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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that God must be rather than have his attributes (the doctrine of divine simplicity).

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.If God simply is his attributes, then divine justice and divine mercy are identical, which contradicts the logical incompatibility of their extensions across cases.
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    • 2.The identity of distinct attributes generates a formal contradiction that cannot be dissolved by appeal to ineffability or analogical predication without abandoning cognitive meaningfulness of theological language.
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    • 3.A doctrine that entails the identity of formally distinct properties is more costly to coherence than the dependency relations it was invoked to avoid.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Aquinas's own distinction between God's esse and his essentia in creatures presupposes a conceptual framework of real distinctions that, when consistently applied, undermines the claim that God's attributes admit no real distinction.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.If real distinctions are intelligible for creatures, the burden of proof falls on the divine simplicity theorist to show why analogical extension of such distinctions to God is categorically blocked rather than merely inappropriate.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The Anselmian definition of God is that God is maximally perfect, that than which no greater can be conceived.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.A God who was less than maximally perfect would not be an absolute reality and an appropriate object of worship.
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    • 3.An absolute reality must be a se (from itself), and so not dependent on anything distinct from itself either for its nature or for its existence.
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    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.