Aquinas and the Simplicity of God
With respect, and if I have the right guy, that should be Saint Thomas Aquinas. And what do you mean by God’s simplicity? From an engineering perspective, God is as complicated as it gets. Heck he created everything we hear, see and feel and it all works perfectly. There is nothing simple about that.
Note: I'm going to give the long answer first. If that bogs anyone down, you'll find my own, simpler two cents, probably much more Barthian than the top part, below.
To the first point, yes, that would be one and the same. Being a Protestant, I often favor dropping the “saint” designation, although I will use it at times (I don't reject the bestowing of sainthood on Aquinas or others so much as support the sense that all believers are saints). For some reason I find it more natural to refer to Augustine as “St. Augustine” than I do Thomas Aquinas as “St. Thomas Aquinas.” I'm not sure why, I guess because he can't just be referred to as “St. Thomas.” “St. Augustine Hippo” wouldn't be much better, so Augustine is lucky that he had a more unique name. Really, though, I think part of it is that one can have a general theological discussion without any presumptions when talking about “Thomas Aquinas,” but not even the name will be agreeable to all if you use “St. Thomas Aquinas.” Interestingly, Aquinas is often referred to as just “Thomas” in the field of theology, maybe because one comes to feel as if he is an old friend over time.
At any rate, Thomas — there I go using that reference to him — makes it his first key point in Summa Theologica about the nature of God, other than that God can be demonstrated to exist, that God is simple. This follows on St. Augustine and St. Anselm, and agrees with Angelic Doctor's friend, St. Bonaventure, although more exactly, it seems to be a doctrine whose influence stretches back to Plato. Aquinas uses this doctrine to define first and foremost what God is not (complex) and thus set the stage for the rest of his discussion on God (Aquinas is nothing of not methodical and perfectly rational — hence my quibble with Francis Shaeffer a few weeks ago).
What simple means here is that an object has no smaller parts. For instance, I am made up of many physical parts and metaphysical parts that aren't essential to humanness, they are “accidents” (unnecessary). Anything that makes me me is not necessary for me being a human, only for making me Tim Butler. Moreover, even essential parts of my humanness come merely from my “participation” in humanness and not my being “human,” full stop, for you are a human too. God, on the other hand, is necessarily as He is (unchanging and perfect) and does not participate in things such as goodness, love, mercy, etc., but rather is those things. As the Bible says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).
Following the Thomistic-Aristotelean viewpoint, when I say John is good, but Susan is better and Mark is best, I am defining the characteristic of goodness based on the “benchmark” of goodness, that is, God. The emphasis here is that when I say that John is good, that means part of his nature is goodness, but when I say God is good, I mean really that God is God (or, as Barth would say, “God is freely being Himself”) — His entire nature simply is Him. God can't be less than any of those things, because when we isolate the “attributes” of God, we are really just speaking in terms humans can understand by analogy, in reality, God's attributes are all merely one divine nature.
Does that help? I can try to explain more — I'm not really doing Aquinas much justice. For anyone interested, the appropriate part of the Summa is 1.3
My Simple Two Cents: God is freely Himself so we can merely say God is God. However, when I talk about anything else in the world, I essentially spend my time defining what that thing is not. I am using a keyboard, which means I am not using a toaster. Moreover, as everything in this world is corrupt and unable to follow its own nature, we often talk in terms of what a thing is suppose to be and what it actually is. I need to be talked about in attributes, because I do not live up to the ideal of perfect humanness because of my fallen nature (so we talk in terms of defining which parts of God's nature I am suppose to be like but am not). Moreover, even if I did live up to God's plan for a human, I'd still not encompass all good things, so I'd still need to be attributed as being “human” (which really is a limiter saying which parts of God's nature I am not even suppose to be).
I think that's a fair explanation of the gist of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). I'll probably post the paper I am writing on the subject, perhaps broken into smaller bits within the not too distant future.
Apropos to the Wet Snow
Gently falling now,
The snow glistens in the yard,
All is clean for now.
The sleet and freezing rain started at 8:15 this morning (Thursday) and is continuing even now into Friday morning. We had some “thunder snow,” lots of freezing rain, some normal rain to melt everything together into bigger hunks of ice, and now more freezing rain. Supposedly, next up is some light fluffy snow. The amount of ice (several inches) is really quite amazing in and of itself. I'm glad I don't need to be anywhere for the next few days.
Let Me Pat Myself on the Back
Ok, I don't normally do this, but I happened to run into an old blog post of mine, and just had to revel in it for a moment — well, sort of, I would have preferred being wrong, for the most part.
“For those, like me, of the Right, we have a serious problem. As the
saying goes, if these are our friends, we hardly need enemies. I
predict a Democratic landslide in 2006, unless we get our collective
acts together.”
