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    The identity in God of essence and existence, possibility... — Carmelics
    Home/Divine Attributes
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    The identity in God of essence and existence, possibility and actuality, is the ground of God's necessary existence.

    Divine Attributes
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.A necessary being is one whose possibility entails its existence, and whose nonexistence entails its impossibility.
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    • 2.Something must ground this necessity of existence.
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    • 3.Saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds does not provide a ground, but merely a graphic Leibnizian representation of the notion of necessary being.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Essence and existence are distinct categories: essence specifies what a thing is, while existence adds that it is, as Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason.
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    • 2.If existence is not a real predicate or determination of essence, then no identity of essence with existence can serve as an ontological ground for necessary existence.
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    • 3.The claim therefore collapses into a sophisticated restatement of the ontological argument, inheriting all its vulnerabilities to Kantian and Humean critiques.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Divine simplicity requires that God's essence just is God's existence, but Scotus argued this obliterates the formal distinction between divine attributes, rendering God's nature unintelligible.
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    • 2.A being whose essence is identical to its existence provides no explanatory traction over brute necessity, since we can equally posit that the universe's existence is necessary without grounding that in an essence-existence identity.
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    Divine Attributes

    Related

    A being whose essence is identical to its existence provides no explanatory trac...A necessary being is one whose possibility entails its existence, and whose none...Divine simplicity requires that God's essence just is God's existence, but Scotu...Essence and existence are distinct categories: essence specifies what a thing is...
    +4 moreShow less
    If existence is not a real predicate or determination of essence, then no identi...Saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds does not provide a ...Something must ground this necessity of existence.The claim therefore collapses into a sophisticated restatement of the ontologica...

    Similar

    If God is by definition a necessary being, then necessary existence is...87%The essence of God involves necessary existence87%The most available ground for including necessary existence in God's e...85%God is the ultimate ground of criteria of identity for all things85%

    Source

    AI-extracted3/3 agreementValid
    SEP: divine-simplicity
    View source passageHide passage
    One can also arrive at the simplicity doctrine via the divine necessity. As maximally perfect, as that than which no greater can be conceived, God must be a metaphysically necessary being, one that cannot not exist. A necessary being is one whose possibility entails its existence, and whose nonexistence entails its impossibility. But what could be the ground of this necessity of existence if not the identity in God of essence and existence, possibility and actuality? Saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds does not provide a ground, but merely a graphic Leibnizian represen...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The passage explicitly argues that the identity in God of essence and existence grounds divine necessity by posing it as a rhetorical question ("But what could be the ground of this necessity of existence if not the identity in God of essence and existence?"), and the extracted premises accurately capture the reasoning that necessity requires a ground and that possible-worlds talk fails to provide one, leaving the essence-existence identity as the answer.

    Confidence: The author poses a rhetorical question implying this is the answer.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit