Thomas M. Cothran

William Hasker on Divine Simplicity

2017-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

In “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake”,¹ William Hasker argues that “the strong doctrine of divine simplicity is a mistake, one from which theology needs to be liberated.”² With this sweeping charter, Hasker proceeds to critique the “traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity, attributed to Aquinas and before him to Augustine.”³ The strong notion of divine simplicity is, in Hasker’s view, riddled throughout with category errors, logical failures, the “dehumanization” of God, and departures from the broader traditional understanding of God’s character.

Through a Secondary Source Darkly

Hasker begins with certain qualifications. His purpose lies not in settling a historical question in the history of thought, but in engaging with that history of thought on the substance of the matter at hand.

I recognize, of course, that it is often important to establish as accurately as possible the exact views of some historical figure, even though this will not be the purpose of the present essay. But once that has been done, this accomplishment is merely preliminary to raising the question: Do we have good reason either to agree or to disagree with the thinker in question?⁴

That Hasker is not engaged in historical research is clear from selection of interlocutors. Neither St. Augustine nor historian of his through merits examination.⁵ St. Thomas Aquinas receives more attention, but primarily through contemporaries who draw on St. Thomas in the context of current debates.⁶ Hasker does not examine either Augustine’s or Aquinas’ accounts of what he means by the terms “will”, “knowledge”, “love”, “action”. And although Hasker does quote Aquinas’ account of what he terms “simple simplicity”,⁷ he does not set forth a clear statement Aquinas’ (or Augustine’s) formulations of the strong version from which he seeks to liberate theology.

Nor does Hasker address the key components of the metaphysical framework necessary to explain the traditional notion of divine simplicity, at least in the work of St. Augustine or St. Thomas. He raises the St. Thomas’ postulate of the identity of God’s existence and essence only to say suggest it may involve a confusion of categories and quickly move on, saying “we won’t pursue this example.”⁸ As any reader of St. Thomas knows, St. Thomas’ formulation of divine simplicity turns on the identity of existence and essence in God,⁹ and any treatment of divine simplicity that does not address the existence-essence distinction does not address Aquinas’ notion of simplicity. And Hasker raises a number of questions that Aquinas himself raises as objections and then answers; yet Hasker does so without indication of those discussions. For instance, Hasker asks, if God is actus purus, “how can he be free?”¹⁰ without giving any sign that Aquinas raises the question and offers an answer in a number of places.¹¹

Had Hasker not held himself out as correcting the traditional views of Augustine and Aquinas, the neglect of what Augustine and Aquinas actually said would not be objectionable. Were Hasker’s purpose simply to limit his criticism to the recent and narrow confines of analytic philosophy of religion where St. Augustine and St. Thomas have colored the debate, little treatment of their views would be necessary on Hasker’s part.

Hasker, however, does not withhold judgment on Augustine or Aquinas, and verdicts on their conclusions come thick and fast. His goal, after all, is extravagant: to “liberate theology”. He does not hesitate to pronounce a verdict on Aquinas’ motivation for the doctrine of simplicity¹², or to declare that truthmaker theory represents a genuine advance in the traditional argument for simplicity,¹³ or to identify logical deficiencies in the traditional formulations of simplicity,¹⁴ to announce “we need to grasp the problem [of divine cognition] as it is conceived by Aquinas and his followers”¹⁵, and to lay out “Aquinas’ perspective” on the individuation of actions.¹⁶ That Hasker is targeting the view of St. Thomas is clear both from the judgments he makes in the course of his article and in the light of his overall purpose. Unfortunately this lets the paucity and inaccuracy of Hasker’s treatment of St. Thomas’ views undermine his entire argument. And I, like Hasker, in employing the shorthand of the “traditional view of divine simplicity” be referring primarily to the tradition stemming from St. Thomas.

Methodological Objects: Nescience and Deferral

Hasker’s constructive argument prominently features two methods: declarations of personal nescience and raising objections only to defer discussion of their merits. The former methodological deficiency is worth noting, because is hardly unique to Hasker, but are widely deployed in analytic philosophy of religion. The latter is worth noting because Hasker defers the very questions most vital to evaluating the truth of the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity.

Personal Nescience

Personal nescience serves Hasker’s argument both as an offensive and defensive tactic. On defense, Hasker puts forward a syllogisms with premises such as “God is a conscious mental subject”, and is largely content to support this premise by claiming he cannot understand how anyone could disagree. “I find it difficult to see how anyone could regard any of the premises in this argument as seriously open to question.”¹⁷ But of course a central matter in dispute concerns whether God is a conscious mental subject.¹⁸ That Hasker cannot even conceive how one could disagree with him is connected, is not merely Hasker reporting on his psychological state. Hasker’s inability to visualize that the opposition disagrees seems to result from his deferrals of essential components of the opposing view, as we shall see shortly.

Confessions of intellectual myopia crop up frequently in his critique of others. Citing Stump’s exposition of St. Thomas’ notions of identity, which in her view resolve some apparent problems in the objections to divine simplicity, Hasker confesses “far as I can see her proposals fail to resolve the problems with simplicity that are discussed in this essay.”¹⁹ His reply to W. Matthew Grant’s essay, which is directly on point for most of the criticisms Hasker advances? “I do not see, however, that Grant provides any resources for answer the argument given in the text.”²⁰ And, in place of a critique that sets forth the rudiments of knowledge as traditionally predicated of God, Hasker replies “‘knowledge’ that involves no distinctive intrinsic state of the knower is, it seems to me, simply unintelligible.”²¹ Where personal nescience served on defense as an attempt to assert the indubitability of Hasker’s premises, here it serves an offensive function. Hasker attempts to motivate the opinion that the traditional arguments for divine simplicity are unintelligible because he has not made sense of them.

The argument from personal nescience lacks philosophical significance, but it does have several rhetorically advantageous properties. As a general principle, the less one understands, the more one can apply one’s personal nescience. The work of an author is simplified. A systematic presentation of the opposing view decreases the scope of one’s nescience, which defeats the purpose of the tactic. And the argument from personal nescience has this useful advantage: if the author makes a mistake in his presentation of the alternatives, how can he be blamed? He can immediately claim the opposing view too complex, too esoteric, too unintelligible–and cite his own error in proof of that point. Careful philosophical consideration is inimical to such a strategy.

Deferral

Hasker’s other tactic is to allege problems with traditional view only to indefinitely defer a defense of that allegation. Simply flagging points of disagreement for discussion at some future date is not in itself objectionable. However, Hasker defers points critical to understanding the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity. The two most crucial points for getting a handle on the traditional notion of simplicity concern the identity of being and essence in God, and the notion of accident and extrinsic denomination. We consider each in turn, showing how Hasker evades consideration of these points and why they are critical.

Identity of Being and Essence

St. Thomas understands metaphysical composition in terms of act-potency correlates. A being is composite if it is a composed of potentiality and a corresponding actuality; otherwise it is simple. While St. Thomas thinks that bodily existents are composed of form and matter, the ultimate composition that distinguishes created things from God is the distinction between being and thing, existence and essence. For St. Thomas and his progeny, metaphysical simplicity just is the denial of a real distinction between a thing and its being. Composite beings have being, but they are not identical with being. Created things exist, but are not their existence; they have existence, but do not exhaust its content; they have a nature, they have being, but their nature is not being.²²

Given that St. Thomas’ account of simplicity is in his view–and in the view of several of the writers Hasker is engaging–articulating the existence-essence distinction, one would think that Hasker would counter with an argument. Instead, Hasker simply brushes the existence-essence distinction aside as a “possible example” of a category mistake; asserting that, in any event, it “certainly looks like a category mistake, but there are complications here and we won’t pursue this example.”²³

Accident and Extrinsic Denomination

The second point necessary to understand the traditional articulation of divine simplicity concerns St. Thomas’ approach to accidents and predicates. Not every predicate is a real accident. An accident is some formal act to which a subject stands in potency. I have the capacity to learn French; a labrador does not. If I become fluent in French, I have both a formal perfection and a potentiality to further act: conversing in French. The developed ability to speak French does not belong to me by nature, and it is something that changes me. Thus, it is an accident.

“French-speaking” is also a predicate. That is, one can assert “Jane speaks French.” And in this case, there is a real accident that does correspond to the predicate, if the statement is true. Yet predicates do not necessarily entail accidents. Some entail natures: “Alice is a cat.” Some predicates are grounded in relations that are in turn grounded in intrinsic accidents. In the statement “Ann is taller than Beth”, “taller than Beth” is predicated of Ann by virtue of a relation grounded in an accident: in this case, her height. Ann’s height is a real accident. Yet if Ann is an older sister, and Beth grows to be taller, the predicate “taller than Beth” can no longer be predicated of Ann, despite no imminent change in Ann herself.

Some predicates are grounded in causal relationships. Take “the spider startled Jeffrey”. The predicate “startled Jeffrey” can be predicated of the spider, without the spider being undergoing any intrinsic change. If Jeffrey does not overreact, the spider may continue on his way, unobstructed and oblivious of Jeffrey. So the predicate “startled Jeffrey” may be true of the spider, without implying any change or accident in the spider itself. “The sun killed the plant” is a similar example: nothing inherent to the sun changes in killing the plant.

This turns out to be critical to understanding how things are predicated of God. If we say “God created the world”, an elementary understanding of predication its relation to accidents shows us that this need not imply no more change in God than it does a spider or the sun. Moreover, St. Thomas has been at pains to set out the sense in which terms like “knowledge”, “action”, “love”, “will” etc. are predicated of God.

Unfortunately, Hasker pays little attention to this notion of accidents and their relation to predication. The subject comes up briefly:

“Stump’s way of addressing this is by a discussion of the medieval notion of an ‘accident,’ which she argues is not the same as our modern notion of an accidental property …. So for God to create individuals instead of others he might equally well have created is not an ‘accident’ in God and is not inconsistent with God’s simplicity. (I omit here a discussion of the sense of ‘accident’ Stump attributes to Aquinas, as this is complex and not altogether clear.)”

