Psience Quest

Quote:What happens if I deny divine simplicity along with its underlying mereological extravagance? I am left with a wide array of models of God and competing metaphysical positions. Let’s be clear about this fact. With debates over models of God, we are also considering debates over competing metaphysical claims.[10] Our options are not really Thomistic metaphysics or atheism. That is a false dichotomy. There are many other metaphysical theories that are available to the Christian who wishes to develop a biblical doctrine of God.  

Moreover, there are many alternative models of God that one can turn to if she denies divine simplicity. The options are not classical theism or atheism. Here are a few of the other options: neo-classical theism, open theism, panentheism, pantheism, and process theism.[11] To be sure, some contemporary classical theists, like Feser, caricature these other models as nothing more than superhuman deities. They even lump these quite distinct models into the incredibly unhelpful, and uninformative, category of “theistic personalism.” But this is nothing more than a caricature that does not reflect serious scholarship. It might turn out that, upon close examination, these other models of God are not viable options. (Personally, I would rule out a couple of these models of God on biblical grounds.) But a Christian who takes seriously the problems for divine simplicity ought to take seriously the available models of God instead of asserting that our options are classical theism or atheism.

Quote:While we’re on the subject of divine simplicity and creation, let’s consider a closely related issue.  In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas argues that God wills himself, that he does so necessarily, that what he wills he wills in a single act, and that he wills other things besides himself.  Doesn’t it follow that he also wills these other things necessarily?  Doesn’t it follow that they too must exist necessarily, just as God does?  No, neither of these things follows.

Quote:Scotus, like other classical theists, affirms divine simplicity.  But he famously differs with Aquinas and other fellow classical theists over some important matters of background metaphysics.  Let’s consider some views of Scotus that are relevant to the debate over divine simplicity.  Some of these involve disagreement with other proponents of the doctrine, though some of them are merely important contributions of Scotus’s own with which other proponents could agree.

Quote:In the "Divine and Local Simplicity" essay, I left open a question, that if fundamentally thinking and feeling are identical, how did it come about that we now distinguish them? I do not have a satisfactory answer to this question, but I think that the answer is tied to the answer to another question: how do referential forms come about, which is to say, how did language come about?

Recall that in that section I distinguished between mathematical thoughts, and, say, the thought of a house, where the difference is that, for example, the thought of a triangle is the triangle, while the thought of a house is not the house. The thought of a house refers beyond itself, while the thought of a triangle does not. The former is referential, and the latter is non-referential. A referential form points to something else, which could be another referential form, a non-referential form, or formlessness. Excluding the last case, what we have is that one form "brings to mind" another. This implies that the second could lie outside of mind. Assuming that nothing is outside of Ultimate Mind, this could only happen in a localized consciousness such as ours. Thus the need for referential form is correlated with the localization of consciousness.

Sense perception is also correlated with localization, and it is not that hard to see that sense perception is by and large a language (or many languages), that is, is referential. It is generally accepted, once one has moved beyond naive realism, that the objects of perception are referential, although the more commonly used term is that they are 'representations'. Even, or perhaps especially, the critical realist must acknowledge that what is actually seen is not what is "really there". Instead, according to the materialist sort of critical realist, what is actually seen is a product of electro-chemical activity of the brain. For the idealist, what is actually seen is the result of a "meeting of minds", the mind of the perceiver, and the mind whose conscious activity is communicated to the perceiver through what is perceived.