Today, I’m going to start looking at chapter 5 of Dr. Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. I thought I’d begin with Feser’s take on Divine foreknowledge and free will. To cut a long story short: Feser is a predestinationist who professes at the same time to believe that humans possess genuine free will. In order to reconcile these beliefs, he proposes an analogy which at first seems plausible, but which ultimately collapses because it completely ignores our personal relationship with our Creator. To make matters worse, Feser holds that God knows everything that happens in this world, non-propositionally. He proposes another analogy to explain how this might be, but at most, it merely explains how God might know creatures; it fails to explain how He knows what they get up to. I conclude that not only is Feser’s account of God’s foreknowledge incoherent, but his account of how God knows any fact whatsoever about the world is also unintelligible.
This will be a much shorter post than my last one, so there’s no need to crack open a beer (at least, not yet). I’ll explain the picture of Mia Farrow shortly.
Divine foreknowledge and human freedom
Let’s begin with Feser’s predestinationism. To be sure, Feser never uses the word “predestination” in his book, but that is precisely what he believes: he hold that God decides everything that happens in this world. As Feser puts it, “he knows everything – including the present and the future – precisely by virtue of being its cause” (2017, p. 214) and he also compares God’s knowledge to “an author’s knowledge of the characters and events of the story he has come up with” (2017, p. 212). As Feser explains:
Now, the way an author knows these characters and events [in his story] is not by observing them. It is not a kind of perceptual knowledge. Rather, the author knows them by knowing himself, by virtue of knowing his own thoughts and intentions as an author. And that is precisely the way in which God knows the world. … [I]t is in a single, timeless act that God causes to exist everything that has been and will be. And it is in knowing himself as so acting that God knows everything that is, has been and will be. His knowledge of the world is a consequence of his self-knowledge. (2017, p. 212)
This analogy invites the obvious objection that if God knows everything that happens in the world by causing it to happen, then human beings cannot be said to have free will. Feser has a ready answer: just as the characters in an author’s story can be said to act freely, so too can the human characters in God’s story. In his own words:
Consider once again the analogy with the author of a story. Suppose it is a crime novel and that one of the characters carefully plots the murder of another, for financial gain. We would naturally say that he commits the murder of his own free will, and is therefore justly punished after being caught at the end of the novel. It would be silly to say: “Well, he didn’t really commit the murder of his own free will. For he committed it only because the author wrote the story that way.” The author’s writing the story the way he did is not inconsistent with the character’s having freely committed the murder.… It is perfectly coherent to say that the author wrote a story in which someone freely chooses to commit a murder.
Similarly, it is perfectly coherent to say that God causes a world to exist in which someone freely chooses to commit a murder, or to carry out some other act. God’s causal action is no more inconsistent with our having free will than the author’s action is inconsistent with his characters’ having free will… The author’s causal relation to the story is radically unlike the relations the characters in the story have to each other, and God’s causal relation to the world is radically unlike the relation we and other elements of the world have to each other. (2017, pp. 214-215)
Which brings us to Mia Farrow, who played the part of Jacqueline in the movie Death on the Nile, which was based on Agatha Christie's book of the same title. As most of my readers will be aware, in the book, Jacqueline de Bellefort and her fiancé, Simon Doyle, plot the death of wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway, coming up with a very clever scheme which they nearly get away with. Only at the end of the story does detective Hercule Poirot uncover the truth, at which point Jacqueline finally confesses before embracing Simon, and then shooting him in the head before killing herself.
