Theistic Conceptualism, Divine Simplicity, and Platonism
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ม.ค. 2022
- Does Feser's Augustinian proof succeed? Is Theistic Conceptualism compatible with Divine Simplicity? And should we prefer Theistic Conceptualism to Platonism? I explore these questions and more in an epic discussion with @ParkersPensees.
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(1) The original video: • Abstract Objects: Plat...
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IMPORTANT NOTE:
At one point in the discussion I say, roughly, that "Anderson says something like 'God's thoughts aren't about anything'". But I would like to make an important clarification about this.
Here's what I was thinking. At minute 53 in his discussion with Malpass, Anderson says that “divine thoughts don’t have propositional content”.
I take this to imply that divine thoughts aren’t about propositions. So, God’s thought that ‘Paris is the capital of France’ is not about Paris’ being the capital of France, ie, the meaning expressed by the aforequoted sentence. What, then, is it about? It can’t be about itself, since Anderson had-just prior to the time stamp above-denounced the self-reflexivity that engenders infinite regress. But if God’s thought that ‘Paris is the capital of France’ is not about Paris’ being the capital of France, and if it’s also not about itself, I took this to imply that God’s thought here isn’t about anything. (What’s any other plausible candidate for what it’s about? Cheeseburgers?)
In essence, I understood Anderson’s claim to imply, by clear and innocuous inferences, the claim that God’s thoughts aren’t about anything.
Now, in retrospect, I should have been more cautious in what I said. I should have said that Anderson said God’s thoughts have no propositional content, and that this pretty clearly (read: clear to my mind) entails that they aren’t about anything. And so I apologize for not being as clear as I should have and thereby suggesting something Anderson did not explicitly say.
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By Divine Simplicity, the Problem of Composition is identical to the Problem of Evil.
I would love to watch more of this combination.
With all the Platonism going on the channel, have you given any thought to doing more explicit philosophy of mathematics stuff? You and your guests allude to philosophy of mathematics here and there, but it would be nice to have a full deep discussion/interview. I know your and your channel's primary focus is philosophy of religion, but the connection between these two domains is incredibly important. For instance, often you guys were speaking of concepts, properties, and relations where category theory (although not perfect) offers a nice framework to relate these rigorously.
I only subscribed to this channel to find out how Joe makes his web shooters.
lolol
Para nada, él tiene telarañas biológicas como su antecesor Tobey Maguire 🕸
Hi Joe,
Could you do a video specifically on how we determine whether something is contingent or necessary? It is one thing for people to agree with the Pruss defense of the PSR, but our understanding of what is contingent vs what is necessary obviously will impact our belief in the work that the PSR does.
It's a fair question. I think Joe covers it in his contingency argument videos. But essentially the idea is that something is considered contingent if it could have failed to be/exist/obtain. ie: it was possible that it didn't exist.
eg: The proponent would say you are contingent, because at some point in the past of the actual world you did not exist and it would have been possible that you were not born (parents didn't meet etc). Basically: in modal sense there is a possible world in which you never existed. Something is contingent if it fails to exist in any possible world, so you would be contingent.
You would be necessary if you must exist - ie: if you exist in all possible worlds including the actual world (you could not fail to exist).
Probably a little clumsily put - think Joe could phrase it better. But does that help?
@@christaylor6574 Hi Chris, yeah that is a good definition of what contingency is, but what I’m really interested is the rules by which we determine whether any actual individual thing is contingent or necessary. I’m guessing there is more to it for Joe than just whether we can conceive of a world without a given thing in it.
For myself, it makes a lot of sense that anything that is made up of “parts” or of which we can speak of it as one thing + at least one more thing requires an explanation as to why those two parts are together. And even if we agreed on this we would have to spell out what we consider a part to mean.
If there is another way to consistently approach actually determining what is contingent and what is not I would be curious to hear it.
Joe are you aware of Dr Alex Malpass 3 hours long discussion on Thought adventure podcast youtube channel ?did you watched that full discussion ?
Joe I’m curious if you watch much of john vervaekes stuff and what your views are on it? I like how he bridges philosophy with practical and tangible application (often showing how certain philosophies explain things we already do on an unconscious level). However I’d be interested to hear in what ways someone in good faith philosophically agrees or disagrees with his work.