Hasker’s Presentation of the Arguments for Divine Simplicity

What of Hasker’s presentation of the arguments for divine simplicity? At a minimum, a philosophical presentation should present those arguments for an opposing position which the opposition regards as the strongest, and, needless to say, it should do so accurately. Does Hasker meet this minimum? Hasker presents two arguments: an argument from the multiplicity of the forms, and an argument from the dependence of a whole on its parts. The first argument is simply not one advanced by any of Hasker’s primary interlocuters; though Augustine makes brief appearances and a citation to an essay by Brian Leftow mentioning Augustine’s motivations is mentioned, neither Augustine nor a similarly Platonist stand-in features prominently in those writers with whom Hasker is engaged. So we can happily grant that the multiplicity of subsistent forms is not a useful one for establishing divine simplicity, unless one is arguing with a certain type of Platonist.

The second argument for divine simplicity is relevant to the remainder of Hasker’s discussion, but he both misstates and misunderstands it. The argument is taken from the following passage in St. Thomas’ Summa Contra Gentiles I.18:

Every composite … is subsequent to its components. The first being, therefore, which is God, has no components. Every composite, furthermore, is potentially dissoluble. This arises from the nature of composition…. Now, what is dissoluble can not be. This does not befit God, since he is through himself the necessary being.²⁴

Hasker immediately glosses this passage: “Aquinas lucidly explains the basis for an important claim made by the doctrine of simplicity: namely, God is not assembled out of parts and cannot be decomposed into parts.”²⁵ Yet this is not what St. Thomas says. He does not refer to parts, but to components (componentibus), and the difference is clear in the immediate context that Hasker omits. SCG 18 is about whether God is composite, and Aquinas quickly says: “In every composite there must be act and potency.”²⁶ St. Thomas is explicitly speaking here of components in the sense of act-potency correlates.²⁷

Here we see the relevance of the essence-existence distinction that Hasker defers. For if in things there is a real distinction between what a thing is and its act of existing, then we have components in sense that Aquinas is using the word componentibus. Aquinas’ motivation here is unabashedly metaphysical, and articulated in view of the existence-essence distinction that runs through the entirety of his metaphysics. It arises not from the vagaries of common sense and the concomitant ambiguous notion of parts to which Hasker appeals, but from a strict demonstration.²⁸ Because Hasker does not have this in view, he misstates what St. Thomas’ argument actually is, and as a result neither of the two main arguments of divine simplicity Hasker sets forth are relevant.

Specific Critiques of Divine Simplicity

Hasker divides his critiques of “strong” divine simplicity into a) category mistakes, b) logical failures, and c) the dehumanization of God. We begin by attempting to determine what Hasker takes “strong simplicity” to be. He believes that the problematic transition from “simple simplicity” to “strong simplicity” is that the latter rejects “any sort of internal distinction whatsoever in God, including distinctions which cannot at all reasonably be considered as indicating ‘components’ of which God is assembled or into which God can be decomposed.”²⁹ Hasker provides no citation here of who makes this extension, perhaps because this is not the traditional notion of divine simplicity. But it is evident that he regards this view as the one held by St. Thomas, and even elsewhere makes the wildly incorrect claim that St. Thomas rejected a real distinction in God with respect to the Trinitarian persons.³⁰ (In fact, St. Thomas clearly affirms a real relation between the persons in God, and regards any denial of this point as heresy.³¹) The traditional notion of divine simplicity, which St. Thomas explicitly states in the part of the SCG passage cited by Hasker, consists precisely in the denial that God is composed of act and potency.

Category mistakes

Hasker’s primary example of a category mistake is the identify of God with his actions. Says Hasker, “we are told, God is identical with his action of parting the Red Sea.”³² The culprit who misinformed Hasker goes unnamed; traditional adherents to the doctrine clearly assert otherwise. God is identical with his own act of being, yet the actus essendi of finite things are different acts distinct from God. These acts are caused by God, and St. Thomas deploys a sophisticated notion of instrumentality to explain them as God’s actions; but they are nevertheless extrinsic to God.³³ The difference between God willing some event or not is not in God, it is in the world, and if one cannot see that, one has missed the whole point and God is conceived as no more than one more wistful soul (albeit gifted with super-powers) struggling to have his way.

Hasker believes that the sort of truthmaker theory advanced by Brower and widely accepted in contemporary philosophy vitiates some of the conceptual confusions that plague traditional theists. And he pronounces the verdict: “this truthmaker interpretation represents a genuine advance in formulating the doctrine of divine simplicity, one that advocates of that doctrine would be well advised to embraced.”³⁴ To which those advocates may well respond that the salient point was grasped long ago, and articulated perfectly well by, say, St. Thomas’ instructions to beginners.

The various names applied to God are not synonymous, even though they signify what is in reality the same thing in God. In order to be synonymous, names must signify the same thing, and besides must stand for the same intellectual. conception. But when the same object is signified according to diverse aspects, that is, notions which the mind forms of that object, the names are not synonymous. For then the meaning is not quite the same, since names directly signify intellectual conceptions, which are likenesses of things. Therefore, since the various names predicated of God signify the various conceptions our mind forms of Him, they are not synonymous, even though they signify absolutely the same thing.³⁵

Truthmaker theory does not, as Hasker sees it, clear away all the category confusions. He things that “relational predications, such as ‘God created the universe’ or ‘God loves King David’” still pose a problem, but he defers that to his discussion of logical failures.³⁶

Logical failures

Hasker claims to identify “the logical inability of the doctrine [of divine simplicity], in its traditional form, to accommodate assertions about God that are nearly universally accepted among theistic philosophers and theologians, including the adherents of divine simplicity.”³⁷ More specifically, Hasker thinks he has discovered in the cases of God’s knowledge of contingent facts and God’s willing particular events a fundamental incoherence.

If God is pure act, God cannot have multiple intrinsic acts of thought. On this point Hasker is correct. Divine simplicity entails that God does not have a multiplicity of intrinsic acts, whether of will, or knowledge, or anything else. Because Hasker has not examined the relevant arguments for divine simplicity, he has only one option: to show a logical inconsistency between God’s knowledge and his simplicity. If there is a logical error lurking within the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine cannot be true; if, on the other hand, there is not a logical error, then determining the truth of the doctrine turns on the exact arguments Hasker has evaded.

God’s knowledge

Hasker raises two primary objections to way divine simplicity has been reconciled to divine knowledge. First, if God knows things by knowing his essence, he can only know possibilities, not actualities. Second, the claim that God’s knowledge of contingent facts entails nothing about his inner state is both unintelligible and contrary to the nature of a conscious mental subject (a category which for Hasker includes God). The latter question Hasker raises again in the context of divine action, and we, like he, will address the issue there.

Hasker relies on James Dolezal to relay the traditional view that in knowing his own essence, God knows all contingent things. Hasker counters by declaring that

What a knowledge of divine essence gives us–and gives God–is a knowledge of the realm of creaturely possibility; what it does not and cannot give us is knowledge concerning which of these possibilities are actual.^20^ What is actual but contingent does not follow from what is possible; that is the nature of possibility and actuality. Only if the divine nature contained within itself, not only the myriad realm of possibilities, but the specification of which possibilities are to be actualized, could that nature be by itself an adequate vehicle for knowledge of the created world. But this would mean that all actual creaturely objects and state of affairs are as necessary as the divine essence itself, a conclusion that would be welcome to Spinoza, but not, one would think, to an orthodox theist.³⁸

At footnote 20, Hasker claims that “On this point Aquinas agrees”, citing SCG I.81.4. Yet St. Thomas clearly does not believe that God’s self-knowledge renders only knowledge of creaturely possibilities. Nor does he agree, as Hasker assumes that we can comprehend the divine essence. Hasker’s implicit argument seems motivated by the assumption that while we may know what God is, that knowledge does not give us knowledge of which creaturely possibilities in fact are, and therefore God’s knowledge his essence yields no more. Yet St. Thomas rejects the premise, holding that “we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not.”³⁹ Because God is infinite, and our acts of understanding are finite, we cannot comprehend of God’s essence. So our knowledge of God, which proceeds indirectly, cannot yield knowledge of actuality of creatures. The notion that our knowledge of God fails to entail anything about the concrete goings on in the world has no bearing on whether God’s self-knowledge in fact does.

Hasker’s claim that St. Thomas counts God’s knowledge of himself insufficient for knowledge of the concrete actualities in the world is contrary to every one of St. Thomas’ statements on the subject. St. Thomas treats this exact question so many times and at such great length⁴⁰ that one is at a loss to see how his meaning could be mistaken.

We need not even grasp all the details where St. Thomas rejects what Hasker says he affirms. A general understanding of St. Thomas’ thought sufficiently explains his doctrine. Existence makes the difference between a thing and nothing. God is existence subsisting, and things exist by participation in him. God’s knowledge of himself is inclusive of knowledge of what participates in him. Given that what makes a singular thing be is its participation in being, and it is that participation which renders a thing known by God, it follows straightforwardly from St. Thomas’ framework that God knows singular things, not merely general possibility. The only way to mistake St. Thomas on this point is the misinterpretation of being as possibility rather than act, and one could not get St. Thomas more backward than that.

Hasker says that “only if the divine nature contained within itself, not only the myriad realm of possibilities, but the specification of which possibilities are to be actualized, could that nature be by itself an adequate vehicle for understanding the world.”⁴¹ The “specification” that makes the difference between possibility and actuality is, for St. Thomas, existence; and St. Thomas’ central metaphysical claim about God is that he is by nature existence. Hasker’s claim that the presence of this specification in God renders the being of things necessary is given without supporting argument, or any consideration of the many places where St. Thomas considers this exact point.

The point here is not merely that Hasker mistakes the traditional view, but that his allegation of a logical contradiction is premised upon that very mistake. If God is subsisting existence–pure act–and he knows how he is participated, then he knows not only what could be, but what actually is. What does not take part in existence does not exist, and so if that participation entails divine knowledge, then God’s knowledge of singulars is exhaustive.

The primary difficulty Hasker has lies in imagining what it is like for God to know. He tries to imagine what it would be like to grasp everything in a single act of cognition and comes up blank. This is not, on St. Thomas’ account, because of Hasker’s limitations, but rather the limitations of human cognition. Human beings, according to St. Thomas, do not comprehend God, God is identical with his act of knowledge, and so human beings do not comprehend God’s act of knowledge. This does not, however, imply a retreat into mystery, for we do not need to imagine what it is like for God to know to affirm that he does, any more than it is necessary to understand what it feels like for a bat to navigate to affirm that it in fact does. Knowledge is, on St. Thomas account, the immaterial comprehension of form; and if God is subsistent being, he comprehends everything that is.