I don’t imagine any of Agatha Christie’s readers felt terribly sorry for Jacqueline de Bellefort or her fiancé, Simon Doyle. But if someone were to use the characters in her novel, Death on the Nile, in an attempt to explain how God’s causing human choices is perfectly compatible with human free will, then I would have to point out three massive disanalogies:
(i) in crime novels, it’s one of the characters (an officer of the law) who catches up with the criminal and brings them to justice. Moreover, it is only the characters in the story (not the author) who blame the murderer for his/her actions, and denounce him/her as an evil person when they discover the truth. But in our case, it isn’t human characters who ultimately punish sinners (many of whom end up getting away with their crimes on Earth), but God, the author of the human drama. [For instance, many Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that God publicly pronounces sentence on sinners, on Judgment Day.] And unlike a crime novel, it isn’t just other human beings who blame and accuse these sinners: rather, it is God who says, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41), and who berates the servant in the Parable of the Talents who buried his talent in a hole in the ground as a “wicked, lazy servant” (Matthew 25:26). That would be like Agatha Christie punishing Jacqueline de Bellefort, instead of Hercule Poirot, and telling her off for being a wicked, wicked woman. I’m sure my readers can readily see that it makes no sense for an author to personally blame one of their own characters for his/her misdeeds. And if God’s relationship to us is like that of an author to a character in his story, then by the same token, it makes no sense for God to blame us for our misdeeds, even if other people do;
(ii) in crime novels, the characters are not even aware that they are characters created by an author, and of course, they make no attempt to communicate with the author. Many human beings, on the other hand, are very much aware that they have a Divine Author, and some of them even communicate with Him daily, in prayer, believing that they have a religious duty to do so, since He is their Creator;
(iii) in crime novels, the characters are incapable of defying the will of the author: they simply do whatever the author wishes them to do. By contrast, human beings are perfectly capable of defying the will of their Divine Author: it’s called sin.
But the irony is that Feser himself pointed out what was wrong with his own analogy in a 2011 post, titled, Are you for real?:
All the same, the world is not literally a mere story and we are not literally fictional characters…
…[P]recisely because the characters [in a story] do not exist but are purely fictional, they are not true causes the way real things are. Everything they seem to do is really done by their author: We say that Spider-Man punched out the guy who shot his uncle, but all that happened in the real world is that Steve Ditko (in collaboration with writer Stan Lee) first drew a panel in which Spider-Man punches the guy and then drew a panel in which the guy is unconscious. Strictly speaking, Spider-Man didn’t do anything, because there is no Spider-Man.
Well, if Spider-Man didn’t do anything, then he didn’t choose anything either – and neither did the bad guys he pursued in the comics that bear his name. And in that case, the guy who shot Spider-Man’s uncle did not “commit the murder of his own free will” (as Feser suggests in his analogy above) because he didn’t really murder anyone. It is therefore a mystery to me why Feser declares in the same post that he thinks the storybook analogy is “useful for helping us to understand why divine causality is not incompatible with human freedom.” Really?
I conclude that Feser’s reconciliation of Divine causation of human choices (or predestination) with human free will is radically flawed. The analogy he invokes is faulty, in three fundamental ways.
Finally, here’s a little thought experiment. Suppose that after you die, you find yourself confronting a Being who reproaches you for the bad choices you made while on Earth, and says He’s going to punish you for them – and then proceeds to tell you that He caused you to make those choices! What would your reaction be? Probably an unprintable one, I imagine.
OK, now it’s time to treat yourself to a beer – and some cookies, too. Why cookies? See below.
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(A tip for anyone thinking of visiting Australia: VB [image courtesy of Wikipedia] isn’t our best beer. Cascade Premium Lager is, IMHO. Boag’s Brewery in Launceston, Tasmania, makes some pretty good beer, too.)
God’s knowledge of what goes on in the world
But Feser isn’t finished yet. In his section on omniscience, in chapter 5 of his book, he goes on to explain that it would be an anthropomorphic mistake to think of God as having multiple concepts in his Mind, or entertaining various propositions. This, we are told, would conflict with the doctrine of Divine simplicity (defended by classical theists of all stripes), which means that God is totally and utterly devoid of parts: He doesn’t even have any real properties, let alone the mental property of believing a certain proposition (e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK) to be true.
