Monday, May 29, 2023

The Trinity, Divine Simplicity, Tropes

 If one rejects strong divine simplicity (DDS) and construes God as a complex substance is there still a path to show theism is explanatorily better than priority monism or priority pluralism? I don’t see (DDS) as required given the work of Gregory Fowler and Matthew Baddorf. I think God's intrinsic attributes are not numerically identical. God's love is numerically distinct from God's power. They are identical only in the sense they are all divine attributes. Or to use Scotus's formal distinction. God's attributes are formally distinct from each other but inseparable from God (given unitive containment). What is intrinsic (e.g. numerically distinct but inseparable attributes) to God is grounded by God and is God. If God is taken as a fundamental substance that grounds His necessarily numerically irreducibly distinct properties, parts and powers. If the divine persons of the Trinity are taken as proper parts like Dr. Chad McIntosh with symmetrical, mutual dependence in which they ground each other and ground their shared properties.


Or consider Dr. Joshua Sijuwade’s DDS aspectival account I think it can be reformulated to accommodate a stronger Trinitarian monotheism. If substances or entities are a complex or bundle of tropes. In which case, the Father is an omnipotence module trope that grounds or self-exemplifies the Son and Holy Spirit tropes. The three tropes are a complex or bundle that is one entity or substance not three independent entities or substances. 

No comments: