Abstract
Although the doctrine of divine simplicity has faced substantial criticism in recent years, Jeffrey Brower has recently offered a novel defense of the view by appealing to contemporary truthmaker theory. In this paper, I will argue that Brower’s defense of divine simplicity requires an implausible account of how truthmaking works for essential intrinsic predications. I will first argue that, unless Brower is willing to make an ad hoc exception for how truthmaking works in God’s case, he is committed to saying that essential intrinsic predications about any object are made true by that object alone, not by its having essential properties. I will then argue that reflecting on cases where distinct essential intrinsic predications about an object have different causal explanations behind them shows that this general view of truthmaking is implausible.
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Notes
For an overview of the doctrine, see Vallicella (2019).
For some common criticisms, see Plantinga (1980).
Roughly, a predication about an object is intrinsic if it is about the object itself and not how the object is related to things wholly distinct from itself. A predication about an object is extrinsic otherwise.
One might object that the truth of (PA) (and hence the falsity of (TA)) is just obvious. One might think it is obvious that someone’s justice, for example, must always be a property and can never be a concrete substance. While I agree that (PA) is the more plausible view, I do not think that there is any knock-down objection to (TA). As Brower notes, the proponent of (TA) can at least partially explain why people find (PA) so natural by pointing out that (TA) is consistent with the claim that referents of expressions of the form ‘a is F’ are often properties (2009, 114–115). Brower also notes that it is open for the proponent of divine simplicity to take expressions of the form ‘a is F’ to be technical terms that are stipulated in the context of articulating divine simplicity to refer to truthmakers (2009, 114–115). In any case, I think that Brower’s account has deeper problems than his account of abstract reference, so I’m willing to grant him the truth of (TA) for the sake of argument.
Some might worry that God still turns out to be a property on this view, as “God’s justice” is a paradigmatic example of a property. It just turns out, one might say, that properties turn out to sometimes be concrete objects on Brower’s account. I don’t believe this objection creates much of a problem. What is important is that God is still understood as a concrete individual substance on Brower’s account rather than anything that is abstract, capable of being instantiated by objects, or capable of being multiply exemplified. If one insists that God must still be called a “property” because God is identified with God’s justice, then I think Brower would (and should) be okay with that. What is important is that the problematic implications normally associated with calling God a “property” have been removed.
Following Brower (“Making Sense of Divine Simplicity,” pg. 19), I am using a purely modal account of essence. Below (footnote 14) I consider whether Brower would be better off using a richer, non-modal account of essence. I argue that he would not.
The restriction to propositions that have truthmakers is present in order to appease those who do not believe that negative existential truths have truthmakers. If negative existential truths don’t have truthmakers, then the principle would be violated without the restriction. For example, the event of Gary’s eating the pizza might causally explain the truth of the proposition that there is no more pizza at the party in a way that it does not causally explain the truth of the proposition that there are no humans on Mars. But, since the relevant propositions don’t have any truthmakers, there can be no difference in how Gary’s eating the pizza is causally related to their truthmakers.
By “Socrates-shaped” I mean that it has one of a range of determinate shapes that would be recognizable as looking like Socrates. So, the statue could lose an arm and still be Socrates-shaped.
If you disagree, just switch these properties out for ones you do believe are essential to the statue.
Note that adding an additional instance of the causal relation between John’s decision and the relevant truthmaker will not be of any help. For one, it seems entirely ad hoc to do so. There is no reason to think John makes any causal contribution distinct from the contribution he makes to the truth of the statue’s being Socrates-shaped. Moreover, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Any new causal relation between John’s decision and the single truthmaker that the two propositions share would, plausibly, causally explain the truth of both propositions and do so in exactly the same way. This is because being causally related to the truthmaker for a proposition is all there is to causally explaining its truth and there is no way to causally explain a truth other than by being causally related to its truthmaker.
If you disagree, you can swap them out for different examples.
Note that I am not committed to saying that distinct essential intrinsic predications always have distinct truthmakers. The cases of differing causal explanations are simply supposed to show that essential intrinsic predications generally require properties (not just the object itself) to figure in their truthmakers. The challenge for Brower is to say why predications about God are exempted from this pattern. Saying that essential intrinsic predications require properties to figure in their truthmaking is consistent with saying that, in some cases, two essential intrinsic predications are made true by the instantiation of a single property. The key point is that properties need to be involved, not that there must always be distinct properties for distinct predications.
Another possible way of replying to my argument would be by appealing to a richer, non-modal account of essence of the sort defended by Kit Fine. How would this help? Well, perhaps all the true intrinsic predications about God are essential in this richer sense, while the essential predications I relied on in my argument are only essential in the modal sense. Perhaps intrinsic predications that are only essential in the modal sense require more than just the object in question to ground them, while intrinsic predications that are essential in the richer sense only require the object itself to ground them. However, this reply will not work. My argument could be run with examples involving features that are essential in the richer sense. For example, in the statue case, let it instead be God who is trying to decide how to create a new organism, and let John and Sarah be two angels tasked with deciding different essential (in the richer sense) features of the organism. My argument goes through just as before. For more on this non-modal account of essence, see Fine (1994).
Note that on this way of thinking, causal relations obtaining in the world would count as metaphysical explanations. So, it is not a distinction between grounding explanations and causal explanations, with grounding explanations counting as the ‘metaphysical’ explanations.
See also Beebe (2018).
Even if you think that this is metaphysically impossible, it certainly does seem conceptually possible. I think that’s all I need to show that the proposed explanation is inadequate.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
For some discussion of how facts about conversational context might affect claims about causation, see Mackie (1980, 34 ff.).
I would like to thank Karen Bennett, Nate Bulthuis, an audience at the 2019 Central Regional Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Da Vee, D. Why truthmaker theory cannot save divine simplicity. Int J Philos Relig 90, 43–60 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-021-09789-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-021-09789-9