Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

The Divine Job Description

What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?

I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)

1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.

But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)

If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.

"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job -- the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all -- won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.

If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman -- not below but beyond the personal and the human.

As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism. This is an extremely important point typically missed by atheists and mortalists.

2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Some will say, incoherently, that we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.

Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.

3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value. God is not a good being, but Goodness itself in its prime instance.

4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, one that is profoundly unsatisfactory, but also one from which escape is possible.  Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.

When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body, or at least not the gross body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.

What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .

Burden of Proof, Appeal to Ignorance, Safety Considerations, and God

Presumption and Burden of Proof

Firearms instructors sometimes say that every gun is loaded.  This is plainly false as it stands, but a wise saying nonetheless if interpreted to mean: every gun is to be presumed loaded until proven unloaded. Presumptions are procedural rules.  To presume every gun to be loaded is to adopt a procedural rule to treat every gun as if it is loaded regardless of how antecedently likely it is that it is loaded.  Suppose the likelihood is near zero: I examined the gun carefully an hour ago and I found it to be unloaded.  Nevertheless, the presumption that it is loaded remains in force.  I continue to behave as if it is loaded.  For example, I don't point the gun at anything unless I want to destroy it.

I conclude that to presume that proposition p is not to assert that p is true, nor to assert that p is probably true, nor to assume that p is true, but to decide to act as if p is true.  A presumption, then, is not a proposition, although it embeds one.  A presumption is something like a decision.  More precisely, a presumption is the accusative or content of an act of presuming, an accusative that is not itself a proposition, but embeds one.   The accusative might be: to proceed as if the accused is innocent.  This embeds the proposition *the accused is innocent.* 

A presumption is not like a belief in the following important respect.  To presume that a gun is loaded or that a man is innocent is not to believe that it is or that he is.  To believe that p is to believe that p is true.  But to presume that p is not to presume that p is true; it is to act as if p is true without either accepting or rejecting p.  To presume that Jones is innocent until proven guilty  is not to believe that he is innocent until proven guilty; it is to suspend judgment as to guilt or innocence until sufficient evidence is presented by the prosecution to warrant a verdict one way or the other.  When I presume that p, I take no stand as to the truth-value of p -- I neither accept nor reject p -- what I do is decide to act as if p is true.

Presumptions must be defeasible.  (I suspect that an indefeasible presumption is no presumption at all.) The presumption of being loaded is defeated in a particular case by carefully examining the gun and showing that it is unloaded.  So while a presumption is not a proposition, it embeds a proposition that can be shown to be false.  Defeasible presumption and burden-of-proof are correlative notions.  (They are like rights and duties in this respect but also in that both are normative notions.)  In a court of law, for example, if the accused enjoys a presumption of innocence, as he does in the Anglosphere, then the accuser bears a burden of proof, a burden which, if properly discharged, defeats the presumption. 

Appeal to Ignorance?

So if  person A claims to person B that a certain gun is unloaded, the burden of proof is on A to show that it is unloaded; person B does not bear the burden of proving that it is loaded.  It is not just that he bears a lesser burden; he bears no burden. Indeed it seems that B would be within his epistemic rights were he to claim that his ignorance of whether or not the gun is loaded is good evidence of its being loaded.  But this is an appeal to ignorance.  It has not been shown that the gun is unloaded; ergo, the gun is loaded.

It has not been shown that ~p; therefore p gives us the form of the ad ignorantiam 'fallacy.'  Construed as a deductive argument, it is clearly invalid.  Construed as an inductive argument, it will be in many cases weak.  For example, suppose the gun is straight from the manufacturer and right out of the box.  Then the probability of its being loaded is very low, and the argument: This gun out of the box has not been shown to be unloaded; ergo, this gun is loaded is very weak.

Nevertheless, safety considerations dictate a defeasible presumption in favor of every gun's being loaded, whether out of the box or not, a presumption that places the onus probandi on the one who maintains the opposite.  So one might  conclude that the appeal to ignorance in this case is reasonable even though the argument is deductively invalid and inductively weak.

