The Simple Case for the Simple God

Why Divine Simplicity Is Definitely True (if God exists)

Many people object to the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity (namely, that God is not a composite; not made up of any prior ontological parts, constituents, or the like)—which, by the way, was by far the dominant conception of God throughout most of Western history—because it seems spooky or weird. Fair enough. The doctrine does raise some interesting puzzles, like how to make sense of God’s real attributes all being really identical (I’ve written on this), or how simplicity doesn’t entail modal collapse (I’ve written on that, too). Honestly, though, I don’t think these puzzles are especially difficult to resolve—or at least it’s not hard to see how various resolutions are possible. And a lot of the difficulty comes from a tortured misunderstanding of the doctrine to begin with.¹

What gets far less attention these days are the theoretical resources the doctrine provides. I’ll just mention two here (for those interested, my entire dissertation is focused on this topic and looks at far more fine-grained applications). So, let’s take a look.

The first resource concerns fundamentality and the philosophy of God. To my lights, the primary motivation for divine simplicity—the “master argument,” if you will—is basically just super obvious, since it seems to me the ineluctable result of a series of straightforward conceptual truths.

To wit:

1. Whatever is composite depends on ontologically prior components.

2. Whatever depends on something ontologically prior is not ultimate.

3. God is ultimate.
   Therefore, God is not composite.

Divine simplicity, recall, is simply and only the claim that God is not composite, where a composite is just anything “built up” or “made of” parts or constituents more basic than itself. Again, I take this to be a mere conceptual truth about what “composite” means. Moreover, when it comes to God, whatever else one wants to say, the notion of absolute ontological independence is non-negotiable. If one were to talk about God as in any way caused, dependent, or derived, then they really just aren’t talking about God at all. Which is just to say: divine simplicity is definitely true—that, or God does not exist.²

But to drive the force of this argument a little further, consider a simple parallel that virtually no theist would think to reject:

1. A caused entity depends on a cause.

2. Whatever depends on something is not ultimate.

3. God is ultimate.
   Therefore, God is not a caused entity.

Two quick notes. First, this is obviously not an argument for the existence of God. It is, rather, an argument for the simplicity of whatever is taken to be ontologically ultimate—if, if, if!—one holds to such a thesis (and I think there are good reasons to). Really, the point is that if one is a theist, they must take God to be simple if they want to continue talking about God as… well, God.

Second, it’s important to remember that the God of the philosopher was always a simple God precisely because of the sort of logic sketched above. Philosophers were on the hunt for some ultimate first and unifying principle of everything, and they recognized there were serious constraints on what kind of entity could actually fit that theoretical bill. Their project always began with ruling out what could not suitably serve as the primary or fundamentally first principle of everything. That meant stripping away any features that implied contingency, dependence, or derivation.

Compositeness was always on that list, and for many it was the primary marker of contingency/dependence/derivation. Why? Because other “contingency indicators”—for example, mutability or change—were themselves ultimately made intelligible by the fact that changing or mutable entities are composite (for example, being composed of various metaphysical parts, which makes change possible in the first place). And for Aquinas, of course, things are contingent precisely insofar as they are metaphysical composites—composites of a “what-ness” element (essence) and an “is- ness” element (existence). In other words, Aquinas offers a metaphysics of contingency, which is ultimately a metaphysics of composition.

That said, the earlier claim to simplicity is actually fairly neutral across various ontologies—it’s something many, if not all, metaphysicians should feel the force of, whether they hold to trope theory, bundle theory, substrate theory, Aristotelian forms, or what have you. Still, I think the doctrine is most fruitful when cashed out in broadly Thomistic fashion, which is itself a kind of amalgam—or perhaps “synthesis” is the better word—of Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism.

To see why, consider the notion of a relevant difference with respect to fundamentality. This ties back to what we just mentioned—namely, figuring out what could make something different enough to not itself require some further cause or explanation. Not just any difference will do, of course, since many are plainly irrelevant: being a little further to the left or right doesn’t make something fundamental and uncaused, nor does weighing seven or eight grams less. Those are differences, yes, but not differences that matter when it comes to whether something is fundamental.

What’s nice about the Thomistic ontology is that it has a super (to use a technical term) relevant difference available—and that, of course, is that God is not only not composite but identical to His existence. In God there is no composition between essence and existence and (by logical extension) no composition between act and potency, form and matter, substance and attribute, and so on. God is simple through and through, whose very nature is simply His “to be.”

