I think issues pertaining to models of God are among the most underrated difficulties for Catholicism. Catholicism imposes pretty strict constraints on one's model of God against which there are many dozens of arguments. You can't hold various defensible views of foreknowledge, you have to be committed to timelessness (which might force certain controversial views of time), you're bound to accept simplicity, impassibility, immutability, and so on down the list. Each of these has a massive literature with many problems afflicting the target views.
With that said, I do know some Catholics whose views aren't anything like the Thomistic doctrine of divine simplicity. They're nominalists who don't believe in metaphysical parts. They don't think God is numerically identical to his omnipotence, omniscience, aseity, timelessness, etc. ("We're not *that* crazy", they assure me.) They also don't think he is distinct from them, since there is no such thing as God's omnipotence, omniscience, aseity, and so on. (Though, of course, God is omnipotent, a se, omniscient, etc.) So God has no metaphysical parts and is thus simple in important sense. He also doesn't have any physical parts. And they simply deny that different (intrinsic) intentions or beliefs or desires or actions across worlds count as parts. (Some of them are nominalists or adverbialists about these things, too, but others are realists about them who simply deny that they're parts.) So they agree that God has no parts. God is simple. And they don't face any of the challenges from providential collapse, modal collapse, contingent belief/desire/intention, numerically distinct reasons (distinct from each other or from God), and the like. Are these views compatible with Catholicism? I don't know. But that's how they're comfortable accepting divine simplicity without any of the challenges to simplicity I've published on. Of course, there are other challenges to other doctrines (e.g., timelessness) I've written on. But this is how they're comfortable with divine simplicity. And honestly, *this* kind of divine simplicity seems quite defensible to me.
I guess I’m not a nominalist, so I can’t have this — still, that does seem like a better view. (One interpretive worry: it seems like when we’re interpreting church documents, we should care more about the propositions being affirmed, not the wording. Even if a nominalist version of divine simplicity fits with the wording of the Church’s pronouncements, it seems unlikely that that’s the proposition the councils are affirming, given that nominalism wasn’t in the air at the time.)
Well, even non-nominalist proponents of divine simplicity could conceivably say God has distinct properties if they say that distinct properties aren't parts. Properties are parts of particulars only under constituent ontologies, not relational ontologies. So one might try to say God has distinct properties but no parts. (Again, is this compatible with Catholic dogma? I don't know.)
As for what propositions the councils are affirming, I would have to see what the relevant doctrinally binding statements are and in what context they are pronounced. As a proper cradle Catholic, I don't know the relevant Church history concerning doctrinally binding affirmations of divine simplicity. It's at least worth noting, though, that nominalism has been around at least since Abelard in the early 1100s, and many nominalists in the middle ages were prominent Catholic theologians/philosophers (e.g., William of Ockham).
Would other incorporeal beings also be simple, having attributes yet no parts? Could we say the mind is simple in this sense as well, regardless of its cause?
I’m not into DDS, but I don’t think Providential collapse is too thorny. It’s always seemed to me like a Boethian can take the view in stride pretty well and it seems like a stretch to say that God has absolutely no control over creation in an indeterministic system. The range from “0-1” can still be relatively tightly defined
Yes and No. On the one hand, theists who affirm libertarian free will have to accept that God has relinquished some control in order to allow for it. I don't think the Catholic Church has any doctrines about the incompatibility of free will and determinism (though it may have some doctrines that entail it, I'm not sure), but free will is a Catholic ddoctrine, and most Catholic theologians seem to be incompatibilists.
But the problem is that DDS implies that, either modal collapse is true, or God has relinquished all control over his creation, since his creative act is compatible with any possible world existing. But this is also incompatible with Catholic doctrine (and the doctrines of basically anything branch of Christianity).
Well yes but honestly we are talking about religion, about God, and for me at least, logic hasn't got much to do with that. Religion isn't math, or science. Things do not have to make sense in the same way, they are not in the same framework.
It doesn’t — what rules dialetheism out for me is that the impossibility of true contradictions is one of the clearest and most obvious intellectual seemings I have (“the impossibility of true contradictions” isn’t the seeming, but I have intellectual seeming about not-P ruling out P in every possible world that contradict dialetheism about P)
Dialetheism, wow… where was this word my whole life. Thanks. I guess I don’t find it that inconceivable that true contradictions might exist outside the universe… it seems like a feature/limit of logic or its instantiation in our minds that we can’t conceive of extra-logical possibilities. But we can interrogate other aspects of our minds and see their arbitrariness (our emotions, sensory profile, various intuitions etc). Is logic so rock solid that it rules all things in all beings and all possible universes or is it a limit of our faculties of logic that we cannot use logic to interrogate extra-logical possibilities and investigate the validity of logic itself?