Although we cannot know what it is like for God to know, we nevertheless find strong indications that higher modes of knowledge tend to be more unified. The child learns that 1 + 1 = 2, and that 2 + 1 = 3. The two are discrete facts, relatively unconnected. But as the child advances to understand the principles of arithmetic, the notion of integers and of addition is grasped in principle, and the child performs an act of understanding that includes within its sweep the addition of any integers whatsoever. Likewise, even adults use the base-10 decimal system and the base-60 decimal system without grasping just what a base decimal system is. We know that after _9 the decimal second from the left becomes 1, and that the 1 in 10 is in the tens place. And we know that 30 minutes past the hour is half past. But what we often do not grasp is the essential feature of the base decimal system is that every place is the digit multiplied by a number that is the base number to the power of the index. So, in the base-10 system, the first place is 10^0, the second 10^1, the third 10^2, and so on. In understanding the pattern b^i, where b is the base and i is the index, one grasps at once not only base-10, but base-60, base-2, and so on.

Our higher acts of understanding grasp a multiplicity in a single act. The higher the act, the larger the multiplicity. This does not demonstrate that God knows in a single act of cognition – for that we need the arguments for simplicity – but it does strongly indicate that the higher the form of knowledge, the more unitary it is and the broader its sweep.

God’s actions

Brower, on Hasker’s view, proposes a “radical and surprising” solution to the problem of how the diversity of what God does (and knows) can be reconciled with God’s simplicity: “these propositions not only are not solely about God’s intrinsic state, but they entail nothing whatever concerning that state.”⁴² How can we say that God performing an action involves no internal difference than God not performing an action? Or for that matter, how can we say that God knowing some fact about the world makes no difference to God?

The key to answering this question–or at least to understanding the traditional answer to this question–rests generally on an account of extrinsic predication and specifically–in St. Thomas’ case–on a theory of actio and operatio. Brower’s solution is neither a radical revision of the tradition, nor surprising to one familiar with that tradition. For St. Thomas, predicating any action or act of knowledge of God save his proper act is by extrinsic denomination.⁴³ The question of the logical coherence of attributing action to God turns on the logical coherence of extrinsic denomination as it pertains to action.

Consider this example: “God creates the world.” What makes the predicate “creates the world” true? It is the real relation of dependence of the world upon God. St. Thomas believes that he has shown that insofar as anything exists, it is due to God’s granting that thing existence. The difference between God granting the thing existence or not is simply whether the thing is or not. Has a thing existence or not? If the former, it is from God. “Creates the world” entails no difference in God from “did not create the world”.

St. Thomas is not engaged in special pleading on this point. Causal predication even in the case of creaturely causality often is a clear cut case of extrinsic predication. The sun kills the plant. Does the plant’s dying or surviving make some intrinsic difference in the sun? Clearly not: no intrinsic difference in the sun occurs by a plant’s dying or surviving.⁴⁴ Thus, “kills the plant” is predicated of the sun by extrinsic denomination: the real difference, the ground in reality that makes the predication true or false, is in the plant.

The example of the sun need not be taken to imply an emanationist theory of God’s creating the world. We can substitute examples of human affairs. “The lecturer taught the student” is true if the student actually learned; it is the intrinsic state of the student, not of the teacher, that makes that proposition true.

The apparent difficulty that remains, perhaps, is that the teacher performs a particular action (diagramming on a board or reading a passage out loud) that is distinctly directed teaching the student. Here we find both analogous and disanalogous features. The act by which the lecturer attempts to teach the student (drawing on the blackboard) is not the actuality that makes it true to predicate “taught the student” of the lecturer. Likewise, God’s proper action is not the act that makes it true to say that God created the world, though the latter act has a real dependence on the former. On the other hand, a teacher makes an attempt–one that may succeed or fail–to teach the student. That act is directed toward the student’s learning, and may or may not achieve its aim. God’s action, on the other hand, cannot fail, and his proper act has as its end the ultimate good, with which it is identical.

Now Hasker may find incredible the view that God does not have particular, imminent actions the way we do, but he cannot very well argue that the tradition has committed a logical contradiction. Discrete imminent actions are simply not a component of “knowledge”, “will”, or “action” as the tradition predicates these terms of God. Knowledge is the immaterial, intentional presence of a thing;⁴⁵ “will” is either the enjoyment of the Good⁴⁶ or the ordering of things toward the Good⁴⁷, and action is the production of an effect. Hasker may find these notions of knowledge, will, and action unsatisfying, but that is a different matter than identifying a logical contradiction.

De-Mammalizing God

The substance of Hasker’s argument does not rest in his allegation that the traditional articulation of divine simplicity involves category errors and logical inconsistencies. Hasker has not examined the traditional formulation of divine simplicity, nor distinguished it from its corollaries and consequents. Nor did Hasker examine the traditional formulations of divine will, divine knowledge, and divine action to put it into relation with divine simplicity (a rather critical step in showing a logical inconsistency, one would think).

Where Hasker’s argument has any purchase it is not at the level of conceptual or logical rigor, but by appealing to a commonsense notion of God’s personality. Hasker puts the case this way: in its strong form, the doctrine of divine simplicity “has the effect of dehumanizing God.”⁴⁸ Hasker’s terminology here is as striking as it is unapologetic, and it helps a great deal in explaining why he finds the traditional notions of knowledge, will, and action unintelligible. The explanation is not merely that Hasker has not dealt with those traditional notions, though this likely plays a large part. It is that the tradition Hasker belongs to ties its notion of God to the specifically mammalian aspects of our rational and volitional faculties.

Human beings are intelligent mammals. Our intelligence is bound up with our animality, and our animality with our rationality. Our knowledge is gained from our experience, even if it may not be reducible to it. And the world of our experience is, beyond any doubt, the world of an upright, social mammal. Quarks and black holes, however real they are, are not the fare of our ordinary experience. Useful objects that fit in our hands, homes suited to our size and fit for our biological needs, the magnitude of the earth beneath us and the sky overhead constitute our everyday frame of reference, the opinions of those in our social circles are the norm of our common sense.

It is easy enough to see how our mammalian nature means that our knowledge is had in the transition from potential to actual knowledge. Is there food to be had? The infant cranes his neck to the feeling of another’s skin, the hunter-gatherer heads out to his favorite spots, the employee goes to the store armed with a credit card. We look nearby, and if we cannot see what we are looking for, we move to a better position, employ the tools we have available to us, and being social animals we ask someone else. If that does not work we have more indirect strategies for deciding whether something is there. We start out not knowing, not seeing, and we set about finding out. Our instinctive, pre-philosophical notion of knowledge is that of animal extroversion, which is based primarily on ocular vision.

It is clear enough why animals like ourselves move from potential to actual knowledge. We are here, and most of the objects of our daily concern are located out there. We lack knowledge of things, and our conduit to knowledge is perception. What is unclear is why the same should be said of immaterial entities who are not here rather than there, who, being immaterial, do not have the need for a conduit from one spatio-temporal point to another, and whose object of concern is not limited to everyday medium sized objects. The problem is not unique to God; it encompasses angels as well. We do not know, so we take a look. But we look with our eyes. Our eyes are receptive (though we can turn them in this direction or that), and are informed by what stands opposed to them at some distance. What could it mean for angels to take a look, or for God? Perhaps an angel turns its attention now to this, now to that; but that can only be on the basis of something it already knows. We know things as “out there” because we are here and have senses that convey what is spatially outside ourselves. Imagining a similar conduit in the case of an immaterial being only attributes the features and limitations attendant on materiality.

St. Thomas’ answer is clear: we might not know what it is like for angels or God to know, and we should not attribute to them that are bound to animality. But while we might not know what it is like for immaterial beings to know, we can know that they know. It is a sufficient condition for knowledge that a thing be comprehended immaterially. Nothing remains uncomprehended by God; God is being subsisting, and nothing is simply other than being. It follows that God knows, even if we have no qualitative feel for that knowledge. We should not expect to.

Conclusion

It may be suggested that Hasker’s essay could be charitably and creatively re-interpreted as a critique not of the traditional notion of divine simplicity as held by Augustine and Aquinas, but merely as a critique of how that notion has been interpreted or even misinterpreted by the contemporary philosophers of religion for whom Hasker devotes the most space. Yet we can divide these philosophers into two camps: those who hold to the traditional doctrine, and those who diverge from it.⁴⁹ To the extent that Hasker aims at those who in fact hold to the traditional doctrine, the charitable interpretation does nothing to shield Hasker from the critique I have advanced (namely, that Hasker does not address or misinterprets key elements of that doctrine). And to the extent Hasker aims at those who diverge from the traditional notion of divine simplicity his efforts are irrelevant to his overall thesis: that the traditional notion of divine simplicity is mistaken. In neither case does the charitable revision salvage Hasker’s arguments.

I have argued in this essay that Hasker’s case against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity fails. Yet this conclusion is not entirely negative; the argument also serves as a template for how an evaluation of divine simplicity would need to proceed. If Hasker’s omission of the notions of essence-existence distinction and the relation between predication and intrinsic accidents renders an evaluation of divine simplicity impossible, then, inversely, a pre-condition for understanding the traditional notion of divine simplicity would be articulating those notions. If Hasker has operated from a mammalian notion of knowledge, action, and will, then a successful approach to divine simplicity would require the examination of knowledge, action, and will as traditionally attributed to God.

Understanding is a prerequisite for judgment. Grasping the traditional case for divine simplicity and formulating it accurately a necessary condition to reaching a judgment on its merits. My argument has been that Hasker has rushed to judgment on that traditional doctrine. And my criticisms have operated at the level of understanding: what is the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, its corollaries and consequents, and the broader framework in which it has been situated? And my concern, like Hasker’s, has not remained within the narrow confines of recent analytic philosophy of religion, but with the broader tradition, and especially as that tradition stems from St. Thomas. Unlike Hasker, I have devoted attention to what that tradition actually says. That tradition not only remains standing after Hasker’s critique; it remains untouched.

Bibliography

Hasker, William. “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2016): 669-725.