So how does God know what we’re up to? Does He perhaps have a single super-proposition in His Mind, which is a conjunction of all true statements? That won’t work, either: as Feser points out, the super-proposition “will itself have component parts,” contradicting Divine simplicity. Instead, Feser proposes two more analogies of his own:
A better, though still imperfect, way to understand the nature of God’s knowledge would be to think in terms of analogies like the following. From a beam of white, various beams of colored light can be derived by passing it through a prism. Though the colors are not separated out until the beam reaches the prism, they are still in the white light in a unified way. From a lump of dough, cookies of various shapes can be derived by means of cookie cutters. Though the various cookies with their particular shapes are not separated out until the cutters are applied to the dough, they are still on the uncut dough virtually. Now, God is pure actuality, whereas every kind of created thing represents a different way in which actuality might be limited by potentiality. That is to say, each created thing is comparable to one of the specific colors that might be derived from the white light that contains all of them, or is like one of the many cookie shapes which might be derived from the dough which contains all of them. God’s creation of the world is thus like the passing of white light through a prism or the application of the cutters to the dough. The prism draws out, from the color spectrum which is contained in a unified way in the white light, a particular beam of this color and a particular beam of that color, and the cutters draw out, from the variety of possible cookies contained in a unified way in the lump of dough, a cookie of this particular shape and a cookie of that particular shape. Similarly, creation involves drawing out, from the unlimited actuality that is God, various limited ways of being actual.…
Now, just as if you knew the white light perfectly, you would know all the colors which could be derived from it, and if you knew the lump of dough perfectly, you would know all the shapes which might be carved out of it, so too, perfectly to know that which is pure actuality would entail knowing all the various limited ways of being actual which might be derived from it. And that is how God knows all of the various kinds of finitely actual things which exist or might exist – by virtue of perfectly knowing himself as that which is pure or unlimited actuality. (2017, pp. 215-216)
Now, Feser is very careful to point out that the foregoing illustration is just an analogy, and a highly imperfect one at that: for example, “created things are not made out of God in the way cookies are made out of dough” (2017, p. 216). But theological errors of this sort do not concern me greatly. When using an analogy, there is one and only one thing I expect it to do well: represent accurately the specific state of affairs which it’s meant to be an analogy of. If it can explain that one little thing which it’s meant to shed light on, then I’ll forgive whatever additional deficiencies it might possess.
In this case, the “one little thing” that I’m asking Feser’s twin analogies to shed light on is God’s ability to know everything that happens in the world, without knowing it propositionally (as that, according to Feser, is precluded by God’s simplicity). At the very best, Feser’s analogies relating to light and cookies only serve to explain how God could know what might happen, in a simple fashion. But in the light illustration, we need to know about the size, shape and positioning of the prism, if we wish to know what color of light can actually be seen. And if we want to know what kinds of cookies are actually made by the chef, we need to know which cutters he is using. Nothing in the nature of light or dough will tell us anything about the actual choice of colors or cookies that was made. And likewise, nothing in the nature of God as unlimited actuality will tell us (or Him) about what actually happens in the real world.
“But surely God could know what happens, simply by knowing His own choices when creating the world and all that is in it?” I hear you suggest. Indeed he could – assuming for the moment (as Feser does) that God knows what happens in the world by causing it to happen. But here’s the thing: just as the size, shape and positioning of the prism (which determines what color light we actually see) is something complex, and just as the shapes of the various cutters (which determine what cookies we actually eat) are also complex, so too, the specific choices God makes when causing the world to be in its present form are complex, not simple: “Yes, I want lions in my world; no, I don’t want unicorns; yes, I decree that Lee Harvey Oswald will kill JFK and thereby change the course of American history; no, he won’t kill Jackie or Governor Connally.” And so on. The whole point of Feser’s light and cookie analogies was to explain how God could know about these events without in any way compromising His simplicity. But it is precisely on this point that the analogies fail.
Let us recall Feser’s earlier remark that God knows the world “by virtue of knowing his own thoughts and intentions as an author.” I respectfully submit that it would be impossible for anyone (God included) to make a warts-and-all world like ours with a single, simple thought.
Until and unless someone can suggest a better analogy than Feser’s light and cookie analogies, I am forced to conclude that the notion that God could have simple, non-propositional knowledge of earthly affairs is a nonsensical one, just as I am forced to reject Feser’s reconciliation of God’s causing our choices with our making them freely.
Time for another beer, I’d say. What do readers think? Over to you.
Welcome to Christianity!
🙂 🤓
Again, thanks, Vince.
Why is it thought important that God be simple in the radical way(s) suggested by Feser here?
And from your other thread on the book, I’m curious about this purported value of ‘simplicity’:
Why should we believe that if something is ‘simple and non-composite’ it doesn’t need to be ‘explained’ in the sense of having its existence accounted for? Suppose a perfectly simple instantaneous, partless, teensy atom, e.g. Doesn’t it make sense ask for its ‘explanation’?
Thanks.
VJ,
Just as a heads up, for logistical reasons I may not be posting here that much at TSZ anymore even though I really love this place a lot — almost too much.
But I will offer a comment fwiw to contribute to your discussion. I think using modern language, we could say humans have degrees of freedom, but not complete choice. For example, we didn’t chose our parents or our gender or so many other things about our lives that seemed foreordained.