I've seen mystics of various flavors take this viewpoint, but the Scholastic project was about making their theology compatible with classical logic and reason. The Eastern Orthodox are much more comfortable with chalking things up to being a Mystery.
Yes, but my understanding is that Catholics aren’t bound to a specific position on this, and I have heard it advocated by priests before. I don’t think it’s a “mystical” or unreasonable position.
Catholic doctrine does hold that faith and reason are never incompatible. That preclude the view that God violates the laws of logic - there could be things about him that aren't discoverable by logic (Catholics hold that there are), but not anything opposed to logic. Also, abandoning the laws of logic is a ridridiculously high cost for any view. As far as I'm concerned, that immediately takes a view off the table if it's committed to the laws of logic being wrong.
It doesn’t preclude the view that God violates the laws of logic. Reason doesn’t dictate that logic must control all things material and immaterial including omnipotent creators of universes and natural laws. This also does not mean the laws of logic are “wrong” any more than laws of physics are wrong because they didn’t hold during the beginning of the universe.
"Reason doesn’t dictate that logic must control all things material and immaterial including omnipotent creators of universes and natural laws."
Reason most certainly *does* dictate this (well, except for the "control" part. Logic doesn't control things - it just delineates the only coherent states of affairs there can even be in the first place). The laws of logic are analytic, meaning they are true simply by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved, not by any external facts about particular objects.
If you're willing to go as far as, "God can violate the laws of logic," then what is even left for, "Faith and reason are never incompatible," to mean? At best, this view would make the doctrine vacuous, since it would imply that reason can say nothing whatsoever about God. But the Catholic Church explicitly denies this - it's also a doctrine that reason can tell us certain things about God. And it certainly goes against Thomistic metaphysics, which DDS is supposed to be based on. Thomistic metaphysics holds that laws of logic like the principle of non-contradiction are absolute, meaning they do apply to God.
"This also does not mean the laws of logic are 'wrong' any more than laws of physics are wrong because they didn’t hold during the beginning of the universe."
If, by "the laws of physics," you mean the laws that physicists know about (as opposed to the unknown true underlying laws), then it's uncontroversial that, yes, these laws technically are "wrong" in the sense that they don't apply to all situations. When physicists say that these laws are true, they mean that they provide a very close approximation to reality in virtually all circumstances we know about, not that they describe reality perfectly. But that's not the case with the laws of logic. When philosophers say that the laws of logic are correct, they don't mean that they work pretty well in a certain limited domain. Any philosopher who said that would not be considered to be in favor of classical logic - theirs would be a revisionary account.
The laws of logic are not analogous to those of physics anyway - the former are necessary and the latter contingent.
And like I said, even if you don't think that allowing God to violate the laws of logic is against Catholic teaching, it's still a massive cost to the theory. If the only way to make a doctrine work is to say, "Well actually, logic doesn't apply here," then the doctrine is just a terrible one that no one should believe. It means that to believe it, you have to reject the necessity and universality of the laws of logic, which is just massively implausible, and it's not even clear why you you would want to in order to defend a proposition - after all, if the laws of logic don't apply to God, then you can't even reason logically about him, so how could you even say that he exists, or that he's simple, let alone that he's simple *and* Thomistic constituent ontology applies to him (it's that last part that actually causes the problems with DDS)? It's also just special pleading.
Lmfao cmon lets not make this torturous with snide nuance trolling. Surely you can see there’s nothing incoherent about what I’ve argued above and the proposition that the logic which binds our universe may not bind all possible universes being compatible with the view “faith and reason are never incompatible”. This isn’t just like saying that logic doesn’t apply to the evolution of species or some other arbitrary area, we’re talking about a region beyond the laws of space and timethat define our existence, and also containing strange and in some sense implausible features like omnipotence and omniscience. If you think logic is this deep truth across all possible worlds and constitutes the meta-logical structure of reason itself, why can’t logic derive its own validity? You basically believe theres an arbitrary illogical hole at the bottom of the structure the governs all possible worlds and all possible beings. That doesn’t sound any more “reasonable” than what I’m arguing. And I’m not Catholic, but Catholics aren’t bound to accept every Thomistic teaching on this either.
