“Don’t mess with Texan metaphysicans, pardner.”
In a recent series of posts (uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco), I’ve been chewing on some philosophical arguments that “social” trinitarians have used for their doctrine. Been finding more gristle than meat.
In my latest installment, I was privileged to get some penetrating critical feedback from fellow philosophy of religion bloggers located in my home state of Texas – Alexander Pruss of Baylor and Mike Almeida of UT San Antonio (here, comments #2, 7-9) These guys are extremely sharp and are doing a lot of creative work in the field, by the way. About perfect beings – I’ve come to find out that Mike has thought a lot about this!
This post is my attempt to process Mike’s feedback, continuing the conversation, and trying to make it intelligible to less technically inclined readers. (For those not familiar with “possible worlds” discourse – a few introductory sources are here and here.) Next time, I’ll work through Alexander’s helpful comments.
Mike focuses his fire on a crucial premise of an argument I came up with against Anselmian social trinitarians (i.e. ones who argue for their position using perfect-being arguments), namely:
6. If some great-making properties are infinitely increasable, then the concept of a Greatest Possible Being is the concept of an impossible being. (compare: highest possible integer)
- Mike’s first shot: no way José – if “Greatest Possible Being” means a being which is the greatest being in every possible world, this being still might be greater in some worlds than in others. There’d be no possible world in which God is surpassed by a greater being, yet in some of those worlds, God is greater than he is in others.
- Dale [dodges the bullet]: sure, that’s a coherent concept, but that’s not what Anselmian theologians have in mind. They want to say that God is greater than any being in any possible world – no being in any possible world – and this includes God too – is greater than God is in this, the actual world. Put differently: they think God is as great as a being could possibly be – and this rules out that God could be greater than he is in this world. They don’t want God’s greatness to vary across all the possible world’s he’s in, which, of course, is all of them.
- Mike: Okay. [reloads]
- Mike’s second shot: Still, your premise is false. Here’s why:
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. (from here, #7, emphases added) [blows smoke from barrel of his six-shooter, returns it to holster]
I think his second shot boils down to this: it is possible that God should create all possible creatures. And if this is so, there could be a greatest possible being, even if such a being’s greatness supervenes (in part) on having freely made happy creatures.
While Mike reloads ;-), I’ll jump out from behind my boulder and lob a couple of rocks in his general direction. (I seem to have left my gun at home.)
- [wimpy sounding grunt, throw] I don’t grant that it’s possible that God creates all createable creatures, because not all of them are compossible – that is, it isn’t consistent to suppose that some pairs of them are both created. Just to pull one sort out of thin air (there may be much better examples): There could be a sort of being which would be happy only if their world contained no beings of some other kind – call them essentially bigoted creatures.
- Mike, of course, is aware of this problem. Thus, he invokes multiple actual worlds – multiple total spacetimes, all of which are actual, as real as this possible world we’re all in, and none temporally or spatially related to any other. God could just actualize multiple possible worlds – however many it takes to create all the happy creatures there could be.
- [uuuughaah… a pebble sails] Don’t have much argument for this, but I assume that necessarily, any portion time is temporally related to all others, and any region of space is spatially related to all others. (Let me put it that way – though I may not want to commit to such entities as times and spaces, or portions or regions thereof.) I can form mental images of a “multiverse” containing several “island universes”, but I don’t think these amount to any intuitions that such are possible. To the contrary, they seem impossible to me.
- [can’t find rock, throws handful of sand] I’d be happy to make a social trinitarian retreat to this. If an argument for social trinitarianism depends on such dubious modal claims, it’s a pretty weak argument. Let my argument just run on the assumption that there can be at most one actual world. (It may sound perverse out of context, but because of my views on time I actually doubt whether we’re even in an actual world, as normally defined – see my “Three Roads” paper in Faith and Philosophy.
OK, time to drop the gunfight metaphor, before it starts using me (rather than vice-versa).
Next time I’ll respond to some further thoughts from Mike on infinitely increasing properties.
Technorati Tags: Mike Almeida, possible worlds, Anselm, social trinitarian, greatest possible being, social trinity, ontological argument
… yeah, I’m well aware of the differences between Plantinga and Lewis.
Right, I wouldn’t presume to instruct you on the matter, I was just trying to answer the question.
Hi Mike – yeah, I’m well aware of the differences between Plantinga and Lewis. My point is that some of us think that even the status, the kind of abstract reality, Plantinga gives to possible worlds is too much.