Footnotes

William Hasker, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90 (No. 4) 2016 669-725, p. 725. ↩
Hasker 2016, p. 725. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” p. 699. ↩
Ibid 699-700. ↩
Hasker does briefly cite an article by Brian Leftow for a short account of Augustine’s position, but the mention is brief and plays little role in Hasker’s overall argument. ↩
Aquinas is cited in footnotes 4, 20, 57, 58; John Wippel’s Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II is quoted on p. 709. Stump, Brower, and Dolezal all use St. Thomas as a resource in contemporary debates. ↩
Ibid. 701 - 702. ↩
Ibid. 703. ↩
See De Ente 4.6. ↩
Ibid. 713. ↩
Treatment of this question abound in St. Thomas’ corpus. See, for instance, DV Q. 24, art 3, Q. 23 art 1, and SCG I.82. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a mistake?”, p. 702. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a mistake?”, p. 705. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake”, p. 706. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake”, p. 707. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 708. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, pp. 712 - 713. ↩
If this remark seems puzzling, recall that a subject is one actualized by accidents; and that in the case of knowing, our possible intellects are actualized by the forms of things. Our knowledge is passive. But for the traditional view, God’s knowledge is not passive but active, not receptive but creative. God is not a subject that receives forms, and hence not a conscious subject. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 703. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 713. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 712. Hasker acknowledges that not everyone finds this notion unintelligible, and so offers an argument. But the argument is explicitly premised upon God being a “conscious mental subject”, in defense of which Hasker notes that he cannot imagine how anyone would disagree. ↩
The best short overview on the subject is St. Thomas’ De Ente. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 703. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 701; cf SCG I.18 3-5. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 701. ↩
/SCG/ I.18 2. ↩
And when Aquinas does use the term partes in this chapter, he clearly does so in the broad sense, one not restricted to material parts. See e.g., SCG I.18 2. ↩
See, e.g., DE 5, ST I qs. 2-3, SCG I ch. 13-18. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 702. ↩
See Hasker’s interview with Dale Tuggy, at the 22 minute mark. ↩
/ST/ I.28 1, 3. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 704. ↩
The best scholarly treatment of which I am aware on this subject may be found in Bernard Lonergan’s Grace and Freedom I-4 (2000 ed.). ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 705. ↩
See, for instance, St. Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology sections 23 - 27. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, 706. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, 706. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, 709. ↩
/ST/ I, q. 3 prol. ↩
/ST/ I, q. 14, art 11, SCG I.65, DV 2.7, all take as their subject this exact question. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 709. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p 710. ↩
See, for instance, St. Thomas distinction at ST I q. 25, art. 1 ad 3. ↩
It may be objected that this is an empirical question for astro-physicists, but this only makes the point. If the sun’s killing the plant does involve some slight effect on the sun itself, this is an empirical question, and its affirmative answer runs contrary to expectation. ↩
See ST I q. 14, art. 1. ↩
See ST I, q. 19, art. 1. ↩
See ST I, q. 19, art. 2. ↩
“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 719. ↩
Of course, a writer may hold to certain elements and diverge from other elements. In that case, we can divide positions, rather than writers, into the categories of those that hold to the classical doctrine, and those that do not. ↩

Is the Trinity Contradictory? The Case of Dale Tuggy

2017-07-01T08:26:48+00:00

If one had to choose a teaching of Christianity that caused more confusion than any other, the leading candidate would likely be the doctrine of the Trinity. Who has not been told at some point that God is both one and three, and that, though contradictory, such Christians must acquiesce for the sake of faith? Critics—both popularizers and sometimes academics—often hold up the Trinity as an exemplar of Christian irrationalism, proof that Christians cannot be both reasonable and faithful.

But the dogma of the Trinity, as disclosed in the life of the Church, revealed in the Scriptures, developed by the pre-Nicene Church Fathers, formulated at the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, and interpreted by the likes of Boethius and Augustine in the West and the Cappadocians in the East, does not demand acceptance of either contradiction or blind faith. As traditionally formulated, the doctrine is not contradictory at all.

Whence, then, the confusion? For both misguided believers and ill-informed critics, the answer tends to be that they have mistaken the elements of Trinitarian doctrine. Many criticisms raised in academia compound the error with a sort of malpractice of the philosophy of language, or by simply ignoring the traditional fundamental tenets about the nature of God

As Aquinas observes, language signifies a conceptual content generally and is directed toward a specific reality. Sometimes what we say may not signify much in the conceptual order (as when one asks of an unknown animal wandering through the back yard: “what is that?”). At other times language can be rich with content but not designate any real object, as with fairy tales.

This distinction between language’s ability to signify and to designate makes the difference between the mystery of the Trinity and its caricature, “mysterianism.” The Trinity is indeed mysterious. But in acknowledging mystery, we nonetheless grasp our language own about that mystery. We need not entirely comprehend something to understand what it is that we might say about that thing. When dogma concerns the mysteries of God, it may not exhaustively disclose divine things, but we should not conclude that dogma itself is beyond understanding. As Philip Cary pithily put it: “Although God is incomprehensible, the doctrine that God is incomprehensible is not.”

Take, for instance, Dale Tuggy’s criticisms of Trinitarian doctrine. Tuggy is a philosopher and a Christian at CUNY Fredonia. Tuggy’s work is instructive, because it exemplifies common assumptions about the Trinity which—though usually thoughtful and lucid—render the traditional doctrine unintelligible. Explaining what goes awry in Tuggy’s critique helps to identify those unspoken presumptions that can occlude what Trinitarian doctrine actually says. And by clearing away misunderstandings about the Trinity, we can easily see that Trinitarian doctrine does not pose any contradictions.

History, Analyzed

Analytic philosophy has a reputation for Procrustean treatments of intellectual history. There is some truth to this prejudice—Bertrand Russell did author A History of Western Philosophy, after all—but at present many analytically trained philosophers do excellent work on historical figures, either in the form of intellectual history or by bringing older sources into contemporary debate. These treatments succeed because they buttress their concern for argumentative rigor with an understanding of the broader historical and metaphysical frameworks in which those arguments can be intelligible.

Tuggy’s treatment of the Trinity too often borrows from the Russell’s school. Certain mistakes result from an inadequate survey of the Patristic tradition. For instance, Tuggy claims that Christians before Origen’s authorship of On First Principles (c.216-32) thought of the Word as coming into being at a particular time.¹ Beyond the obvious Scriptural ground for the eternity of the Son (Ephesians 7:2, Hebrew 7:24, Revelation 1:8), even a quick skim of the early post-apostolic fathers shows the Word’s eternity confirmed, for instance in St. Ignatius (b. 50 AD),² and by the first major Christian systematic theologian—St. Irenaeus (b. 125 AD).³

Similarly, Tuggy claims that catholic theologians first insisted on the full divinity of Christ in the fourth century, and he has in mind the Cappadocian Fathers and Constantinopolitan council. Yet, again, the New Testament attributes the proper names of God from the Old Testament—Lord, I am—to Jesus,⁴ and the apostles preached the same message. St. Irenaeus in the second century declared that “The Father is Lord, and the Son is the Lord, and the Father Is God, and the Son is God.” Tertullian (b. 155) remarks that “thus does He [i.e., the Father] make Him [the Son] equal to Him [i.e., the Father]: for by proceeding from Himself He became His first-begotten Son, because begotten before all things.”⁵ And it was Origen of Alexandria who pioneered not just the language of hypostases to distinguish the Father, Son, and Spirit, but likely also the term “homoousios”.⁶ And, of course, the Nicene’s council’s declaration of the Father and Son possessing the same being, and the description of the Son’s being “true God from true God” is unmistakable.

Aside from simply overlooking textual evidence, Tuggy pays scant attention to the close relationship between dogma and practice. Tuggy claims that “Early on, Christians did not call the Holy Spirit ‘God,’ nor did they worship or pray to the Holy Spirit.” Not only does the Scripture regard the Holy Spirit as the inner source of Christian worship (e.g., I Cor. 12:3), the means by which believers receive Christ and have access to the Father (Eph. 2:18),—but even at the first generation of Christians, Christians were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. If baptism does not count as an act of worship, needless to say, nothing does. Indeed, in the controversies about the status of the Holy Spirit, those who regarded the Spirit as divine were able to appeal precisely to the prayers and practices of the Church.

At other times, Tuggy does engage with the primary sources but misconstrues their meaning. For instance, he argues that St. Augustine means by the term person “basically … nothing.” In support of this rather surprising view—given the sheer quantity of pages in which Augustine talks about what he does mean by the persons of the Trinity—Tuggy appeals to De Trinitate VII.11, where Augustine says that

“the only reason, it seems, why we do not call these three together ‘one person’, as we call them ‘one being’ and ‘one god,’ but say ‘three persons’ while we never say ‘three gods’ or ‘three beings,’ is that we want to keep at least one word for signifying what we mean by ‘trinity,’ so that we are not simply reduced to silence when we are asked three what, after we have confessed that there are three.”⁷

Applying the distinction between signification and designation, Tuggy interprets Augustine to mean that the term “person” is used without signifying anything, while (presumably) designating the Father, Son, and Spirit. Yet this is clearly not what Augustine is saying. Augustine is explicitly talking about the difficulty of selecting a Latin term to signify what is meant by the three “hypostases” (a Greek term) of the Trinity. The difficulty is that the Latin terms that typically render ousia and hypostasis, namely essence and substance, do not express a distinction. They mean more or less the same thing. The Latin term persona was chosen, as Augustine notes, not because it already includes the connotations Trinitarian doctrine expresses, but simply because, as Latin lacks any term readymade to express the distinctions central to the Trinitarian formula, some term must be chosen lest Christians are “simply reduced to silence when we are asked three what.” This is simply how terms of art are coined.

Augustine makes the context of his remarks—namely, the difficulty of capturing the Greek in Latin—hard to miss: prior to the passage Tuggy quotes, one finds Augustine saying “our Greek friends have spoken of one essence, three substances; but the Latins of one essence or substance, three persons; because, as we have already said, essence usually means nothing else than substance in our language, that is, in Latin.” And the entirety of the passage cited by Tuggy concerns the question of how best to render the Greek into Latin. Tuggy neglected the linguistic difficulties that Augustine painstakingly addresses, with the result that the position he criticizes turns out to be his own misinterpretation.

