- John West
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Re: The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity
Just to bring out the implications of my previous footnote [3]'s argument a little more:
What makes <God caused the apple to change from green to red> true? Since both God and the apple could have existed without God causing the apple to change from green to red, it's not God, the apple, or the mereological sum of God and the apple. Once again, it's probably a state of affairs God causing the apple to change from green to red.
But then if you make it so that God has no real relations to creation, you've banned him from directly causally interacting with the created world apart from his initial creation of it. (And if you say that God can have real relations to the created world, what principled reason is left for denying that God can have the relations usually used to make knows that propositions true to it?)
It's worth introducing the distinction between internal and external relations. Two or more particulars are internally related if and only if there exist properties of the particulars which logically necessitate that the relation holds. They're externally related if and only if there are no properties of the particulars which logically necessitate that the relation holds.
God's causing something to exist involves an internal relation[1]; all other causation by God involves an external relation. God has to be what ultimately causes something to exist if it exists; he, however, doesn't have to cause it to cause (say) an apple to turn from green to red. In other words, even if God causes an intermediary to indirectly cause the apple to turn from green to red, he still has to directly causally interact with the intermediary (which is part of the created world) and God could have still chosen to not do that. So saying that, despite footnote [3]'s argument, God can still indirectly causally interact with the created world just kicks the problem back a step.
As far as I can tell, this leaves us with three ways that God can interact with creation: (1) by his initial act of creation, (2) by concurring or not concurring with some state of affairs coming into existence or, (3), by concurring or not concurring with something continuing to exist. But surely God can interact with creation in ways other than those three? Surely he can have positive influence on creation apart from the initial act of creation and keeping creatures in existence, not just “not concur” or let them fizzle out of existence.
[1]Though, this may be another one of those weird cases where the relation isn't normally internal.
- John West
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Re: The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity
Having gotten my hands on Miller's A Most Unlikely God (now $441.37 on Amazon) and seen him use some of the same language you use here:
My sense is that it is both here, that the asymmetrical nature of the causal relation is the reason why causal relations can be Cambridge; I think I would not want to say that they must be, for causal relations will not be Cambridge relations when their objects specify the action, as is the case if the student is an object of the professor's deliberation and as is the case when God wills his own goodness. It is possible, if the student furtively left the room, for the professor to lose the property "is teaching the student" without a change on his part; thus that would be a Cambridge change.
I now think we've been talking about entities from two different categories as relations, and so talking past each other.
On the contemporary view of relations (relations), the idea that a has the “causing relation”, R, to b, but b doesn't have the “being caused relation”, R*, to a is absurd. R and R* are just the same relation—a single intermediary between a and b—talked about in two different directions.
But on the medieval view of relations (res respectivae or respectives), relations aren't single intermediaries at all. On it, you can make the truthmaker for the teacher-student example the teacher and the student-having-a-respective-pointing-towards-the-teacher without giving the teacher himself a real respective.
Likewise, you can make God and creatures-with-a-“being-caused”-respective-pointing-towards-God the truthmakers for causal propositions about God without giving God himself a real respective. So if relations are accounted for by respectives, you can avoid my truthmaker arguments[1].
That said, since writing the argument at the bottom of this post, I've come to worry it indicates that using respectives to account for symmetrical relations makes narrowly logical impossibilities possible. (It seems to be included in the very definition of resemblance that it's symmetrical. Yet, the argument shows it possibly nonsymmetrical. This is absurd.)
[1]Though it's worth flagging if Cambridge property replies commit you to a medieval view of relations.
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Thread Starter- Greg
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Re: The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity
John West wrote:
[1]Though it's worth flagging if Cambridge property replies commit you to a medieval view of relations.
Certainly. Miller especially moves between medieval and analytic modes of expression. He has found some very clean ways of pitching Thomist positions on the nature of God, which helps him to flag disagreements with folks like Plantinga in terms more amenable to that debate, but I think there remain questions to be resolved of just how medieval he gets exactly and, of course, whether his position is defensible. Elmar Kremer's book-length treatment of Miller is very good (one probably does not lose anything by skipping Miller's books altogether and adverting to Kremer), but as he admits, he is almost entirely sympathetic and does not focus on critique.
- 884heid
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Re: The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity
This is sometimes called the accidental property objection. Just for fun, one way out of it is to adopt a form of theistic modal concretism.
Just read Michael Almeida's elucidation of theistic Modal Realism. Adopting his view would probably escape your objection but I feel like his position requires, to a certain extent, Plantinga's transworld depravity with a Molinist definition of a feasible world as one that is constrained by the counterfactuals of human freedom. While some might argue that the aforementioned is *catered* to the Molinist but not necessarily required for his argument to pass(which I think his argument actually requires), he still relies mostly on a strict view of bivalence about the possible future, which classical theists (following Aquinas) and non-Molinists might find slightly problematic.
- Etzelnik
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Re: The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity
Well, we need to distinguish 'creation' in two senses:
First creation (emanation, bringing about of being, creation ex nihilo): This refers to the initial giving of being (either temporally or in terms of its "procession"/"emanation"/"giving" from its ultimate source). Plato and classical platonism identify this activity with the form of the Good/the One.
Second creation (formation, crafting, shaping, designing the world): This refers to the arrangement of disorganized being already present into an intelligible, orderly, lawful world. Plato and platonism often identifies this activity with the demiurge and/or the henads. You can assign angels to this role (as Tolkien explicitly does is his cosmology). It is the usual idea people have of God's (or gods') creating the world and is most of the account of creation to be found in Genesis.
Provided that distinction is sufficiently clear the problem doesn't seem solved. Did the One have to emanate this demiurge or could he have emanated another? In your language *this* creator and not another would have to be necessary and I'm not sure that saves real possible worlds- certainly not without introducing a notion of libertarian freedom somewhere.
Do you remember that passage from Nahmanides I showed you in the beginning of Genesis where he divides these two creations between the words ברא and יצר-עשה?
Last edited by Etzelnik (9/30/2016 1:36 pm)
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- 884heid
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Re: The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity
Have any of you guys read this essay on Thomistic Modal Realism? What do you guys think?