At that point we're on a different kind of discussion with different parameters, although if logic is off the table that allows for far more theological interpretations than the Catholics (or anyone!) may be comfortable with. It's a double edged sword.
I think your modal collapse argument falls flat and ergo your providential collapse argument is superfluous. Consider:
God *is* creation, but God isn’t the things he creates. God *is* creation, but he can choose how he exercises creation. So he creates Adam with free will and Adam sins and then God can use his providential judgement to guide the world based on the fact that Adam sins. If Adam doesn’t sin, the world can end up in a different place because God being fixed and God being creation doesn’t imply that God has to create the same thing every time.
When we say “God is Creation” we implicitly have to draw a line between God and the things he creates. God is the potent force of creation, he’s not the material things he creates. He creates Adam with free will and can guide further creation in time in response to Adam’s choice. Look at the statement God is Mercy. God’s exercise of mercy obviously has to change in response to how each and every one of us exercises our free will. If someone never sins (yes, impossible) God doesn’t have to extend his mercy at all. If the same person makes a different choice and sins greatly and repents he has to extend his mercy greatly. But God isn’t somehow different based on how much mercy he has to extend. The same logic should follow with creation, just because God is the raw force of creation doesn’t mean God is somehow different based on if creation differs from one hypothetical universe to another.
Therefore, there is no risk of modal collapse, because God can freely create in response to human free will, Adam didn’t *have* to sin because God would have simply created differently had Adam not. He still would have been creation, just his *creations* would have differed between these universes.
ETA: For clarity, this is not me saying, as you suggest in your providential collapse argument, that "noting intrinsic to God's act of creation fixes what sort of creation will result". I'm saying that God is fully in control of his act of creation, but he is not bound by his unchanging essence into one outcome of creation. I can mold the same clay into a vase or a mug, but I'm still forming the clay and in control of the outcome. Ditto with God. He can choose how and what he creates, but he's fully in control of the outcome of what is created.
There is some of a divine simplicity argument in the Dao de ching and later daoist texts like Wang Bi’s commentary (probably inconsistent with the more specified Catholic doctrine) that simplicity is the barrier to human understanding - simplicity is a minimum perception of something unperceivable, as opposed to a true attribute.
ok i think scotists would have very different sorts of answers as thomists to this sort of question, being voluntarists. but the appropriation of theological terminology by contemporary analytic philosophers in general is often fraught with conceptual difficulties, at least in ethics and moral philosophy which was what i studied. the very term simpliciter plays a crucial role in medieval philosophy that it doesnt in modern philosphy.
Mormonism rejects divine simplicity and some of the other associated classical theism claims. Some of it is compelling and some of it is more puzzling. I’d be happy to send you some Mormon philosophy stuff if you’d like.
BRUH! I read this article a while ago but I didn’t know it was you😂. I’ll spare you the sources, you might know more than me haha. I love this article. Thank you!
“Aquinas Wollen” is cool but Amos is better. Also, given your name, why not try Judaism? Or is the probability of its being true too low for your tastes?
Too bad they don't give take-backs for confirmation names. I sometimes kick myself for not making Thomas my confirmation name, since I was always debating religion with the priests and teachers in my confirmation class: it could cover both the theological interests of Aquinas and the skepticism of the Doubting Thomas. I chose Luke because of Star Wars, which was a rather geeky way of showing how unsure I was of my faith even then.
I *completely* fail to understand the spikiness of these horns from your post.
Why is modal collapse so bad? If your god is EVERYTHING, i.e. if the totality of the universe/all possible universes is god, and thus sort of... intrinsically necessary, it's necessary in ways much different from "god had no freedom to act otherwise, people had no freedom etc etc etc"; it happens on a different level of abstraction/ meta/ whatever you philosopher people call those slices of perspective / pov. This seems to me somewhat similar (tho obviously more sophisticated) to an objection to an omniscient god knowing in advance about the Fall and "allowing" it to happen? Those things happen at a different level? One of the features of Creation is time, for example, but a god proposed by DDS is surely out if time, not just out of in-universe(s) time of Creation but more fundamentally, no so much outside of existing time but with time not being a thing so to speak?
The other collapse seems (again, from the OP) also not problematic, because the given Creation being *unnecessary* doesn't imply it's random or uncontrolled/undesigned?