From the physics standpoint, we are strangely confronted with analogous problems. We can impose a pre destination on quantum particles in the past by our decisions in the present. That is, in modern physics, rather than the past being a cause for the future, the future is the cause of the past. This may seem strange from our perspective, but it is perfectly natural in some formulations of physics and it had relevance to quantum computing. See for example:
http://www.meta-religion.com/Physics/Quantum_physics/quantum_philosophy.htm
Additionally, the quantum particle has some in predictability that is like free will within certain bounds. I see sort of the same thing in mathematics that deals with infinite (transfinite) concepts where there are not yes/no answers but degrees of freedom where a simple yes/no answer is a matter of choice and perception, not some pre-determined outcome that we are so used to in the finite realm where 1+1 =2. In the realm of infinite/transfinite math, it’s not so straight forward, which makes creativity a beautiful and sublime thing that emerges from infinite mathematical realms.
I point this out to say, some of the classical theology is a bit obsolete in the way we actually conceptualize material reality and mathematical “reality”, and these “realites” provides many of the metaphors and analogies we use to describe theological ideas. Thus, it’s helpful to perhaps expand the suite of metaphors we can apply to the questions you are looking into.
So, I don’t have answers to the questions you posed, but I hope those are some useful data points.
quote:
Rather, the author knows them by knowing himself, by virtue of knowing his own thoughts and intentions as an author. And that is precisely the way in which God knows the world. …
end quote:
That is pretty close to my own understanding of God’s knowledge.
As far as the supposed problems with the analogy because literary characters don’t interact with the author.
Christianity is unique in that God is not only the author of the story but the central character as well. It’s in his role as Christ that God judges sinners not as an author outside of the story.
quote:
The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,
(Joh 5:22)
end quote:
I know some folks bristle at a God with that kind of sovereignty but it fills me with awe and makes me want to worship..
quote:
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
(Rom 11:33-36)
end quote:
peace
You forgot the “essentially existent” part.
peace
Moved a post to guano.
Can science literacy here survive the loss?
Glen Davidson
There might be another route to Feser’s conclusions (though with unintended consequences?).
Kant suggests that the way in which we know the world is through “discursive understanding,” which is merely formal. It’s propositionally structured and requires a source of content from outside itself, which is supplied by sensible intuition. We have immediate representations of particulars (which is what K means by “intuition”) by way of sensory contact with them (which is why it’s sensible intuition). Both can be contrasted with intuitive understanding or (what is the same thing) intellectual intuition. Divine understanding is like that: it’s not mediated by concepts (generals) but it involves directly apprehending the Leibnizian complete idea of each particular thing in its infinite complexity.
(One can see Kant as arguing in effect that Hume was right about us but Leibniz was right about God.)
But our belief in free will is itself propositionally structured: it takes the form of counterfactual propositions. E.g. “if I had given in to temptation and eaten the last cookie, I would have regretted it”; “if I had cut that person off in traffic I would have made her angry and resentful”, etc.
Divine understanding, being an immediate apprehension of the infinite complexity of each and all individuals, doesn’t need concepts. Only we do. One might say that God doesn’t need concepts because He knows the names of each and every thing. (One might compare this idea with speculation about Adam’s language before the Fall.)
So the reason why divine understanding of each individual at every moment in the totality of space and time doesn’t conflict with our belief in free will is that they aren’t even in the same box.
This does have the consequence of making God even more remote, mysterious, and unknowable. This is not a problem for the mystics, but it may cause trouble for theologians.
This is an important insight.
The remote becomes intimate
The mysterious becomes intelligible
The unknowable makes itself known
In the incarnation
quote:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.
(Joh 1:14a)
and
Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”
(Joh 11:40)
end quote:
Amen and amen
peace
Not so simple anymore then. These characteristics don’t even entail eachother.
Incidentally, your particular version of God is the least simple of any of them–this side of Vishnu at least.
As Feser puts it, “he knows everything – including the present and the future”
Does god know when a particular atom of Uranium will decay ?
… this atom here will decay at 2:35 PM tomorrow.
Are us heathens expected to take this seriously ?
It doesn’t matter if God knows, as long as he doesn’t do anything with that knowledge.
It’s okay to seriously laugh.
So Kant was a Molinist re: free will then?
