Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

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.

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Bill Vallicella

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5 responses to “Divine Simplicity and Divine Comprehensibility”

  1. tom Avatar
    tom

    Your reader seems to assume that the Abrahamic faiths maintain we can have direct knowledge of God, even if only impartial direct knowledge. Whereas you, Dr. BV, seem to maintain that on DDS we can have, at most, indirect knowledge of God. So, if we amended the argument to say ‘direct understanding’ or ‘directly understand’, then maybe the argument goes through. Presumably, adherents of the Abrahamic faiths will want to go further than mere indirect knowledge of God inferred from his effects.
    But even this I’m not sure about because didn’t Aquinas think we could have no direct knowledge of God as he is in himself? But he did make provision for the revealed truths of scripture (incarnation, trinity) being known through faith, which, for Thomas, is some kind of intellectual assent to doctrines not provable by reason. But I’m still not sure if this would count as ‘direct understanding’ of God as he is in himself.
    These are tough issues.

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  2. Miloš M. Avatar
    Miloš M.

    Maybe analogy with abstracta can be useful here? If there is number 2, for example, we can’t understand part of it – because there isn’t such a thing. But we can grasp some properties and relations with other abstracta.

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  3. D Bagwill Avatar
    D Bagwill

    Thinking of faith as the assent of one’s intellect to various unprovable propositions is, I think, an insufficient grasp of the term.
    The biblical meaning, as far as I can tell, is always relational; not much to do with propositions divorced from trust, reliance, commitment and other aspects of personhood.
    Which brings us back to the question of the simple God. If faith is in fact a term of relationship, it must be more than the relationship to an idea, or to an Unmoved Mover. It must be a real relationship.

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  4. Dave Bagwill Avatar
    Dave Bagwill

    Clearly, a Jewish ‘peasant’ (Crossan’s book about Jesus) in 4 A.D would not be conversant with the terminology of DDS, nor in fact would he be very convinced of it if he did understand it, having been raised deep in Jewish culture and history, which was replete with the warnings, comfortings, covenants of promise, prophecies fulfilled and other characteristics of Yahweh over a period of a couple thousand years. Apparently he would have thought that mankind needed deliverance and in fact a Savior. Yahweh was called ‘Father’ in N.T. times, and that ‘peasant’ called for familial love, closeness, justice and truth, as befitting who the Father was and is.
    St. Paul, raised in Tarsus where philosophy was literally talked about on the street corners, had a lot of experience with Athens. He wrote, famously, that “..but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness..”
    Now he was not talking about every Jew, or every Greek.
    Can I find a logical fault in either stance – Athens or Jerusalem? Nope. But I do think Jerusalem – as you have pointed out – is not a suburb of Athens. I kinda lean the other way, actually. But I have benefitted from both.

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  5. Dave Bagwill Avatar
    Dave Bagwill

    Note: Crossan used the term ‘peasant’ in his book “The Life of A Mediterranean Jewish Peasant.”

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