Trinitarian Doctrine

Tuggy summarizes the traditional Trinitarian view as “The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just one thing and they are not.”⁸ More precisely, Tuggy summarized the doctrine of the Trinity as holding that “The Father is identical to God, the Son is identical to God, and the Holy Spirit is identical to God, but the Father is not identical to the Son, the Son is not identical to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not identical to the Father.”⁹

Tuggy maintains that the “is” in this formula is an “is” of identity, and “God” is used in precisely the same way in each instance. Moreover, Tuggy thinks the term God designates a particular entity, and that either the terms “Father”, “Son”, and “Holy Spirit” likewise designate particular entities (resulting in tritheism), or aspects of a single instance (modalism). Tuggy’s objection is both logical and metaphysical. It cannot be the case that a=Z, b= Z, and c= Z without a, b, c, and Z being identical. If Tuggy has accurately captured the doctrine of the Trinity, then he has demonstrated a logical contradiction and an incoherent metaphysics.

Although the summary Tuggy provides does not express the classical Trinitarian dogma, it does state with remarkable clarity some of the most common misconceptions of Trinitarian doctrine. The misunderstanding concerns both the language used to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity (specifically the way in which the term “God” is predicated), as well as the metaphysical frameworks native to the Patristic period. Let us consider both of these in turn.

Language: Predicating Divinity

Orthodox believers call the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity “God”. To employ the distinction we set forth earlier, “God” can be used to designate the Trinity as a whole, or any person of the Trinity. “God” signifies the possession of the divine essence in the subject of which “God” is predicated. Thus, when we predicate “God” of the Trinity as a whole, or one of the persons, our designation differs while the conceptual content remains the same.

For this reason, believers do not call the Father “God” in the way that this author is called “Thomas,” but more in the way that this author is called human (though with an important difference we will discuss shortly). The Father is God because he enjoys the fullness of the divine essence. Likewise, the Son is called God because he too has the fullness of the divine essence. So too the Holy Spirit. When Christians speak of “God” in each instance, they mean to signify the same conceptual content, but designate a distinct reality.

“God”, then signifies one essence, though it can designate any one of the Persons of the Trinity, or the Trinity itself. So Gilles Emery observes that in “the credo … the Son is ‘God from God.’ Here, the first name God distinctly designates the Son, while the second clearly designates the Father.”¹⁰ Without accounting carefully for the way in which theological language is actually used, one easily misses what is going on when Christians use the word “God.” An elementary understanding of the philosophy of language should be sufficient to dispel this misconception of the Trinity.

Metaphysics

However, when any investigation heads down too far down the path of linguistic questions, we quickly find ourselves in a thicket of metaphysical questions. Does the traditional doctrine of the Trinity mean that the persons of the Trinity share an essence in the way that the author and readers of this article share a certain essence? If we wish to understand the way the Church Fathers would answer this question, we must be attuned to the ways in which theologians of the Patristic era conceived individuation and metaphysical constitution.

For instance: many in the Platonic schools would hold that two human beings share an identical essence, while the more Aristotelian answer is perhaps that each man has a similar essence–formally identical but numerically distinct.

I was once told with the utmost seriousness that I was ridiculous for buying almond milk, because “everyone knows you cannot milk an almond.” Missing the background assumptions of a belief or practice makes even reasonable things seem absurd. One can see a similar confusion when Tuggy attributes to the Fathers the following difficulty: if Father, Son, and Spirit share the same essence in the way that humans or dogs share an essence then “they [i.e., the persons of the Trinity] are not numerically identical to one another, [and] the Father and Son are two different Gods.”

But, of course, in the Patristic era with the welter of scriptural hermeneutics, middle and neo-Platonism, revived Aristotelianism (etc.), this is no more a metaphysical problem than almond milk is a scam. If two physical beings share in the same essence, they are individuated (at least in part) by their material. Thus, two dogs can equally share the canine essence while being different dogs because the canine form is instantiated in different matter.¹¹ While it follows for physical beings that universal essence is instantiated in discrete entities, matter is necessary to constitute these beings as individuals. Yet God (qua God) is not a material being. The analogy that humans are to human nature as the Trinitarian persons are to the divine nature obviously cannot hold, because material beings relate to their nature in a fundamentally different way than immaterial beings. Given the insistence on divine simplicity, there is no distinction between God and divine nature. The doctrine of divine simplicity is an essential constituent of Trinitarian theology, not a philosophical roadblock that must be surmounted. The problem Tuggy attributes to the Church Fathers is no more a problem than is the proper way to milk an almond.

Which leads to a second, more fundamental metaphysical issue. Tuggy clearly regards God as a discrete being, a being among other beings.¹² While this assumption is normal in the context of analytic philosophy of religion, it is quite foreign to early Christianity, both in the theoretical sphere of theology and the practical spheres of liturgy, prayer, and worship. When Moses asks God for his name, the answer is given in terms of being: I AM. At least by the time of Isaiah, the Hebrew Scriptures had secured a firm view of God’s transcendence, and had firmly distinguished his way of being from that of the gods. The strong apophaticism of the Old Testament and the consequent prohibition against idolatry attest that even prior to the Christian era, God cannot be reduced to a mere being among other beings. Thus, while theologians may speak of God as a being, they do not predicate “being” in the same sense of God as they do particular beings in the word. (The analogy of being is not simply a special exception made for God; as Aquinas argues, we do not even refer to all worldly beings as beings in the same sense.¹³)

As David Bentley Hart has vigorously argued, the difference between polytheists and monotheists has never been how many individuals fall into a genus of deities. The difference is, rather, that the gods are beings in the world, usually immortal, that exceed human beings by degree in their power, beauty, intelligence, and (perhaps) goodness. God, on the other hand, is not individual of a kind or a being in the world at all. God’s powers do not exceed those of worldly beings simply by degree. Whereas gods—if there be any—might share in some common essence—or might instantiate a specifically identical essence—in God himself there is no prior essence on which God depends, or which constitutes him as a kind of entity. This is why the early Christians can speak of men becoming “gods”—not as joining the Trinity as another hypostasis, but simply as becoming immortal. Compared to the monotheistic way, Tuggy’s view regards God not as the eternal Creator who exceeds all limits, but as a particularly powerful spirit, a glorified angel—much more a Mormon view of God than a Christian one.

The One God

Classical monotheism (Christian or otherwise) does not regard God to be one in the numerical sense. There is not one God in the way there is one quarter in my pocket or one sitting president of the USA. Numerical unity is an effect of finitude. Counting presupposes limits. A human being differs from a dog because the latter is subject to limits the former is not. Even in the case of one person who is entirely comparable to the other not only in nature, but also by possessing to the maximal extent possible the same accidental features, these persons will still differ because each is limited at a particular time to this material rather than that of the other. For this reason we can count human beings. But God is not a physical being and does not have a limited way of being. It is limitation that enables us to count distinct entities arithmetically. God’s limitlessness makes arithmetical numbering inapplicable.¹⁴

An atheist might deny the existence of an infinite source of worldly being, and an analytic philosopher of religion might deny its coherence. But our objective is to determine what traditional Trinitarians say, and this requires us to be able to entertain and evaluate the metaphysical frameworks they employ.

The sense in which God is one is, for the generations that developed orthodox Trinitiarianism, primarily in terms of metaphysical simplicity. Or, to put it another way, God is perfectly one, while we—that is, finite, composite things, are only imperfectly one. Our unity is that of an individual being, individuated precisely by virtue of the diversity of our metaphysical constituents.

God, on the other hand, lacks metaphysical composition. There is, in God, no distinct principle of substance or accident, form or matter, essence or existence—in short, no potency distinct from act. God cannot, then, be distinguished from creatures as creatures are distinct from each other—as one limited thing is distinct from another by virtue of the distinct limits of each, their finite way of being, their place within the cosmic order—but as the infinite differs from the finite. This is, more or less, what the Western Fathers meant when they called God “being itself” and what the Eastern Fathers meant when they said that God was “beyond being.”

Christians have articulated this “ontological difference” variously: the author of Genesis portrays places God above the generation of the world (unlike, say, the Greek gods), Isaiah declares that the Lord’s thoughts and ways transcend those of created beings,¹⁵ God names himself in terms of Being in the first person in Exodus, St. Paul identifies the triadic dependence of creatures on God as being from, in, and through God, St. Irenaeus depicts God as an infinite surplus of being in which all created things partake as finite participants, St. Augustine identifies God as ipsum esse (being itself),¹⁶ Dionysius the Areopagite places God beyond being,¹⁷ Aquinas declared God to be the pure, unrestricted act of existence, and so on. And the notion of God’s transcendence does not originate with “elite” theologians, but with God’s revelation of himself in the Old Testament, especially the prohibition on identifying God with any finite being, any being who occupies a particular place in the cosmos, as well the necessary logic of a Creator who is independently of the cosmos, to say nothing of the liturgical and spiritual practices of the New Testament Church.

Tuggy has little patience for this central aspect of early Christian thought. In fact, he claims that to deny that God is a being, is to be an atheist—an accusation, not coincidently, that simply repeats—for more or less the same reason—the common pagan claims that Christians were atheists. Both believe in a multiplicity of discrete, humanoid entities called gods, and both regard the traditional Christian view that places God outside the order of finite existents as atheism. But if Tuggy (or his pagan forebears) is correct on this point, then the great theologians of the Christian tradition—from Moses to Isaiah to Paul, Irenaeus to Augustine to Aquinas—were atheists. Some theologize in monastic garb, others in tweed suits, and still others sporting tinfoil hats.

Transcendence and Immanence

The specifically Scriptural notion of transcendence is, as Phillip Cary has pointed out,¹⁸ essential to understanding the Trinity. In much of the pagan philosophical traditions (especially the neo-Platonist stream) and the early Christian heresies (especially the Gnostics and the Arians), God’s transcendence was modelled on a spatial paradigm: distance. As the heavens overarch the earth and its denizens, so God stands above and apart from lower realities—immediately below him stand the immaterial intellects, then man, then animals and plants, and finally inanimate matter. Human salvation was often thought of in terms of ascent, closing the distance from below by freeing the soul from its bodily boundaries so that it may rise through the aeons; or else in terms of descent, either through a series of cosmic mediators or by supplementing philosophical reflection with religious practices (as one can see in Iamblichus’ defense of theurgy.)