If by “These characteristics” you mean God’s attributes then sure they do once you understand them properly
I would vehemently disagree and say that simplicity is a key doctrine in properly understanding the Christian God.
Simplicity is what makes it possible to say things like God is truth and God is love and not mean them metaphorically.
peace
God knows everything that can be known simply because he is the cause of everything that exists. The event described as the decay of a particular atom of Uranium was foreordained by God from the foundation of the world.
quote:
“If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.”
end quote:
R.C. Sproul
peace
I think that Feser and many other theologians (and indeed, many philosophers) begin with root world-view assumptions which they then try to support by reverse-engineering a favorable argument. The better route would be to begin with an agnostic perspective and self-evident truths and follow those – logically – wherever they lead.
Most of these issues are relatively simple to clean up if one can honestly follow the logic wherever it leads without trying to direct the process towards a desired outcome.
Is a root-level, uncaused cause of actualized existence necessary? Yes. If there is “someplace else” for that entity to cause things to happen, where is it located? Where did it come from? What is it made of? Everything is necessarily “made of God” and occurs within God – there’s nothing else and nowhere else.
How can such a being “choose” what to create? There is no means by which to choose, no framework that could inform such choices. Since things actually exist, creation exists; since God (as its whole self) has no framework for “choice” or even “self-identity”, God as its whole self cannot have free will, because there is no context for it – free will requires context.
Is God as its whole self even conscious? It can’t be – at least not in the way we understand consciousness. It’s not an individual with a context that would provide a means of being conscious. It cannot have individual thoughts, because what would those thoughts be about? Thoughts require individuation, separate forms.
How is it then that we have free will and individuality? I suggest we go then to Feser’s analogy – we have individuality and free will because we have individual identities – individual colors, or shapes in the dough (without the shapes being cut all the way through the dough). The individual is still god, just experiencing as a kind of “illusionary” separated self. This provides the context necessary for free will – self and other.
This brings us back to: how did God make the choice of what to create and what not to create as cookie-dough impressions? The simple answer lies outside of the box most want to argue themselves into: God didn’t choose because God (as its whole self) cannot make choices; God created everything that could possibly exist. Everything.
But even then, the term “created” implies that God existed “before” creation and “chose” to create it, neither of which can be true. God is not a temporal entity; the existence of time relies upon fabrications in the cookie dough and an individual perceiving itself moving through those permutations. Everything existing is the eternal nature of what God is, and what we individually experience is just our particular perception of what we can experience of what is around us (so to speak) from our particular cookie-dough shape location.
That may not be a conclusion many would like, and of course I’m not providing all the argument or the model in full, but I don’t really see any viable alternative. Either we are all aspects of God in an eternal manifest creation in God where everything that can exist does exist, or else we’re going to run into various logical issues about the nature of God, existence, individuality and free will.
List them.
But you’ve stated on many occasions that most people (me, for one) don’t have free will.
There’s no viable alternative to nonsense that you’ve just made up?
It seems to me that all theists have ever done is run into those logical issues. Take this thread as exhibit one for example. None of you can agree, none of you have come to any conclusions that you can build upon for the next round.
You’ve just demonstrated neatly that your god does not exist. Given there are undeniably logical issues regarding the nature of god, existence and free will then we’re in the second of your clauses – the “or” clause where god does not exist.
Ironic much?
So I guess your god is another one of those non-player-character robots that don’t have free will which you think make up the world, who exist for your benefit alone.
Hubris much?
If we were sitting on a porch I would want to explore what you mean by “aspects of God”. But I find this to be interesting
I think that we should start with God’s own self-revelation.
To start anywhere else is like trying to reach heaven by stacking bricks. It’s definitely not going to succeed but might lead to some hefty mistaken arrogance.
peace
OMagain, OMagain, jiggity jig …
I exist, I have free will, “other” exists, identity requires context, etc.
No, I said you and others may not have free will. You may be a biological automaton.
There are undeniable issues when one attempts to frame the nature of God according to certain a priori assumptions or worldview requirements. There are no such issues if one begins from scratch and doesn’t try to force the nature of such things towards those ends.
IMO, God cannot be anything other than self-revelatory at every location and in every experience; the question really is about how the individual chooses to perceive, filter, interpret and organize that information.
Well, obviously not. God isn’t an individuated anything, in my view. Perhaps a better term for it would be “Source”. Kind of new-agey, but maybe that would set some of the baggage aside that usually accompanies the term “God”.
