God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness by James E. Dolezal

Author:James E. Dolezal [Dolezal, James E.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781610976589
Publisher: Pickwick Publications, An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2011-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

5

Simplicity and God’s Absolute Attributes

IN ADDITION TO MAINTAINING the real identity between God’s essence and existence, the traditional DDS also holds that all of God’s attributes are really identical in him. If God were a complex of really distinct attributes or properties then those various attributes would be more basic than the Godhead itself in explaining or accounting for what God is. To be considered most absolute with respect to all the various perfections predicated of him it is necessary that one regard those perfections as identical with God himself. Identity is the watchword of the strong account of divine simplicity and is crucial to the orthodox articulation of divine absoluteness. Often this identity is expressed in the claim that all that is in God is God.

Given their denial of any composition and diversity in God’s essence and attributes, DDS supporters face the challenge of exactly how to understand the relation between the multifarious perfections attributed to God. Even if some of those perfections are acknowledged as improper or as Cambridge properties of God, certainly there remain many attributes that are properly predicated of him. But, the question is asked: How can an absolutely simple God have more than one attribute? The customary response of adherents to the strong version of the DDS has historically been to insist that even though the senses of the various attributes are really distinct, the referent, God, does not possess them as really distinct properties. The mode of human signification does not match the mode of God’s subsistence. Indeed, in God each perfection is really identical with all the others inasmuch as each is identical with the Godhead and God cannot be really distinct from himself.1

Ingenious as this Identity Account (IA) may at first appear, it is by no means obvious to many modern philosophers and theologians that it makes any sense. In fact, the lion’s share of modern opposition to the DDS tends to take the line that the IA just doesn’t square with what we know about properties and how they function. In chapter 1 it was noted that Richard Gale, Christopher Hughes, Thomas Morris, and Alvin Plantinga all level formidable “property” challenges against the DDS. In response, many recent defenders of the DDS have not questioned whether a Property Account (PA) is the appropriate way of construing the IA. Rather, they aim at undermining the narrower conception of properties presented by the various critics.2 In this way they propose to defend the IA by constructing an explanation of divine properties suitable to its claims.

Other defenders of the DDS, feeling the pressure of the property challenge, have chosen instead to abandon the IA altogether rather than engage in the elaborate and seemingly ill-fated project of developing an adequate property explanation for it.3 These DDS proponents prefer to explain the doctrine as teaching a harmonious unity among the divine attributes rather than a real identity. The point of divine simplicity, they maintain, is to show that there is no internal contradiction or disagreeableness among the intrinsic divine attributes.

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