here is the argument as I understand it:

1) If DDS is true, then God has no parts.

2) If God has no parts, then we cannot understand any part of God.

Therefore

3) If DDS is true, then we cannot understand any part of God.(1, 2)

4) We cannot understand the whole of God.

5) We cannot understand God at all unless we can either understand some part of God, or the whole of God.

Therefore

6) If DDS is true, then we cannot understand God at all. (3, 4, 5)

7) On the Abrahamic faiths, we can understand something about God.

Therefore

8) DDS is inconsistent with the Abrahamic faiths.

I would say that the argument fails at line (5). We can understand something about God without understanding God himself in whole or in part.  If we understand God to be the creator of the universe, then we understand something about God without understanding the whole of God or any part of God.  We understand God from his effects as that which satisfies the definite description 'the unique x such that x created the world and sustains it in existence.'  We can presumably understand this much about God without knowing him in propria persona or any of his parts. The question whether God is simple would seem to be irrelevant to question whether we can know anything about him.

Mundane analogy: I can know something about the burglar from the size and shape of the footprints he left without knowing him or his parts.

If God is Uniquely Unique, How could He be Addressed in Prayer?

My entry God as Uniquely Unique ended on an aporetic note. I acknowledged the following sort of objection, but had nothing to say in response to it. How could the ontologically simple God be of any religious use to the suffering creature wandering in the desert of the world?

"Such an utterly transcendent God as you are describing is ineffable!  He is the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. I want a God with a face, a God that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."

The problem can be put like this. The exigencies of the intellect drive us toward the simple God, a God so utterly transcendent as to be inconceivable to us.  The exigencies of the heart, however, move us toward a personal God with whom one could enter an I-Thou relation. Is it possible to mediate this opposition? 

Is it possible to stand astride Athens and Jerusalem, with a foot in each, and not topple over or be torn apart?

A letter from Robert Deinhammer, S. J., of Innsbruck, Austria suggests a way.  Here is his letter followed by my translation:

Ich bin gerade wieder einmal nach längerer Zeit auf ihrem Blog gewesen und finde Ihren jüngsten Eintrag über die einzigartige Einzigartikeit Gottes sehr wichtig.

Ich würde mit P. Knauer sagen: Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. Wie kann man dann von ihm reden? Antwort: Wir begreifen von Gott immer nur das von ihm Verschiedene, nämlich die geschaffene Welt, die aber auf ihn hinweist und ohne ihn überhaupt nicht sein kann. Geschaffensein bedeutet im Rahmen einer relationalen Ontologie ein "restloses Bezogensein auf …/ in restloser Verschiedenheit von …". Dies ermöglicht auch "hinweisende" Rede von Gott: Die Welt ist Gott ähnlich und unähnlich zugleich; Gott seinerseits ist der Welt gegenüber aber nur unähnlich. Die Relation der Welt auf Gott ist vollkommen einseitig. In diesem Sinne führt natürliche Theologie nur zur Einsicht, dass Gott in "unzugänglichem Licht wohnt" (1 Tim) und wir als bloße Geschöpfe keinerlei Gemeinschaft mit ihm haben können.

Vor diesem überaus dunklen Hintergrund erläutert allein der Inhalt der christlichen Botschaft, wie dennoch Gemeinschaft mit Gott ausgesagt werden kann: Wir sind von vornherein aufgenommen in eine göttliche Relation, nämlich in die ewige Liebe des Vaters zum Sohn, die der Heilige Geist ist. So kann Gott auf die Welt real bezogen sein, ohne dadurch von der Welt abhängig zu werden. Aber gerade weil diese göttliche Liebe nicht ihr Maß an der Welt hat und deshalb auch keine Macht der Welt dagegen ankommen kann, kann man sie auch nicht einfach an der Welt "ablesen" oder durch meditative Versenkung erkennen. Sie ist nur erkennbar im Glauben an die Botschaft Jesu: Der Sohn hat eine menschliche Natur angenommen, um uns in einem menschlichen Wort sagen zu können, das wir an seinem Verhältnis zum Vater Anteil haben. In diesem Sinne wird dann auch Gebet erst möglich: Jesus Christus nimmt uns hinein in sein Sprechen zum Vater.

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

I have just now visited your blog again after a long while and I find your most recent entry on the unique uniqueness of God to be very important.

I would say, with P. Knauer, that God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable.  But then how can one speak of him? Answer: We conceive of God always only by way of that which is different from him, namely, the created world which points to him and which without him cannot be at all.  In the context of a relational ontology, creaturehood means 'a total relatedness  to . . . / in total difference from . . . .'  This makes possible 'pointing' talk of God: the world is both like and unlike God; God on his side, however, is only unlike the world . The relation of the world to God is completely one-sided or unilateral.  In this sense natural theology leads to the insight that God "dwelleth in inaccessible light" (1 Timothy 6:16) and we mere creatures can have no kind of community with him.

