A lot has been published recently about divine simplicity, including a book chapter of my own a couple years ago which has played some role in the ongoing discussion. I was once a proponent of divine simplicity, but am no longer. In this brief post, I want to explain what I think is objectionable about this idea.
Briefly stated, the doctrine of divine simplicity conceives of God as pure undifferentiated actuality. This is another way of understanding the more familiar formulas about God as “absolutely simple,” as “identical to his properties,” and so on. It is a way of restating what it means, on the one hand, for God not to be nothing at all and, on the other hand, for there not to be in God any distinction between form and matter, substance and accident, nature and supposit, essence and existence, and so on, as Thomas Aquinas argues (ST 1.3).
God is also supposed to be that in virtue of which everything else exists. If there is anything other than God which exists, then God is the ultimate cause of that thing’s existing. But here a problem arises. If God is pure undifferentiated actuality, then he cannot be otherwise than he actually is. This is because there is in him no mixture of actuality and potentiality, no distinction of ways he actually is and possibilities for being otherwise. Presumably God causes things to exist because of the way he is, just as fire causes water to boil because the way it is, just as the sun melts ice and dries clay because of the way it is (as well as because of the way these things are). Presumably, too, if a thing is to be capable of producing different effects than it actually does, one must hold that it must possibly be different itself. The possibility of a difference in the effect presupposes the possibility of a difference in the cause. From these ideas it follows that if God is the cause of everything else and he cannot be otherwise than he actually is, then nothing can possibly be different than it is, since everything is caused by God in virtue of the way he actually (and necessarily) is. This is called a modal collapse.
I’ve argued that the way out of this problem is for the proponent of divine simplicity to reject the idea that a possible difference in the effect requires a possible difference in the cause. This makes it possible to say both that God could not possibly have been different than he actually is and that all things apart from God could have been different than they actually are, even though God would still be their ultimate cause. But while I think this proposal solves the problem of preserving the contingency of created things, it nevertheless raises other problems that I think are hard to overcome.
Suppose that God could have caused a different world to come into existence than the one that actually did, or perhaps even no world at all. This means that there must not be anything about God in himself that demands or entails the existence of any particular world. Among other things, this entails that God could not want any particular world to exist, since if he did, it would exist, given that he is omnipotent, and it would exist necessarily, since he exists necessarily and would be identical to this wanting of his. Thus, the existence of God, immutable and unchangeable as he is, is equally compatible with the world’s existence or its nonexistence.
What follows from this? I think it follows that it would be strictly speaking false to say that God loves you. That would of course be bad news if one takes Jesus’s words as true: “The Father himself loves you” (John 16:27). But why think that follows?
I think that to love a person means both doing good to a person and wanting to do so as one does it. It is doing good to a person because one wants the other person to benefit from one’s action. But this means loving another person is a matter of being interiorly disposed in a certain way. By “interior disposition,” I mean feeling “pushed” or “pulled” in the direction of a certain course of action. For example, because I love my son, I feel “pulled” in the direction of helping him when I see him crying.
Now, the proponent of divine simplicity can say that God “loves” people in the sense that he does good to people, i.e. he causes things to happen which are good for them. But this is not enough for love stricto sensu because the element of interior disposition is missing. A sudden and unexpected rainstorm can save a village from drought and thus do good to them, i.e. cause something to happen which is good for them, but the rainstorm does not love the village because it did not want to do good to them. In the same way, one person can intentionally cause a chain of events to take place which end up significantly benefiting another person, but so long as the first person did not want to benefit the second by doing what he or she did, so long as the first person did not feel a “push” or a “pull” toward benefiting this other person for his or her own sake, it does not count as an instance of loving.
Now, God cannot have any interior disposition by which he would be pushed or pulled in the direction of causing a particular event to happen. Because he is simple, he would be identical to that disposition and thus the particular event which that disposition would bring about would exist just as necessarily as God himself does. This means that positing the sorts of interior dispositions on the part of God that would make it possible to say that he really loves people would entail positing a connection between the pure undifferentiated actuality of God and this particular world in such a way that leads once more to a modal collapse.
For that reason, I think what the proponent of divine simplicity has to say, if one is speaking strictly, is that God does not “love” people. Rather, he causes things to exist which are good for people, indeed he may even do this as a result of some intentional act on his part, but he does this without wanting to or specifically intending it in particular. It is rather a fortuitous result of the sort of world that God happened to bring into existence as a result of what he does will, although it was equally possible for him to cause a different world to exist as well, or else no world at all, even as he would remain entirely the same across these equally possible scenarios. The essential element of the interior disposition is missing in God’s case, and this is why I think he could not be said to love people stricto sensu.
