Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum / The Accidental Property Objection to Divine Simplicity

**Posted by John West** 9/05/2016 1:40 pm

Suppose we live in w, the actual world. We want to affirm that God could have created a different possible world, v. But if God creates w he knows that w is the actual world, and if he creates v he knows that v is the actual world. So it's possible that God could have been different. Simplicity entails immutability. So God isn't absolutely simple.

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.

**Posted by iwpoe** 9/05/2016 2:04 pm

Is there any reason for me to not bite the bullet and take this as a reductio showing that God couldn't have created v?

**Posted by seigneur** 9/05/2016 2:40 pm

That's why on Advaita Vedanta, God and Creator are different. It's understood that Creator cannot be absolutely simple, therefore God is not really Creator. Creation (along with the one who creates) is apparent.

**Posted by iwpoe** 9/05/2016 5:31 pm

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.

**Posted by DanielCC** 9/05/2016 6:08 pm

iwpoe wrote:
Is there any reason for me to not bite the bullet and take this as a reductio showing that God couldn't have created v?

Modal collapse - all truths turn out to be necessery truths. It helps if rather than talking of creation as a making one thinks of it as Leibniz did as God actualising a possible world (and since possibility is arguably related to what God can do God's only being able to actualise one world means that that world alone is possible aka there is only one possible world).

**Posted by iwpoe** 9/05/2016 9:05 pm

Is there a real distinction between the being only one possible world and everything in the world being necessary? It does seem to me that if there's only one possibility then that's the necessary one. Or am I fudging a formal distinction with an informal one?

**Posted by John West** 9/06/2016 9:24 am

iwpoe wrote:
Is there any reason for me to not bite the bullet and take this as a reductio showing that God couldn't have created v?

Surely God could have created one more atom? one more blade of grass? one more hair on Donald Trump's head? If so, God could have created some distinct, non-actual world v.

**Posted by iwpoe** 9/06/2016 8:14 pm

Suppose there is only one possible world. Besides its alleged counter-intuitiveness, what's wrong with it?

**Posted by Due_Kindheartedness** 9/06/2016 11:02 pm

Listen to the central claim of modal concordism: possible worlds actually exist. But then they're not merely possible world's anymore.

**Posted by iwpoe** 9/06/2016 11:13 pm

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:
Listen to the central claim of modal concordism: possible worlds actually exist. But then they're not merely possible worlds anymore.

I agree. That does seem a valid worry.

Let me see if there's a way out. We could make a distinction with respect to the kind of being that they are. You would say that those are actual possible worlds, as opposed to constructs or fantasies or some other unreal way of construing possible worlds. This would be similar to saying that something like platonic forms are formal realities not things in the way that a rock is a rock but not imagined or otherwise unreal entities in the way that say a painting of a rock is.