*** I'm probably closest to an atheist leaning agnostic, and definitely not a Christian, and I have not heard of DDS before but had I heard of it during my youthful searching period, it'd seem like a good argument FOR Christianity, so it seems very interesting to me that this was a reason someone decided to reject Catholicism.
DDS is one of the main reasons why I, a lifelong Protestant who now thinks Sola Scriptura is probably false, haven't converted to Catholicism (yet).
However, I'm beginning to think there is a possible way Catholics could simply grant modal collapse while maintaining divine freedom. One could argue that even if leeway freedom is out of the picture, God's one necessary divine act still maintains sourcehood freedom. Now the question might become, "Why should a Christian accept God still acts freely, even if there's no possible world where God chooses otherwise?" Well, there's this idea literally central to Christian doctrine called the Trinity. From my understanding, no Christian believes the three divine persons could've done otherwise than participate in eternal love. Nonetheless, this doesn't restrict Christians from claiming the three divine persons freely love each other. Hence, just as the Trinity's lack of leeway freedom doesn't disqualify divine freedom, so too God's one necessary divine act shouldn't disqualify divine freedom.
Ultimately, I still acknowledge how weird this view is. While it preserves divine freedom, it's undeniably strange (and probably wrong) to think there's no possible world where my laptop is .005 inches to the left of where it sits now.
Being outside of time and omniscient and allowing free will in one’s creations solves everything youre talking about and the post talked about and seems to be consistent with both logic and scripture. At the same time those all intuitively made sense for me for as long as I can remember so idk maybe it is hard or I’m missing something.
I think issues pertaining to models of God are among the most underrated difficulties for Catholicism. Catholicism imposes pretty strict constraints on one's model of God against which there are many dozens of arguments. You can't hold various defensible views of foreknowledge, you have to be committed to timelessness (which might force certain controversial views of time), you're bound to accept simplicity, impassibility, immutability, and so on down the list. Each of these has a massive literature with many problems afflicting the target views.
With that said, I do know some Catholics whose views aren't anything like the Thomistic doctrine of divine simplicity. They're nominalists who don't believe in metaphysical parts. They don't think God is numerically identical to his omnipotence, omniscience, aseity, timelessness, etc. ("We're not *that* crazy", they assure me.) They also don't think he is distinct from them, since there is no such thing as God's omnipotence, omniscience, aseity, and so on. (Though, of course, God is omnipotent, a se, omniscient, etc.) So God has no metaphysical parts and is thus simple in important sense. He also doesn't have any physical parts. And they simply deny that different (intrinsic) intentions or beliefs or desires or actions across worlds count as parts. (Some of them are nominalists or adverbialists about these things, too, but others are realists about them who simply deny that they're parts.) So they agree that God has no parts. God is simple. And they don't face any of the challenges from providential collapse, modal collapse, contingent belief/desire/intention, numerically distinct reasons (distinct from each other or from God), and the like. Are these views compatible with Catholicism? I don't know. But that's how they're comfortable accepting divine simplicity without any of the challenges to simplicity I've published on. Of course, there are other challenges to other doctrines (e.g., timelessness) I've written on. But this is how they're comfortable with divine simplicity. And honestly, *this* kind of divine simplicity seems quite defensible to me.
I guess I’m not a nominalist, so I can’t have this — still, that does seem like a better view. (One interpretive worry: it seems like when we’re interpreting church documents, we should care more about the propositions being affirmed, not the wording. Even if a nominalist version of divine simplicity fits with the wording of the Church’s pronouncements, it seems unlikely that that’s the proposition the councils are affirming, given that nominalism wasn’t in the air at the time.)
Well, even non-nominalist proponents of divine simplicity could conceivably say God has distinct properties if they say that distinct properties aren't parts. Properties are parts of particulars only under constituent ontologies, not relational ontologies. So one might try to say God has distinct properties but no parts. (Again, is this compatible with Catholic dogma? I don't know.)
As for what propositions the councils are affirming, I would have to see what the relevant doctrinally binding statements are and in what context they are pronounced. As a proper cradle Catholic, I don't know the relevant Church history concerning doctrinally binding affirmations of divine simplicity. It's at least worth noting, though, that nominalism has been around at least since Abelard in the early 1100s, and many nominalists in the middle ages were prominent Catholic theologians/philosophers (e.g., William of Ockham).
Would other incorporeal beings also be simple, having attributes yet no parts? Could we say the mind is simple in this sense as well, regardless of its cause?