Now, say whatever you want about whether such a claim even makes conceptual sense (great news: it does!³), what everyone should admit is that it offers a very clear and powerful relevant difference with respect to fundamentality. God being simple and identical with His existence not only explains why God exists (via an essentialist explanation) but also why God exists necessarily and (within the Aristotelian scheme) why God exists as uniquely unique—as a non-multiplicable entity. God alone exists through Himself, necessarily.

These are—not just for the theist, I think, but for any serious-minded metaphysician—extremely promising results, particularly among those who maintain that reality is “well-founded.”

OK. I said I wanted to mention two resources, and the second is not just related to simplicity but to simplicity in conjunction with a certain notion of goodness—namely, the classical idea that goodness is nothing “over and above” being, but simply being considered under the aspect of perfection or desirability. There’s a lot that goes into this traditional line of thought, but I’ll simply assert without an argument for now that there’s much to commend it.⁴ For our purposes, once this commitment is in place, then in conjunction with simplicity some interesting results follow.

For example, as Eleonore Stump has pointed out, divine simplicity offers a tidy resolution to Euthyphro’s dilemma: is something good because God wills it, or does God will it because it’s good?⁵ The classical theist answers: everything acts according to its nature, including God. But given simplicity, just as God is unrestricted being itself, God is unrestricted goodness itself—God is, quite literally, The Good as such. Not only does anything with being receive its being from God, but anything with goodness receives its goodness from Him as well.

So: things are good because God wills them and God wills them because they are good—all because God is The Good through which everything else comes to be and participates in goodness. Both claims are true when seen through the lens of classical philosophy of God, because both reduce to the same fact: The Good is self-diffusive. There is nothing beyond God that determines goodness (God is the paradigm Good), yet neither is His will arbitrary, since He cannot will evil without contradicting His nature as Goodness itself.

This paradigm offers as well, with respect to meta-ethics, an attractive foundation for robust moral realism—ultimately able to secure not only stance-independent moral facts but also moral constraint (so that moral facts could not have been a chaotic free-for-all, scattered all over the place, as I’ve discussed before). Of course, one still needs to bring in an actual ethical theory at this stage (and for my money, a traditional essentialist view is best), but for now I’ll leave open the idea that classical theism can provide a rich meta-ethical foundation that is, at least initially, compatible with a range of particular ethical theories.

Finally, notice that apart from simplicity, there’s really not much room to maneuver out from the horns of Euthyphro. Many non-classical theists try to co-opt the classical response—still insisting that God is somehow the Good as such—but without embracing, as classical theists do, that God is identical with His goodness, or without being able to say (that is, with any real metaphysical meat) exactly what makes God the paradigm in the first place. But that leaves only two options, it seems to me: either some aspect or element of God (whatever one takes His “goodness” to be—a trope, a property instance, what have you) becomes the ultimate paradigm, and not God Himself; or else there is some standard outside of God by which His actions are measured. If the latter, then the very notion of God is attenuated to the point of no longer successfully referring to God at all, and one also loses a truly unifying, ultimate first principle of everything.⁶ The former, to my mind, is just as bad, since it equally succumbs to the issues raised earlier in this article.

Both are serious theoretical costs.

I’ll leave it there for now—but for anyone looking for more by way of arguments for the existence of the (absolutely simple) God, there’s always my book.

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1. See my book The Best Argument for God for further defense.

2. This is also why classical theists often somewhat annoyingly—but not incorrectly, I think—assert that to deny divine simplicity is basically just to affirm atheism!

3. Here one needs a defense of the thick theory of existence, which Barry Miller brilliantly provides.

4. For a defense, see Gaven Kerr’s essay in this volume.

5. For the uninitiated: the dilemma is meant to push the theist into accepting one of two unacceptable positions—either that morality is entirely arbitrary, or that there is some standard above God by which His actions are determined or measured. The best way out, of course, is to dive between the horns of the dilemma. But what I’ve suggested above is that (very probably) only the classical theist has the resources to make such an escape not only available but natural—as in, not ad hoc.

6. As recent discussions about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God have shown, what counts as successful reference to God is a difficult matter to adjudicate. But I’m definitely willing to die on this hill: once someone starts talking about a caused, dependent, or derivative entity, they are no longer talking about God.