From Jerusalem to Athens

uppityphilosophertype said:

Its more than a little amusing that a modern day philosophical apologist for Orthodoxy would attempt to hang so much of his anti-protestant polemic on such a tendentious and recondite doctrine as Divine Simplicity; and that without ever actually getting around to telling us what he thinks this doctrine is; or why modern Protestants should feel the need to be saddled with it.

Just stating the doctrine is evidently no easy task, given the opaque and generally metaphorical way it has been broached by its historical advocates. Its most natural and well known formulation; set against the backdrop of a commonsense or platonic account of property instantiation, is *universally rejected* by both protestant and catholic thinkers alike, and has been, since at least the 1980 publication of Does God Have A Nature?

Contemporary advocates of the doctrine are quite willing to set aside the intuitive understanding of DS as worthless and incoherant. In its most recent rehabilitations (ie, William Mann, Brian Leftow, Christopher Hughes), the commonsense metaphysical backdrop for the doctrine has been replaced by a relatively clunky and controversial aristotelean, or trope-theoretic account of property instantiation. And while these latest formulations are not obviously subject to the withering criticisms Plantinga used to surgically disembowel the intuitive doctrine in the book mentioned above, its not at all clear that the aristotelean face of DS is even *relevant* to a modern protestant thinker's views on metaphysics and doctrine, let alone that this particular formulation is *entailed* by them.

Perry does have one point though. But like some of the other points he makes, its of the most frivolous sort; that indeed *some* protestant theologians did acknowledge the force of compositionalist objections to our shared sovereignty-aseity intuitions about God, and seemed to feel that the best way to defuse such worries is with some sort of footnote-affirmation of DS. But bare appeal to old, old, protestant theologians will do no argumentative work here. Asking what Calvin or Charles Hodge thought about the ontology of properties, their individuation, the nature of property-instantiation, identity theory, substance ontology, compositionality, and the cluster of other arcane concepts within the nexus of DS; --matters that have only relatively recently been placed under the microscope-- is about as appropriate and decisive as asking what ole Ptolemy thought about the special and general theories of relativity.

The reality of the matter is that the non-revelational metaphysical opinions of medieval and pre-20th century christian thinkers in general, just doesn't have the claim on modern and representative protestant theological thinking that Perry seems to think it does.

3/18/2006 6:46 AM