“This clears it all up, right?”
Anselm: “Um, no. I must bestow upon it the analytic frown of uncomprehension.”
(image credit)
I used to think I had a great objection to Anselm’s famous ontological argument. (Bear with me – this has something to do with social trinitarianism.) The argument, at least many forms of it, basically goes like this. If it is logically possible that there’s a Greatest Possible Being (i.e. a being such that there’s no logical possibility of there being a greater one), then it is necessary that there’s a Greatest Possible Being. More simply: if it’s possible (non-contradictory) that God exists, then it’s also necessary that God exists (i.e. it is inconsistent to suppose God not existing). (For more, see here and here. For more than you’d ever want to know, here.)
Many critics have replied like this:
I’d be a sucker to grant your premise. Why should I think that the notion of a Greatest Possible Being is the notion of a possible thing at all? Maybe that phrase is like “Two-dimensional triangle with interior angles adding up to 181 degrees” – at first blush, this seems a consistent idea, until you realize that the definition of a 2-D triangle entails that its interior angles add up to 180. Maybe greatness has no top limit – maybe the concept of the Greatest Possible Being is like the concept of a “Highest Possible Positive Integer“. No such thing, of course – for any integer, there a higher one.
My idea was this: part of what makes any being great, is having done good things. So, however great God is, he could always create one more happy creature, or make one more beautiful planet. Heck, even an electron has some objective value. So, no matter how great God actually is, he can’t be a Greatest Possible Being, for there’s another possible world in which God does more great things, and so is greater. If this is right, nothing could be the Greatest Possible Being, and theists should not argue in any way which supposes that a Greatest Possible Being is a possible being.
I then realized, though, that ontological argument proponents were working with an idea of greatness such that greatness supervenes only on essential, intrinsic properties of a being. Theists deny that God essentially has the property of creating this or that creature, or indeed, of creating at all; Christian theists, eager to preserve divine freedom and divine transcendence of the cosmos, almost uniformly say this. Count me in. Perhaps God’s credit, desert, or praiseworthiness is infinitely increasable (because his good works are so), but there’s no reason to deny an upper limit to greatness which supervenes on only essential, intrinsic properties. I’m now sympathetic to some ontological arguments.
But what has any of this to do with the Trinity? In my recent series (here, here, and here) I’ve been discussing the idea that divinity, or maximal perfection, or some essential feature had by God, would logically entail that he’s actually loving something (actually, someone) other than himself. Social trinitarians often lean on this sort of speculation to support their views, although they crucially appeal to the Bible as well. But if I’m right, they’d better stick to the Bible – these arguments ought not convince.
The problem for social trinitarians is this: Do you want to think of God as the Greatest Possible Being, either because you want to advance an ontological argument, or because you find the concept theologically useful? If so, you must stick with a concept of “greatness” where this is a property which supervenes only on essential, intrinsic properties. If you don’t, you’re ontological argument is liable to my objection above. Again, if you adopt a wider concept of greatness, because you want relational properties to count for greatness, so as to argue for multiple persons “in” God, you have no way to block this move: it’s greater to create a good world than to create nothing. Hence, God essentially creates a good world. And you don’t want to say that.
Let me try to put this in the form of an argument, a destructive dilemma.
- Greatness either supervenes only on intrinsic, essential properties, or not.
- If it does, then the property “loving another” isn’t a great-making property (it isn’t intrinsic).
- If the property of “loving another” isn’t a great-making property, then no Anselmian social trinitarian argument is sound.
- If it does not, then properties other than intrinsic and essential ones may contribute to a thing’s greatness.
- If properties other than intrinsic and essential ones may contribute to a thing’s greatness, then some of these other properties are infinitely increasable.
- If some of these properties are infinitely increasable, then the concept of a Greatest Possible Being (GPB) is in fact the concept of an impossible being (in other words, there couldn’t be a GPB).
- If a GPB is an impossible being, then this reasoning is always unsound:
- God is a GPB.
- For any x, if x is a GPB, then x has feature F.
- God has feature F.
- If the above reasoning is unsound, then no Anselmian social trinitarian argument is sound.
- Either way, no Anselmian social trinitarian argument is sound.
Davis’s argument for social trinitarianism turns on the concept of a “perfect being”. If a “perfect being must be a GPB”, then I think the above may refute his argument.
Technorati Tags: social trinity, social trinitarian, impossible Trinity, Anselm, ontological argument, greatest possible being
Pingback: Doxazo Theos » Blog Archive » Is God Necessarily Good?