But if God so dwells and is unapproachable by us, and we can enjoy no community with him, how are we to explain the Christian message that we nevertheless can have community with God? As follows. We are from the outset taken up in a divine relation, namely, in the eternal love of the Father for the Son, which relation is the Holy Spirit. In this way God can be really related to the world without thereby becoming dependent on the world.  But precisely because this divine love has no worldly measure and also cannot be opposed by any worldly power, one cannot simply 'read it off' from the world or know it by non-discursive meditation.  Divine love is knowable only by faith in the message of Jesus: The Son has assumed a human nature in order to be able to say to us in human words that we share in his relation to the Father.  In this sense prayer is first possible: Jesus Christ takes us into his speaking with the Father.

How is community with God possible given his absolute transcendence? That is the problem. If I understand the above, the solution requires both Trinity and Incarnation. Within the Godhead, the Son loves the Father and the Father the Son. This eternal relation of love is the Holy Spirit. God, in the person of the Son, becomes man. "And the Word became flesh and dwellt among us."  Fully human and fully divine, Jesus Christ brings the divine into the creaturely realm.  The transcendent becomes immanent without ceasing to be transcendent. God acquires a human face and speaks saving words within the range of human hearing.

The question cannot be suppressed: Is not the solution as problematic as the original problem?   The exigencies of the discursive intellect drive us beyond it to the simple God who lies beyond the discursive intellect and is devoid of human meaning. The restoration of such meaning, however, via Trinity and Incarnation, also involves inconceivabilities, as any good Unitarian will be quick to point out.

God as Uniquely Unique

I hit upon 'uniquely unique' a while back 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 metaphysically possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every such possible world. By contrast, Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human inasmuch as he does not exist in every metaphysically 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 Gedanken and Bolzanian Saetze an sich 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 Alvin 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 he 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.  (See my SEP entry.)

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 in 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.

How Could God be Justice itself?

David Gudeman writes; I reply:

 

George Berkeley was the first author who really shook my confidence in my existing world view. Before I read Berkeley, I had a Mr. Johnson-style contempt of physical idealism; after reading Berkeley, I realized that I had been naive--not because Berkeley was necessarily right, but because once I suppressed my presuppositions, I found him hard to refute, and came to realize how logically futile Mr. Johnson's refutation was.

Well, no one calls it 'physical idealism.' Stick with 'Berkeleyan idealism.' And of course it cannot be refuted ad lapidem, by kicking a stone.  Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. 

 

I offer this story as evidence of my good faith in the following, because I know I have irritated you before by bringing up topics like this, and very much do not want to do so again. In particular, I do have hopes that there is something to be found here if only I can come to grasp it.

 

With that, I'd like to ask you if you can explain what you mean by phrases like "God is the measure of Justice. God is Justice itself." (From this entry.)

 

To me this looks like a couple of category errors. God is a person, a measure of justice is a measure, and justice is a quality. How can these three be equated in any literal sense? [. . .]

Fair questions. 

 

A. I take it that you will grant me that God is a wholly just person.  Now assume the following: God is unique; there are non-divine persons; none of the latter are wholly just.  You and I are non-divine persons, and neither of us is wholly just, although one of us may be more just than the other.  There are degrees of justice in non-divine (created) persons. Now it makes sense to say that God sets the standard with respect to justice or being just.  God is the measure of justice in that he is just to the highest degree, and we fail to measure up, to different degrees.

 

It therefore makes sense to say that God, a person, is the standard, exemplar, measure of justice.  There is no category mistake.  The second alleged category mistake is harder to deal with, and a wholly satisfactory answer is not possible because when we discuss God, the ultimate source of all being, value, and intrinsic intelligibility, we are at the outer limit of intelligibility. (The Intelligent Source of all intrinsic intelligibility, because it is an Other Mind, cannot be understood with the clarity and completeness with which we understand ordinary objects among objects.) All I can hope to show is that the accusation of category mistake can be turned aside or rationally repelled. So here we go.

 

B. God is a just person, and he is just to the highest possible degree. Now is God just in virtue of instantiating a property of justice that exists independently of him?  You say justice is a quality. I'll play along. Is God just in virtue of instantiating this quality?  (Perhaps you are thinking of this quality as a necessarily existent 'abstract object.') If you say yes, then you compromise God's aseity, his from-himself-ness.  God is the Absolute. Not an absolute, but the Absolute.  As such, he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his existence or nature.   You will grant that God cannot have a cause of his existence external to himself. You must also grant that for God to be God he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his nature (essence).  So he can't be just in virtue of instantiating your quality, justice.  God sets the standard by being the standard: there is no standard of justice outside of God that he needs to conform to.