(If you happen to be completely unfamiliar, his work deals a lot with platonism / neo platonism, realism etc which is why this convo sparked this question, and sorry if you’ve already addressed this somewhere that idk about)
I haven’t heard of him! I should check it out🙂
Sincere question here: If God's thought does not have or consist of propositional content, then what are His thoughts exactly? How would it even make sense to say God has thoughts at all? What would they be? What could they be?
Sincere question here: What do you mean by "God"?
Apparently God's thoughts *just are* the propositions in question. Trouble arises, though, when we ask: what are his thoughts *about*? As you might have seen, I write in the description of this video that -- to me -- it seems like he'll have to say they're not about anything. But, first, this strikes me as deeply implausible, and second, it removes the very feature of thoughts that moved Anderson to identify propositions with divine thoughts [namely, their intentionality].
@@MajestyofReason Thank you very much for the reply. Yes, I was responding to what you had posted in the description of the video (I haven't listened to the video yet). I agree with you with respect to the trouble. It would be weird to say God has thoughts but they aren't about anything. If God's thoughts are just propositions (not sure exactly what the "just are" qualification really provides here. Is it that they are propositions "and nothing else", or that they are propositions "and nothing over and above" propositions, etc. Anyway...) then it would seem to follow from the nature of propositions (natural assumption about propositions given the various roles that they play in a variety of domains) that God's thoughts would be just about what the propositions are, i.e. propositional constituents and relations, whatever they are. Here one wouldn't have to modify an understanding of God's thoughts per se, but rather could modify one's view of what propositions are in order to accommodate intuitions about what divine thinking is or should be. But I look forward to listening to the video.
Joe, you are tremendous. Thank you very much for all of your great work!
i think it’s more likely a divine conceptualist like Plotinus, St Augustine, St Maximos the Confessor etc, would say they are pre-propositional intelligible content.
Hi Joe
Can you Invite Cosmicskepic on THIS channel to talk about Free will
What's your personal View on Free will??
(1) I’ll be making an extensive video on freedom, fatalism, and foreknowledge some time soon, so stay tuned for that🙂
(2) I explain my view of free will in my 3K AMA video - check time stamps in description
(3) as for inviting cosmic skeptic, my response is: potentially. I’m v busy with the semester right now and have already set up lots of cool convos for the channel, and so it might have to wait
@@MajestyofReason thank you for reply I am looking forward for your future works also when In future you do a discussion with Alex Please Directly Do that in this Majesty of reason channel because he is very Popular on TH-cam it will help many people to know your channel Your discussion with Alex in Capturing Christianity is your MOST viewed video in TH-cam 2nd Is rationality rules 1 episode of kalam series So Please Invite Good Popular theists n atheists TH-camrs to your channel in future it will help Many people like Me to be aware of your great Channel thank you
@@MajestyofReason Fantastic! Appreciate you taking the time to produce videos while busy studying.
I was thinking recently about free will and causality. A theist asked me if I could travel back in time to when Hitler was a child (1910) - given what I know he will do - would I kill him? I get he was asking a moral question but I kind of thought that I couldn't. I 'know' Hitler dies in 1945 then it would seem that I couldn't kill him in 1910 (even if I chose to), because it would contradict something I know about Hitler's death.
I wondered how having such knowledge affects causality - or what is causally possible. Before creation - God knows Hitler will die in 1945 in this actualised world - does this mean Hitler did not have causal powers to - say - commit suicide before 1945? Does one have causal powers if one can't act on it? Maybe free will only works if one does not have knowledge of their future 'light cone'/causal future.
Perhaps you'll cover something like this in your video anyway. Thanks.
@@christaylor6574 I’ll cover some stuff similar to that. I like the way you probe these issues. Something helpful to think about is the direction of explanation. I think the theist should say that God knows Hitler will do X *because* Hitler will do X; and so Hitler’s activities and powers are explanatorily prior to (and hence aren’t limited or constrained by) God’s knowledge. Much more can be said, and I know I didn’t fully address your comment; but that suffices for now🙂
@@MajestyofReason Thank you, Joe. That's a good answer. ie:
1. Hitler does have causal powers to not do X, but chooses to do X.
2. Which is why God knows Hitler will do X.
No worries - short responses are helpful - appreciated.