Idk, I mean, if that’s allowed why not just allow fornication and swearing
I’m not into DDS, but I don’t think Providential collapse is too thorny. It’s always seemed to me like a Boethian can take the view in stride pretty well and it seems like a stretch to say that God has absolutely no control over creation in an indeterministic system. The range from “0-1” can still be relatively tightly defined
Isn’t it possible that God’s relinquishing of some control over his providence could represent the space he allows for free will?
Seems like he’d be relinquishing all his providence — even the providence he has over whether to relinquish his providence!
Yes and No. On the one hand, theists who affirm libertarian free will have to accept that God has relinquished some control in order to allow for it. I don't think the Catholic Church has any doctrines about the incompatibility of free will and determinism (though it may have some doctrines that entail it, I'm not sure), but free will is a Catholic ddoctrine, and most Catholic theologians seem to be incompatibilists.
But the problem is that DDS implies that, either modal collapse is true, or God has relinquished all control over his creation, since his creative act is compatible with any possible world existing. But this is also incompatible with Catholic doctrine (and the doctrines of basically anything branch of Christianity).
Couldn’t you escape this bind by just taking the view that God’s agency isn’t bound by the laws of logic?
you could, but you can wriggle out of any puzzle that way!
Well yes but honestly we are talking about religion, about God, and for me at least, logic hasn't got much to do with that. Religion isn't math, or science. Things do not have to make sense in the same way, they are not in the same framework.
Very nearly! That doesn’t invalidate it though.
It doesn’t — what rules dialetheism out for me is that the impossibility of true contradictions is one of the clearest and most obvious intellectual seemings I have (“the impossibility of true contradictions” isn’t the seeming, but I have intellectual seeming about not-P ruling out P in every possible world that contradict dialetheism about P)
Dialetheism, wow… where was this word my whole life. Thanks. I guess I don’t find it that inconceivable that true contradictions might exist outside the universe… it seems like a feature/limit of logic or its instantiation in our minds that we can’t conceive of extra-logical possibilities. But we can interrogate other aspects of our minds and see their arbitrariness (our emotions, sensory profile, various intuitions etc). Is logic so rock solid that it rules all things in all beings and all possible universes or is it a limit of our faculties of logic that we cannot use logic to interrogate extra-logical possibilities and investigate the validity of logic itself?
I've seen mystics of various flavors take this viewpoint, but the Scholastic project was about making their theology compatible with classical logic and reason. The Eastern Orthodox are much more comfortable with chalking things up to being a Mystery.
Yes, but my understanding is that Catholics aren’t bound to a specific position on this, and I have heard it advocated by priests before. I don’t think it’s a “mystical” or unreasonable position.
Catholic doctrine does hold that faith and reason are never incompatible. That preclude the view that God violates the laws of logic - there could be things about him that aren't discoverable by logic (Catholics hold that there are), but not anything opposed to logic. Also, abandoning the laws of logic is a ridridiculously high cost for any view. As far as I'm concerned, that immediately takes a view off the table if it's committed to the laws of logic being wrong.
It doesn’t preclude the view that God violates the laws of logic. Reason doesn’t dictate that logic must control all things material and immaterial including omnipotent creators of universes and natural laws. This also does not mean the laws of logic are “wrong” any more than laws of physics are wrong because they didn’t hold during the beginning of the universe.
"Reason doesn’t dictate that logic must control all things material and immaterial including omnipotent creators of universes and natural laws."
Reason most certainly *does* dictate this (well, except for the "control" part. Logic doesn't control things - it just delineates the only coherent states of affairs there can even be in the first place). The laws of logic are analytic, meaning they are true simply by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved, not by any external facts about particular objects.
If you're willing to go as far as, "God can violate the laws of logic," then what is even left for, "Faith and reason are never incompatible," to mean? At best, this view would make the doctrine vacuous, since it would imply that reason can say nothing whatsoever about God. But the Catholic Church explicitly denies this - it's also a doctrine that reason can tell us certain things about God. And it certainly goes against Thomistic metaphysics, which DDS is supposed to be based on. Thomistic metaphysics holds that laws of logic like the principle of non-contradiction are absolute, meaning they do apply to God.
"This also does not mean the laws of logic are 'wrong' any more than laws of physics are wrong because they didn’t hold during the beginning of the universe."
