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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Divine Simplicity

Form

The classical theist argument, from Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, I, q.3) and in its modern form from Edward Feser:

  1. Anything composed of parts depends on those parts, and on whatever combines them, for its existence.
  2. The ultimate explanation of reality cannot depend on anything else, or it would not be ultimate.
  3. Therefore the ultimate explanation must be absolutely simple: without physical, metaphysical, or logical parts; with no distinction between its essence and its existence, or between its attributes; pure actuality, "subsistent being itself".
  4. Only the God of classical theism answers to this description. Therefore classical theism is true, and the ground of reality is God.

The argument is usually offered as the capstone of the cosmological arguments: having reached a first cause, it says what the first cause must be like.

My Positions

  1. The conclusion describes nothing. A being whose knowledge is identical with its power, which is identical with its goodness, which is identical with its existence, with no distinction between any of them, has no properties in any sense I can use. Alvin Plantinga's objection (Does God Have a Nature?, 1980) stands: if God is identical with each of his properties, then God is a property, and a property does not create universes or love anyone. The Thomist reply that these are "analogical" predications concedes that the words do not mean what they usually mean, and does not say what they mean instead (Ignosticism).
  2. Simplicity collapses the contingency of the world. If God is simple, there is no distinction between God and God's act of will. God exists necessarily; so God's act of will exists necessarily; so what God wills, this universe, is necessary. Either the universe could not have been otherwise, which contradicts the Argument from Contingency that got us here, or God's creative act is distinct from God, in which case he has a part. R. T. Mullins has pressed this "modal collapse" and the replies (that creation is an extrinsic or "Cambridge" property of God) amount to saying that God's creating the world is a fact about the world, not about God, which drains "God did it" of content.
  3. Simplicity as a virtue is being equivocated with simplicity as a lack of parts. The sense in which a hypothesis should be simple (Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony) is that it posits few independent things. A being with infinite knowledge, power, and goodness is not simple in that sense merely because it is declared to have no parts; it is the most extravagant entity ever proposed, with a label that says "no assembly required".
  4. "Pure act" and "subsistent being itself" are names for the stopping point. Every explanatory chain ends somewhere (Münchhausen trilemma). The argument insists that where it ends must be simple, and then calls whatever is simple God. A simple physical ground (a single field, a brute law) would satisfy premises 1 to 3 as well and better, since it has at least one known instance of something like it.
  5. It is not an independent argument. It takes for granted that the cosmological arguments have delivered an ultimate explanation and then characterises it. If the First Cause Argument, Argument from Contingency, and Argument from Existential Dependence fail, there is nothing here to be simple.
  6. A simple God is indistinguishable from deism or pantheism. With no distinction between intellect and will, no change, no parts, and no real relation to the world (Aquinas's own position), the being described does nothing in particular. It is a long way from the one who argued with Abraham, and the religion built on it needs a second, very different god for the Bible (God).

Notes

I note in fairness that divine simplicity is contested among theists themselves. Plantinga, Craig, Swinburne, and most analytic theologians reject it; it is defended mainly by Thomists and by some Reformed scholastics. When the argument's own side cannot agree whether its conclusion is coherent, I am not required to settle it for them.

Sources

  • Aquinas, T., Summa Theologica (c. 1270), I, q.3
  • Feser, E., Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017)
  • Plantinga, A., Does God Have a Nature? (1980)
  • Mullins, R. T., "Simply Impossible: A Case Against Divine Simplicity", Journal of Reformed Theology 7 (2013)
  • Dolezal, J., God Without Parts (2011), for the defence

Also see