A Lewisian price for Anselmian theology? My first reaction would be: if that’s the price, adios to Anselmian theology! 🙂 But maybe we could talk about this at some future date.
Scott – I think you’re only willing to count as “possible” some state of affairs which is consistent with the history of the world so far – you’re insisting that this is the most relevant kind of possibility. Metaphysicians nowadays assume a Leibnizian method – talking about self-consistent total histories of everything (or in Mike’s case – consistent histories of everything in a particular space-time) – the thought being that each of these is eternally/timelessly and equally within God’s power to actualize. Your view fits better, in my opinion, with God in time, A-theory, “flowing” time.
For those not well read on modal metaphysics – three good starting places: Loux’s Metaphysics, Lowe’s Metaphysics, and two chapters in the Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics.
JT is generally on track with what I was thinking. What would it be for me to cognize an indexical of W9? Is this me just spouting out some gibberish; especially is the indexical of W9 is a possibility that I or no other creature in this world can actualize. I have less confidence in speculating about other worlds because: what makes me think there is another ‘world’, what makes me think this other world is ‘possible’, what makes me think this other world is ‘inaccessible to any creature in our world’?
I can see how all this is a way to say that, I could’ve done otherwise at time T–but to speak about a whole world to explain this non-actualized possibility in our world, this seems a bit baroque to my ears.
Perhaps I am playing the role here of those ignorant churchmen who fought against Copernicus. You possible-world theorists are saying, ‘there are other possible worlds out there’, and I’m saying, ‘nope, our world is actual and it has possibilities-but there are not other worlds with their own possibilities’. But, I’d certainly be happy to say that God could create other worlds than ours, other universes. But to my ears, I’d like a little positive confirmation–a good old demonstration, if you will. But you might say, that sort of proof is not the right sort of proof for defending possible worlds metaphysics. At which point we have an aporia.
It isn’t like these possible worlds get taxation without representation by the King of England. The point is, I’ve never met a person who can actually think an indexical of W9. King George certainly knew about the Colonies and had to deal with them. But we’ve still to meet these W9 creatures … (so yeah; a Lewis-style possible world metaphysics is my target here).
I confess I am not as well read as I ought to be on modal systems, so there could be things out there I just need to read to correct my Aristotelian intuitions.
Hi Dale, you write,
I wonder if it sticks in Scott’s craw when Mike uses language like this: “It is actual in world w9 that Dale speaks Chinese.” (Obviously, w9 isn’t the actual world.) This, it seems to me, commits one to the reality of (merely) possible worlds – they must be there for anything to be actual at them. This suggests that possible-worlds-talk is more than just talk, more than a way of discussion what could have been but ain’t
No, of course they are real (in the sense that they are not parts of the actual world). On the other hand, I don’t hold that they are fictional. But their being real does not commit anyone to genuine modal realism, or to their having the same ontological status as our world. Plantinga is a realist too. But his view is consistent with saying that possible worlds just are ways the world could have been, but aren’t.
I don’t know what Mike’s views are on the ontology of possible worlds, but Plantinga happily accepts their existence. Indeed, for him, all possible worlds are real in this actual world, although only as non-obtaining states of affairs – as abstract objects.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘real’. But it is true for Plantinga that all possible worlds exist in every world. They exist but, of course, are not actual in every world–that is, they do not obtain in every world. I’m closer to a Lewisian on worlds. I claim that possible objects exist in the same way that actual ones do. I don’t distinguish existence from actual existence. My reasons are mainly that genuine modal realism solves several otherwise intractable problems for Anselmian theists.
And I’m not sure whether we need to buy (ii). Is it true that every possibility is actual in some world? Could there be some possibilities for which there is no world?
Besides, can’t every world be contingent? Suppose God creates n number of worlds, each of which is actual in itself. Can’t each of these be contingent?
sorry, I said
then all possibilities are necessarily actual in some world’
but I meant
‘then every possibility is necessarily actual in some world’.
I suspect that Scott was thinking something like this:
if (i) all possible worlds are ‘real in the Lewisian sense, such that ‘actual’ and ‘possible’ are indexicals that indicate which world for some x, and if (ii) there is a possible world for every possible state of affairs, then all possibilities are necesarily actual in some world. Therefore, all worlds are necessary. Therefore, creation is not contingent.
Dale: I’d be surprised if you could; I sat down to try to wrestle with it a bit, and ended up understanding it less than when I had started. So, either ignore, or randomly insert the term “onto-theology” in there and see what happens.
