Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
This article defends the modal collapse objection to the doctrine of divine simplicity. Brian Bosse asked me about this. Here is my answer. Put on your thinking caps, boys and girls. (Hey Joe, who was it who used to say that back at STS, Sr. Ann Miriam in the first grade?)
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Hi Bro Bill !
Well I remember sister Ann Miriam! Her last name was Zell, and her brother, Dr. Harry Zell was the man who introduced my parents to each other.
But I don’ t remember her saying that. Perhaps Bro Inky remembers.
Sister Ann taught us all to read; it was said of her that she could teach a cabbage how to read.
We owe her thanks every day, even now.
>>We owe her thanks every day, even now.<< Indeed, and the rest of the good sisters as well, even though some of them, Sr. Rose Celeste, 5th grade, and the principal Sr. Augustine -- Gus as we called her -- were tough customers. My favorite was Sr. Mary Stella, 3rd grade. She told me I was brilliant. I had to agree with her! I tracked her down, phoned her, and thanked her. That was a few years ago. They are all dead now, I'm pretty sure. Obits are online. I am not sure Mary Stella remembered me, but she remembered the Odegaard boys. That was a whole other world, and the the world the nuns grew up in was other still.
When I spoke to Mary Stella on the phone I asked her if any other former students had ever called her to thank her. She said no. What ingrates we mortals be!
If God is necessarily omnipotent, God has the power to cause contingent states of affairs. If God is necessarily omnipresent, God is present to all contingent states of affairs that God causes. If God is omniscient, God knows fully all contingent states of affairs that He brings about with His omnipresence and omnipotence.
Compare the above to this: If God is necessarily omnipotent, God has the power to cause -. If God is necessarily omnipresent, God is present to all – that God causes. If God is omniscient, God knows fully all – that He brings about with His omnipresence and omnipotence.
With the second paragraph bereft of the unnecessary term contingency, how well does it make sense of God?
Thanks for the substantive post, Bill. I agree that the move from (1) to (2) involves the fallacy of confusing the necessitas consequentiae with the necessitas consequentis. The necessity of the inference relation between an antecedent and a consequent does not entail the metaphysical necessity of the consequent.
You wrote:
>>whereas the dependency status of abstract objects, being creatures, are ab alio, or dependent, from another, namely, God.<<
>>For abstracta are creatures: they derive their existence from God.<<
How would you respond to the so-called ‘bootstrapping objection’ to the claim that God created abstract objects?
Take properties, which are plausibly abstract objects. If God created abstracta, then God created properties (assuming properties are abstract objects). But consider the property of *being creative.* How could God create that property? Wouldn’t he already have it? In other words, logically prior to creating the property of *being creative,* it seems that God already possesses that property. And on DDS, it seems that God would be identical to the property of creativity, since God is what God has (as you noted that Augustine put it). The property of *being creative* thus seems uncreated. (One could pose similar bootstrapping objections regarding other properties, such as *being powerful.*)
Elliot,
On DDS, God is identical to his attributes. Omnipotence is one of the divine attributes, so God = omnipotence. Given that God is concrete, omnipotence must also be concrete, whence it follows that omnipotence is not an abstract object. If properties are abstract objects, then the divine attributes are not properties.
As for being creative, it cannot be a divine attribute, since God might not have created anything.
Has someone in print made this bootstrapping objection? If yes, who?
The real problem here is DDS itself. On the one hand, God must be simple if he is the Absolute. On the other hand, we cannot render DDS intelligible, given our discursive/dianoetic intellects.
Richard,
So what are you saying, that creatures are as necessarily existent as God is? Then you accept modal collapse.
You are coming across as a panentheist along the lines of Spinoza. You need to come clean as to what position is.
By the way, omnipresence is not omnipresence to, but omnipresence in. The idea is that God is everywhere in space in every spatial thing — and this despite his transcendence! He is both ubiquitous and immanent but also transcendent and nowhere. Everywhere and nowhere.
This appears to throw a monkey wrench into the doctrine of Incarnation. The man Jesus is not everywhere but at a particular place at a particular time. But if Jesus = God, then Jesus is everywhere and nowhere.
Bill,
I’m a bit perplexed, as I’ve laid out my position before on this blog quite recently. I am a Platonic polytheist who understands that the Gods are non-extended in Their hyparxis. My argument is that the monotheistic definitions of the above terms re: the omni attributes lead to modal collapse. Also, let me give a thank you for correcting the word I used, as you are correct.
Thanks, Bill.
