Possible Worlds Again: Thomist versus ‘Analyst’

Fr. Matthew Kirby by e-mail:

By the way, in thinking about my comments on the [your] SEP entry I realised that I had used the term "possible worlds" in an idiosyncratic way, one non-standard within the analytical school, applying a Thomist twist to it. Unlike standard usage, I do not include a hypothetical transcendent First Cause as an element within any "possible world", but instead define possible worlds in that context as potential concrete totalities that may result from God's choice with respect to creation. Thus God Himself is not an element of any possible world (though His supernatural actions ad extra can be) on this construal, as possible worlds are each a sum of finitised, dependent, created being/s considered across their development.

 

What Fr. Kirby says certainly make sense.  Talk of God existing in every possible world comes naturally to analytical theists who are concerned to affirm the divine necessity. Such talk, however, is bound to sound strange to those of a traditional bent who quite naturally think of God as the transcendent creator of the world, a creator who could have created some other world or no world at all, and its therefore 'outside of' every possible world.

Herewith, some comments in clarification.

Let's start with the obvious point that 'world' supports a multitude of meanings. (I once cataloged a dozen or so distinct uses of the term.)  If we use 'world' to refer to the totality of what exists, then, if God exists, he is in the world: he is a member of that all-inclusive totality of entities.  If, on the other hand, we use 'world' to refer to the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything at all that is created by God, then God is not in the world.  God, after all, does not create himself: he is the uncreated creator of everything distinct from himself.  So God does not count as a creature.

So far, then, two senses of 'world.' World as totality of entities and world as totality of creatures. God is in the first totality, but not in the second. But a Thomistic theist such as Fr. Kirby might balk at my placing God in the totality of entities.  If God exists or is, however, then God is an entity.  (I define an entity as anything that is or exists.)  To put it in Latin, even if God is esse, he is nevertheless ens, something that is.  God is at once both Being (esse) and ens (being).  Note my careful distinction between the majuscule and miniscule  'B/b.'  In fact, if God is ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being, then he can't be other than every being; he must be both Being and being.  God is Being in its prime instance, which is to say: God is both esse and ens, Being and being. More on this later, since Fr. Kirby seems to disagree.

Unless one is treading the via negativa with Dionysius the Areopagite and Co., one must admit that God is. 

I hasten to add that, while God is both esse and ens, and therefore is, he is not an ens among entia, a being among beings. So I grant that God fits somewhat uneasily within the totality of entities. For while he is an entity, he is the one being that is also identical to Being. (How is this possible? Well, that is the problem  or perhaps mystery of divine simplicity.) Still, God is.

I have distinguished two senses of 'world.'  World as totality of entities and world as totality of creatures. But there is a third sense: world as a maximal state of affairs.  "The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (These are the first two propositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)  This is pretty close to the main (not the only) analytic understanding of 'world' in talk of possible worlds.

Here, then, is one  'analytic' approach. The actual world is the total way things are. A merely possible world is a total way things could have been or could be. The actual world is the total way things are, but not the things that are that way. Thus the actual world is not the same as the universe, whether physical or physical plus any nonphysical items there  are.  Why not? 

The plausible line to take is abstractist. Worlds are maximal (Fregean) propositions and thus abstract entities or maximal (abstract) states of affairs, as on A. Plantinga's scheme in The Nature of Necessity.  They are not maximal mereological sums of concreta, pace that mad dog extreme modal realist, David Lewis, may his atheist bones rest in peace.  If worlds are propositions, then actuality is truth. That is one interesting consequence. Another is that worlds are abstract objects which implies that the actual world must not be confused either with the physical universe (the space-time-matter system) or with that plus whatever nonphysical concreta (minds) that there might be. And if worlds are abstract objects then they are necessary beings.  So every possible world exists in every possible world.

The actual world is a possible world. This is because everything actual is possible. But of course the actual world is not merely possible. Mere possibility and actuality are mutually exclusive.

There is a plurality of possible worlds. This is because the possible outruns the actual: the set of actualia is a proper subset of the set of possibilia. So if there are possible worlds at all, there are many of them. If you say that there is only one possible world, the actual world, then that leads to the collapse of modal distinctions, or, to put it less dramatically, the extensional equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary. This view, call it modal Spinozism, cannot be dismissed out of hand. But I will not here argue for the reality of modal distinctions. That is something we are now presupposing.

What I have just sketched is at odds with Fr. Matt's quite reasonable view that (merely) possible worlds are "potential concrete totalities that may result from God's choice with respect to creation." The actual world would then be the actual concrete totality of creatures.   On this view God is not a member of any possible world.

Fr. Kirby and I will agree that God is a necessary being. An analytic theist will express this by saying  that God exists in all possible worlds.  Given that worlds are maximal propositions, and actuality is truth, to say that God exists in every possible world is to say that God exists according to every world. 'In' therefore means 'according to.'  So no matter which world is actual, God exists.

I see no harm in talking the analytic way.  I see no harm in saying that God, if he exists, exists in every world, and if he does not exist, then he exists in no world.  That is a graphic, Leibnizian way of portraying God's non-contingency where a non-contingent being is one that is either necessary or impossible.  It is just a way of saying that If God exists, then he exists no matter how things are.

Up to a point, then we can achieve a rapprochement between the analytic way of talking and the Thomist way. But only up to a point.  For a Thomist, it is the divine simplicity that is the ground of the divine necessity.  (God is necessary because he is simple; it is not the case that he is necessary because he exists in all possible worlds. Compare: The biographies of Lincoln say he was assassinated because he was; he wasn't assassinated because they say he was.)  And for a Thomist, God cannot be subject to the system of possible worlds; said system must be grounded in the divine intellect.  More needs to be said. But it is Saturday Night and time to punch the clock,  pour myself a drink. and cue up some oldies.