Why I Left Catholicism

on the devilish complexities of divine simplicity

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

Heyyo! :) If you want to support me—a lowly, lowly student dressed in sackcloth and ashes, tears in my eyes, etc.—consider upgrading your subscription and growing Awol’s Army! I’ll make it well worth your while (wink wink). Now, on with the show…

---

I stopped taking communion when I was seventeen.

I’d been comfortably Catholic for about three years at this point, having converted at fourteen because I thought Catholicism was true/liked its vibe.

I still like its vibe, but no longer think it’s true.

Let me comment on the vibes point. Catholicism is unbelievably awesome. Catholic aesthetics — its art, its music, its sculpture — are simply the bomb; Catholic spirituality is objectively superior to that of many spiritual traditions on offer, and protestants wish they could lay claim to Catholicism’s philosophical heritage. (I took Aquinas as my confirmation name, in honour of the galaxy-brained Angelic Doctor who could dictate multiple books at the same time without a single dose of Ritalin.)

Many leave Catholicism for exactly the reasons you’d expect — they don’t like Catholicism’s sexual prohibitions, pro-lifeness, or what have you, and are justifiably disturbed by clerical pederasty and the Church’s complicity in hiding it.

These weren’t the reason I left: at the time, I was happy to accept the Church’s sexual teachings — even if I couldn’t make sense of all of them¹ — and I knew that Catholicism could be true even if there were paedophiles masquerading as Catholics.

My deconversion route was… less traditional: I noticed an obscure Catholic doctrine of God that Catholics are bound to assent to, thought about it a bit, realised I couldn’t assent to it, and so provisionally stopped being Catholic. (After that, I began thinking I’d probably bought into Christianity too hastily as well, so I took a step back and went agnostic. A year later, or thereabouts, at seven minutes past midnight, I became a theist again, on account of the extremely convincing argument from psychophysical harmony. Now, I’m trying to figure out which religion to wager on. Hinduism does pretty well in my book, but Christianity is still a live option.)

The obscure Catholic doctrine in question was the devilishly complicated doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). According to DDS, as traditionally formulated, all that is in God, is God. More clearly: all that is intrinsic to God — e.g., his omnipotence — is identical to God.

This extends even to God’s act of creation: God’s act of creation, according to DDS, is identical to God himself, as are all of God’s acts. (Indeed, there is ultimately no distinction between God’s acts on DDS — there’s only one divine act, and God is identical to it. God is pure actuality — the act of being itself.)

DDS is hard to get one’s head around. Despite its name, DDS is maybe the least simple thing Catholics believe. If you want to dig deeper, I recommend the wonderful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Divine Simplicity, by

William F. Vallicella

— a defender of DDS. On Substack,

Patrick Flynn

writes well-written things in defence of the doctrine. For a very accessible breakdown, check out this article by Catholic apologist Trent Horn, or this video by Gavin Ortlund, a protestant pastor who accepts DDS.

Needless to say, there are very smart people (very smart people) who defend divine simplicity, and who, if I got into a war of words with them, would eat my lunch for breakfast and clean my clock in the process. I’m just registering why I, personally, have trouble accepting the doctrine. This isn’t an invitation for you to deconvert from Catholicism too. Justification is person-relative; different people have different evidence, and weight their evidence differently — even if it made sense for me to deconvert, given my beliefs and priorities, it doesn’t follow that others should deconvert too. It’s possible to be a reasonable Catholic, and there are many Catholics for whom, given their beliefs, it would be positively irrational to leave the faith over something so pernickety.

Anyway, here’s my main problem with DDS. As Joe Schmid has powerfully argued, DDS faces a dilemma, both horns of which are pretty scary. The first horn is something called “modal collapse”; the second horn is something called “providential collapse”.

Both horns are very spiky.

A theory implies modal collapse if it implies that there’s only one way the world could be. Put differently, a theory implies modal collapse if it implies that every fact about our world is necessary — i.e., you had to read this blog post, the world had to contain exactly x number of molecules, and I had to throw in a subscribe button:

For Christians, modal collapse would be a gnarly result: it implies that Adam had to sin, Jesus had to atone, and God had to create the universe exactly as he did.

