Armchair Christianity: The Exalted Trinity

on deriving truinity from first principles

Note: the “t” on my keyboard is semi-broken, so please forgive, I beg, any ypos ha unforunaly resul.

One of my pet interests in philosophical theology is the extremely motivated project of trying derive the truth of trinitarianism from the armchair, without appeal to scripture, tradition, or history.

A while back, a paper made the rounds on X-formerly-Twitter which argued that you could derive the doctrine of the trinity from the prior claim — widely endorsed among theists — that God has all great-making properties.

In particular, the paper argued that ‘being exalted’ is a great-making property, and for God to have always had this property, there must be at least three divine persons: one to be exalted, one to do the exalting, and one to sit back and watch, because exaltation needs an audience.

I have finally gotten around to reading the paper, and offer my nine objections below the paywall of Awol.

Before that: why should anyone care about these sorts of arguments? My answer is that if you’re interested in thinking about what the best probabilistic case for Christianity might look like, you’re going to want to say something about its prior probability (that is, he probability of Christianity prior to looking at the evidence for it). This is because the likelier Christianity is in advance of looking at the evidence, the less heavy lifting said evidence needs to do.

Thus, if your read on the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is that it’s decent but not that strong, an a priori argument that, e.g., we should expect God to become incarnate, die for our sins, and be a Trinity of co-equal co-eternal persons might still be enough to render Christianity highly probable overall. As the Jewish philosopher Samuel Lebens puts it, “[i]f you’re half-expecting God to become incarnate at some point, then that’s going to alter what you take to be likely and what you take to be unlikely.”¹

What goes for the incarnation goes for the Trinity, too. If you were half-expecting God to be a Trinity, then it’s not so ideologically costly to adopt a trinitarian worldview. And if you were strongly expecting God to be a Trinity, then you should lend much more credence to the one religion that teaches trinitarianism. (Conversely, if the prior probability you assign a three-person’d God is equal to the prior you assign to a 278-person’d God or a 768357397-person’d God, then that is bad news for Christianity.)

I while I don’t find Moore’s exaltation argument convincing, I do think it’s a valuable paper, since the first half of it is devoted to dredging up a rich goldmine of a priori arguments for trinitarianism that Christians have offered over the centuries, from Augustine to Scotus to the Cappadocian fathers. Even if Moore’s strategy doesn’t work, one of the historical arguments he lists might turn out to be rescuable.

Here is Moore’s argument, as he sets it out in the paper:

1. ‘Being exalted’ is a great-making property

2. A divine individual must possess all great-making properties

3. A divine individual must possess the property ‘being exalted’ {1, 2}

4. Only another divine individual could exalt the first divine individual

5. There are at least two divine individuals {4}

6. Exaltation requires third-party recognition

7. The exaltation must be recognised by a third divine individual

8. There are three divine individuals {5, 7}²

My worries for Moore are as follows: