Justified True Belief

(P1) God has many genuinely distinct essential attributes. + Scripture presents God through a rich vocabulary of perfections: he is holy, loving, omnipotent, omniscient, just, and self-existent. An essential attribute is one a thing cannot lack and still be itself, the way a triangle cannot lack three sides, and each of these belongs to God that way. (1) Scripture describes God through many distinct perfections. - He is holy, set apart from all creation and from every moral imperfection (Isaiah 6:3, Revelation 4:8). He is loving, directing his care and covenant faithfulness toward creatures and supremely toward those made in his image (1 John 4:8, Deuteronomy 7:9). He is omnipotent, sovereign over all things with unlimited power (Revelation 19:6, Job 42:2). - He is omniscient, knowing all things down to the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Psalm 139:1-4, Hebrews 4:13). He is just, never acting against moral perfection (Deuteronomy 32:4, Romans 3:26). He is self-existent, drawing his being from no source outside himself (Exodus 3:14, Acts 17:25). - These are not one feature approached from six angles. Learning that God is holy does not already tell you what learning that he is loving adds, and a reader who knew only that he was omnipotent would still have to be told that he is just. Scripture treats them as distinct because they are distinct. (2) Any doctrine of divine simplicity has to answer to that vocabulary. - Ask a child what a bicycle is made of and she can take it apart for you: wheels, frame, chain, saddle. Ask what God is made of and the church's old answer is that he is not made of anything. He was never put together. That teaching is divine simplicity, and everyone who holds it, in any version, agrees on at least that much. - The disagreement is over how far to push it. The strong doctrine, the classical form taught by Aquinas, adds the identity thesis: each of God's attributes is identical with his essence (what he is, the nature that makes him God rather than anything else) and with every other attribute, so that his wisdom simply is his power and his power simply is his holiness. That claim protects God's independence from everything outside him, and it pays for the protection in philosophical difficulty. The weak doctrine stops at "never put together." It keeps the attributes distinct and asks how much simplicity can be affirmed without giving any of them up. - Whichever version one holds, Scripture sets the floor. Any doctrine on which God has no genuinely distinct attributes, or on which positive language about him says nothing, fails on biblical grounds before its philosophical problems are even reached. (3) The attribute-words keep their ordinary core meaning when said of God. - When Scripture says God is wise and a wise person is wise, "wise" is not being used in two unrelated senses. If it were, "God is wise" would tell a reader nothing at all, like using one word for a colour and for a temperature: grammatical, and empty. - Nor is the word used in exactly the same way, since God's wisdom is unlimited and ours is not. The core meaning is shared and the degree is maximal. Duns Scotus pressed this point seven centuries ago: unless "wise" keeps some one meaning across its human and divine uses, no reasoning from creatures could reach God at all, and every argument of natural theology would fail at its last step (Ordinatio I, d. 3, pars 1, qq. 1-2). - The strong doctrine does not deny this much. Aquinas held that names like "wise" and "good" are said of God properly rather than as metaphors, and that "wise" and "powerful" are not synonyms when said of him (Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, aa. 3-4). His theory of analogy, the view that a word said of God keeps its human meaning while stretching it, is his account of how far the stretch goes. Whether the stretch goes too far is one of the things the two doctrines argue about (D13). P1 needs only what both grant: the attributes differ in content, and each is truly said of God. Therefore, any acceptable doctrine of simplicity must leave God with many genuinely distinct attributes, each truly and informatively said of him.