The situation is similar to that in a court of law.  The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, so the burden of proof rests on either the state in a criminal proceeding, or on the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney in a civil trial.  In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.

We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.

Safety Considerations

There are 'safety' considerations in both the gun example and the law example.  It is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not get shot -- that we presume every gun to be loaded. "Better that a hundred guns be unnecessarily examined than that one sentient being be accidentally shot."

And it is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not sentence an innocent person -- that we presume the accused to be innocent until proven guilty.  "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted."

But now what about God?  Don't safety considerations apply here as well? If God exists, then our ultimate happiness depends on getting into right relation with him.  So why can't one make a legitimate appeal to ignorance here?  Now of course from the fact that no one has proven that God does not exist, it does not follow that God exists.  That is an invalid deductive argument.  That would be a truly fallacious instance of ad ignorantiam.  But it is also invalid to infer than a gun is loaded because it hasn't been proven to be unloaded, or that a man is innocent because he hasn't been proven to be guilty.  It just doesn't follow in any of these cases.  And yet we reasonably consider the gun loaded and we reasonably find the accused to be innocent.  And so why can't we reasonably presume God to exist on the basis of the fact that he hasn't been shown not to exist?  If the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that gun is unloaded, why doesn't the burden of proof rest on the one who claims that God is nonexistent?  We don't want to get shot, but we also don't want to lose our ultimate beatitude -- if ultimate beatitude there be. 

You can't say that that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making a positive claim; for there are positive claims that need no proof.  And you can't say that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making an existential claim; for there are existential claims that need no proof. If you claim that extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist, then the burden is on you.  But if you claim that there are Saguaro cacti in Arizona, then the burden of proof is not on you but on the one who denies it. Nor can you say that the burden rests on the theist because he is controverting the widely-accepted viww that God does not exist; the consensus gentium is that God exists.

Earlier I argued that we shouldn't bring BOP considerations into the God discussion at all.  But if we do, why doesn't the BOP rest on the atheist?

Pigliucci's Confusion

Massimo Pigliucci thinks that if one understands who bears the burden of proof in a trial, then one ought to see right away that the burden of proof rests on the theist.  For, "the burden of proof is always on the party making a positive claim, not on the one making a negative one."  This strikes me as confused.  It is true that the party making a complaint or bringing a charge is making a positive claim, but this is not the reason why the BOP rests on the accuser.  It rests on the accuser because of the presumption of innocence that the accused enjoys.  The BOP rests on the accuser not because his claim is positive but because of the procedural rule enshrined in our system of law according to which one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

It is not true that the BOP is always on the one who makes a positive claim.   'That hillside is studded with Saguaro cacti' said to my hiking companion needs no proof.  I shoulder no probative burden when I make a commonplace observation such as that. Therefore, the following is an unsound argument:

Everyone who make a positive claim bears a BOP.
The theist makes a positive claim.
ergo
The theist bears the BOP in his debate with the atheist.

I argued above that if BOP considerations are relevant to the God debate, then the BOP is on the atheist.  To appreciate the argument I gave, you have to realize that the God question is not merely theoretical.  It is a practical question.  In that respect it is like the gun safety and court room cases.  My interest in whether or not a particular firearm is loaded or unloaded is not merely theoretical, or I should say, not at all theoretical.  It is a practical interest in maintaining the health and physical integrity of myself and the people around me.  Similarly with the law.  If you are accused of homicide you are in deep trouble and face the loss of your liberty or your life.  Arguably, the God question is in the same boat.

So I invite you to accept one or the other of the following conclusions.  The BOP is borne by the atheist.  BOP considerations should be kept out of the theist-atheist debate altogether. 