Is it immoral for me to thumbs up before I've heard a single word?
Not necessarily, though it could be seen as disingenuous.
“Now, it is not repugnant to the simplicity of the divine mind that it understand many things; though it would be repugnant to its simplicity were His understanding to be formed by a plurality of images. Hence many ideas exist in the divine mind, as things understood by it; as can be proved thus. Inasmuch as He knows His own essence perfectly, He knows it according to every mode in which it can be known. Now it can be known not only as it is in itself, but as it can be participated in by creatures according to some degree of likeness. But every creature has its own proper species, according to which it participates in some degree in likeness to the divine essence. So far, therefore, as God knows His essence as capable of such imitation by any creature, He knows it as the particular type and idea of that creature; and in like manner as regards other creatures. So it is clear that God understands many particular types of things and these are many ideas.”(ST I.15.2)
My understanding as to why we should believe God is like this as opposed to another way is that the metaphysical starting point is what this all hinges on. It is only upon establishing that a necessary being must be pure act that we then proceed on to understanding that beings intellectual life.
Without the metaphysical background being established the later points will seem completely arbitrary. Considering your own use of participation language with regards to Platonism I would think you would at least find Aquinas’ view posted above to be coherent and congruent with divine simplicity even if you believed you had been given no sufficient reason to think God’s internal life must be like that.
A: “Now, it is not repugnant to the simplicity of the divine mind that it understand many things; though it would be repugnant to its simplicity were His understanding to be formed by a plurality of images.”
Me: Sure; nothing I said denies this
A: “Hence many ideas exist in the divine mind, as things understood by it; as can be proved thus.”
Me: The question, though, is whether this can be held *consistently* with the traditional DDS, firstly, and secondly, whether Aquinas means by ‘many ideas’ many positive ontological items numerically distinct from one another. (For he could instead mean that in God there is a single positive ontological item, God himself, which is identical to an act of knowing, such that this one act of knowing is an act of knowing infinitely many things. By itself, this latter view doesn’t imply positive ontological items intrinsic to but distinct from God.) The passage you quoted answers neither of these questions.
A: “Inasmuch as He knows His own essence perfectly, He knows it according to every mode in which it can be known. Now it can be known not only as it is in itself, but as it can be participated in by creatures according to some degree of likeness. But every creature has its own proper species, according to which it participates in some degree in likeness to the divine essence. So far, therefore, as God knows His essence as capable of such imitation by any creature, He knows it as the particular type and idea of that creature; and in like manner as regards other creatures. So it is clear that God understands many particular types of things and these are many ideas.”
Me: Again, nothing I said denies any of this. Suppose God knows types/ideas of creatures by knowing his essence; fine. The question still remains as to whether there are positive ontological items intrinsic to but distinct from God. And realism about abstract objects, as I argued in the video and elsewhere, entails the answer is ‘yes’. Nothing in the passage here engages with the reasoning I proffered.
You: “My understanding as to why we should believe God is like this as opposed to another way is that the metaphysical starting point is what this all hinges on.”
Me: I didn’t deny we should believe God is like this, i.e., that God knows many things by reflecting on his essence. The question is whether there are positive ontological items intrinsic to but distinct from God. As I argued in the video an elsewhere, realism entails that the answer is ‘yes’, and nothing in your comment addresses anything in said reasoning.
You: “It is only upon establishing that a necessary being must be pure act that we then proceed on to understanding that beings intellectual life.”
Maybe by ‘we’ you mean you and some others, but this certainly isn’t a pre-requisite for investigating and understanding God’s mental life. We could just as easily build theories of what God is like and compare their theoretical virtues to rival theories.
Me: “Without the metaphysical background being established the later points will seem completely arbitrary. Considering your own use of participation language with regards to Platonism I would think you would at least find Aquinas’ view posted above to be coherent and congruent with divine simplicity even if you believed you had been given no sufficient reason to think God’s internal life must be like that.”
