First you have to consider how God loves himself. Is it necessary or free? If he has any freedom he has every freedom and his acts are necessary because of the will he applies himself with

I would think God's love for himself is necessary, but then I think everything God does is necessary.

I think everything God does is free. Freedom is objective choice about ends in order to "be good". God is act and can't be any different from how we become good. If we are free and he is not, what is he to us? A hyperuranion? The core of simplicity is the ability to choose to think and act

Gregory

I know that lots of Thomists claim that Divine Simplicity does not preclude God's free choices., but my question is how this is possible given that God is identical to all of His 'properties', which would include that he is identical to both His choice to do X and to His choice to do Y and even to His choice to do nothing at all.

God would have his normal thoughts with the addition of his knowledge that he choose something (such as to create). You're basically presenting Spinoza's critique

How can God be in everything if we are free?

I don't know whether I am presenting Spinoza's critique, but what is wrong with my critique?
Additional knowledge seems to be impossible, because then there is no simplicity anymore.

I don't think God can be in everything is we are free, unless we are, in a way, God.

In a way. We all have individualized empirical selfs. God has room for everything, and I think you are correct contra Thomism. Even the Trinity seems contrary to simplicity. There is more than a relationship to self involved. Christians claim 3 persons, 3 experiences as one experience

One way I've heard Meister Eckhart paraphrased on this is that God "boils over" in love and creates. In this way, creation is necessary, although it's unclear if "what is created" is necessary.

I think that's a nice bit of imagery. This sort of idea gets developed more in Jacob Boheme's vision of a God who necessarily creates because the existence of something that is not God is required to define God. This entails that God must create to have self-knowledge. A single, undivided unity existing alone becomes no different from nothing at all existing. Any description of such being would be contentless.

Anyhow, if I recall the Thomistic definition of contingency correctly, then God's choices are sort of necessarily not contingent. Only created things are contingent, since only they can have created causes.

Building off Saint Augustine, one could argue that God is necessarily tripartite because meaning itself is necessarily tripartite. God cannot have self knowledge without this tripartite nature, for the conveyance of meaning always required an object known, the sign through which it is known, and an interpretant.

As Augustine shows in De Trinitate and De Doctrinal, there is some solid pieces of Scripture to work with in supporting a mapping of the object/sign/interpretant to the Father/Word/Spirit as well.

Returning to the original question, I'm not sure exactly how to conceptualize God as actualizing A versus B. The Logos is itself the ground of cause and effect, before and after. We tend to think of freedom entirely in terms of before and after, cause and effect, so this makes thinking of divine freedom tricky.




Our freedom is part of God's freedom. Created beings are, in a way, like subsystems within the universal system that is God. These subsystems can have relative amounts of freedom, since they can be more or less self-determining. I think it would be fair to call most pre-Reformation Christian thinkers panentheists, and the problems of God's sovereignty versus human freedom seem less acute in panentheism.

In the Summa, Saint Aquinas argues that God is present to/in everything as cause (and effects are signs of their causes). This jives with the older Augustinian view that God is "within everything but contained in nothing."

Just got another way of looking at it, we could consider Maimonides argument for the via negativa re: statements about the Divine Nature.

Following Aristotle, all our concepts come from sense experience — sense experience that is necessarily of only finite, created things. So, when we make affirmative statements about God, such as "God is living," what we are actually doing is making a negative statement about "what God is not." God is not living in the way that creatures are living. Rather, the statement is really meant more along the lines of "God is not dead."

Likewise, "God's attributes are necessary," can be taken as "there are no contingent facts vis-á-vis God in the way that facts about creatures can be contingent." Saint Aquinas doesn't buy into the need to hew to the via negativa as strictly as Maimonides, but I do think this jives with his explanations of how facts about God are necessary if I am remembering correctly. Contingency applies to creatures, by definition.

In the language of Saint Thomas, we would say that predicates assigned to God are a form of analogical predication as opposed to uniquivocal.

I know about the via negativa, but I don't tjink it applies to necessary things."God is identical to all His 'properties' " is very clear. Those 'properties' or 'predicates' themselves can be attibuted analogically to God, that is, God's knowledge is identical to God's Goodness, but that doesn't mean that creaturely knowlegde is identical to creaturely goodness.
But i see no way out of the conclusion that if God is identical to all of his properties, then God's 'property' of creating A is identical to God's 'property' of creating B.

Proponents of the doctrine of Divine simplicity, and especially Thomists, maintain that God is a necessary, absolutely simple and immutable being who is identical to all of his properties. — Walter

This Thomistic fetish doesn't make sense: "absolutely simple and immutable" excludes "properties" just as, for instance, a triangle excludes parallel lines. The only modal implication to this "doctrine" is that (à la L. Carroll or A. Meinong) it describes an impossible object.

The way I understand it, divine simplicity is tied to God's total lack of contingency. For Aquinas, God's essence includes existence itself, making God unique among all beings. In contrast, everything else derives its existence from God as the Uncaused Cause.

Contingency involves a reliance on causes and conditions, but God, as the Uncaused Cause and necessary being, transcends such dependencies; God is the foundation of all existence. God can't be a composite being because there is no way for God's "parts" to interact, since everything in the divine nature is necessary.