(P2) A thing's properties are not parts or constituents out of which it is composed. + Everything in the weak doctrine turns on what a property is. If wisdom, power, and holiness are ingredients God is put together from, the way a wall is put together from bricks, then a God with many attributes is a God made of parts, and this premise says that whatever a property turns out to be, it is not an ingredient of the thing that has it. (1) Philosophers disagree about what, if anything, a property is. - Socrates is wise. Gold is yellow. God is omnipotent. Each sentence has the same shape: a subject, then a predicate, the part that says something about it ("is wise," "is yellow," "is omnipotent"). Saying it is a predication. The question is what has to exist in reality for the predication to be true, and that is an ontological question, ontology being the study of what there is, as opposed to what we merely say or think. - Property realists say a real abstract entity answers to each predicate. An abstract entity exists outside space and time; it has no location, no weight, and no physical features, and it is what a mathematician has in mind who thinks the number 7 would exist even if there were nothing left to count. Wisdom-itself, on this view, is such an entity. Socrates exemplifies it, meaning he is an instance of it, the way a red ball is an instance of redness, and wisdom-itself would exist whether or not anyone had ever been wise. A property many things can share at once is also called a universal. • Some realists go further and make the property a constituent of the thing that has it: a genuine building-block, as bricks are constituents of a wall and hydrogen and oxygen are constituents of water, except that this block sits at the level of being rather than of matter. On that picture Socrates is partly made of his wisdom. - Property anti-realists deny that any such extra entity is needed. A true sentence of the form "a is F" requires the concrete individual a, and nothing called F-ness over and above it. The truthmaker for "gold is yellow," meaning whatever it is in reality that makes the sentence true, is simply gold, being the kind of stuff it is. (2) A predicate describes its subject without adding an entity to the world. - Start with something W. V. Quine noticed in 1948. When you say "Socrates is wise," the words "is wise" do their whole job without your having to believe in a separate thing called wisdom-itself. Reading every predicate as the name of an abstract object, he argued, is a grammatical illusion rather than a metaphysical necessity. That half of his view is exactly what anti-realism needs: a predicate describes, and it does not add an entity to the world. - Quine did not stop there, and here the weak doctrine parts company with him. A criterion of ontological commitment is a rule for reading off, from what a person says, what they have thereby claimed exists. Quine's rule says you are committed to whatever your best theory says "there is." In his famous slogan, to be is to be the value of a bound variable, which is a logician's way of saying that whatever your "there is" sentences range over, you have signed for. • Physics cannot be stated without saying there are numbers, so Quine concluded that numbers exist. By the same rule, a theory that says "there is a property the two apples share" is committed to that property. Taken whole, his criterion is the engine of Platonism (the view, named for Plato's Forms, that abstract objects like numbers and properties really exist), not a way out of it. (3) An ordinary "there is" is not a census of reality. - The way out is neutralism, the view that neither the words "there is" nor a name commits you to the existence of anything. Listen to ordinary speech. There is a way you smile. There is a faster way to get to work than the highway. There is a lack of compassion in the world, and something the two of us have in common, and infinitely many prime numbers. - Nobody who says these things believes they have just added five new residents to reality, and the neutralist says they are right not to. Ordinary "there is" is not a census. So "God is wise" and "wisdom is one of God's attributes" can both be true without wisdom-itself being anything at all. - Neutralism did not begin as a theological convenience. Its roots run back through a century of work in logic and the philosophy of mind that had no interest in the divine attributes, and the charge that it was invented to rescue God is answered on its own ground (D6). - Anti-realism is contested, of course, and property realism is held by serious philosophers on the other side. It is the more direct of two routes to this premise, since if there are no properties there are certainly no property-parts, and it is the route the weak doctrine's own defenders take. The objection that properties plainly exist is answered on its own (D1, D11, D12). (4) Even a property realist can deny that properties are parts of things. - One of the most careful property realists writing today believes there are abstract properties and still holds that they are not constituents of the things that have them. A red apple is related to redness, not built out of it. He offers no analysis of that relation (call it exemplification, instantiation, or having), takes it as basic, and finds the rival talk of properties as constituents of things unintelligible. - This is the relational picture, the opposite of the constituent picture: a thing stands in a relation to its properties, which lie outside it, rather than containing them as parts. Think of it this way: having many properties no more composes a thing than having many admirers does. The admirers are real, you are genuinely related to every one of them, and not one of them is a piece of you. - The Christian has a reason of his own to prefer the anti-realist route. If wisdom-itself existed on its own, uncreated and necessary, God would not be the only uncreated reality, and his aseity, his existing from himself and depending on nothing outside him, would be in question. The realist who takes the relational route owes an answer to that worry from somewhere else (D10); the anti-realist does not. - The