The reason I think realism is plausibly incompatible with DDS is specified in the video. Moreover, I have already explained why Aquinas’s quotation firstly doesn’t address anything in my argument and, secondly, underdetermines whether Aquinas thinks means (A) or (B) or something else [and hence underdetermines whether Aquinas conceives of these ‘many ideas’ in a way incompatible with traditional DDS]: (A) There are many positive ontological items numerically distinct from one another within God’s intellect; or
(B) In God there is a single positive ontological item, God himself, which is identical to an act of knowing, such that this one act of knowing is an act of knowing infinitely many things, which we could call his many ideas.
I won't say that none of the issues that make difficult the compatibility of the doctrine of divine simplicity, with theistic conceptualism, or platonism were an issue for the late ancient Platonists, because they were. But I can't help but feel that many of the tensions between these doctrines are a direct result of Christian, and Muslim, and Jewish philosophers building thier monotheistic theologies with the bricks and mortar of neoplatonist metaphysics. For a non-Christian Platonist like Plotinus, it's the One that is absolutely simple, while Intellect/the Forms are ontologically posterior. In fact, its *because* the Forms are posterior to the One that the One is simple, since it could only have properties by participating in the Forms. Moreover, Intellect, although its sometimes misleadingly called 'divine mind', does not think, does not reason, and doesn't even know anything but itself, which is to say, the Forms and thier various relations of "interweaving". Its like Aristotle's 'thought thinking itself'. It doesn't know "propositions", or contingent truths, or tensed truths or anything else. It also doesn't create the physical world. All of that is done, according to Plotinus, by the "world soul". So, for neoplatonists, the God who creates the physical world is not the God who is is purely actual, and the God who knows the plurality of different Forms is not the God of whom divine simplicity is true. ...its only after these ideas are taken up by monotheists to develop thier own theologies that there arises the need to collapse all of these distinct (and mutually incompatible) notions of God into one. And its that move that seems, to me at any rate, to be at root of a lot of the inconsistencies being debated in natural theology and philosophy of religion currently.
Let’s assume that [1+1=2] & [This steak is overcooked] are two different things. It’s still logical that [1+1=2 & This steak is overcooked] could be one fact. So if all true things were expressed in one truth, that one truth would be God’s thought, & that thought would be God.
Thanks for the comment!
The main problem with the proposal, though, is that this is a *complex* fact -- it has structure and components. And so while it may be one truth that is identical to God's thought, it would be a structured thought with components. And so God would be identical to something structured and with components. And so divine simplicity would be false. And so this doesn't save divine simplicity.
Another problem is that there are too many propositions to be taken together into a single conjunction, as can be shown by Cantor's Theorem. See, eg., drive.google.com/file/d/139_6-j-SnKKcfF2J9VPJIxWss0fEBWNg/view
@@MajestyofReason Ok, but between God & His creation there seems to be a clear refraction of His Simple, Infinite, Eternal perfection, to our multiple, finite, temporal imperfect state, no? It’s as if there is a (figurative) prism, through which basically everything about God gets broken up into the appearance of “parts”.
Don’t we accept this about all His other so-called attributes? Omniscience, Omni-benevolence, Omnipotence, Perfection, Infinity, etc., are all different expressions, or ways we perceive, a simple God.
Pythagoras is supposed to have said “God created the universe when He put a limit on infinity.” I interpret that as saying God created physical reality by creating a privation of Himself. Of course, I have no idea how He would have done that. But as a result the Physical realm is fundamentally as much non-perfect & non-simple as it is non-infinite & limited.
Friendly neighborhood philosophy man
Im still convinced you’re secretly Tom Holland
1:42:00 what's wrong with God being a sustaining cause for properties? Why does there need to be a temporal creation?
17:05 "Necessarily existing mind"... what is 'mind' in this context?
17:48 "... some kind of mind..." ... what is 'mind' in this context?
17:54 "... concepts within the mind." ... what does 'within' mean?
All this goes away when one realises that 'the mind' exists in the same way that 'the sky' exists i.e. it doesn't
(except as pragmatic data (thinking tools) to assist human-to-human communication).
Hey Joe, who do you think are the most intelligent atheists of today. The only one I'm really aware of is oppy!
See the end of my video “Why am I agnostic?”🙂
How can a mind be simple? To be utterly simple, God would have to be utterly mindless. You can't have both intelligence and simplicity. A mindless rock is simpler than a mind. A supreme mind cannot be simpler than a rock. This should be supremely simple to understand.
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