If, by "the laws of physics," you mean the laws that physicists know about (as opposed to the unknown true underlying laws), then it's uncontroversial that, yes, these laws technically are "wrong" in the sense that they don't apply to all situations. When physicists say that these laws are true, they mean that they provide a very close approximation to reality in virtually all circumstances we know about, not that they describe reality perfectly. But that's not the case with the laws of logic. When philosophers say that the laws of logic are correct, they don't mean that they work pretty well in a certain limited domain. Any philosopher who said that would not be considered to be in favor of classical logic - theirs would be a revisionary account.
The laws of logic are not analogous to those of physics anyway - the former are necessary and the latter contingent.
And like I said, even if you don't think that allowing God to violate the laws of logic is against Catholic teaching, it's still a massive cost to the theory. If the only way to make a doctrine work is to say, "Well actually, logic doesn't apply here," then the doctrine is just a terrible one that no one should believe. It means that to believe it, you have to reject the necessity and universality of the laws of logic, which is just massively implausible, and it's not even clear why you you would want to in order to defend a proposition - after all, if the laws of logic don't apply to God, then you can't even reason logically about him, so how could you even say that he exists, or that he's simple, let alone that he's simple *and* Thomistic constituent ontology applies to him (it's that last part that actually causes the problems with DDS)? It's also just special pleading.
Lmfao cmon lets not make this torturous with snide nuance trolling. Surely you can see there’s nothing incoherent about what I’ve argued above and the proposition that the logic which binds our universe may not bind all possible universes being compatible with the view “faith and reason are never incompatible”. This isn’t just like saying that logic doesn’t apply to the evolution of species or some other arbitrary area, we’re talking about a region beyond the laws of space and timethat define our existence, and also containing strange and in some sense implausible features like omnipotence and omniscience. If you think logic is this deep truth across all possible worlds and constitutes the meta-logical structure of reason itself, why can’t logic derive its own validity? You basically believe theres an arbitrary illogical hole at the bottom of the structure the governs all possible worlds and all possible beings. That doesn’t sound any more “reasonable” than what I’m arguing. And I’m not Catholic, but Catholics aren’t bound to accept every Thomistic teaching on this either.
At that point we're on a different kind of discussion with different parameters, although if logic is off the table that allows for far more theological interpretations than the Catholics (or anyone!) may be comfortable with. It's a double edged sword.
I think your modal collapse argument falls flat and ergo your providential collapse argument is superfluous. Consider:
God *is* creation, but God isn’t the things he creates. God *is* creation, but he can choose how he exercises creation. So he creates Adam with free will and Adam sins and then God can use his providential judgement to guide the world based on the fact that Adam sins. If Adam doesn’t sin, the world can end up in a different place because God being fixed and God being creation doesn’t imply that God has to create the same thing every time.
When we say “God is Creation” we implicitly have to draw a line between God and the things he creates. God is the potent force of creation, he’s not the material things he creates. He creates Adam with free will and can guide further creation in time in response to Adam’s choice. Look at the statement God is Mercy. God’s exercise of mercy obviously has to change in response to how each and every one of us exercises our free will. If someone never sins (yes, impossible) God doesn’t have to extend his mercy at all. If the same person makes a different choice and sins greatly and repents he has to extend his mercy greatly. But God isn’t somehow different based on how much mercy he has to extend. The same logic should follow with creation, just because God is the raw force of creation doesn’t mean God is somehow different based on if creation differs from one hypothetical universe to another.
Therefore, there is no risk of modal collapse, because God can freely create in response to human free will, Adam didn’t *have* to sin because God would have simply created differently had Adam not. He still would have been creation, just his *creations* would have differed between these universes.
ETA: For clarity, this is not me saying, as you suggest in your providential collapse argument, that "noting intrinsic to God's act of creation fixes what sort of creation will result". I'm saying that God is fully in control of his act of creation, but he is not bound by his unchanging essence into one outcome of creation. I can mold the same clay into a vase or a mug, but I'm still forming the clay and in control of the outcome. Ditto with God. He can choose how and what he creates, but he's fully in control of the outcome of what is created.
Love DDS.
But loved the last two sentences and the 3rd footnote too much to not violate my own conscience and like this post.
Well played, sir.
I just wanted to express my agreement; Pruss's defense of Christian sexual ethics is impressive.
There is some of a divine simplicity argument in the Dao de ching and later daoist texts like Wang Bi’s commentary (probably inconsistent with the more specified Catholic doctrine) that simplicity is the barrier to human understanding - simplicity is a minimum perception of something unperceivable, as opposed to a true attribute.
great post. made me want to read and think more about this. have you consulted neoscholastic sources? or scotists ones?
