On Three Problems of Divine Simplicity

The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God is a " substantia seu natura simplex omnino " —an " altogether simple substance or nature " —and the First Vatican Council reiterated the teaching. The doctrine of divine simplicity is at the center of Thomas's natural theology, since it is essentially involved in his attempt to show that the First Cause that he has proved to exist in the Five Ways has the appropriate divine attributes. The doctrine claims that there is no ontological composition in God of any sort, whether of matter and form, or of essence and accident, or of this attribute and that attribute considered as ontologically distinct. The doctrine is a traditional part of Christianity and Judaism, though I understand that Islam may have ultimately rejected it. Divine simplicity, like the complementary doctrine of the Trinity, leads to intellectual difficulties. I will talk about the three most major ones that arise within the context of natural theology. The first problem is that it appears incomprehensible how we can meaningfully predicate different attributes of God, such as " perfect mercy " and " perfect justice " which will be my stand in for any pair of prima facie distinct attributes. For according to the doctrine of divine simplicity when God has attributes A and B, then God's being A is ontologically identical with God's being B. The difficulty is that under such circumstances " mercy " and " justice " seem to lose their ordinary language meaning and since our linguistic usage is based on ordinary language, it becomes meaningless to use the terms about God. This is the " multiple attributes " problem. The second problem comes from noting that the doctrine of divine simplicity entails that in some relevant sense God has no intrinsic contingent properties. I have no definition of an " intrinsic property " , but we can get a rough and ready understanding of what is meant when we think about paradigm cases such as the lump of coal's containing such-and-such a number of carbon atoms or Fred's being in horrible pain, as contrasted with extrinsic properties such as John's being taller than Fred, Bush's being President, and so on. If God had an intrinsic contingent property A, then A would be a property that in some possible world God lacks. But God plainly has at least one non-contingent property, B, such as being …