simplicity conclusion does not wait on that answer. Whether a reader ends up an anti-realist or a relational realist, nothing in the properties makes God a compound, and that is all this premise claims. Its denial is constituent ontology, the view that a thing's properties are ingredients it is built from, and that view is one camp among three rather than the default. (5) Anti-realism does not make talk about God empty. - You might think: "If there is no wisdom-itself in God, then 'God is wise' is just something we say about him." That is a real position, and it has a name. Theological nominalism holds that the attribute-words are only labels we attach to God, with nothing in him answering to them, so that "God is wise" reports our way of talking rather than anything true of God. It is emphatically not the weak doctrine's position. - The distinction that matters is between "this predication is true" and "this predication commits us to a distinct abstract entity." The anti-realist holds that "God is wise" is genuinely, factually, informatively true. What he denies is the further claim that its truth requires a thing called wisdom-itself, either as a constituent of God or as a separate necessary being alongside him. - Telling a friend that your grandmother was patient, funny, and stubborn gives three real and different pieces of information about one woman, and nobody supposes you have posited three abstract objects she was assembled from. In the same way God can be genuinely and distinctly omniscient, omnipotent, and holy, each predication fully meaningful and adding what the others do not, without any of them naming a separate entity that composes his being. Therefore, having a property is not having a part, and God's many attributes are many true things about one God rather than many pieces of him.

(P3) If properties are not constituents of their bearers, having many distinct attributes does not entail composition. + This premise is the hinge of the argument: once properties are not ingredients, there is no way to get from "many attributes" to "many parts." (1) Without property-ingredients, the classical argument for the identity thesis loses a premise. - The classical argument for the strong doctrine runs in five steps: • God has many attributes. • Those attributes are distinct abstract entities or metaphysical constituents. • If they are distinct from each other and from God, then God is composed of them and depends on them. • Composition and dependence are incompatible with aseity. • Therefore the attributes must all be identical with God and with each other. - The argument is valid. But its second step is constituent ontology applied to God: it treats the attributes as ingredients he is built from. If P2 is right, that step is false and the argument does not go through. - The third step needs the ingredients too. God "depends on" his attributes only if they are something he is made of, or something outside him that does the work of making him what he is. On the anti-realist route there is nothing of either kind. On the relational route the properties do no such work: God is powerful, and power-itself merely answers to the word, so he leans on it for nothing. What the relational realist still owes is not an answer about composition but an answer about whether anything uncreated exists alongside God, which is the aseity question (D10). (2) A truthmaker account shows how the weak view works in practice. - A truthmaker is whatever in reality makes a true statement true (P2). The truthmaker for "the cat is on the mat" is the actual cat in its actual place, and truthmaker theory asks, of each true statement, what must exist for it to be true. - The truthmaker approach to divine simplicity was worked out by a defender of the classical doctrine, who used it to make sense of the traditional identity claims: "God is his wisdom" becomes "God himself, and nothing else, is what makes 'God is wise' true." The weak doctrine borrows the account and declines the identity language, since on anti-realism there is no wisdom-itself for God to be identical with (D13). - So "God is omniscient" is true because of God, "God is omnipotent" is true because of God, and "God is holy" is true because of God. There is no abstract entity for each predicate and no constituent for each attribute. One concrete reality makes all these distinct predications true by being the kind of being he necessarily is. - The distinctions among the attributes are real distinctions in content and meaning. They are distinctions in what is said of God, not divisions in him. (3) What is true of God essentially is made true by God alone. - Many philosophers hold that a creature's contingent features, the ones it could have lacked, need truthmakers beyond the creature itself. One popular candidate is the trope, a particular instance of a property belonging to one individual: the wisdom of Socrates is his own particular wisdom, not wisdom-itself, and it is something he acquired and could lose. Trope theorists count it as a constituent of Socrates while he is wise. A thoroughgoing anti-realist says instead that Socrates, as he now is, makes "Socrates is wise" true and no further item is needed. The weak doctrine can leave that quarrel about creatures open. - God differs from creatures in two respects that settle the matter for him whatever is said about them. For one thing, every one of his essential attributes is necessary: he cannot fail to be omniscient, omnipotent, or holy, so there is no wisdom he acquired and none he could lose. For another, God exists necessarily, so his being the way he necessarily is suffices to make every essential predication about him true, with no intermediate property-instances and no building-blocks. - Whether God also has contingent states, his knowing that Peter exists or his willing this world rather than another, is a further question (D4). A contingent state is neither a separable part nor an ingredient, so the answer either way leaves P4 standing. Therefore, a being with many distinct attributes is composed of nothing on that account, and the argument that drove the tradition to the identity thesis loses the premise it cannot do without.