No primary sources or history of philosophy—only the modern stuff
ok i think scotists would have very different sorts of answers as thomists to this sort of question, being voluntarists. but the appropriation of theological terminology by contemporary analytic philosophers in general is often fraught with conceptual difficulties, at least in ethics and moral philosophy which was what i studied. the very term simpliciter plays a crucial role in medieval philosophy that it doesnt in modern philosphy.
This was interesting. Thanks for writing.
Mormonism rejects divine simplicity and some of the other associated classical theism claims. Some of it is compelling and some of it is more puzzling. I’d be happy to send you some Mormon philosophy stuff if you’d like.
Feel free! (You might like this post from a while back about pre-existence https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/god-and-deontology?r=2248ub&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
BRUH! I read this article a while ago but I didn’t know it was you😂. I’ll spare you the sources, you might know more than me haha. I love this article. Thank you!
My hot take is Pruss' book _One Body_ is his most important work
Probably tbh
“Aquinas Wollen” is cool but Amos is better. Also, given your name, why not try Judaism? Or is the probability of its being true too low for your tastes?
I took it as a middle name, so it’s Amos *Aquinas* Wollen to you!
Judaism is cool, but yeah, P|✡️ is too low for my tastes
Too bad they don't give take-backs for confirmation names. I sometimes kick myself for not making Thomas my confirmation name, since I was always debating religion with the priests and teachers in my confirmation class: it could cover both the theological interests of Aquinas and the skepticism of the Doubting Thomas. I chose Luke because of Star Wars, which was a rather geeky way of showing how unsure I was of my faith even then.
I *completely* fail to understand the spikiness of these horns from your post.
Why is modal collapse so bad? If your god is EVERYTHING, i.e. if the totality of the universe/all possible universes is god, and thus sort of... intrinsically necessary, it's necessary in ways much different from "god had no freedom to act otherwise, people had no freedom etc etc etc"; it happens on a different level of abstraction/ meta/ whatever you philosopher people call those slices of perspective / pov. This seems to me somewhat similar (tho obviously more sophisticated) to an objection to an omniscient god knowing in advance about the Fall and "allowing" it to happen? Those things happen at a different level? One of the features of Creation is time, for example, but a god proposed by DDS is surely out if time, not just out of in-universe(s) time of Creation but more fundamentally, no so much outside of existing time but with time not being a thing so to speak?
The other collapse seems (again, from the OP) also not problematic, because the given Creation being *unnecessary* doesn't imply it's random or uncontrolled/undesigned?
*** I'm probably closest to an atheist leaning agnostic, and definitely not a Christian, and I have not heard of DDS before but had I heard of it during my youthful searching period, it'd seem like a good argument FOR Christianity, so it seems very interesting to me that this was a reason someone decided to reject Catholicism.
DDS is one of the main reasons why I, a lifelong Protestant who now thinks Sola Scriptura is probably false, haven't converted to Catholicism (yet).
However, I'm beginning to think there is a possible way Catholics could simply grant modal collapse while maintaining divine freedom. One could argue that even if leeway freedom is out of the picture, God's one necessary divine act still maintains sourcehood freedom. Now the question might become, "Why should a Christian accept God still acts freely, even if there's no possible world where God chooses otherwise?" Well, there's this idea literally central to Christian doctrine called the Trinity. From my understanding, no Christian believes the three divine persons could've done otherwise than participate in eternal love. Nonetheless, this doesn't restrict Christians from claiming the three divine persons freely love each other. Hence, just as the Trinity's lack of leeway freedom doesn't disqualify divine freedom, so too God's one necessary divine act shouldn't disqualify divine freedom.
Ultimately, I still acknowledge how weird this view is. While it preserves divine freedom, it's undeniably strange (and probably wrong) to think there's no possible world where my laptop is .005 inches to the left of where it sits now.
Being outside of time and omniscient and allowing free will in one’s creations solves everything youre talking about and the post talked about and seems to be consistent with both logic and scripture. At the same time those all intuitively made sense for me for as long as I can remember so idk maybe it is hard or I’m missing something.
This is about 40% of why I didn't convert to Catholicism, hilariously enough. Still very much like the vibe though. Ergo Anglicanism.
Read and dwell upon The New Testament.