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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