(P4) God is a spiritual substance with no separable parts and no metaphysical constituents. + This premise is the positive half of the doctrine: what simplicity, in its weak form, asserts about God. A substance is a thing that exists in its own right rather than as a feature of something else, a horse rather than the horse's colour, and God is a substance with no matter in him. (1) Simplicity means non-composition, not attribute-identity. - The weak doctrine does not identify the divine attributes with each other or with the divine essence. It requires only that God not be assembled from separable parts, whether physical or metaphysical. - God is not made of matter. He is not a compound of form and matter in Aristotle's sense, where matter is the stuff and form is what organizes it into this kind of thing, as bronze and a shape make a statue. He has no parts that could be divided from each other and leave him diminished or destroyed by their removal. And given P2, he has no property-constituents either. - Stated as a formula, the weak doctrine reads: "(DS₄) As a spiritual substance, God is not composed of separable parts; neither does he have metaphysical constituents." The label is the one its defenders use, the numeral marking it as one formulation among the several the tradition has produced, and the formula keeps the legitimate core of the historical doctrine without the contested identity thesis. (2) Scripture and aseity together warrant the premise. - Scripture's side is plain. God is spirit (John 4:24), so there is no matter in him to divide. He names himself as the one who simply is (Exodus 3:14), and he is served by no one as though he needed anything (Acts 17:25). Nobody assembled him, and he leans on nothing. - Aseity carries the rest. Think of a house. It depends on its bricks, on its mortar, and on its builder, and take the bricks away and there is no house. Anything with separable parts is like that: it depends on those parts, on their arrangement, and on whatever arranged them. A being who exists from himself, with nothing before him, cannot be a thing of that kind, because there was nothing to supply the parts and no one to assemble them. - The same reasoning bars ingredients at the level of being, if there were any. A God built from wisdom-itself and power-itself would depend on them as prior components, which aseity forbids. P2 says there are no such ingredients in anything; aseity adds that there could be none in God in any case. (3) DS₄ says more than that God is immaterial. - You might think: "Of course God is not made of physical parts. He is a spirit. So DS₄ says nothing." But every clause of DS₄ denies a picture of God that serious theologians have actually held, and a claim that rules out real positions is not a trivial one. - Consider what classical theology said about angels. Aquinas held that even angels, purely spiritual as they are, are composed of essence and existence as distinct metaphysical principles. What an angel is (its essence) is one thing; the bare fact that it exists is another; and so something outside the angel must account for why that nature exists at all rather than remaining merely possible. God alone is not like this. In him, essence and existence are not two items needing something to unite them. God simply is. - The weak doctrine need not adopt that analysis of angels, and it does not claim that simplicity by itself sets God apart from every created spirit. What sets him apart is aseity (P4.2): for every creature, angels included, the question why it exists has an answer outside it, and for God it has none, because there is nothing outside him to give one. DS₄ is what aseity requires at the level of composition. It is the same denial the tradition made when it said God is not compounded of form and matter, of essence and existence, or of substance and accident (an accident being a feature a thing can gain or lose while staying itself, like a tan). - So the doctrine does real work without the identity thesis. It rules out God's being assembled, or depending on anything more fundamental, or having a unity that the separation of parts could threaten. It also explains why his attributes are not separable from him as a creature's are: Socrates can lose his wisdom and keep his strength, and God cannot lose his omniscience while keeping his omnipotence. Joined to the attributes established by the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments, it gives a God who is genuinely one and was never put together, at none of the strong doctrine's metaphysical cost. Therefore, God is a spiritual substance with no separable parts and no metaphysical constituents, which is exactly what the weak doctrine means by calling him simple.