Dear M.,
Sorry, but I can’t make out what your proposal means. But then, I don’t understand Aquinas’ Fourth Way.
Mike and Scott:
I wonder if it sticks in Scott’s craw when Mike uses language like this: “It is actual in world w9 that Dale speaks Chinese.” (Obviously, w9 isn’t the actual world.) This, it seems to me, commits one to the reality of (merely) possible worlds – they must be there for anything to be actual at them. This suggests that possible-worlds-talk is more than just talk, more than a way of discussion what could have been but ain’t. I don’t know what Mike’s views are on the ontology of possible worlds, but Plantinga happily accepts their existence. Indeed, for him, all possible worlds are real in this actual world, although only as non-obtaining states of affairs – as abstract objects.
Scott confesses “Aristotelian” intuitions about modality – I wonder if he’s thinking more along the lines of another theory of modality recently explored by Alexander Pruss?
“I’m not sure why you’re epistemically averse to multiverses.”
Mike,
This is a big topic, but my short answer: it’s a bad idea to trust scientists of any sort on the question of broadly logical or metaphysical possibility. The fact that they take a thesis seriously does nothing to dislodge intuitions that something is impossible. I already mentioned one reason for my aversion – the view that any time must be temporally related to all other times.
This might now seem obvious. But I was responding in (13) above to this claim of yours.
But to posit that these contingent sets of affairs are contingent/possible in our world, but actual in another world that is inaccessible to us, then that is where I disagree.
If these things are possible, then yes, they are actual in another world. This is more or less why I’ve been the PossP entails PossActP urging for the last few posts.
I do admit that these inferences might break down for Lewis where there are things that exist but are not possible or actual. But this is a different story entirely.
Scott,
Still, what does ‘actual’ add in the second clause? If I take it out, what do I lose?
Here’s what you might lose. You might not notice that each world is actual at itself, quite independently of whether you happen to be a genuine modal realist. It is sometimes forgotten that, even for realists of the sort Plantinga happens to be, it is true at each world w that w is actual. This does not entail that every world is on an ontological par. Partly, this is because (for Plantinga, and many share his intuitions on this) it is also true that only one world is actual simpliciter and it not true here, at our world, that any other possible world w is actual. Some find it hard to keep in mind that the claims in bold type are consistent with each world being actual at itself. But they are.
Scott: Is your position this, then: every possible world is considered actual from within itself, though this is basically a tautology and nothing is gained from saying it. In addition, however, this present world is not merely actual within itself, but ACTUALLY actual, in a way that other worlds aren’t in any fashion. Is this correct?
Mike: Sounds right to me.
_if it is possible that you got out of bed, then it is possibly actual that you got out of bed._
Still, what does ‘actual’ add in the second clause? If I take it out, what do I lose?
My guess is that it has something to do with something like a proximate (= immediate) possibility or remote (=mediate) possibility? Where a ‘proximate possibility’ = ‘possibly actual’; and a ‘remote possibility’ = ‘possibly possible’.
So, my ‘possibly getting out of bed at 7am’ is one that was ‘immediate to me’; but my ‘possibly flying through the sky with a jet pack at 7am’ requires some mediating steps (e.g. the invention of a jet pack, etc.).
So, again, what does ‘possibly ACTUAL’ conceptually add to the second clause?
This is a basic break down into conceptual confusion, no? It is one thing to say at 10pm, ‘I could have got out of bed at 7am this morning’, it is another to say, ‘my possibility of getting out of bed at 7am this morning is actual’.
I see no confusion. I said what is possible is possibly actual. This point is true on any modal metaphysics you like. So, if it is possible that you got out of bed, then it is possibly actual that you got out of bed. There is nothing to be confused about here. I did NOT say if it is possible you get out of bed, then it is actual that you get out of bed or that the possibility that you got out of bed is actualized. These are completely different claims from what I asserted.
Mike,
This is a basic break down into conceptual confusion, no? It is one thing to say at 10pm, ‘I could have got out of bed at 7am this morning’, it is another to say, ‘my possibility of getting out of bed at 7am this morning is actual’. If we start saying that ‘possible’ just means ‘actual’, then what does it mean to say something is ‘actual’? If we conflate this distinction, then I fear we destroy my ability to pre-philosophically say, ‘I could have gotten out of bed at 7am this morning, but I didn’t; I actually got out of bed at 7am this morning’.
