Category: Divine Simplicity
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Is God a being among beings or Being Itself? An Exchange with Dale Tuggy
Top o' the Stack. One morning, just as Old Sol was peeping his ancient head over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition range, I embarked on a drive down old Arizona 79, past Florence, to a hash house near Oracle Junction where I had the pleasure of another nice long three and one half hour caffeine-fueled…
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If Someone is Walking is He Necessarily Walking?
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?) Substack latest.
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Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added: . . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects.…
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God as Uniquely Unique
Top o' the Stack Correctly used, 'unique' is three-way polyvalent. It can mean that which is one of a kind, that which is necessarily one of a kind, and that which is uniquely unique in that it transcends the kind-instance distinction.
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Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse
Top o' the Stack. Another deep dive into one of the gnarliest conundra in natural theology. The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad: 1) Classical theism is untenable if the ED cannot be defeated. 2) The ED can be defeated only if DDS is true. 3) DDS entails the collapse…
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If Someone is Walking, is He Necessarily Walking? DDS and Modal Collapse
In an article I am studying by Daniel J. Pedersen and Christopher Lilley, "Divine Simplicity, God's Freedom, and the Supposed Problem of Modal Collapse," (Journal of Reformed Theology 16, 2022, 127-147), the authors quote Boethius: . . . if you know that someone is walking, he must necessarily be walking. (Consolation, v. 6) They then…
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If God is Simple, How can the World be Contingent?
This entry is an offshoot of the earlier discussion of classical theism and its difference from theistic personalism. These labels have the meaning here than they had in that earlier discussion. Classical theism is committed to all three of the following: 1) God is simple. 2) God freely created the world in the libertarian 'could…
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Theistic Personalism versus Classical Theism: Response to Roger Pouivet
Professor Roger Pouivet (Université de Lorraine, France) recently subscribed to my Substack series. I wrote to thank him and to request a copy of his Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology Does to Classical Theism. He replied promptly and I dove into his article. It proved to be stimulating and I thank him for writing it. Herewith,…
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Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Divine Simplicity
Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but…
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God and Existence: How Related?
A reader asks: You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were? This is an entirely reasonable question. I will…
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Divine Simplicity and Incarnation
This from a reader: Jordan Daniel Wood . . . affirms that God does not have possibilities within himself to actualize and thus the Incarnation—God becoming a human being—must in some way [be] actual prior to its historical event; God does not become a human being but in some way already is a human being…
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On God’s Not Falling Under Concepts
Fr. Deinhammer tells us, ". . . Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. . . ." "God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable. . . ." Edward the Logician sent me an e-mail in which he forwards a stock objection: Who is it who is absolutely inconceivable…
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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…
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If God is Uniquely Unique, How could He be Addressed in Prayer?
My entry God as Uniquely Unique ended on an aporetic note. I acknowledged the following sort of objection, but had nothing to say in response to it. How could the ontologically simple God be of any religious use to the suffering creature wandering in the desert of the world? "Such an utterly transcendent God as…