God as an Ontological Category Mistake

John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes:

Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence on the same level of existence as anything else that exists.  From that position it follows, not merely that the traditional 'proofs' of the existence of God can be criticised, but that the very conception of a God or a supernatural way of being is an illogical conception -- God is an ontological category mistake as we may say. (Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986, 118-119)

If someone said that the average thought has such-and-such a volume, you would not say that he was factually incorrect; you would say that he had committed a category mistake inasmuch as a thought is not the sort of item that could have a volume: it is categorially disbarred from having a volume.  Someone who says that God exists is saying that there exists something whose mode of being is unique to it and that everything  other than God has a different mode of being.  But the idea that there are two or more modes of being or two or more levels of reality, according to Anderson, is 'illogical" and ruled out by the exigencies of rational discourse itself.  To posit God, then, is to involve oneself in a sort of ontological category mistake, in the words of A. J. Baker.

Let's see if we can understand this. 

The Andersonian thesis is an exceedingly strong one: the very concept of God is said to be illogical.  It is illogical because it presupposes the notion, itself illogical, that there are levels of reality or modes of existence or ways of being.  What makes the argument so interesting is the implied claim that the very nature of being rules out the existence of God.  So if we just understand what being is we will see that God cannot exist!  This is in total opposition to the tack I take in A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002) wherein I argued from the nature of existence to (something like) God, and to the tack taken by those who argue from truth to God.

The Andersonian argument seems to be as follows:

1. There is a single way of being.

2. The single way of being is spatiotemporal or natural being.

3. If God exists, then his way of being is not spatiotemporal or natural.

Therefore

4. God does not exist.

Note that the argument extends to any absolute such as the One of Plotinus or the Absolute of F. H. Bradley or the Paradigm Existent of your humble correspondent. Indeed, it extends to any non-spatiotemporal entity.

The crucial premise is (1).  For if  'way of being' so much as makes sense, then surely (3) is true. And anyone who accepts (1) ought also to accept (2) given that it is evident to the senses that there are spatiotemporal items.  So the soundness of the argument pivots on (1).  But what is the argument for (1)? 

Note that (1) presupposes that 'way of being' makes sense.  This is not obvious.  To explain this I first disambiguate 'There are no ways of being.'   Someone who claims that there are no ways of being could mean either

A. There are no ways of being because there is a single way of being.

or

B. There are no ways of being because the very idea of a way of being, whether one or many, either makes no sense or rests on some fallacious reasoning:  either a thing exists or it does not.  There is no way it exists.  We can distinguish between nature (essence) and existence but not among nature, existence and way of existence.  What is said to belong to the way a thing exists really belongs on the side of its nature. A drastic difference such as that between a rock and a number does not justify talk of spatiotemporal and non-spatiotemporal ways of being: the drastic difference is just a difference in their respective natures.

Many philosophers have championed something like (B).  (See Reinhard Grossmann Against Modes of Being. Van Inwagen, too, takes something like the (B)-line.)  If (B) is true, then Anderson's argument collapses before it begins.  But I reject (B).  So I can't dismiss the argument in this way.

Anderson's view  is (A).  The problem is not with the concept of a way of being; the problem is with the idea that there is more than one way of being.  This is clear from his 1929 "The Non-Existence of Consciousness," reprinted in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, wherein we read, "If theory is to be possible, then, we must be realists; and that involves us in . . . the assertion of a single way of being (as contrasted with 'being ultimately' and 'being relatively') [a way of being] which the many things that we thus recognise have." (SEP 76)  Thus what Anderson opposes is a duality, and indeed every plurality, of ways of being, and not the very notion of a way of being.  One could say that Anderson is a monist when it comes to ways of being, not a pluralist.  To invoke a distinction made by John Passmore, one to be discussed in a later entry, Anderson is an existence-monist but not an entity-monist.