 

If so, if God is not an instance of justice, a just entity, then he must be (identically)  justice.  The Platonist Augustine drew this conclusion, one that entails the divine simplicity, and the Jansenists followed Augustine in this. God is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form or paradigm.  Supreme Wisdom is itself wise; supreme Justice is itself just.  God is at once each of his attributes and also their unique instance.  God is, but he is not a being among beings.  God is (identically) Being itself, but not in a way the detracts from his being a being, or to be precise, the being.  For God to be God he must be unique in the highest possible sense: not one of a kind, not necessarily one of a kind, but necessarily such  that in him kind and instance are one.

 

The theist faces a dilemma.  Either God is or is not distinct from his attributes. if the former, then God is not God. If the latter, then God is beyond the comprehension of the discursive intellect.

 

(But is the second horn so bad? A God worth his salt must be transcendent, Transcendence itself. (Otherwise, your god is an idol. Whatever you say about Islam, it at least has a lively sense of the transcendence of God.)

In conclusion, Gudeman's second accusation of category error can be rationally resisted as I have just done.  One can cogently argue  up to the divine simplicity. The problem, however -- and I freely admit it -- is that the discursive intellect cannot wrap itself around  (cannot understand) how something can be ontologically simple. One is reduced to pointing beyond the discursive sphere.

 

Here we reach an impasse beyond which we cannot move by philosophical means. But what justifies the conceit that the only way to the ultimate truth is the philosophical way?

Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery

Bradley Schneider writes,

. . . while we're on the subject of divine simplicity, I would be interested in your thoughts on the following dilemma.  Suppose you are strongly persuaded by philosophical arguments that, if God exists, God must be simple, i.e., some version of DDS must be true.  Otherwise, if God were composite, He would not be absolute and therefore would not be God.  At the same time, you appreciate the problem of modal collapse.  That is, you appreciate that DDS appears to imply modal collapse.  Suppose further that you are convinced that modal fatalism cannot be true, i.e,. the world that we inhabit is both ontologically and modally contingent.  Question: Can you, with intellectual integrity, believe in or have faith in God's existence in this scenario?  It seems to me that you can if you accept the following:  (a) DDS is true; (b) DDS does not imply modal collapse; and (c) the reason DDS does not imply modal collapse is a mystery beyond human comprehension.  

 

Is that a reasonable position or an intellectual evasion?  Put another way:  There are obviously some philosophical assertions that are so demonstrably incoherent or contradictory that one cannot hold them with intellectual integrity, e.g., "There is no truth," "I have no beliefs," etc.  Is the belief that [DDS does not imply modal collapse and the reason is a mystery] analogous to such beliefs?  When is it reasonable to believe in something that you don't understand? 

 

Well, Bradley, you are asking the right questions.  The central question, I take it, is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.

 

To affirm mysterianism is to affirm that there are mysteries.  But what is a mystery?

Mystery-1:  A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known.  For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is, if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting or a mystery.  The aim of scientific research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.'   Perhaps we could say that this is the Enlightenment Project in a nutshell: to de-mystify the world.  The presupposition that guides the project is that nothing is intrinsically mysterious or impervious in principle to being understood; there are no mysteries in reality.  Accordingly, all mystery is parasitic upon our ignorance which, in principle, can be overcome.

Mystery-2:  A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.

An example of mystery-2 is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them).  The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means.  What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible.  Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth.  We cannot understand how it is possible.  But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible. 

(Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered.  Someone who is convinced by the Zenonian arguments, but who refuses to deny the reality of motion, is a mysterian about the reality of motion.  He is saying: Motion must appear to us as logically impossible; yet motion is actual and therefore possible  despite our inability to explain how it is possible. This mysterian could easily grant that the irrefutability ofthe Zenonian arguments is excellent evidence of the unreality of motion but still insist that motion is real.  He might say: the considerations of our paltry intellects must give way before the massive evidence of the senses: you can see that I am wagging my finger at you now. The evidence of the senses trumps all arguments no matter how compelling they seem. Similarly, the believer in the triune God could say that God's revelation trumps all merely human animadversions.)

So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true.  For it could be like this:  given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!

The philosophical mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense.  Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense? 

McGinn 'takes it on faith' as a teaching of the scientific magisterium that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc.   It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned.  Of course mental activity is brain activity!  What the hell else could it be?  You think and feel with your brain not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle) There is one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it. And so consciousness, self-consciousness, qualia, intentionality, conscience must all be reducible without remainder to physical processes and states.

But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states.  Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian.  He grants their force and then says something like this:

It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process.  But it is a brain process.  It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth.  It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.

As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case unalterable.  And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian.  What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory.  Access denied!  We have no access to certain truths because of our cognitive make-up. 

This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity.  And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp and wholly understand Trinity,  God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into  heaven soul and body!