Unfortunately, there’s a pretty natural pathway from DDS to modal collapse. Here’s how: traditionally, God is thought to exist necessarily — that is, God couldn’t fail to exist. Every way the world could be includes God. There are no possible worlds in which God is absent. But if God’s act of creation is identical to God, as DDS says it is, and if that means God’s act of creation is necessary, it’s natural to think the creation that results is going to be necessary too. But if the creation that results from God’s act of creation is necessary, then our world, and everything that goes on in it, is necessary also.

Bish, bosh, modal collapse.

You might try to skirt this implication by denying that God exists necessarily. Richard Swinburne, for instance, thinks God only exists in some possible worlds, and I’m moderately sympathetic to this idea. If you think God only exists in some possible worlds — i.e., if you think God could’ve not existed — then you don’t get the implication that everything is necessary. If God hadn’t existed, things could’ve been different.

Unfortunately, DDS is defined in a way that’s meant to just entail divine necessity — indeed, this is supposed to be a key philosophical advantage of affirming DDS. In particular, DDS states that God’s essence (i.e., his essential nature, the thing that makes God what he is) is identical to his existence. This supposedly entails that God is necessary, since he has to exist by dint of his nature.

But even if DDS — understood properly — doesn’t entail divine necessity, the objection morphs into a different one: even if there are multiple possible worlds — some containing God and others not — it still seems like a problem if, conditional on God existing, there’s only one possible shape creation could take. Intuitively, that would undermine God’s providence, since he’d have no leeway over which universe to create, or whether to create one at all.

Which brings me to the dilemma’s second horn. One way — and as far as I can tell, the only way — for DDS proponents to escape the threat of modal collapse is to say that even though God’s act of creation is necessary (because it’s identical with God, and God is necessary), which type of creation springs from God’s creative act isn’t fixed or specified or determined by any intrinsic features of that act. In other words: the DDS proponent could say that there’s nothing in God’s act itself that fixes what type of universe he’ll create, or whether he’ll create one at all.

Problem: this seemingly implies “providential collapse” — i.e., it undermines (collapses!) God’s ability to control whether and what to create. To illustrate, imagine I can snap my fingers, and that, by snapping my fingers, I will cause some amount of money — anywhere from 0 to ∞ dollars — to pop into existence. Suppose there’s nothing intrinsic to the way I snap my fingers that will fix how much money, from 0 and ∞, will pop into being. In that case, it really seems like I’m not in control, not provident, over how much money I get by snapping my fingers.

Plausibly, if you say “nothing intrinsic to God’s act of creation fixes what sort of creation will result”, this destroys God’s providence in a similar way: if nothing intrinsic to God’s creative act fixes or determines, say, how many atoms in the universe, then it seems like there’s an indeterministic or chancy link between God’s creative act and the creation that springs from it. But this looks like a bad result, because it looks like God’s not in control anymore.²

I’m not writing to convince anyone, and I’m certainly not writing to deconvert anyone. If you’re having your faith rocked by the modal collapse/providential collapse dilemma for divine simplicity, don’t listen to me — listen to the real experts. I write instead to the millions of Catholics who have left the faith after reading “From Modal Collapse to Providential Collapse” by Joseph C. Schmid, published in Philosophia³.

I write to say: you are not alone.

1. At the time, I’d read — and been extremely impressed by — Alexander Pruss’s One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics. I’m still in awe of this book; it stands head and shoulders above anything Catholics have produced in defence of traditional views on homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and artificial contraception. I’m more skeptical of Pruss’s arguments than I was then, but a few years ago, I felt they were plausible enough that traditional sexual ethics weren’t off the table completely.

2. Daniel Shields has an interesting response to Schmid’s argument here. I’m not sure I understand it, but insofar as I do, I suspect what Shields says on page 86 is incoherent.

3. When I put this into GPT to check for typos, it said: “This is likely hyperbolic since it implies millions left Catholicism specifically because of this article, which is improbable. Consider rephrasing for accuracy.”