Now what's the argument for (1)? As far as I can tell the argument is something like this:

5. Truth is what is conveyed by the copula 'is' in a (true) proposition.

6. There is no alternative to 'being' or 'not being': a proposition can only be true or false. 

Therefore

7. There are are no degrees or kinds of truth: no proposition is truer than any other, and there are no different ways of being true. (5, 6)

8. (True) propositions are concrete facts or spatiotemporal situations:  propositions are not intermediary entities between the mental and the extramental.  They are not merely intentional items, nor are they Fregean senses.  The proposition that the cat is on the mat just is the concrete fact of the cat's being on the mat.  And the same goes for the cat: the cat is identical to a proposition.  Anderson's student, Armstrong, holds that a thick particular such as a cat is a proposition-like entity, a state of affairs; but Anderson holds the more radical view that a cat is not merely proposition-like, but is itself a proposition.  But if a cat is a proposition, then

9. Being (existence) = truth.

Therefore

1. There is a single way of being. (from 7, 9)

Therefore, by the first argument above,

4. God does not exist.

Critique

A full critique is beyond the scope of this entry especially since brevity is the soul of blog, as some wit once said.  But what I am about to say is, I think, sufficient to refute the Andersonian argument.

If everything exists in the same way, what way is that? Anderson wants to say: the spatiotemporal way.  He is committed to the proposition that

A. To be is to be spatiotemporal

where this is to be construed as an identification of being/existence with spatiotemporality.  Good classical metaphysician that he is, Anderson is telling us that the very Being of beings, das Sein des Seienden, is their being spatiotemporal.

Now there is a big problem with this.  A little thought should convince you that (A) fails as an identification even if it succeeds as an equivalence: one cannot reduce being/existence to spatiotemporality.  For one thing, (A) is circular.  It amounts to saying that to exist is to exist in space and time.  Now even if everything that exists exists in space and time, the existence of that which exists cannot be identified with being in space and time.  For  a thing cannot be spatiotemporal unless it exists. So even if (A) is true construed as telling us what exists, it cannot be true construed as telling us what existence is. 

A second point is that, while it is necessary that a rock be spatiotemporal, there is no necessity that a rock exist, whence it follows that the existence of a rock cannot be identified with its being spatiotemporal. Necessarily, if a rock exists, then it is spatiotemporal. But it does not follow that a rock exists.

Now if (A) fails as an identification, then it cannot be the nature of Being that whatever is is in space and time.  Nor can it be dictated by "the nature and possibility of discourse" (SEP 2) or by the possibility of "theory" (SEP 76).  Consequently, the Andersonian battle cry "There is only a single way of being!" cannot be used to exclude God.

For any such exclusion of God as an "ontological category mistake" can only proceed from the exigencies of Being itself.  What Anderson wants to say is that the very nature of Being logically requires the nonexistence of God.  But that idea rests on the confusion exposed above.  For his point to go through, he needs (A) to be an identification when at most it is an equivalence.

Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism?

Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity? 

Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as follows.

A haecceity is a property H of x such that: (i) H is essential to x; (ii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in the actual world; (iii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in any metaphysically possible world.

So if there is a property of Socrates that is his haecceity, then there is a property that individuates him, and indeed individuates him across all times and worlds at which he exists: it is a property that he must have, that nothing distinct from him has, and that nothing distinct from him could have. Call this property Socrateity. Being abstract and necessary, Socrateity is obviously distinct from Socrates, who is concrete and contingent. Socrateity exists in every world, but is exemplified (instantiated) in only some worlds. What's more, Socrateity exists at every time in every world that is temporally qualified, whereas Socrates exist in only some worlds and only at some times in the worlds in which he exists.

Now suppose you are a classical theist.  Must you accept haecceitism (as defined above) in virtue of being a classical theist?  I answer in the negative.  Franklin Mason answers in the affirmative.  In a comment on an earlier post, Mason gives this intriguing argument into which I have interpolated numerals for ease of reference.

[1] When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals he would get.  Thus [2] he didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.  Thus [3] there must be a way to individuate all possible individuals that in no way depends upon their actual existence. [4] Such a thing is by definition a haecceity. Thus [5] there are haecceities.

