Difficulties of Simplicity

Quaerens Deum: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Dec 2016

This paper attempts to show that the doctrine of divine simplicity suffers from difficulties which undermine its plausibility. The main difficulties explored are Plantinga’s problem of double identification, Pruss’ multiple attributes problem, and Schmitt’s co-specificity problem. In more recent years, defenders of the doctrine have offered a way out of these problems by interpreting it in light of a truthmaker account of predication. This paper analyzes this recent defense, among others, and attempts to show that this new interpretation of divine simplicity still has problems which undermine the plausibility of the doctrine.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=lujpr

Difficulties of Simplicity

Quaerens Deum: Th e Liberty Undergraduate Journal for Philosophy of Religion Difficulties of Simplicity Cody M. Bradley 0 1 0 Thi s Article is brought to you for free and open access by 1 Liberty University Recommended Citation Part of the Religious Thou; ght; The - ology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Introduction The doctrine of divine simplicity, that God is not composed of any kind of proper parts whatsoever, can perhaps be seen as early as in Parmenides, reaches its zenith in scholasticism, and still today remains Catholic dogma. Despite being central to medieval theology, the doctrine—at least in its strongest form—is rejected by many contemporary theologians and philosophers of religion. However, in recent years some philosophers have defended divine simplicity by conjoining it with truthmaker theory, what Noël Saenz calls “divine truthmaker simplicity.”1 The aim of this paper is to show that the doctrine of absolute divine simplicity, even in its relatively new truthmaker form, still suffers from difficulties which undermine its plausibility. What & Why As Yann Schmitt point outs, simplicity is a “scale notion,” bearing a range of variation either within the doctrine itself or closely related to it.2 For example, 1 Noël B. Saenz, “Against Divine Truthmaker Simplicity,” Faith and Philosophy 31, no. 4 (2014): 460. 2 Yann Schmitt, “The Deadlock of Absolute Divine Simplicity,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 74, no. 1 (2013): 129. Thomas Morris presents a “threefold denial” included in the traditional understanding of the doctrine: (1) spatial simplicity, that God has no proper spatial parts; (2) temporal simplicity, that God has no proper temporal parts; and (3) property simplicity, that God has no proper metaphysical parts.3 Moreover, William Alston, while rejecting property simplicity, advocates divine cognitive simplicity, in which all of God’s knowledge is a single non-propositional intuition.4 Similarly, J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig postulate a type of divine creative simplicity in which God’s creation and conservation of the world is a single act in itself, rather than multiple individual acts.5 Of the simplicities mentioned above, spatial simplicity is the only uncontroversial one among philosophers and theologians within monotheistic traditions. The most controversial one, and the one this paper seeks to further explore, however, is property simplicity, or what Schmitt calls “absolute divine simplicity” (DDS). This view posits that God has no kind of metaphysical composition or complexity whatsoever. On DDS, (1) God is identical to his essence/nature/existence, (2) God is identical to his properties, and (3) God’s 3 Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology, ed. C. Stephen Evans, Contours of Christian Philosophy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 114. 4 William P. Alston, “Does God Have Beliefs?,” Religious Studies 20, no. 3 (1986): 287-306. 5 J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 526. properties are identical to each other.6 Eleonore Stump explains the doctrine as follows: For all things other than God, there is a difference between what they are and that they are, between their essence and their existence; but on the doctrine of simplicity the essence that is God is not different from God's existence. Therefore, unlike all other entities, God is his own being.7 Some of the motivations for this doctrine are fairly straightforward. If there is no distinction between God and his properties, then this avoids the problem of God being dependent upon his properties for his existence and composition, thus preserving what Alvin Plantinga calls the “sovereignty-aseity intuition.”8 Moreover, as noted by Nicholas Wolterstorff, DDS provides a sort of “theoretical fecundity” from which other apparent divine attributes such as incorporeality, eternality, and others naturally flow.9 Bearing this in mind, it is no wonder that Aquinas introduces God’s simplicity in his Summa Theologica right after arguing for God’s existence. Difficulties 6 Aquinas Summa Theologica I q.3 a.3. 7 Eleonore Stump, “God's Simplicity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 135-36. 8 Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 1-2. 9 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Divine Simplicity,” in Philosophical Perspectives: Philosophy of Religion, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991), 5:531. A standard argument against DDS, most notably put forth by Plantinga, is that the doctrine seems to deny God’s personhood because it identifies him with his properties.10 Such an argument can run as follows: (1) God is identical to his properties. (2) If (1), then God’s properties are transitively identical. (3) If (2), then God’s (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=lujpr

Cody M Bradley. Difficulties of Simplicity, Quaerens Deum: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2016, Volume 2, Issue 1,