Pingback: trinities - modal shootout on the greatest possible being - Part 2 (Dale)
Pingback: trinities - modal shootout on greatest possible beings - Part 1 (Dale)
Pingback: Doxazo Theos » Blog Archive » An Argument for the Trinity
Just a naive question: do (some) social trinitarians posit that the property that constitutes and distinguishes one divine person from another is an absolute property or a relative property?
If we think GPB is connected in anyway to the property of actualizing any possible world, then I think we’ll run into all sort of problems. In short, GPB would have to actualize an infinite serial amount of possible worlds in order to be GPB. I myself prefer Aquinas’s move (contra Leibniz), there is in fact no greatest possible world that God could create. All possible worlds are not maximally perfect. This point is akin to the point I made above that there can be no infinitely perfect angelic nature. All possible worlds, or again, all divine ideas are of finite (i.e. non-maximally perfect) possible beings.
Dale:
I regard to my second criticism, I think might be a way out for you. Either it is a great-making property of x that x loves an ACTUALLY EXISTING other or not. If not, then the argument for social trinitarianism fails–it only establishes that God loves someone else, not that God loves another existing being. But if it is a great-making property of x that x loves an actually existing other, then some great-making properties are not intrinsic, since loving AN ACTUALLY EXISTING other is plainly not intrinsic.
That said, I worry that (6) is no longer plausible For the social trinitarian may say that only essential properties are great-making, but allow non-intrinsic essential properties to be great-making.
In regard to your suggestion that then it follows that creating a good world is an essential great-making property of God, the social trinitarian can respond that it is a great-making property of God that he freely chooses to create, and hence the property of essentially making a good world is not a great-making property, being inconsistent with a great-making property.
I am not friend of social trinitarianism. But:
1. Theists have good independent reason to reject the loneliness condition for intrinsicality. Necessarily, any positive property that a being has, it has in virtue of God’s cooperation. Necessarily, were there no God, the being would have no positive propertie. Hence, no positive property is an intrinsic property by the loneliness condition, which seems absurd.
Besides, the loneliness condition shouldn’t entail the falsity of Platonism, should it? But if Platonism is true, then nothing can be an intrinsic property, since x cannot have F unless Fness exists, if Platonist is true.
One might modify the loneliness condition as follows to get around these counterexamples: x’s having F is an intrinsic property only if x could have it in a world bereft of all necessary beings other than possibly x. But then (2) is unjustified when the “another” is a necessary being.
2. In the case of a human x, it seems possible for loving y to be an intrinsic property of x as long as “y” is a definite description. Thus, it is possible to have the intrinsic property of loving the present king of France–under that description–whether France has a king or not. If there are haecceities, then a being that can directly grasp haecceities can have the intrinsic property of loving the being that has haecceity H.
If some of these properties are infinitely increasable, then the concept of a Greatest Possible Being (GPB) is in fact the concept of an impossible being (in other words, there couldn’t be a GPB)
Dale, I was responding to what you say here. Your modified/clarified view is this, I think, with GB for greatest being and GPB for greatest possible being.
G. (Vx)(Vy)(Vw)((x is GPB in w -> (y is GB in w’ & (w’ is not w) -> (x > y))).
In English, if x is GPB in w, then x is greater than the greatest being in any other world.
Since you’d be happy to get another reason why (6) is mistaken, even given (G), I’d be happy to offer one. To be fair, let me use your example. You say suppose that greatness supervenes . . . on some infinitely increasable property e.g. having made X number of happy creatures.. Good enough. For each infinite set of creatable happy beings there is some world w in which they are created. Let w0 be the world containing aleph-0 happy beings, let w1 be the world aleph-1 happy beings . . .and so on upward. Let God actualize every world in that sequence. In this case we have every world wn corresponding to a spatiotemporally isolated universe (i.e. an island universe) Un in a single cosmoi or multiverse M. Every createable happy creature has been created. And since we have stipulated that God’s greatness supervenes on the infinitely increasable property of having made X number of happy creatures, God is GPB by the principle (G) above.
An medieval by-water: scholastic theologians believed in angels. They thought all angels, relative to one another, imitated the divine essence in a greater or lesser degree. So, angel A is a low-grade imitator of God, relative to angel D, who is much more like God. But wait a second? Are there an infinite amount of angels or not? Let us suppose that there are angelic ‘natures’ and individual angels who are constituted by a given angelic nature. (For example, ‘humanity’ is a nature, ‘angelic+1’ is another nature, ‘angelic+2’ is another, etc.) So, e.g. Gabriel is one kind of angelic nature, and Raphael has another (lower) grade angelic nature.