I don't anticipate any disagreement with Mason as to what an haecceity is.  We are both operating with the Plantingian notion.  We disagree, however, on (i) whether there are any haecceities and (ii) whether classical theism is committed to them. I deny both (i) and (ii).  In this post I focus on (ii).  In particular, I will explain why I do not find Mason's argument compelling.

My reservations concern premise [1].  There is a sense in which it is true that when God created Socrates, he knew which individual he would get.  But there is also a sense in which it is not true.  So we need to make a distinction.  We may suppose, given the divine omniscience, that before God created Socrates he had before his mind a completely determinate description, down to the very last detail, of the individual he was about to bring into existence.  In this sense, God knew precisely which individual he would get before bringing said individual into existence.  Now either this description is pure or it is impure.

A pure description is one that includes no proper names, demonstratives or other indexicals, or references to singular properties.  Otherwise the description is impure.  Thus 'snub-nosed, rationalist philosopher married to Xanthippe' is an impure description because it includes the proper name 'Xanthippe.'  'Snubnosed, rationalist, married  philosopher,' by contrast, is pure.  (And this despite the fact that 'married' is a relational predicate: necessarily, to be married is to be married to someone or other.)  Pure descriptions are qualitative in that they include no references to specific individuals.  Impure descriptions are nonqualitative in that they do include references to specific individuals.  Thus 'person identical to Socrates' is a nonqualitative description.

Now if God has before his mind a complete pure description of the individual he wills to create then that description could apply to precisely one individual after creation without being restricted to any precise one.  (Cf. Barry Miller, "Future Individuals and Haecceitism," Review of Metaphysics 45, September 1991, p. 14)  This is a subtle distinction but an important one.  It is possible that Socrates have an indiscernible twin.  Call him 'Schmocrates.'  So the complete description 'snub-nosed, rationalist philosopher, etc.' could apply to precisely one individual without applying to Socrates, the man in the actual world that we know and love as Socrates.  This is because his indiscernible twin Schmocrates would satisfy it just as well as he does.  The description would then apply to precisely one individual without being restricted to any precise one.  So there is a clear sense, pace Mason, in which  God, prior to creation, would not know which individual he would get.  Prior to creation, God knows that there will be an individual satisfying a complete description.  But until the individual comes into existence, he won't know which individual this will be.

As I see it, creation understood Biblically as opposed to Platonically is not the bestowal of existence upon  a pre-existent, fully-formed, wholly determinate essence.  It is not the actualization of a wholly determinate mere possible.  There is no individual essence or haecceity prior to creation.  Creation is the creation ex nihilo of a  new individual.  God creates out of nothing, not out of pre-existent individual essences or pre-existent mere possibles.  Thus the very individuality of the individual first comes into being in the creative act.  Socrates' individuality and haecceity  and ipsiety do not antedate (whether temporally or logically) his actual existence.

Mason would have to be able rationally to exclude this view of creation, and this view of the relation of existence and individuality, for his argument to be compelling.  As it is, he seems merely to assume that they are false.

Could God, before creation, have before his mind a complete impure description, one that made reference to the specific individual that was to result from the creative act?  No, and this for the simple reason that before the creative act that individual would not exist.  And therein lies the absurdity of Plantingian haecceities.  The property of identity-with-Socrates  is a nonqualitative haecceity that makes essential reference to Socrates.  Surely it is absurd to suppose that that this 'property' exists at times and in possible worlds at which Socrates does not exist.  To put it another way, it is absurd to suppose that this 'property' could antedate (whether temporally or logically) the existence of Socrates.

We are now in a position to see why Mason's argument is not compelling.  If [1] is true, then [2] doesn't follow from it.  And if [2] follows from [1], then [1] is false.  Thus [1] conflates two distinct propositions:

1a.  When God created the world, he knew precisely which pure complete descriptions would be satisfied.

1b.  When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals would exist.

(1a) is true, but it does not entail

2.  God didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.

(1b) entails (2), but (1b) is false.

I conclude that classical theism does not entail haecceitism.  One can be such a theist without accepting haecceities.  This is a good thing since there are no haecceity properties!