But let's return to  the doctrine of the Trinity. We are assuming that it is apparently contradictory, and that attempts to relieve the apparent contradictoriness fail.  See The Logic of the Trinity Revisited in which I spell out the doctrine, show the (apparent) contradiction, and rebut a couple of quick responses to it. Now consider the following position:

 

The Trinity doctrine appears contradictory to us (ectypal) intellects, and must so appear in our present state due to cognitive limitations endemic in our sublunary, and presumably fallen, condition. (Sin has noetic consequences.) In reality, however, the doctrine is internally consistent and each of its component propositions is true.  It is just that we cannot understand, in our present state, how the doctrine could be true. So, in our present postlapsarian and pre-salvific state, the Trinity must remain a mystery.  The claim is not that the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction; there are no true contradictions, pace Graham Priest and his tiny band of dialetheists.  The claim is that the Trinity doctrine is true and non-contradictory, but not such as to be understandable as true and non-contradictory by us in this life. On the contrary, it must appear to us as contradictory and false in this life.

 

Following Dale Tuggy, we may call the position I have just sketched positive mysterianism.  In critique of it, Tuggy says this:

 

Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma [Trinity] resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, [can] this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?

The admission is that the doctrine appears contradictory to us.  But this admission is not part of the defense of the rationality of believing the doctrine. Presumably, only a latter-day Tertullian would defend the rationality of belief in a doctrine on the ground of the doctrine's appearing absurd, i.e., logically contradictory, or actually being absurd.  No one will say, "It is rational for me to believe that p precisely because, after careful and protracted consideration, it appears to me that p is or entails a logical contradiction."

 

The positive mysterian (PM) is not defending the doctrine on the ground that it appears contradictory. The PM is defending the doctrine on the ground that what appears contradictory might not be contradictory. The PM, in other words, is appealing to the possibility that there are certain non-contradictory truths that must appear to us in our present state as contradictory.

 

Is that possibility one that can be dismissed at the outset?  Can one be objectively certain that there cannot be truths that are reasonable to affirm but must appear to us as contradictory?

 

The PM can grant to Tuggy that, in general, a doctrine's appearing to be contradictory is a strong reason for thinking it false while insisting that the appearance of contradictoriness does not entail the reality of contradictoriness.  A strong reason needn't be a rationally compelling reason. Can Tuggy & Co. be objectively certain that the Trinity doctrine is contradictory and necessarily false simply on the basis of its appearing to be such to us in our present state?  No, they can't be certain. So there is the possibility that the doctrine is really true despite being apparently contradictory.

 

'But then couldn't any old crazy doctrine be defended  in this way?" 

 

There are philosophers who take the eliminativist line that consciousness is an illusion. This is a crazy view that refutes itself straightaway: nothing is an illusion except to consciousness; hence, the crazy view presupposes the very thing it proposes to eliminate. Well, could one give a mysterian defense of the crazy view? I don't see how. We have direct Cartesian evidence that consciousness exists and cannot be an illusion.

 

Philosophy is long, but blog is short. So I need to wrap this up. The question is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.  My tentative answer is that one may reasonably affirm positive mysterianism.  

Summa Theologica, Q. 19, Art. 3: Whether Whatever God Wills He Wills Necessarily

This is the question we have been discussing. Let us now see if the answer Thomas gives is satisfactory.  The question is not whether, necessarily, whatever God wills, he wills.  The answer to that is obvious and in the affirmative. The question is whether whatever God wills, he wills necessarily. If so, then God's willing creatures into existence is a necessary willing despite the creatures being contingent. If not, then God's willing contingent creatures into existence is itself contingent.  

Objection 4. Further, being that is not necessary, and being that is possible not to be, are one and the same thing. If, therefore, God does not necessarily will a thing that He wills, it is possible for Him not to will it, and therefore possible for Him to will what He does not will. And so the divine will is contingent upon one or the other of two things, and imperfect, since everything contingent is imperfect and mutable.

This 'objection' strikes me more as an argument for the thesis that whatever God wills he wills necessarily than as an objection to it. The gist of the argument is as follows. If it is not the case that whatever God wills he necessarily wills, then the divine will is in some cases contingent. But the divine perfection rules this out. Ergo, etc.

Reply to Objection 4. Sometimes a necessary cause has a non-necessary relation to an effect; owing to a deficiency in the effect, and not in the cause. Even so, the sun's power has a non-necessary relation to some contingent events on this earth, owing to a defect not in the solar power, but in the effect that proceeds not necessarily from the cause. In the same way, that God does not necessarily will some of the things that He wills, does not result from defect in the divine will, but from a defect belonging to the nature of the thing willed, namely, that the perfect goodness of God can be without it; and such defect accompanies all created good.

This reply takes us to the heart of the matter.  The solar analogy is arguably lame, so let's just ignore it. 