Now, some theologians worried that if we posited an infinite amount of angelic ‘natures’, then surely there’d be an angel with infinite perfection in virtue of being constituted by an infinitely perfect angelic nature? If so, this angel would be equal in perfection/greatness as God. But this can’t be. So, let’s say that there is a finite amount of angelic natures. And, consequently, we can say there is a possible infinity of angels that can instantiate different angelic natures. The point is that there can’t be an angelic nature with infinite perfection. Consequently, there is a finite amount of angelic natures.
Re: a great-making property; why not just say the property is infinite, not as an ordinal number, but as a cardinal number? Talking about an infinite property along the lines of infinite+1 surely is thinking of infinity as an ordinal number, or at least mixing ordinal and cardinal concepts. If we take God’s infinite great-making property as a cardinal number, then such a problem about whether or not God could be more perfect than God now is, won’t follow.
Hi David,
Thanks – I think I see what you’re driving at.
Suppose I agree to what you call the loneliness condition – that a property is intrinsic only if there’s a possible world in which which the thing is alone and has it. But, suppose the Father is a necessary being, and that he necessarily “generates” the Son. So, there’s no possible world in which the Father is alone, so the loneliness condition would absurdly tell us that, e.g. his powers, etc. wouldn’t be intrinsic. So, you say, we should jettison the loneliness condition, which opens the door to “loving another” being an intrinsic property.
In reply, loving another is a paradigm case of a relational property – if there’s an intrinsic/relational property distinction, surely this is going to be on the relational side. Of course, when enjoying that relational property (i.e. when one is in a loving relationship), this may entail that one has various other properties which are intrinsic – e.g. being conscious, feeling a certain way or being disposed to, having certain beliefs, being disposed to work for the good of the beloved. The only motivation I can think of to say that loving another is itself intrinsic, is to save a priori arguments for social trinitarianism! Do you know of any other reasons?
The loneliness condition won’t do, precisely because it is conceivable that there be more than one necessary being. I think of the “test” for intrinsicality like this: would X have F if (even per impossible) X were the only thing in existence? Or maybe: does X have F solely because of how things are with X itself, and not because of how X is related to something else? For all I know, these may admit borderline cases… But “loving another” would seem to be one of them. What do you think?
Hey Dale,
Here’s my gloss on 1 and 2: If greatness supervenes only on properties that are both intrinsic and essential, then the property “loving another” is not a great making property.
Why think that the conditional is true? That is, why think that the property of “loving another” is not an intrinsic property? Presumably because of the following necessary condition for intrinsicality (call it the loneliness condition): if x has F intrinsically, then it is possible for x to have F in worlds where only x exists. Notice that if the loneliness condition is false, the property of loving another could be an intrinsic property.
Hi David – thanks for the comment. Can you elaborate a teeny bit more?
I guess that one test for an intrinsic property would be: would the thing have it even if (and this may be a counterpossible) nothing else existed? If so, it’s intrinsic. If not, it’s relational – still could be essential, conceivably, if relational properties may be essential.
Thanks to Matthew Mullins for the Prosblogion posting. In the first comment there, Mike Almeida (blog) sez
Several reasons? I’d be glad to know what the others are.
As to this one, let me see if I can follow Mike’s reasoning. Suppose (as I do) that God exists in the actual world. Suppose that greatness supervenes, in part, on some infinitely increasable property e.g. having made X number of happy creatures. So no matter what degree God has this in the actual world, there will be some possible world in which *some* being has more knowledge. So far, so good. Now Mike’s point is: But these other beings might be God – the same being who has a little less of this great-making property in this world.
In reply, I guess there’s an ambiguity in some Anselmian reasoning. A being might be unsurpassibly great – meaning that in no possible world, is there a being greater than it is in that world. Or, it might be unsurpassibly great in the sense of being at least as great as any being in any possible world (whether itself or another). I guess I was assuming that Anselmian theologians were using this latter, stronger sense of “greatest possible being”. Mike is right that if there are infinitely increasable great-making properties, it doesn’t follow that there’s no GPB in the first sense. But I think it does follow that there’d be no GPB in the second sense. Let me put it this way – I assume that Anselmians wouldn’t be satisfied with a being who could have been greater than it in fact is, even though it is the greatest possible in Mike’s weaker sense.
Look at the kind of reasoning mentioned in premise 7 above – this would come out invalid, understanding GPB Mike’s way. Thus, I suggest that Anselmian theologians don’t mean what he suggests by GPB.
If I’m right about this – and I’d be glad to hear Mike’s other objections – then I guess I don’t see a problem for the argument I suggested.
Very interesting post, thanks.
Why think that 2 is true?
I suspect it has to do with thinking that the lonliness test is a necessary condition for intrinsicality. Is that correct?
Comments are closed.