Arius’ insistence that the Son’s role as mediator made him something less than God but more than a creature can be understood in terms of this logic of distance. God is—as all other beings in the order of the world—securely fastened to his place in the cosmic hierarchy. His transcendence, then, remains a relative transcendence, not differing in kind from the way one entity transcends another. This sort of transcendence cannot be reconciled with immanence, and so God stands in need of intermediary beings that transit the great chain of being on his behalf.

The Scriptural model of transcendence is, of course, quite different. God’s transcendence is not that of one entity related to another within a common world. God creates the world from nothing—and therefore is not a being in or of the world—and yet “in him we live and move and have our being.” The act of creation renders God both transcendent to and imminent within the world. God is not in the world—he is not a discrete being that is here rather than there, now rather than then, of this sort rather than that—and yet, as the absolute source of being, all beings have being by participation in him. God is more interior to things than they are to themselves. There simply is no distance we need to bridge to “get to” God.

In salvation history, God does not come into the world from without, as in Gnostic mythology. Instead, God creates a distance by meeting us in creaturely form. As in ordinary vision, we do not see the causes of our seeing, so God escapes notice precisely by virtue of his imminence. Jesus’ humanity is strange precisely because God now can be differentiated by the disciples by being over there rather than over here (on the shore rather than a fishing vessel, for instance).

This Scriptural account resonates both with the philosophical arguments for God’s existence and nature. God’s transcendence may be gestured at by the metaphor of transcendence, but it is most usefully articulated for philosophical discourse in terms of metaphysical simplicity. The dependence of individuals, which are necessarily composed of act and potency, on a source that lacks metaphysical composition is subject to metaphysical demonstration.¹⁹ If, per impossibile, certain theistic personalists are correct insist that the Scriptures regard God as a mutable, finite entity, then it follows that the Scriptural God is not really a creator, but only a demiurge; that god, like the rest of us, depends for his being on the absolute; and that we might best leave the Scriptures for the deeper truths of the philosophers.

Hypostasis and Ousia

Supposing that God is one in the sense understood in the Patristic era—not one in the sense of a discrete being, but the One—how did the orthodox believe that God is also three? The debates that led up to the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Councils were fueled largely by the claims the Scriptures make about who Christ was—God, Lord, Logos, the revealer of the Father, one can declare his identity as “I am” and proclaim that “I and the Father are one.” The author of the Gospel of John begins with a declaration of the Logos who was in the beginning with God, and indeed was God, and then reveals Jesus’ identity in dramatic fashion with the apostle Thomas say to Jesus “my Lord and my God.”

Yet in applying the names of God—Lord, I am—to Jesus, the Scriptures also maintained a distinction between the Son and Father. Jesus is portrayed as having been sent from God (indeed, conceived by the Holy Spirit), attributed a filial relationship with the Father, and regarded as the visible revelation of the invisible Father.

Christians in the post-apostolic era inherited this peculiar dialectic of unity and difference, and—especially once the Church began to free itself from the threat of persecution and had the space to establish its doctrines in a more precise fashion—felt compelled to explore these truths in more depth.

The predominate two trends that emerged were conceiving the unity of the Godhead as merely one in will—as business partners in a joint venture—or, more radically, as one in being.²⁰ The first council of Nicaea (325 AD) considered various proposals about the Father and Son, including some intermediate positions—such as Eusebius’ suggestion that the Father and Son do not possess the same being, but rather, like a human father and son, possess similar essences (homoiousios). But the Nicene council rejected the Eusebian option in favor of the doctrine that the Father and Son are of one being, consubstantial, homoousios.

What, then, of the diversity of persons? For the Fathers, it cannot be the case that the Father and Son participate in a separate, subsistent essence, as some Platonists believed human beings participate in a subsistent human nature. For all the differences among the contending parties, no-one thought that the Father was dependent on a higher cause; and, as we have seen, positing a distinct essence would entail metaphysical composition. Nor did the orthodox party think that the Father and Son were but masks of the same individual playing different roles (as the term persona suggested). They regarded as heresy the denial of a real and permanent difference between the divine persons, which they denominated modalism or Sabellianism.

The formula that was settled upon was that there are three hypostases in one ousia, which was translated, awkwardly, into Latin as one substance in three persons. Even at the time the language was proposed, it was understood that the term “persons” was used as a term of art, and that its ordinary senses—including the notion of a mask or a mere role—would, taken out of context, be quite misleading. (Tuggy does not take into account the evolution of the notion of person, and simply anachronistically attributes a modern notion to the early Christian period.) This is even more true in the modern era, when—following Descartes—we tend to think of a person as an individual center of discursive consciousness, possessed of an independent intellect and will. Whatever the orthodox formula means, it is most certainly not that.

But the question remains: how can we maintain that the persons are one in being and yet really distinct? The answer was given in Scriptural terms. The Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit proceeds from the Father with the Son. The Persons of the Trinity differ—contra Sabellius, really and eternally differ—from one another. And yet, because the Father gives the whole of his being save what is proper to his person (namely, being the Source) to the Son, and with the Son the Spirit, all three persons possess the fullness of divinity. The Son, on the other hand, is really the full expression of the Father. A contrast between the Aristotelian notion of relations in substances, on the one hand, and the Christian notion of divine relations, on the other, is useful here. A substance for the Aristotelian has its being in itself, while relations have the status of an accident (that is, a way that a substance can be, but one that is always a subsequent expression of a substance, not a constitutive principle). A subsistent relation could not be more different: the divine persons’ relations constitute their personhood. An Aristotelian substance is not what it is by virtue of its relations. The Father is who he is in the eternal act of begetting the Son and spirating the Spirit, for instance; whereas I would be who I am regardless of whether or not I penned this article.

There is, then, an element of truth in the subordinationist position, and we are now in a position to see where they went awry. While it was perhaps natural to see the processions of the Trinity in terms of a priority of origination, the subordinationists also asserted a diminution of divine “content”, similarly to the descent of Plotinus’ hypostases. In the order of origin, the Father is prior to the Son and the Spirit, in the sense that he is their source.²¹ The mistake lies in inferring that, because the Son and Spirit have their origin the Father, that they therefore possess only a lesser share of the divine essence. Yet the Son is who he is by virtue of being the perfect expression of the Father, and the Holy Spirit likewise subsists as the perfect love of the Father and Son.

This further contrasts human and divine persons. The difference between the two is much greater than merely the materiality and finitude of human beings. “Person” is not predicated univocally of man and God. In begetting a child, a father and mother do not share the fullness of their being to their offspring. Being individuated by their respective material composition, each is a distinct being. On the “Platonic” interpretation, each is a different participant in a human essence, and on the Aristotelian view, each possesses a distinct essence. Their difference is always a distance, and this distance reflects the imperfection of even the most ardent love. The Trinitarian persons, on the other hand, share the fullness of divine being; all that the Father has, he gives the Son and Spirit. Whereas love is for human beings an accident (that is, an addition to human being, an act or a habit), the act of love constitutes the essence of the Trinity. The complete and infinite gift of divine being constitutes the persons as persons; love is not merely something they may or may not do or have.

The notion of subsistent relations—which is almost entirely absent from Tuggy’s analysis of classical Trinitarianism—makes clear why the Godhead may be said to be both diverse (as to persons) and one without composition. God’s unity—that is, his absolute simplicity—is what makes the notion of subsistent relations intelligible. There is, in God, no real distinction between act and potency—and thus no real distinction between substance and accident—and therefore the action of generation and spiriting cannot be adventitious to the divine essence, but must be identified with God’s essence. God’s essence is the infinite Trinitarian life. God’s essence is action, and is therefore relational—not in spite of simplicity, but because of it.

Conclusion

The orthodox formulation does justice to the dynamic of Scriptural language about God: the unity of the Son and Spirit with the Father, the Son’s claims of divinity, the diversity implied in the Son being sent from the Father and the Spirit breathed forth, the baptismal rite, and the insistence of the Shema: the Lord is one.

These arguments, I expect, will not convince the atheist or the analytic theologian equipped with impoverished philosophies of language and being that the Trinity in fact exists. But our aim has been more modest: to discern whether the doctrine of the Trinity, as expounded by the Church Fathers, asserts contradictory propositions. The only answer that can be given once a cursory examination of the original doctrine has been undertaken is negative.

Though I have not attempted to argue that one should believe in the Trinity, a few words on the Christians grounds for belief in the Trinity are not entirely out of place. Most theologians regard the Trinity as something revealed, or something for which merely probable arguments can be given, rather than something that can be philosophically demonstrated in the strict sense. That is to say that Christians believe that God has, in history, revealed the Trinity to us in a Trinitarian way: the Church is moved by the Holy Spirit to the Christ, in whom we are incorporated and through whom we see the Father. The Trinity stands, then, on both sides of revelation: as both–the revealing and what is revealed. The Holy Spirit is given by the Son after the ascension to the Church, to form the heart of worship and to guide the Church into truth.

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are found primarily and concretely in the life and experience of the Church. This can be articulated by theologians (including the authors of Scripture) through second order reflection. But the grounds for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity are—thankfully—not so sterile as Tuggy seems to imagine: extracting propositional content from the Scriptures (without much use for the living context from which Scripture arises and in which it is understood) and seeing what can and cannot be deducted therefrom.

The Scriptures, as read by Christians, are rooted in the life of the Church, a life animated and guided by the Holy Spirit, just as the progression of the seed to the tree is guided by a vital principle. The Scriptures themselves proclaim the living church to be the pillar and ground of truth. It is under this guidance and in this form of life that the truths intimated in Scripture are unfolded. One might not believe the Church to be actually animated by the Spirit of God (if one is an atheist), or else one might prefer to think of Christianity as a set of beliefs—as mental microbes or memes—that can be severed from their place in the concrete, organic life of Christ’s living body. Revelation—and the revelation of the Trinity in particular—is not primarily understood by Christians (traditionally and for the most part) to be the divine dispensation of propositions that reason could not provide, and which Christians should accept axiomatically; rather, revelation is given in the life of the Church—the ongoing experience of the gift and guidance of the Holy Spirit animating its structures of church authority, scriptures, rituals, intellectual life, and political history (as messy as that might be).