The way I have been thinking is along the following lines. No contingent effect can have a necessary cause. The effect that presently interests us is the contingent existence of (concrete) creatures.  The cause is not God, but God's willing these creatures into existence ex nihilo.  So I'm thinking that the divine willing whereby the concrete universe of creatures was brought into existence out of nothing had to be a contingent willing - - with disastrous consequences for the divine simplicity.  

For if God is a necessary being, and, as simple, identical to his willing creatures into existence, then his willing is necessary. But then one might be forgiven for thinking that creatures are also necessary.  Bear in mind that the divine will is omnipotent and necessarily efficacious. Or else we run the argument in reverse from the contingency of creatures to the contingency of divine willing. Either way there is trouble for classical theism. 

The Thomist way out is to ascribe the contingency of creatures, not to the contingency of the divine will whereby they are brought into existence,  but to their own ontological deficiency and imperfection.  God, willing his own good, wills creatures as manifestations of his own good. As neither self-subsistent nor purely actual, creatures are mutable and imperfect. Moreover, God has no need of them to be all that he is.  The reality of the ens reallissimum and the perfection of the ens perfectissimum are in no way enhanced by the addition of creatures: God + creatures = God. (More on this 'equation' in a later post.)

Are creatures then nothing at all? Has the simple God like Parmenides' Being swallowed the whole of reality? (More on this later.) 

I would like to accept the Thomist solution, but I am afraid I cannot. If God exists in every possible world, and God is identical to his willing creatures in every possible world, then creatures exist in every possible world -- which  contradicts our assumption that creatures are contingent, i.e., existent in some but not all possible worlds.  To say that the contingency of creatures resides in their ontological imperfection seems to involve a fudging of two distinct senses of contingency:

X is modally contingent (to give it a name) iff x is possible to be and possible not to be. (This is equivalent to: existent in some but not all possible worlds.)

X is ontologically contingent (to give it a name) iff x is radically imperfect in its mode of being and not ontologically necessary (not self-subsistent, simple, purely actual, eternal etc.)

Now if creatures exist at all -- which may be doubted if God + creatures = God -- then they must be contingent in both senses, But then our problem is up and running and the Thomist solution avails nothing. Contingency of creatures in the second sense cannot be read back into God, but modal contingency of creatures can be.

Welcome to the aporetics of the Absolute.

Sound or Unsound on Classical Theism? If Sound, then What?

1) The existence of God is necessary for the existence of creatures: no God, no creatures.

2) The existence of God is not sufficient for the existence of creatures: the existence of God does not entail the existence of creatures.

Therefore

3) God is really distinct from the act whereby he brings creatures into existence.

It is interesting to note that the argument is sound even if God is a contingent being. The premises are commitments of classical theism and are therefore true within classical theism.  The conclusion follows from the premises.  

So the argument is sound.  Does it have any consequences for the doctrine of divine simplicity?

Addendum (3/1)

The argument above is an enthymeme and not formally valid as it stands. The addition of the following auxiliary premise ensures formal validity. ('Formally valid' is a pleonasm but useful for paedagogical purposes.)

2*) If the existence of God is not sufficient for the existence of creatures, then God is really distinct from the act whereby he brings creatures into existence.

Necessary God, Contingent Creatures: Another Round with Novak

In an earlier thread, Lukas Novak writes,

. . . God simply does not need any causal acts to mediate his causal power. He is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately. It is only with respect to this causal power which is an aspect of his essence that we call the selfsame essence an "act" (in the sense of activity).

The above is a response to the line I have been taking, which is essentially as follows. 

God necessarily exists. What's more, he is simple. God creates our universe U. U, having been created, exists. (And it wouldn't have existed had it not been created by God.) But U exists contingently, which implies (given that God created U) that God might not have created U.   Now consider God's creating of U.  This creative action is at least notionally distinct both from God and from U.  On the face of it, we must distinguish among God, God's creative action, and the effect of this action, namely, U.

We now ask: Is the divine creative action necessary or contingent?  I will now argue that it is not necessary.  God exists in every possible world. If his creating of U occurred in every possible world, then U would exist in every possible world. But then U would not be contingent (existent in some but not all worlds), but necessary. Therefore, God's creating of U, given that U is contingent, is also contingent: it occurs in all and only those world in which U exists.  

So God's creating U is contingent. But God is necessary. It follows that God cannot be identical to his creating U.  But this contradicts the doctrine of divine simplicity one of the entailments of which is that God is identical to each of his intrinsic properties. So the following propositions constitute an inconsistent triad, or antilogism.

1) God is simple

2) All created concreta are contingent.

3) No contingent effect has a necessary cause.

Given that the limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent, one of them must be rejected.

