A critical review of Alvin Plantinga's view of the doctrine of divine simplicity,

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD student in Philosophy of Religion, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor, Department of Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Faculty of Theology and Islamic studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Doctrine of divine simplicity in the sense of the oneness of the essence and attributes of God is one of the most important teachings of classical theism.Accordingly, since any combination shows the dependence on the components and God is purely needless, then no combination in God. The reliance of doctrine on metaphysical topics such as "object" and "property" has led to some criticisms by some analytical philosophers. In Alvin Plantinga’s critical view, if essence and attribute are identical, as well as the similarity of attributes with each other, leads to firstly God has only one attribute and that attribute is nothing but "himself" and secondly the acceptance of such sameness, It will imply that God is an attribute (or a property). Based on this view, properties have an abstract entity and all abstract entities are causally ineffective. As a result, these principles lead to the incompatibility of the doctrine with other attributes like aseity. Finally, one must either doubt the doctrine or defend other metaphysical foundations to explain the relation between essence and attributes. The present article is an attempt to explain this inconsistency and shows that by accepting the infinite nature of essence in classical theology, the metaphysical explanation of the relation between essence and attributes in God requires a model other than Plantinga's metaphysics. Another result is that despite the essence is identical with some properties such as "unity" and "to be identical", explaining them with the pattern of the exemplifying relation is contrary to intuition and entails infinite regress.

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References

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