Dale Tuggy, “Ten Steps Towards Getting Less Confused About the Trinity #6 Get a Date, Part 2”, www.trinities.org/blog. ↩
St. Ignatius, Letter to Polycarp 3:2. ↩
St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies II.13:8. ↩
For an accessible (and sometimes needlessly skeptical) scholarly survey of the uses of the Old Testament designation of God in the New Testament, see Raymond Brown’s Introduction to New Testament Christology. ↩
Tertullian, Against Praxeas ch.7. ↩
See M.J. Edwards, “Did Origen Apply the Word homoousios to the Son?”, Journal of Theological Studies 49,578-590 (summarizing the historical evidence). ↩
St. Augustine, De Trinitate VII.11, quoted in Dale Tuggy, “10 Steps toward getting less confused about the Trinity - #5 “Persons” – Part 1,” www.trinities.org/blog. ↩
“The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing”, p. 172. ↩
“Unfinished Business”, p. 172. ↩
Gilles Emery, The Trinity 48. ↩
The precise role of matter in the constitution of physical objects differs, of course, both across the great philosophical traditions of the time and within them. Yet matter would almost always have played individuating forms, even if the precise relationship of matter to form could differ widely. ↩
To put it more precisely, Tuggy regards “being” as univocally predicated of God and creature. ↩
See John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Aquinas , p. 91. ↩
See Aquinas’ lucid discussion at Summa Theologiae I, q. 30, art. 2 and I, q 42, art 1. ↩
Isaiah 55:8, 9 ↩
City of God, XII, 2. ↩
Divine Names XIII.3 ↩
Phillip Cary, “On Behalf of Classical Trinitarianism: A Critique of Rahner on the Trinity”, Thomist (56:3) 365. ↩
See, e.g., Joseph Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics; Robert Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God; St. Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence for examples. For my reformulation of certain of these arguments, see http://www.thomasmcothran.com/argument-for-existence-of-god/. ↩
Khaled Anatolios has a lucid account in his Retrieving Nicaea. ↩
It is, of course, important not to understand causation here on the model of causation in creatures, whereby causes are greater than effects. Causation in the Trinity refers to the Father as the principle and ungenerated source of the Son and Spirit. For this reason, Latin theologians often tend to prefer speaking of a principle rather than a cause. ↩

God’s Necessity, Being’s Priority

2015-06-28T18:26:48+00:00

It seems inevitable in the course of analytic treatments of philosophy of religion that we must endure talk of “possible worlds.” The deployment of “possible worlds” strike me as problematic for a number of reasons. It tends to conflate metaphysical and logical possibility, it attempts to solve real world questions with the fancies of the imagination, it often assumes that the actual is grounded in the possible (and vice versa) and it grants far too much weight to the powers of abstraction in penetrating the nature of the world.

I couldn’t entirely fend off these misgivings as I read through Dale Tuggy’s continuing arguments in his ongoing debate with William Vallicella. This particular debate, however, can be resolved on simpler grounds. The central question concerned God’s metaphysical simplicity seems to be easily resolved given what Tuggy has already ceded. As soon as Tuggy admitted a real distinction between essence and existence, Tuggy has placed himself on the ineluctable logical sequence towards God’s simplicity and necessity.

Accidentality and Priority of Being

God’s simplicity can inferred from the facts that existence is accidental to and prior to the essences of composite things. To say that existence is accidental is simply to say that it is not the nature of a thing. Knowing what giraffes is doesn’t tell you anything about whether any particular giraffe actually exists, because existence is not the nature of the giraffe. One must ascertain the existence of giraffes by seeking them out, or by depending on the reports of others who have sought them out.

The intrinsic difference between essence and existence is usually the most difficult point to establish on the way toward demonstrating God’s simplicity and necessity–debates on the subject have raged since the 13th century–but Tuggy has already granted the point. Being is an accident for things in the sense that it is extrinsic to their natures.

Being’s priority means that being is not only different from a thing’s essence, but it ontologically prior to that essence, rather than subsequent to the essence in the way of other accidents. The existence of a thing is not something subsequent to the thing’s nature as (to use a traditional example) risibility follows from human nature. Neither is it subsequent in the sense that it modifies the thing as other accidents do. For a thing must first exist to have a nature or possess accidents. Existence is, then, prior to the entire essential order, which includes not only the nature of a thing, but its properties and its qualitative and quantitative accidents.

The priority of existence over essence (again, in the sense of the entire essential order) cannot be escaped by making existence merely part of a nature. If existence was part of a thing’s nature, the other parts would not be. Existence pervades the entirety of the thing, for whatever quality of the thing one places outside the thing’s existence, does not exist.

Therefore, composite things cannot account for their existence. They always come to be from causes that precede them. They cannot be responsible for their existence, because in order to cause themselves to be, they must first exist. (Of course, “first’ is in the sense of causal priority, not necessarily temporal priority). Things that aren’t simple exist contingently.

The Necessity of an Uncomposed Being

If existence is prior to essence in composite things, then there must be a being whose existence and essence are identical. No finite series of composite things could account for the existence of any member of the set of composite things any more than a single composite thing could. Nor could an infinite series of composite things explain the existence of any composite thing, because the power of each to act as an efficient cause depends on there being a being whose existence is not contingent. As Barry Miller has pointed out, the logical form of such a series is A if (B if [C if {D if |…|}]). (For a more detailed explanation, see here.)

If God is the cause of the existence of everything else, then God’s existence cannot be distinct from his essence. Otherwise God is in the same position as every other composite being. If God were composite, then he could not account for his existence, since it is causally prior to him. Another way of saying this is that while being is an accident in composite things, in God, being is a nature.

These, anyway, are the contours of the traditional argument for God’s simplicity, arising mostly from Aquinas De Ente. God’s nature is to be, or to put it another way, God’s essence and his existence are not really distinct. This does not mean that we grasp God’s essence, and, in fact, we do not. For us, God’s essence and existence most often remain conceptually distinct, and we can only get at what God is through analogy, metaphor, meditative prayer, and worship. But these are not required to grasp the argument for God’s simplicity.

Roadmap for an Argument for the Existence of God

2015-02-23T08:26:48+00:00

This post sets out the initial roadmap for the argument for the existence of God that will be set out in later posts. The particular argument I will be using is derived from Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God and, to a lesser extent, W. Norris Clarke’s The One and the Many. Both are simplified versions of Aquinas’ Second Way, and they do not rely on any particular metaphysical view of the world. Thus, one does not need to accept Aquinas’ metaphysics to find the argument compelling.

The argument will proceed in five major steps. The first step is a proof for the thesis that at least one unconditioned reality exists. As we will see shortly in greater detail, an unconditioned reality is one that does not depend on another reality for its existence. It is an absolute reality that transcends the order of space and time.

The second step will demonstrate that any unconditioned reality must be absolutely simple. From simplicity we will then deduce the following: infinity, immutability, eternity, and transcendence of space and time.

The third step will demonstrate that the unconditioned reality is absolutely unique. The fourth and final step will demonstrate that the one unconditioned reality is the continuous Creator of all that is.

My plan is to devote a single post to explaining each step of the argument, and perhaps additional posts to consider any objections. I may modify the plan as we move along.

Step 1: The Necessity of an Unconditioned Reality

2015-01-23T08:26:48+00:00

This is the third post in the ongoing series presenting an argument for the existence of God. In this post we move into the argument itself, taking the first step toward an argument for the existence of God.

In this first step, I will show that at least one unconditioned reality exists. First, we will define what it means to be a conditioned or unconditioned reality. Then we will proceed to demonstrate that the assertion “there is no unconditioned reality” logically entails that there are no realities at all. In other words, the claim that there are no unconditioned realities is logically equivalent to saying that nothing exists. Definitions: Realities Conditioned and Unconditioned

Our terms are drawn from Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God.

1.1 A conditioned reality is any reality whose existence depends in any way on some other reality. “Reality” is used very broadly here. It means not only material objects, but also physical laws, space, time–in short, anything that can be described as really existing.

1.2 An unconditioned reality is a reality whose existence does not depend on another reality for it to exist or happen. Its independence is absolute: if a reality depends upon another reality in any respect, it is conditioned.

1.3 A condition refers to any reality upon which a conditioned reality depends for its existence. A conditioned reality can have many conditions: an apple, for example, depends for its existence upon atomic and sub-atomic reality. The strong force, for example, is a condition for a given apple, for without the strong force, there would not be this apple.

The Argument

We know that at least some things are conditioned. For example, the existence of human beings depends at present upon the earth’s atmosphere. Without the atmosphere, we would not be. Were it not for atomic reality, we could not exist at all. So we can say the following:

1.4 There exist some unconditioned realities.

Given that we know there are at least some conditioned realities, the question is whether there is an unconditioned reality (or realities). At this point, then, there are two options: either all realities are conditioned, or of all realities, one or more is unconditioned. We can put the two options this way:

1.5 Either only conditioned realities exist, or at least one existing reality is unconditioned.

To make things simple, we can refer to the first half of 1.5, which says that only conditioned realities exist, as ~UCR (for there are no unconditioned realities), and the second half as UCR. 1.5 can be reformulated as:

1.5a Either ~UCR or UCR.

If one option is false, the other must be true. If it is either the case that A or B is true, and it is that B is not true, then A must be true. Put in logical notation, the proof looks like this:

A v B

~A

B

This form of indirect proof will be used here. I will demonstrate that the claim that only conditioned realities exist entails that no realities exist. Since this contradicts a fact we know to be true, (namely 1.4, that some conditioned realities exist), we can conclude that “only conditioned realities exist” is false. Thus, there must be at least one unconditioned reality.

Finite Regress of Conditions

Let’s consider a particular conditioned reality with a finite set of conditions, and call it CR1. Any condition with a finite number of conditions will have one or more “terminal conditions.” For example, CR1 has as its condition CR2, which has as its condition CR3.

If CR3 is the terminal condition, two things follow. First, CR3 does not exist, because its condition for existing is unfulfilled. (via 1.1 & 1.3) CR3 is a conditioned reality, which means that must have a further condition, CR4, that also must exist (via 1.3). But in this scenario, CR3 is the terminal condition. (The case of circular conditions, e.g., CR3 having as a condition CR1, is dealt with below.)

Second, the realities prior to CR3 in the series do not exist, because their conditions have not been fulfilled. If CR3 does not exist and CR3 is a condition for CR2, CR2 does not exist. CR2 is a condition for CR1, and therefore CR1 does not exist. (Again, we will consider the case of circular conditions below.)