So, to respond to vjtorley’s point:
I would say yes, that is true, because Source (God) is every creature and is everything every creature does, thinks, or chooses, and every possible iteration thereof, every single potential. But, at the level of “being Source (God)” in any “whole” sense, Source has no capacity to “think about” what that creature is or is doing in any abstract sense because it is all of those things (and all “potentials” of those things) in a literal sense. Source (God) at that level has no beliefs about anything nor experiences any dualistic values or considerations.
As far as a “personal” God is concerned, I don’t know how much more personal it can get than to actually be the person in question.
But, I think vjtorley is attempting to criticize a particular defense of a particular a priori concept of God, instead of considering other concepts of God. That probably makes contributions here a bit off-topic.
Utter confusion here exemplified in just a couple of paragraphs.
Ok, well, sorry then.
Hahaha. Thanks.
Or perhaps he said “simplicity” when he meant “simplemindedness”.
So quantum wierdness refutes God.
2 points and a comment:
The picture of Farrow was appropriate for a second reason: only God and Woody Allen know whether the things Farrow has accused him of are true
Both the beer and the cookies you posted pics of are very good individually, but they go terribly together. I’m sure there’s some philosophical profundity lurking in there.
I think theres a big problem with Feser making analogies between author/God and characters/individuals regarding free will. I know it seems at first glance to be narrow and trivial to point out that those characters don’t exist- Feser would probably say that’s irrelevant because the analogy still illustrates a point but I think it makes all the difference. I don’t know how to establish it rigorously but if I were in a stand up debate with him I’d do the following: I’d wait till he made some basic assertion and then I’d ‘refute’ it by saying ‘I postulate creature X that the assertion doesn’t apply to’ If he then objected that said creature doesn’t exist and couldn’t exist I’d say his analogy above to God as author fails for the same reason.
Yes, I totally agree with you. Fictional characters are kind of essentially fictional, which is exactly why all the silliness is possible. If Superman bloomed into existence from the fictional world, (a) it’s not clear we ought to call the two Kryptonians by the same name, and, in any case (b) the “author” would sort of lose whatever power it formally had.
Incidentally, I thought the Farrow pic was relevant because of the way she “blooms” off the screen in “Purple Rose of Cairo.”
Well, I did try to make it as simple as I could, Neil. Perhaps you’d like it in even simpler terms?
God (as the whole God) is infinite existence. It requires an individual with context to adjudicate, plan, or choose. God (as the whole God) is not an individual with context. When one acknowledges that God is not an individual with a context, the logic is inexorable.
Righteeo.
This “God” you are speaking of, does it have to exist or is it a bit like your “objective morality” insofar as we act as if it exists and inexorable logic suggests it does (much like objective morality) but that does not necessarily mean it does?
Or what?
I suppose there could be no existence at all (and thus no source/god), but we know that’s not true.
William:
You said that God was “infinite existence.” Finite existence would therefore mean no God.
walto,
I was hoping for a Rosemary’s Baby reference.
I don’t think finite existence is a possibility.
walto, to Vincent:
Because Feser believes that any composite entity requires one or more causes, and he wants God to be causeless.
Vincent:
walto:
That doesn’t follow from Vincent’s statement. “Composite things require explanations” doesn’t imply that “no simple thing requires an explanation.”
William:
Any particular reason?
fifth,
Anyone who thinks that the Bible, of all things, is the word of God — a powerful, wise, and loving God — isn’t thinking straight.
From one of your comments in response to my Fine-Tuning OP:
I don’t see how the logic is inexorable. If God is infinitely simple, has no location, no parts, and is atemporal, how can different Universes be created by/in him without overlapping in time or space? And if he cannot adjudicate, plan, or choose, how can he have a purpose in creating a specific Universe?
fifth:
Which is precisely why divine simplicity is incoherent.
RoyLT,
The short answer: consistency is not William’s strong suit.
fifth,
Which means he’s responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world, including the eternal suffering of the damned.
That’s why decent people roll their eyes when they hear you say things like:
You worship a morally inferior God.
Nah, he only causes the good stuff. All evil and suffering from the beginning of Creation has an entirely different source…
Thanks Obama.
RoyLT,
👹
RoyLT:
The Eight-Legged One.
KN,
That hardly lends itself to the notion of divine simplicity, as Vincent points out in the OP.
So God is the empty set?