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Simplicity and Properties: A Reply to Morris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William E. Mann
William E. Mann
Affiliation:
University of Vermont
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Extract

The doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no physical or metaphysical complexity whatsoever, is not a doctrine designed to induce immediate philosophical acquiescence. There are severe questions about its coherence. And even if those questions can be answered satisfactorily in favour of the doctrine, there remains the question why anyone should accept it. Thomas V. Morris raises both sorts of questions about a version of the doctrine which I have put forward. In the following pages I shall respond to what I take to be the most serious of Morris's objections. I shall argue that the doctrine survives Morris's onslaught, but that one observation of his points it in a direction I had hitherto not taken seriously. The bulk of Morris's paper raises questions of the first sort; perforce the bulk of my paper will also. I shall offer, at the end, a reason for thinking that neither of us is yet in a position to pronounce categorically on the second question. My remarks in this paper constitute an interim report on how I think things presently stand with divine simplicity.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1986 , pp. 343 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

page 343 note 1 Morris, Thomas V., ‘On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity’, Religious Studies, XXI (1985), 299–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Numbers in the text of the present paper refer to pages of Morris's paper. The papers of mine to which Morris, refers are ‘Divine Simplicity’, Religious Studies, XVIII (1982), 451–71;Google Scholar‘Simplicity and Immutability in God’, International Philosophical Quarterly, XXIII (1983), 267–76;Google Scholar and ‘The Divine Attributes’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XII (1975), 151–9.Google Scholar

page 344 note 1 I See ‘Divine Simplicity’, 465–7.

page 347 note 1 I say ‘almost any’ to exclude on Morris's behalf cases like being non–self–exemplfed, which of course generates the property–theoretic version of Russell's Paradox. Philip Quinn first called this example to my attention.

page 351 note 1 See my ‘Epistemology Supernaturalized’, Faith and Philosophy, II (1985), 436–56.Google Scholar

page 351 note 2 See Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Absolute Simplicity’, Faith and Philosophy, II (1985), 353–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for details about this connection.

page 351 note 3 For further explication of this claim, see ‘Epistemology Supernaturalized’ and my ‘Modality, Morality, and God’ (in preparation).

page 352 note 1 Plantinga, Alvin, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 46–7.Google Scholar

page 353 note 1 See ‘Epistemology Supernaturalized’.

page 353 note 2 See ‘Modality, Morality, and God’.

page 353 note 3 See Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Abraham, Isaac, and Euthyphro: God and the Basis of Morality’, in Stump, Donald V. et al. (eds.), Hamartia: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 27–50;Google Scholar and ‘Modality, Morality, and God’.

page 353 note 4 See ‘Absolute Simplicity’, 376–8.