Thus, we can conclude:

1.6 Any conditioned reality which has as its conditions a finite number of conditioned realities does not exist.

Consider the following table, which illustrates a simple case of CR1 having two further conditions:

	Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3
Conditioned reality in question	CR1	CR2	CR3
Conditions that must be fulfilled for Conditioned Reality to Exist	CR2 exists & CR2’s conditions are fulfilled	CR3 exists & CR2’s conditions are fulfilled	CR4 exists & CR4’s conditions are fulfilled
Present CR’s existential conditions met?	No	No	No
Previous CR’s existential conditions met?	No	No	No

Compare to the following table, in which CR1’s condition, CR2, is conditioned by an unconditioned reality:

	Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3
Conditioned reality in question	CR1	CR2	UCR3
Conditions that must be fulfilled for Conditioned Reality to Exist	CR2 exists & CR2’s conditions are fulfilled	CR3 exists & CR2’s conditions are fulfilled	No conditions
Present CR’s existential conditions met?	No	No	Yes
Previous CR’s existential conditions met?	No	No	Yes

Infinite Regress of Conditions

What about a conditioned reality with an infinite number of conditions that are likewise conditioned realities? Robert Spitzer points out that this too fails:

“CR1 would have to depend on some other conditioned reality, say, CR2, in order to exist. Hence it is nothing until CR2 exists and fulfills its [CR2’s] conditions. Similarly, CR2 would also have to depend on some other conditioned reality, say CR3, for its existence, and it would likewise be nothing until CR3 exists and fulfills its conditions.”

We saw in the foregoing paragraphs that if the chain comes to a stopping point at, say CR3, anything earlier in the series cannot exist.

If the chain does not come to a stopping point, the whole series will likewise not exist. If we continue through CR4 to CR5 and onward, at no point is any condition satisfied. CR4 does not exist until CR5 exists and CR5’s condition is fulfilled; CR5 does not exist until CR6 exists and its condition for existence likewise is satisfied. At no point, no matter how far we go, can any condition be fulfilled.

The infinite regress can only pile up unfulfilled conditions, because every step introduces a new unfulfilled condition. (This is the case whether we consider the series, so to speak, ordinally or cardinally.) Every attempt to posit a conditioned reality necessarily involves co-positing a conditioned reality whose conditions is, at that step, unfulfilled.

An infinite number of conditioned conditions, then, logically entails the nonexistence of any given conditioned reality.

Thus, we can conclude:

1.7 Any conditioned reality which has as its conditions an infinite number of conditioned realities does not exist.

	Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3	Stage 4
Conditioned reality in question	CR1	CR2	CR3	CR4
Conditions that must be fulfilled for Conditioned Reality to Exist	CR2 exists & CR2’s conditions are fulfilled	CR3 exists & CR2’s conditions are fulfilled	CR4 exists & CR4’s conditions are fulfilled	CR5 exists & CR5’s conditions are fulfilled…
Present CR’s existential conditions met?	No	No	No	No…
Previous CR’s existential conditions met?	No	No	No	No…

As the illustration shows, at no stage of an infinite regress will any condition be satisfied.

Circular Conditions

But what if we posit a circular series of conditioned conditions for CR1? What if we say that CR1 has the condition CR2, which in turn has the condition CR3, which finally has the condition CR1? This can be quickly disposed of. Just as with an infinite chain, at no point, no matter how many times one goes around the circle, will any condition be satisfied.

If the circular regress stops at a certain point such that one of the conditioned realities is the first condition, the argument concerning a finite set of conditions applies. If the circular regress does not stops, but circles indefinitely, the argument concerning an infinite regress applies. In either case, the logical consequence of a circular series of conditioned realities is non-existence.

This gives us the following:

1.8 – A circular series of conditions is either a finite or an infinite set of conditions.

Putting It All Together

Let’s put all this together. It is either the case that there exist only conditioned realities or there exists at least one conditioned reality. (1.5) (This was also stated as either ~UCR or UCR. (1.5a))

Assume ~UCR. Let us also assume that there exists at least one thing. From these two assumptions, it follows there is at least one conditioned reality. We’ll call it CR1.

CR1 must have at least one existing condition for CR1 to exist. (1.1) Any condition CR1 has must also be a conditioned reality, because we have assumed that there exist no unconditioned realities. Either CR1 has as its condition a finite or an infinite number of conditions.

Assume CR1 does not have an infinite number of conditions. (Remember that these conditions are themselves conditioned realities, because we have assumed ~UCR.) CR1 would then have a finite number of conditions. It follows from this that CR1 does not exist. (1.6)

Assume CR1 does not have a finite number of conditions. (Remember that these conditions are themselves conditioned realities, because we have assumed ~UCR.) Then CR1 would have an infinite number of conditions. It follows that CR1 does not exist. (1.7)

Therefore, if we assume that only conditioned realities exist (~UCR), CR1 does not exist. Thus, the assumption that there are only conditioned realities entail the non-existence of any conditioned realities. In addition, the assumption that only conditioned realities exist, means that no unconditioned realities exist. But any reality will either be conditioned or not.

Therefore, if the assumption that only conditioned realities exist (~UCR) entails the non-existence of anything at all. The assumption that there are only conditioned realities is logically equivalent to the assumption there are no unconditioned realities. So we can set up another sub-step:

1.9 If there are no unconditioned realities, nothing exists.

Thus, if anything exists–anything at all–there is at least one unconditioned reality. An unconditioned reality is more certain than the existence of the Atlantic Ocean, or the Peony Star, or the Milky Way galaxy. I could, after all, be a brain in a vat, with all my perceptions pumped in by a computer simulation. But in this case, the computer simulation would still exist. That is, there would be at least one existing reality. And from this it follows there is an unconditioned reality.

No matter what fantastic scenario we come up with–where we might be deceived by a demon, be a part of a computer simulation, be a brain in a vat, or so on–it is indubitably the case that something exists. Something must exist to cause these sorts of deceptions. Therefore, we can conclude that

1.10 At least one reality exists.

If it is the case that at least one reality exists, it is not the case that nothing exists. So from 1.9 and 1.10, we can deduce our conclusion:

1.10 There exists at least one unconditioned reality.

Preview of the Next Steps

This is but the first step of the argument, and it does not, of itself, demonstrate the existence of a Christian God. However, it is a very big step in that direction. There are not many candidates for an “unconditioned reality” that lack the coloring of divinity. Any physical reality cannot be unconditioned, for it depends on things like matter, its constituent parts, space, or time.

Starting down this path takes us into the next steps in the proof. The argument of Step 2 is that an unconditioned reality must be absolutely simple. The argument of step 3 will be that an unconditioned reality must be simple in all perfections. In step 4, it will be shown that an unconditioned reality must be unique–there is only one unconditioned reality. In the final step, step 5, it will be demonstrated that an unconditional reality must be the continuous creator of every conditioned reality.

Introductory Remarks to An Argument for the Existence of God

2015-01-23T08:26:48+00:00

It is commonly assumed that there is no compelling argument for the existence of God. However, the argument for the existence of God is more compelling than almost any other argument about the fundamental nature of reality. The existence of God is more easily and convincingly demonstrated than the existence of other minds; the independent or objective existence of objects; or the real existence of subatomic particles.

In order to back up these claims, it is necessary to set out an argument for God’s existence. This is the first in a series of posts setting out an argument for the existence of God. The argument I will present is a form of the cosmological argument. The cosmological argument is hardly new. It dates back to ancient Greece, and its characteristic reasoning was set out in the Medieval period.

The form of the cosmological argument I will present, however, is primarily derived from the work of Robert Spitzer and W. Norris Clarke. Spitzer and Clarke both offer stripped down forms of the cosmological argument, which require less philosophical background knowledge than the more classical formulations of the arguments. This has the benefit of being more convincing to those who don’t want to spend years studying metaphysics. But it also has a downside: the arguments, though they do demonstrate the existence of a divine creator, say less about that creator than do the classical arguments.

The next post will give the first step of the proof. Before considering the proof itself, we should think about the nature of the certainty of arguments in general. Here are several levels of certainty an argument can attain.

A: Absolute certainty. No rational person could harbor any doubt, however small, as to the argument’s conclusion.

B: Satisfactory certainty. The argument is so convincing that no rational person could be unpersuaded. A reasonable person may be able to identify some doubts about the conclusions of the argument, but those doubts are so small, and the weight of the argument so great, that it would be irrational to deny the conclusion.

C: Relative certainty. A reasonable person can be certain that conclusion of the argument is better supported than any alternative. The argument is not airtight, but it is sufficient to establish that the conclusion is superior to any alternative.

D: Reasonable disagreement. The argument is sufficiently compelling that a reasonable person could reasonably believe the conclusion of the argument to be true. It is not so compelling that it would convince every rational person.

E: Moderate support. An argument does not compel one to a conclusion, but it nevertheless furnishes grounds that tend to support a conclusion.

F: Bad arguments. The argument does not establish its conclusion, nor does it furnish any ground that might lead a reasonable person to think the conclusion more likely.

Arguments can be more or less certain. It is a strange feature of the debate about the existence of God that many people presume that the arguments must be A-type arguments. For almost all other issues, however, we accept B or C type arguments as sufficient. Let me give an example.

Suppose that the argument from contingency presents a dilemma. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the theist shows that either there is a God or things in the world came into existence without a cause. But the atheist, who accepts the dilemma, concludes that the theist has not show to an absolute certainty that the world didn’t just pop into existence without a prior cause. The atheist then concludes that the theist has not demonstrated the existence of God.

Let’s assume arguendo that the dilemma holds and that the theist has not established the first possibility to an A-level certainty. There may still be very compelling reasons to suppose that things cannot come into existence without a prior cause. Even if there is no mathematico-deductive proof of that thesis, it could still be the case that the theist show the conclusion to be compelling enough to convince any rational person.

The point is this. A possible objection does not mean that the argument is not convincing. One cannot offer an absolutely certain argument that we are not brains in a vat, for example. But arguments do not have to be absolutely, deductively certain to establish their conclusions. No major scientific theory rises to A level (or even B-level) certainty, for example. That does not mean they should be rejected.

In my view, an argument can be made that establishes that the existence of God is satisfactorily certain (B). Parts of the argument, such as the argument for the existence of an absolute, non-physical reality, rise to A-level certainty. But I will leave it to the reader to judge how certain the argument is as the series proceeds.