(C1) Therefore, God is simple and yet has many genuinely distinct attributes. + God is simple, God has many genuinely distinct attributes, and there is no contradiction in saying both. The argument is deductive: if the premises hold, the conclusion cannot slip out, and each premise needs only to be more plausible than its denial. P1 gives God many distinct attributes, P2 and P3 keep them from being parts, and P4 says what simplicity then means: no separable parts and no metaphysical constituents. Put together, God is both genuinely many-attributed and genuinely simple. That conclusion fits four things a Christian doctrine of God has to fit, and it has one cost, which is worth stating plainly. (1) Scripture's positive revelation of God stays meaningful. - Scripture says God is omniscient, omnipotent, loving, holy, and just, and expects the words to mean something. The weak doctrine keeps that meaning whole: God's being omniscient is a truth about him genuinely distinct from his being omnipotent, conveyed in words that carry their ordinary meaning at unlimited degree (P1). (2) The Trinity fits without strain. - The strong doctrine has struggled with the Trinity from the start, since three persons who are each identical with one essence ought to be identical with each other. The thinkers most rigorous about the strong doctrine outside the church all concluded that it ruled the Trinity out: Eunomius among the Arians (the fourth-century party that denied the Son's full deity), the Muslim philosopher ibn Sina, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who said that those who confess one God with many attributes "declare the unity with their lips, and assume plurality in their thoughts" (Guide for the Perplexed I.50). - The weak doctrine has no such difficulty. The three persons share one simple, non-composite nature, wholly present in each. Their distinctions are real, not reducible to each other, and require no person to be a metaphysical part of the nature. (3) God's freedom in creation is preserved. - The strong doctrine faces the modal collapse objection, which its defenders dispute. "Modal" concerns what is possible and what is necessary, and the worry is that if God's act of creating is identical with his necessary essence, creation turns out to be necessary rather than free. - The weak doctrine faces no such problem. God is necessarily omnipotent, omniscient, and holy; whether he creates, and what he creates, are contingent matters of his free will, and his creating this universe adds no constituent to his nature. It is a free exercise of the power he necessarily has. (4) The weak doctrine is philosophically leaner. - It needs no constituent ontology and no identity thesis, the claim that has generated centuries of difficulty. On its anti-realist route it carries no Platonic abstract objects either. On the relational route it carries the realist's abstract objects and still no property-parts. - Either way it asks only that God be a spiritual substance with no separable parts, plus the independently motivated denial that properties are ingredients, and it keeps everything theologically essential in divine simplicity (D5). (5) The case rests on the denial of constituent ontology. - Its central moves, that distinct attributes do not entail composition and that God can be the sole truthmaker for every essential predication about him, do not go through if properties are ingredients. A reader who finds that picture more natural, so that a wise thing has wisdom in it the way a wall has bricks in it, will find that the dissolving move of P2 and P3 does not grip. For that reader the strong doctrine's route, which accepts the problem and resolves it through the identity thesis, is the one to weigh. - The two doctrines are less rivals than alternative routes from different starting points, and neither is free of difficulty. The weak doctrine faces the grounding objection, the question of what makes "God is omniscient" and "God is omnipotent" two truths rather than one (D9), and on its anti-realist route it must defend anti-realism on its own merits (D1, D11, D12). The strong doctrine faces modal collapse (C1.3) and the difficulty of reconciling attribute-identity with the personal distinctions of the Trinity (C1.2).