Aquinas posited that in God, essence and existence are identical. This means that God's nature and His act of existing are one and the same.

The idea that God's act to actualize A is also God's act to actualize B doesn't imply a lack of control on God's part in Thomism. Rather, Thomism suggests that God, in His simplicity, is not composed of separate parts or aspects that might conflict. This makes more sense in the Platonic-Pauline view of freedom that prevailed in the ancient world and medieval period. Rather than Lockean "lack of constraint," freedom was more often defined as reflexive self-determination. So God is free if God isn't acted upon by outside forces/contingencies, which is the case. As Uncaused Cause, nothing can act on God, similar to how downward causality works across the Plotinian Hypostasis in Proclus or early Augustine.

Now we might be more likely to look at necessity as its own form of "logical," constraint, but I think Aquinas was more concerned about God's actions not being determined by either creatures or conflicting parts in the divine nature. God's will is unified and consistent, allowing for a coherent and purposeful exercise of divine freedom; God is not in the state that man is, described by Saint Paul in Romans 7, at war with itself.

If you accept Aquinas' premises re God's essence and existence, I don't think there is necessarily a problem here. God isn't really constrained by God's own necessity. Following Boethius, God is also always present to all moments, so there is no problem with temporal decision making; all decisions to actualize are made eternally. That's how I understood it anyhow.

Yes, simple and immutable exclude all properties, but Thomists tend to translate that as "God is identical to all His properties" they say that God's omniscience is His omnipotence is His love etc. and that they are all identical to God. That means they are no real properties, of course.
God is God, and that's it,
But, IMO, this entails that God also is His intention to create X, hence X is necessary.

Count Timothy van Icarus

"Thomism suggests that God, in His simplicity, is not composed of separate parts or aspects that might conflict."

But that's the problem. God's intention to actualize A does conflict with God's intention to actualize B.
So, ther can be no intention to actualiz A or B in God's mind. How can God have control over whther A occurs in that case? If God's will is is unified and consistent, then it cannot lead to A in one possible world and B in another, at least not if God is supposed to be in control.

@Walter
I think that you want to understand God's actions before you know him (who is infinite according to the definition of philosophers and the question is, how can the finite know the infinite?), this seems not possible and you attribute an action to him before you understand what his action really is.
Before knowing God, it is not possible to understand his actions, just like before knowing a human being, one cannot understand his actions.

God is God — Walter

Yes and, regardless of Thomistic wordplay, a tautology is a tautology – vacuous.

It is not a matter of wanting to understand God's actions, it is a matter of analyzing claims about his actions in light of logic.

That may be true, but I am willing to grant, for the sake of the argument, that it makes sense.

That's an interesting take, perhaps correct.

Then let' say the simplest object has one property, this property aligns with the simplest possible thing that could exist which must have at least one property.

What could this be?

A point in space?

I've wondered about this.

A point in space? — Manuel

Not even "a point" – nothingness.

Not even "a point" – nothingness. — 180 Proof

Can nothingness have a property?

I think that you want to understand God's actions before you know him (who is infinite according to the definition of philosophers and the question is, how can the finite know the infinite?), this seems not possible and you attribute an action to him before you understand what his action really is.
Before knowing God, it is not possible to understand his actions, just like before knowing a human being, one cannot understand his actions.

Speaking of human beings... you do understand that each individual human gets to describe their god any way they want to, right? Thus gods are therefore subjective (intersubjective actually), not objective.

Can nothingness have a property? — wonderer1

Maybe: propertylessness.

:lol:

According to Thomists, it is Existence itself and it has no spatial dimensions at all.
Its Essence is Existence and that's all there is to it, except of course that it also rewards and punishes people, creates things ex nihilo etc.

That in itself seems incoherent to me, but I am focussing on something else here, for which I accpet, for the sake of the argument, that it is coherent.
The question in that case still is: how can such simple and immutable being act differently across possible worlds?

No spatial dimension? That's not entirely clear. If something has no spatial dimension, how can we say it exists in the world (as opposed to how we could imagine it to exist in our minds)?

Well, your second question assumes there are possible worlds, maybe, maybe not. But you'd first have to say what leads you to believe that it could act in a way that if has effects on this world.

If you can state how this belief carries force for you, then we could proceed. Otherwise, it seems to me like we are stuck.

But that's the problem. God's intention to actualize A does conflict with God's intention to actualize B.
So, ther can be no intention to actualiz A or B in God's mind. How can God have control over whther A occurs in that case? If God's will is is unified and consistent, then it cannot lead to A in one possible world and B in another, at least not if God is supposed to be in control. — Walter

I don't see how you can introduce possible worlds to the scenario. What God wills is necessary by His act of willing it, therefore it is actual. You cannot say that God wills A in one possible world and B in another possible world, because that would contradict the nature of God as 'His essence is His existence'. Therefore God is necessarily actual, and this excludes Him from "possible worlds" which is a tool of the human intellect. Attributing possible worlds to God is to attribute matter to God, but God is immaterial.

Possible worlds are simply a way of saying if God what could be/have been the case.
According to most Christians, including Thomists, it could have been that God created a completely different world or even no world at all.
My question is if God's essence is his existence , how can He end up xiiling to create different things?

That belief doesn't carry force for me. I am simply assuming it for the sake of the argument.