A) Reject simplicity. If God is not simple, then we can say that God is really (and not just notionally) distinct from his creative acts, and that, while God exists in every world, he creates only in some.   This solution upholds the contingency of created concreta, and preserves the intuitive notion that a contingent effect cannot have a necessary cause.

B) Retain simplicity but accept the consequence that creatures are necessary beings.  That is, retain simplicity and accept modal collapse.

C) Retain simplicity, but reject the notion that no contingent effect has a necessary cause.  This, I take it, is Novak's way out.  As I quoted him above, ". . . God simply does not need any causal acts to mediate his causal power. He is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately."

The difference between me and Novak is that I consider the above triad to be an aporia, a problem for which there is no satisfactory solution. Novak, however, thinks that there is a satisfactory rational solution by way of rejecting (3). He accepts divine simplicity, and he rejects modal collapse.  He concludes that there is no difference in God corresponding to the difference between the existence of U and the nonexistence of U.  The creation of U is not the realization of a divine potential to create U, and God's refraining from creating anything is not the realization of a divine potential to refrain from creating.  And this for the reason that there is nothing potential in God: God is purely actual.

Novak's solution satisfies him, but it doesn't satisfy me. It sounds like magic to me.   I find the following unintelligible: "He [God] is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately." The words make sense, of course, but I find that they do not express an intelligible proposition.

Here, I think, is where the discussion must end.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

The Question

God commands all and only the morally obligatory. But does he command it because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because he commands it? The question naturally arises, but issues in a dilemma. A dilemma is a very specific sort of problem in which there are exactly two alternatives, neither of which is acceptable. Thus we speak of the 'horns' of a dilemma, and of being 'impaled' on its horns.

Bear in mind the following tripartite distinction. For any agent that issues a command, there is (i) the commanding, (ii) that which is commanded (the content of the act of commanding), and (iii) the relevant normative property of the content.   Contents of commands can be either permissible, impermissible, or obligatory.  Note the ambiguity of 'command' as between the act of commanding, and the content commanded. And note that while finite agents sometimes command what is morally impermissible, this is never the case with God. Everything God commands is morally obligatory.  The question is whether the divine commanding makes the action obligatory, or whether it is obligatory independently of God's command.  In the latter case, God is at most the advocate and enforcer of an obligation but not its legislator.

Horn One

If God commands an action because it is obligatory, then the obligatoriness of the action is not due to God's command, but is logically antecedent to it. God is then subject to an independently existing system of norms that are not in his control. He is then an advocate of the moral order and its enforcer, but not its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty.  God is the Absolute, and the Absolute cannot be dependent on anything external to it for its existence, nature, modal status, or anything else, including the justification of its commands.  The sovereign God is the absolute lord of all orders, including the moral order.

Horn Two

If an action is obligatory because God commands it, then the normative quality of the action -- its being obligatory -- derives from a fact, the fact of God's commanding the action. This is puzzling: how can the mere fact that an agent issues a command make the content of the command objectively binding?  Of course, God is not any old agent: he is morally perfect.  So you can be sure that he won't command anything that is not categorically obligatory. Still, the  move from fact to norm is puzzling. The puzzle is heightened if the agent is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  If God is free in this sense, libertarianly free, then he might not have commanded the action, in which case it would not have been obligatory.  This is an unacceptable result.  If it is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, and obligatory to refrain from such an action, normative properties cannot derive from any being's free will.  For that would make morality arbitrary. The normative proposition It is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, if true, is necessarily true. Its truth value cannot then depend on a contingent command even if the one who commands is God.

Constraints on a Solution

We are assuming that God exists, that morality is objective and not up to the whim of any being, and that God is sovereign over the moral order, and indeed, absolute lord of all orders.  So we cannot solve the dilemma by denying that God exists, or by grasping one or the other of the horns, or by limiting divine sovereignty.  We must find a way between the horns.  If we succeed, we will have shown that the dilemma is a false alternative.  

The problem has two sides. First, how do we get from a fact to a norm? To be precise, how do get from the facticity of a commanding to the normativity of the content commanded? Second, how do we ensure that the norm is absolute?  We would have a solution if it could be shown that the fact just is the norm, and the fact could not have been different.

William Mann's Solution via Divine Simplicity

Mann's solution is built on the notion that, with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn, and arbitrarity, is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the moral order if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, Oxford UP, 2015,168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is nonetheless  free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. God then is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer or advocate.  God is not subject to the moral order; he is the source of it. Indeed, he is identical to it. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? It would seem so. This doctrine implies that knowing and willing are identical in God.  If so, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths, including necessary moral truths, cannot be otherwise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.

On the doctrine of divine simplicity, then, the Euthyphro Dilemma turns out to be false dilemma: the simplicity doctrine allows for a third possibility, a way between the horns.*  God is Goodness itself, not a good being among others. As such, he just is the content of morality.  The moral order is not external to him nor antecedent to him logically or ontologically: he is not subject to it.  Sovereignty is preserved. Arbitrarity is avoided because God cannot will any moral contents other than the ones he wills.