Or, we can just equivocate and use the concept ‘actual’ in different ways.
My guess is that the concern is that there is some sort of ‘objective basis’ in it being true that “I could have gotten out of bed at 7am this morning but I didn’t.” If we want to say this is true, then we need to say the possibility was ‘real or actual’. But we need to indicate ‘the possibility was actual*’, where ‘actual*’ means something different than in the sentence, ‘I actually got out of bed at 8am this morning’.
So long as we keep these distinct meanings/uses for ‘actual’ clear, then we’re on safe(r) footing, I think. Otherwise, what may follow is that God necessarily creates whatever God can create; as a Christian, I disagree with such a claim. And in fact, this motivates me to hurry up and redo the post I had up about the Trinity and the Contingency of Creation…. urghh–nothing motivates like things you disagree with.
But to posit that these contingent sets of affairs are contingent/possible in our world, but actual in another world that is inaccessible to us, then that is where I disagree.
But it is true on any modal metaphysics, that what is possible is possbily actual. So all possible worlds are actual at themselves. I don’t know what it could mean to say that a world is not actual at itself.
Mike,
Ah, ok. Yeah, if we take ‘possible world’ to indicate a contingent set of affairs (on a global scale), then that’s fine with me. But to posit that these contingent sets of affairs are contingent/possible in our world, but actual in another world that is inaccessible to us, then that is where I disagree. I just happen to have an Aristotelian empirical intuition about these things (and along quasi-Scotist lines).
if it takes multiverses to show that there can be a GPB even if greatness is infinitely improvable, then that’s bad enough.
I’m not sure why you’re epistemically averse to multiverses. It is common among cosmologists–those doing cosmology in physics, that is–to take seriously the idea that our world is a multiverse. The question is not whether they are possible, in their discussion, but whether they are actual. The possiblity of multiverses is taken as settled.
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I would like to ask whether any essential attribute of God’s greatness could be defined as the limit of an increasing series, whether this is the number of beings produced or something else.
In other words, if God does not instantiate infinite x-ness, could there be an increasing series of finite x-ness?
It seems to me that for any attribute x such that both God and creatures have x, though God infinitely and creatures finitely, God’s infinite x-ness is the basis for the creature’s finite x-ness and not vice versa. In other words, it is God’s x-ness which sets the standard which allows finite x-ness that deviates from that standard, thereby allowing the notion of an infinite series of finite x-ness to begin with. While one could describe God’s x-ness through an infinite series, God’s x-ness is explanatorily prior and so the increasing possible world strategy doesn’t seem to me to work.
Scott – for the record, I’m with you on the greatness issue – it should be thought of, if we’re going to use Anselmian reasoning, as essential greatness.
Hi Mike,
Yeah, EBCs would have the oddball feature that their happiness could have something to do with what’s going on in other spatiotemporally isolated worlds – worlds in which nothing could causally affect anything in their world. These are indeed dubiously possible, at best. But – so are metaphysical schemes which include multiverses, in my view. And you’re right, compossibility is within a world, so I was using, again, an oddball notion of inter-world compossibility. I guess my main point is this: if it takes multiverses to show that there can be a GPB even if greatness is infinitely improvable, then that’s bad enough.
Mike,
Right, but it depends on what you mean by a ‘possible world’–or Lewisian is this ‘possible world’? Is it an actual world that is inaccessible to us in our world; or it is just a way to express non-actualized possibilities of our world? Depending on how you answer this, will likely shape whether or not God’s necessarily creating all possible worlds is fatalism or some form of non-determined free will.
Also, another consequence would be that creation is necessary. At least among classical theists and their friends, creation is a wholly contingent affair, such that God’s essential and necessary properties do not depend on whether or not God has created any world whatsoever.
Perhaps a possible-worlds-metaphysician might like to consider versions of ‘possible worlds’ by classical theists—i.e. account of the divine ideas of possible creatures (and depending on which theologian you are looking at, also necessary and contingent propositional truths).
I lean toward the side of the classical theist view that God in no way can add to God’s ‘greatness’ by making any creature whatsoever, in any (possible) world. Perhaps this is counter-intuitive. But again, I’d also like to know just what a ‘possible world’ is supposed to ‘be’. Is it a real/actual world that is inaccessible to our world; or is it merely contingent features of this world that have not been or are not being actualized?