As I wrote on a mailing list today, as a free market kind of guy, I'm not excited about the Republicans at the moment — they are now the “big government party,” and though I don't trust the Dems talk of smaller government (since it doesn't fit with their overall agenda), I think the fact that people like me, as members of the base, are unexcited was damaging. Moreover, the wishy-washiness of the Republicans on issues like cloning, etc., hasn't given social conservatives like myself much reason to be terribly excited about the GOP either. So, I think the Republicans ended up going for some illusory “moderates” that do not actually exist, or at least do not exist in large enough quantities to win an election, while leaving behind the bases that propelled them into power in '94, and helped for the big wins ten years later in '04. This was worsened by the close association of the GOP with the USA PATRIOT Act, despite the fact that people from both parties stupidly supported this bill. Why the GOP pushed to reup it is beyond me in as much as they actually wanted to win in the election a few weeks ago. Really, the election was all about the stupidity of forgetting what people elected you to do and not even doing a good job lying about it.
LED Lights
I'm trying out LED Christmas tree light strands this year. They are finally becoming somewhat affordable, and I have to say, I'm really impressed. They are cool to the touch, the colors are more vibrant, and they promise many, many times the number of hours one gets with regular Christmas tree lights (which doesn't surprise me, given how long LED lights last in general).
I think this year and next should be the years of LED; this is just one more stake in the heart of the incandescent light bulb.
Anyone else trying out these nifty lights?
Hmm, Am I Allowed to Do This?
Usually, if I plan to critique a major authority, I try to do so using other major authorities. Yet, in my ongoing project concerning God's simplicity, I found I fired at several of Alvin Plantinga's (only the greatest living Reformed philosopher) objections to the doctrine using just my own reason. I wonder if I really should dare to challenge Plantinga so directly? My object initially was certainly anything but clashing with Plantinga.
Of course, I do use the reasoning of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth and C. S. Lewis in doing so — at least indirectly — so maybe I'm OK.
Happy Thanksgiving
Well, I'm a little late, but I just wanted to wish y'all a very happy Thanksgiving. If you were traveling over the past few days, I hope you had a safe trip to your destination and will have a safe trip home again.
I had no less than two Turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie dinners today. I am extremely stuffed and feeling rather tired, particularly after spending some time tonight trying to refine my argument concerning divine simplicity some more.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The Simplicity of God
I'm working on an interesting project at the moment; it is a paper on the subject of the Simplicity of God in general, and Aquinas's view of such in particular. It is interesting because simplicity isn't a doctrine that comes up very often, and yet, Aquinas uses it as the foundation of his discussion of God's nature. Simplicity in this sense isn't an indication of God being “uninteresting,” but rather a suggestion that God is not made up of “parts.”
I've been digging into Barth to try to find his thoughts on the subject; so far I haven't found a lot, but at least from a basic standpoint, Barth's emphasis on God's total freedom (to be Himself) relates quite well to Aquinas's doctrine of Divine Simplicity, I think.
I'll have to talk more about this as I progress on the project.
Sony, the PlayStation 3 and the PC Market
I forgot to mention this on my blog yesterday. My latest commentary on Open for Business analyzes Sony's need to reanalyze its PC strategy in light of the PlayStation 3.
With the launch of the PlayStation 3, the fate of one of the world’s best-known brands, Sony, hangs in the balance. Although the technology, and the price tag, of the new system will likely lead to it moving at least partially into the realm of home theater enthusiasts rather than just gaming enthusiasts wanting the latest game system, presently Sony is staking much of its future on that market. For true security, it needs a complete digital ecosystem, and for that, it needs to change its PC strategy.
You can read the piece here.
Free Coffee
So, I went to Starbucks today and ordered an Iced Venti Latte through the drive through window. I had the money out and was ready to pay by the time the barrista came to the window. She took a little while, but not that long. When she did finally come, I thought it was odd that she did not ask for my money before handing me the coffee, however after giving me the coffee, she told me that the drink was on the house since they had been slow! Indeed, the service wasn't as fast as it is sometimes, but it was still nothing to sneeze at.
That's good customer service for you!
C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot
Most of you know of my great admiration for C. S. Lewis. His writing style has always been, for me, a goal — however hopeless — that I should like to someday reach in my own prose. He also was an academic, a noted literary critic and a master at explaining theology (and, to a lesser extent, philosophy). As a theologian, he also embodied many of the principles of neo-orthodoxy, though I have found little on his direct knowledge and interest in Barth, Brunner and so on.
In short, Lewis is sort of the archetype that I would like to aspire to in most things. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't perfect and I don't “idolize” him, I simply recognize him as a man who did essentially the things I would like to do and did them very well. The combination literary critic-theology writer isn't exactly a common occupation, you know?
T. S. Eliot, as I've come to appreciate him over the last few years, is interesting to me for similar reasons. After a bout in Eastern religion, he ended up an Anglican, like Lewis. He was a literary giant (I'd suggest quite possibly the literary giant of the twentieth century) in both poetry and criticism and he was also well versed in philosophy and theology.
Given that they both worked in the field of literature at Oxford or Cambridge during the same time span, I wondered how they got along, for surely they knew each other. I never actually knew anything in relation to that, however, until I ran into this excellent transcript of a lecture on the subjection. If you read it, make sure to read it all the way through for the interesting twist toward the end.
Interesting.
(It is also interesting I keep bringing up Eliot here. He has been popping up in a lot of things I've been working on lately, not all of them even related.)