Problem Solved?

If God is absolutely sovereign, as he must be to be God, then he is sovereign over every order including the MODAL order.  It is cogently arguable, however, that the simplicity doctrine entails the collapse of modal distinctions and thus the collapse of the modal order. 

It looks as if we can solve the Euthyphro problem, but only by generating a different problem. The Euthyphro problem is solved by saying that (i) the obligatory is obligatory because God commands it, but (ii) the contents of the divine commands could not have been otherwise. They could not have been otherwise because these contents are contained within the unchangeable divine nature.  Hence  God is neither subject to an external moral order, nor the arbitrary creator of it.  God is the moral order. In God, the facticity of the commanding and the normativity of the contents commanded are one. 

But if God, because he is absolutely sovereign, cannot be subject to a logically prior MORAL order, then he also cannot be subject to a logically prior MODAL order. As absolutely sovereign, God must be sovereign over all orders. It cannot be that the possible and the necessary subsist in sublime independence of God.  It cannot be that creation is the selective actualization of some proper subset of self-subsisting  mere possibles, or the actualization of one among an infinity of possible worlds.   Creation is not actualization. For then God would not be creating out of nothing, but out of possibles the Being of which would be independent of God's Being. 

God, then, cannot be subject to a modal order independent of him. So one might think to import into God the modal distinctions, for example, the distinction between the merely possible and the actual.  This importation would parallel the importation into the divine nature of the various contents of divine commands. Perhaps it is like this. God entertains mere possibles which, as merely possible, subsist only as accusatives of his thinking, but actualizes some of them, super-adding existence to them.  The mere possibles that need an act of divine actualization in order to exist would then contingently exist, which is of course the result we want.  Unfortunately, the contingency of actual creatures (Socrates, for example, as opposed to his merely possible brother Schmocrates)  entails the possibility of no creatures and of other creatures who remain merely possible. But then we have in God a distinction between his actual and his merely possible creative decisions.  This conflicts with DDS and its commitment to God's being purely actual (actus purus).

Conclusion

The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) allows for a solution of the Euthyphro dilemma with the following advantages: it upholds the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, the non-arbitrarity of the divine will, and God's sovereignty over the moral order. But God, to be God, must be the absolute lord of all orders, including the modal order.  The simplicity doctrine, however, needed to solve the Euthyphro dilemma entails the collapse of the modal order in which case it is not there to for God to be sovereign over. The objectivity of the modal distinctions needs to be upheld just as much as the objectivity of morality. But this is impossible if DDS is true. So while God must be simple to be God, he cannot be simple if if he is the creator of our universe, a universe whose contingency is the point of departure for the ascent to the divine absolute.

Welcome to the aporetics of the Absolute!

________________________________

* A dilemma is said to be false if there is a third possibility, and thus a way between the horns.  The contemporary Thomist, Edward Feser, maintains that the Euthyphro dilemma is false:

Divine simplicity also entails, of course, that God’s will just is God’s goodness which just is His immutable and necessary existence. That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are. There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him. 

 

Divine Simplicity, Modal Collapse, and the Difference Principle

The question before us is whether the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) can be upheld without the collapse of modal distinctions. 

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 potentialities. 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.  As a necessary being, God exists in every possible world, and as a simple being, he is devoid of act-potency composition in every world in which he exists. 

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. This implies that any universe God creates contingently exists.

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. Had God created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  Had God created a different universe than the one he did create, then his power to create our universe would have gone unexercised. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

In nuce, the problem is to explain how it can be true both that God is simple and that the universe which God created ex nihilo is contingent.  Clearly, the classical theist wants to uphold both. What is unclear, however, is whether he can uphold both.

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. 

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.  But how then avoid modal collapse?

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.  Modal collapse ushers in what I cill call modal Spinozism. 

(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 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.

Steven Nemes' Solution

If God created our universe U, and U is contingent, then it is quite natural to suppose that God's creative act is as contingent as what it brings into existence, namely, U. But this is impossible on DDS. For on DDS, God is identical to his creative causing.  This being so, U -- the creatively caused -- exists with the same metaphysical necessity as does God.  The reasoning that leads to this unacceptable conclusion, however, rests on an assumption:

DP. A difference in effect presupposes a difference in the cause. (Nemes, 109)

For example, the difference between U existing and no universe existing entails a difference in God between his actualized power to create U and his unactualized, but actualizable, power to refrain from creating anything. 

Nemes proposes that we reject (DP), at least with respect to divine causality.  (110) Accordingly, the contingency of U's existence does not reflect any contingency in God, even though U is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment at which it exists.  So if we reject the Difference Principle, then we can maintain both that the created universe is contingent and that there are no unrealized potentialities in God.  But if we don't reject (DP), then "the argument from modal collapse [against the divine simpicity] is successful." (111)

Is the Nemes Solution Satisfactory?