WLC discusses the bootstrapping objection in ‘God and the Platonic Host,’ available here: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/divine-aseity/god-and-the-platonic-host-2018
See the section on “Realism.”
Bergmann and Brower also address the problem in ‘A Theistic Argument against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity),’ available here: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~bergmann/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/bergmann-brower-Oxford-Studies.pdf
See the section “A Theistic Argument against P.”
Chris Menzel responds, highlighting what he takes to be problems with the bootstrapping objection: ‘PROBLEMS WITH THE BOOTSTRAPPING OBJECTION TO THEISTIC ACTIVISM.’
https://philpapers.org/archive/MENPWT-3.pdf
Elliot,
Thanks very much for those references.
Now what did you think of the argument I gave:
” On DDS, God is identical to his attributes. Omnipotence is one of the divine attributes, so God = omnipotence. Given that God is concrete, omnipotence must also be concrete, whence it follows that omnipotence is not an abstract object. If properties are abstract objects, then the divine attributes are not properties.”
Doesn’t that put paid to the BS (no pun intended) objection?
Bill,
Thanks for providing the argument to block the bootstrapping objection. Yes, I think that your argument is effective, and it’s consistent with what seems to be the best response to the objection, namely, that God can create properties without needing to possess properties as a logically prior condition for creating them.
I suspect that one might worry that your argument is an attempt to explain a mystery (the relation between God and properties) by appealing to an even bigger mystery (DDS), and thus is an obscurum per obscurius.
However, as you noted, there is reason to hold that God is simple: his aseity and status as the Absolute seem to require simplicity. And yet it seems we can’t render DDS intelligible.
I noted in your post on philosophy and fiction that philosophy makes better progress than fiction on the Big Questions, but that philosophy hasn’t conclusively settled many of such questions. Questions about the divine nature seem to be good examples of Really Big Questions that philosophy has not settled. This is not to pick on philosophy; literature doesn’t settle such questions, nor science, nor history, etc.
Elliot writes,
>> . . . and thus is an obscurum per obscurius. However, as you noted, there is reason to hold that God is simple: his aseity and status as the Absolute seem to require simplicity. And yet it seems we can’t render DDS intelligible.<<
I agree.
At this level, it all tapers off into mystery. (Some will say it tapers off into bullshit and nonsense.) I'd say that DDS and related doctrines are mystical theses that cannot be rendered intelligible to the discursive intellect. These theses could be taken to be something like Zen koans: means to break through the duality of the discursive into the Transdiscursive. Other theists will balk at this and retreat to an untenable God as a being-among-beings view. Dale Tuggy, for example. Plantinga, plenty of sharp analytic types.
The Reformed boys I criticize in my Stack article will engage in fancy footwork to no avail: they will try to show that DDS can in the end be made discursive sense of.
Still others will use my exercises in aporetics to 'prove' that there is no God at all.
My view is that, apart from a small number of pseudo-problems, philosophical problems are genuine (pace late Ludwig) but absolutely insoluble by us. They are springboards into the Mystical.
I believe I can argue this out rigorously from this side of the Great Divide.
Hi Brother Bill
Yes, our childhood world was another world, gone now, and the nun’s world more gone still. It was a more sane world. The article I link to below has stuck well in my mind, and it explains how the traditional Latin Mass helps maintain sanity; and we are all a little crazy; “Tuttu sono matti, sai?” as my mom was fond of saying. (We are all crazy, you know.)
Here is the article:
https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/7592-traditional-catholicism-religion-for-the-mentally-ill
How much insanity used to be kept at bay by the traditional Catholic church? Much, I would say. The 1960 US population was 179 million; about 25% was Catholic; so about 45 million people, all a bit crazy, “tutti sono matti,” but now ? The insanity is missing a real check, and it rages all around. “Climate change”. “Transgender” “Burn a Tesla.” It makes me want to scream. Because, of course, I’m slightly crazy. And I don’t even know how far I’d have to drive from Mendocino to find a Latin Mass.
All the best,
Catacomb Joe
Actually, Brother Bill, it is not the world of the nuns, or the world of our childhood which is are lost worlds.
It is the world in which we are living now, which is lost.
But I love to see the little cross which Pam Bondi wears. There is hope that we get it all back.
— Catacomb Joe
Bill,
In regards to the issue of God as a being among beings, what if it is not in the nature of a God to have an existence that is identical to it’s essence, but simply to be a self-identical existence beyond essence? Such a one would not be a being, at the very least.
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