Is God an Abstract Object?

Abstract

Before Duns Scotus, most philosophers agreed that God is identical with His necessary intrinsic attributes-omnipotence, omniscience, etc. This Identity Thesis was a component of widely held doctrines of divine simplicity, which stated that God exemplifies no metaphysical distinctions, including that between subject and attribute. The Identity Thesis seems to render God an attribute, an abstract object. This paper shows that the Identity Thesis follows from a basic theistic belief and does not render God abstract. It also discusses how one might move from the Identity Thesis to the full doctrine of divine simplicity and shows that the Identity Thesis generates a new ontological argument. Medieval theologians commonly speculated at length on the relation between God and His essential attributes before proceeding to less abstruse matters.' The dominant view prior to 1300 was that God's relation to His necessary intrinsic attributes is identity-that God is identical with omnipotence, identical with omniscience and so on. This surprising claim was a component of doctrines of divine simplicity held by Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas and hosts of lesser lights. For the claim that God is simple, in these writers, is shorthand for the claim that He exemplifies no metaphysical distinctions whatsoever, including that between subject and essential attribute. Though abstruse, the claim that God is simple is at the heart of these thinkers' concepts of God. To cite but one instance, it is because everything he says about God will be affected by the claim that God is simple that Aquinas in his Summae takes up God's simplicity as soon as he finishes arguing His existence.2 The medievals found divine simplicity important because they explained the concept of God by explicating the concept of a perfect NOUS 24 (1990) 581-598 ? 1990 by Nouis Publications