I say it isn't.  It strikes me as problematic as the problem it is proposed to solve. 

Consider an analogy. In a dark room I turn on a flashlight that causes a circular white spot to appear on a wall. When I turn off the light the spot disappears.  Clearly, the beam of light from the flashlight is the cause and the spot on the wall is the effect. We also note that the beam is not only the originating cause of the spot, but a continuing cause of the spot: the spot depends on the beam at every moment at which the spot exists. In this respect beam-spot is analogous to divine creating- universe existing.  Finally, we note that, just as the spot depends for its existence on the  existence of the beam, and not vice versa, the contingency of the spot depends on the contingency of the beam.   If the spot is contingent, then so must be its cause. Suppose that at time t, the light is on and the spot appears.  To say that the spot is contingent is to say that, at t, t might not have existed. But had the spot not existed at t, then the light would not have been on at t.  Surely it would be absurd to say both that the light is on at t and the spot does not exist at t

Similarly, it seems absurd to say both that the creative causing of U is occurring in every possible world and that U does not exist in every possible world.  Bear in mind that divine causing is necessarily efficacious: it cannot fail to bring about its effect. The divine Fiat lux! cannot be followed by darkness (or no light).   

But of course arguments from analogy prove nothing (assuming the rigorous standards of proof that I favor), and so Nemes would be within his rights were he simply to reject my analogy.  He might insist that just as God is sui generis, the creative relation between God and creatures is sui generis and cannot be modeled in any way.  He might insist that divine causality is unique. In this one case, a causal 'process' that occurs in every possible world -- because said process is identical to God who exists in every world -- has an effect that exists in only some possible worlds.

We are now in the following dialectical situation. Nemes would have us accept DDS and reject DP.  But I see no reason to think that this is any better than accepting DP and rejecting DDS.  Either way, the exigencies of the discursive intellect are flouted. 

An Aporia?

It seems that the proponent of divine simplicity faces a nasty problem.  At the moment, I see no satisfactory 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 created universe is really contingent. We cannot, however, see how both limbs of the dyad can be true and so we must see them as contradictory, even though they are presumably not contradictory in reality.  

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. 

An Exchange with Lukas Novak

In an earlier thread, I wrote:

At best, a cosmological argument takes us from the contingent universe U to a divine creative act that explains the existence of U. Now this creative act is itself contingent: God might not have created anything. If God is simple, then he is identical to the creative act. Since the act is contingent, God is contingent, and therefore not God by the Anselmian criterion. On the other hand, if God is necessary, then the creative act and U are necessary, which is unacceptable. The following cannot all be true:

1) God is simple. 
2) God is noncontingent.
3) God's creative act is contingent. 

Dr. Novak responded:

God's creative act need not be contingent. It only needs to contingently bring about its effect.

God's efficiency is distinct from created efficiency. A created cause is itself changed by causing (by eliciting de novo the productive act as its accidental form), God is not changed by causing (being for eternity identical to any of its timeless creative acts). God would be the same in all respects had He not caused the world into existence. This is the requirement of His perfection.

Novak's first two sentences makes no sense. If the effect is contingent, then the creative act which is its cause must also be contingent. There is a three-fold distinction on the notional plane among God (the agent of the creative act or action), the creative act itself, and the effect of the creative act.  God is a necessary being. Now if God is identical in reality  to the creative act whereby he creates U, as per DDS, then the creative act must also  be necessary, in which case the created universe cannot be contingent.

One source of confusion here is that 'act' can be used in two ways. To say that God is pure act (actus purus) is not to say that God is pure action; it is merely to say that he is devoid of all potency.  Note also that God is not the cause of the existence of U; the cause is God's creative action.

I can agree with the rest of what Novak says, except for the penultimate sentence, but only if he draws the conclusion that follows from it, namely, that the created universe exists of metaphysical necessity.

REFERENCE: Steven Nemes, "Divine Simplicity Does Not Entail Modal Collapse" in Carlos Frederico, et al. eds., Rose and Reasons: Philosophical Essays, Bucharest: Eikon, 2020, 101-119.

 

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? 

Related articles

Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

The Pious Pyrrhonian: Is Beliefless Piety Possible?

Bertrand Russell: Empiricism is Self-Refuting. Is He Right?

What the Meinongian Means by 'Has Being' and 'Lacks Being'

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

John D. Caputo's Truth Problem

God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

Facts, Opinions, and Common Core

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.

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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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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'

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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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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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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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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God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Maimonides on Existence as an Accident and on Divine Simplicity

Being Itself: Continuing the Discussion with Dale Tuggy

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.

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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. 

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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