Является ли Бог Суинберна максимально простым?

Abstract

In this commentary I examine Richard Swinburne’s account of God’s moral goodness. According to Swinburne, God’s moral goodness consists in His immunity to irrational motivation and in the maximal perfection of motivation. Such a God Swinburne calls a ‘best-acting’ God and argues that He is the simplest kind of personal God who could explain the existence of our universe. In my commentary, I first consider some implications of Swinburne’s account of God's moral goodness, which seem problematic to me; second, I offer my own account of the nature of God’s moral action, which could be an answer to these problems. Swinburne identifies two types of explanation of empirically observable reality, a personal explanation and an impersonal (scientific) explanation but reduces both to an explanation in terms of substances and their powers, suggesting that the decisive factor in choosing an explanation is its simplicity. The difficulty of recognizing Swinburne’s best-acting God as the best explanation for the existence of the universe is that what makes such a God morally good is the libertarian choice in accordance with reason, which implies the presence in Him of some potentiality which He should be able to actualize in this choice. But the potentiality means metaphysical complexity, therefore, Swinburne’s best-acting God would be the simplest possible substance explaining the existence of the universe only if a purely actual, i.e. devoid of any potentiality, substance is impossible. Relying on Aristotle’s idea that God is His activity, I try to show that the existence of such a substance, which I call God-Virtue, is possible. My argument assumes that every substance possesses its own principle of action, actualization of which leads to its flourishing. In the case of intelligent substances, the flourishing consists in the actualization of their virtue. Not every activity, however, involves change, so there is a distinction between changing substances and unchanging (divine) substance – for the former flourishing involves a transition from potential state into actual one, whereas the unchanging divine substance does not need such a transition. It follows that it is possible for there to be a substance whose action does not involve any potentiality, so that it does not actualize virtue existing independently of it but is identical with virtue itself. I conclude with brief responses to possible objections that might be raised against my account of God as virtue.