But Jesus teaches that God loves people. If one is inclined to agree with Jesus, and if one is inclined not to accept an interpretation of this teaching according to which God “loves” in the sense of merely causing things to happen which are good for people, then I think that one also has reason to reject the doctrine of divine simplicity.
Thanks for the post, Steven! Some of these intuitions are similar to the ones I try to elicit in my providential collapse article in Philosophia here 🙂
Divine simplicity would be the same as fundamental universal simplicity, but lesser beings make things seem more complicated than they really are 😉
The thing you identify as essential to love is better characterized as that which is essential to creaturely, imperfect love. Dispositions to love are acquired over time, and they’re imperfect in that they don’t always yield loving acts (otherwise they would be natures, not dispositions). To say that God is love itself or loving by nature is, among other things, to negate that imperfection. God doesn’t just love his creatures because he’s “pulled” in that direction–he loves his creatures as fully as it is possible to love them, without needing to be pulled at all.
The analogies to the rainstorm and indirect causation fail, and for the obvious reason that God knows and wills the good of his creatures. Rainstorms don’t love villages because they don’t know/will their good. A person who indirectly causes good for another does not know and/or will the good caused. But God does know/will the good of whatever he loves–and perfectly so. That’s the CT point. None of this has anything to do with dispositions.
God’s inner life is the same whether you exist or not. That is what the proponents of divine simplicity are required to say to avoid a modal collapse. This means that if there is any sense in which God “loves” you, it is a sense which makes no difference to his inner life at all. This implies that he does not have a specific awareness of you as the actual object of his love (rather than as a possible object). If he did have such an awareness, then he would be identical to it and thus you would exist just as necessarily as he does.
I don’t see why you should call that perfect love. I think it is rather not love at all. I don’t think you can say that God loves you and yet deny that God has any awareness of you in particular as the actual object of his love, that nothing at all about God’s inner life would be any different if you never existed, etc.
I think that if God were perfectly loving, it would not follow that he his love would be free of interior dispositions altogether. Rather, he would be perfectly interiorly disposed to act for another person’s good. The perfection of his love would include this “inner” dimension of the sort that divine simplicity does not allow for without modal collapse.
I think this line of argument assumes that there is no libertarian free will. For the sake of argument, construe love as an act of ‘choosing’ someone. Assuming my act of choosing is free, what I end up choosing makes no difference to the act of choosing while it is happening. For instance, if Essau is chosen instead of Issac or vice versa, the act of choosing itself is the same, but what intentions that act forms in me are what changes. The divergent possibilities and intentions diverge directly downstream of the act of choosing. So If God is an act of choosing, there need be nothing about God himself that would be different if he chose someone else instead of me.
Divine Simplicity and The Myth of Modal Collapse: An Islamic Neoplatonic Response
Full article: https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/416065
I offer four arguments that allow a Muslim Neoplatonist to absorb a modal collapse in a possible worlds modality while negating modal collapse within an Avicennian modality:
As for divine love and whether we are really objects of God’s love or not under Divine Simplicity…
The conception of Divine Simplicity in the Ismaili and Sufi Akbari traditions have offered solutions to this. The solution is that there are degrees of God’s eternal emanation or self-manifestation that eternally proceed from the Absolutely Simple Divine Essence.
1. The Divine Essence is absolutely simple and absolutely unconditioned. This is the God of strong DDS.
2. The First Self-Manifestation, Action, Emanation, or Self-Determination of the Divine Essence is at a secondary level of reality, known as the Most Holy Emanation. At this level, there is not absolute simplicity but there is a Unity that potentially contains diversity. At this level, everything in creation exists as a virtual object of God’s Love and God’s Knowledge. Ibn Arabi refers to these virtual, non-existent objects of divine knowledge as immutable archetypes. This is where each of us is present as a non-existent or virtually existent object of divine knowledge.
3. The Second Self-Manifestation or Holy Emanation proceeds from the First Emanation and is a lower level of manifestation where these immutable archetypes become manifest distinctly – within a Divine Unity with Distinction. This is the level where God’s Attributes are mutually distinct from one another – the God conceived by neo-classical theists. At this level, God’s Knowledge is not identical to God’s Love, etc.
4. This is the level of “Creation” or Manifested Existence where we have spiritual and material creatures.
In this Ismaili / Akbari system, God transcends love at the level of His Essence but at the level of His Self-Manifestations which proceed gradually, divine love is a real action and experienced by creatures.