Hi Scott,
As I understand it, the question Dale raises is a conceptual one. It does not depend on maximal greatness being a function of the number of happy beings created. He might have assumed some other infinitely increasing property or relation instead: the basic assumption needed to generate the question is that there is some such property or relation. And I’m not certain that the creation of happy beings would be a contingent fact about a GPB. Maybe it’s necessarily true that a GPB creates all of the happy beings it can. It does have the unwelcome consequence that there’s only one possible world, viz. the multiverse of happy creatures.
One looming question from the Classical theist in the room: why suppose that the property of maximal greatness has anything to do with creating creatures, happy or otherwise? If we want to give an account that identifies the essential and necessary features of this ‘greatest possible being’ [GPB], wouldn’t a description or definition of GPB necessarily exclude any contingent features, i.e. the relation of ‘being a Creator’ to created (= any possible creature)?’
(1) “There could be a sort of being which would be happy only if their world contained no beings of some other kind – call them essentially bigoted creatures.”
By way way of clarification, why doesn’t it matter to the question whether there are essentially bigoted creatures, EBC’s, in some worlds? Let W be a world in which there exists no other beings except those EBC’s. Let the multiverse include the largest number of creatable happy beings. There will still be infinitely many of them, though we exclude EBC’s. That is, it will still be true that the Anselmian being is infinitely improvable and there is a greatest possible being. By the way, I’m not sure what to do epistemically when beings like Plantinga’s McEar or these EBC’s are introduced. Why think such beings are possible? Someone says, what about EBC’s? Someone else says, why not believe instead that there are happy beings in some worlds that have the essential property of being happy only if there are no EBC’s in any world? I can’t bring myself to believe there is either sort of being.
I don’t grant that it’s possible that God creates all createable creatures, because not all of them are compossible
Compossibiity is a relation typically (though not always) concerning objects, properties, states of affairs occupying the some spatiotemporal location. You probably wouldn’t want to deny that you can be holding an ice cream cone at t and not holding one at (a different time) t’. What’s not compossible is that you are both holding and not holding the cone at t. In a multiverse, we have objects occupying different and causally inaccessible universes. Even the nature of space and time needn’t be the same in each of these. Relativity theory might be true in some, but not others. In one of these disconnected spatiotemporal regions an object O might have property P, in another its counterpart might fail to have property P. That does not make the island universes incompossible. You can still argue for incompossibility, but it would require defending positions on a bunch of controversial metaphysical issues.
In response, Mike apparently replies that God could actualize a multiverse in which there are enough spatio-temporally isolated space-times to ensure that all of the relevant beings are created.
I actually do not recall seeing (1) asserted or responding to it. In any case, I certainly didn’t make that reply. The response of those that endorse multiverse solutions to the problem of evil/no best world/ is reasonably straightforward. It does not matter whether you have worlds with bigoted creatures or not. Suppose, as Dale initially suggests, that the greatness of a being is a direct additive function of the number of happy beings it creates. If that is so, take every possible world W that includes an as yet uncreated happy creature. Actualize W as an isolated island universe in a multiverse that includes every creatable happy being. In my view, this is not what would make a being greatest, but it was Dale’s initial suggestion. I’m not holding him to it, I’m just addressing it. I would urge instead that a perfect being actualizes every on-balance good world. This is possible even if there are infinitely many better worlds. The resulting multiverse is the actual world. It is a world with many independent universes.
I don’t want to get sidetracked, but I offered the multiverse proposal (Don Turner defends it, Hud Hudson defends something similar with his 4-dimensional hyperspace proposal) in response to Dale’s conceptual question, which amounted to whether there could be an Anselmian perfect being given that such beings might improve infinitely. I come down in the affirmative on this. But I don’t want to give the impression that I think multiverse proposals are the best approach to these problems. I don’t think they are.
I don’t understand one of Mike’s responses. You say:
(1) “There could be a sort of being which would be happy only if their world contained no beings of some other kind – call them essentially bigoted creatures.”
Suppose that we think (1) is right. In response, Mike apparently replies that God could actualize a multiverse in which there are enough spatio-temporally isolated space-times to ensure that all of the relevant beings are created. But, if (1) is right, you can grant that it is possible for there to be multiple disconnected space-times without granting that it is possible for all of the relevant beings to exist (even in disconnected space-times). If we take (1) seriously, then we ought to think that Mike’s multiverse is an impossible world. We should think this not because it’s a multiverse, but because it’s a world (albeit, with disconnected space-times) in which two (or more) beings exist (albeit, in disconnected spacetimes) that are not compossible.
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