This thesis attempts to address the philosophical implications of the N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) research of Dr. Rick Strassman. Strassman concludes that the psychedelic properties of DMT represent a proper biological starting point for discussing spiritual and near-death experiences. My research attempts to incorporate philosophical elements from the philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion/mysticism to give an accurate account of some of the philosophical issues worth exploring for future research. One of the essential patterns in this thesis is to trace (...) the research and conclusions of Strassman, compare them with the philosophical issues in the contemporary philosophy of mind and to address the problems of spiritual qualia and mystical experience. Part of the issue stems from understanding a theoneurological (brain mediated prophetic/spiritual communication) account for spiritual experiences within the framework of naturalism/supernaturalism philosophy. Here, I decipher the problems of qualitative distinctions amongst spiritual and nonspiritual experiences and how consciousness plays an essential role in this process. (shrink)

Divine Simplicity has it that God is absolutely simple. God exhibits no metaphysical complexity; he has neither proper parts nor distinct intrinsic properties. Recently, Jeffrey Brower has put forward an account of divine simplicity that has it that God is the truthmaker for all intrinsic essential predications about him. This allows Brower to preserve the intuitive thought that God is not a property but a concrete being. In this paper, I provide two objections to Brower’s account that are meant to (...) show that whatever merits this account of divine simplicity has, plausibility is not one of them. (shrink)

We raise various puzzles about the relationship between God and the meaning of life. These difficulties suggest that, even if we assume that God exists, and even if God’s existence would entail that our lives have meaning, God is not and could not be the source of the meaning of life. We conclude by discussing implications of our arguments: these claims can be used in a novel argument for atheism; these claims undermine an extant argument for God’s existence; and they (...) suggest that atheism is consistent with our lives having meaning. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the supposition of divine omnipotence entails a contradiction: omnipotence both must and must not be intrinsic to God. Hence, traditional theism must be rejected. To begin, I separate out some theoretical distinctions needed to inform the discussion. I then advance two different arguments for the conclusion that omnipotence must be intrinsic to God; these utilise the notions of essence and aseity. Next, I argue that some necessary conditions on being omnipotent are extrinsic, and that (...) this means omnipotence cannot be intrinsic to God. I consider three different ways of resolving this conflict, but contend that each is unsuccessful. Before concluding, I explain why the type of strategy used to resolve the traditional paradoxes of omnipotence cannot be successfully employed against the paradox presented here. (shrink)

In contrast to the most common view, I argue that one can consistently affirm that fundamental moral principles are objective and invariable, and yet are dependent on God. I explore and reject appealing to divine simplicity as a basis for affirming this conjunction. Rather, I develop the thesis that God is identical to the Good (the Identity View or IV) and argue that the IV does not fall to the criticisms of simplicity. I then consider a divine will theory (DWT) (...) that claims moral principles are grounded in God’s will. When the IV is conjoined with a DWT, there is reason to affirm an objective, theistically based ethics. The IV and DWT proposed here are models and while I attempt to increase their plausibility, I do not argue for their truth. The IV conjoined with a moral theory such as DWT explains the dependence of moral principles on God, while allowing for objectivity since morality is rooted in the eternal unchanging standard of the Good. (shrink)

The doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God is devoid of physical or metaphysical complexity, is widely believed to be incoherent. I argue that although two prominent recent attempts to defend it fail, it can be defended against the charge of obvious incoherence. The defense rests on the isolation and rejection of a crucial assumption, namely, that no property is an individual. I argue that there is nothing in our ordinary concepts of property and individual to warrant the assumption, (...) and that once the assumption is rejected, the way is clear to viewing the divine attributes as self-exemplifying properties whose self-exemplification entails their identity with an individual. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophical theology the doctrine of divine simplicity has regained attention. There are several new defenses of simplicity in the literature. One of the more surprising, and troubling, aspects of the contemporary defenses amongst Christian philosophers and theologians is a seeming lack of understanding about how radical the doctrine of divine simplicity truly is. As such, I wish to do a few things in this paper. First, systematically articulate the doctrine of divine simplicity. Second, argue that divine simplicity is (...) not a possible perfection. Third, offer some concluding remarks and remaining issues that will need to be sorted out for the debate over simplicity to continue. (shrink)

In this article, I explain how and why different attempts to defend absolute divine simplicity fail. A proponent of absolute divine simplicity has to explain why different attributions do not suppose a metaphysical complexity in God but just one superproperty, why there is no difference between God and His super-property and finally how a absolute simple entity can be the truthmaker of different intrinsic predications. It does not necessarily lead to a rejection of divine simplicity but it shows that we (...) may consider another conception of divine simplicity compatible with some metaphysical complexity in God. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God is an absolutely simple being lacking any distinct metaphysical parts, properties, or constituents. Although this doctrine was once an essential part of traditional philosophical theology, it is now widely rejected as incoherent. In this paper, I develop an interpretation of the doctrine designed to resolve contemporary concerns about its coherence, as well as to show precisely what is required to make sense of divine simplicity.

In On the Nature and Existence of God, Richard Gale follows majority opinion in giving very short shrift to the doctrine of divine simplicity: in his view, there is no coherent expressible doctrine of divine simplicity. Rising to the implicit challenge, I argue that---contrary to what is widely believed---there is a coherently expressible doctrine of divine simplicity, though it is rather different from the views that are typically expressed by defenders of this doctrine. At the very least, I think that (...) I manage to show that there are ways of understanding the doctrine of divine simplicity that have not yet been adequately examined. (shrink)

There is a traditional theistic doctrine, known as the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God is an absolutely simple being, completely devoid of any metaphysical complexity. On the standard understanding of this doctrine—as epitomized in the work of philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas—there are no distinctions to be drawn between God and his nature, goodness, power, or wisdom. On the contrary, God is identical with each of these things, along with anything else that can be predicated (...) of him intrinsically. (shrink)

This volume announces a new era in the philosophy of God. Many of its contributions work to create stronger links between the philosophy of God, on the one hand, and mathematics or metamathematics, on the other hand. It is about not only the possibilities of applying mathematics or metamathematics to questions about God, but also the reverse question: Does the philosophy of God have anything to offer mathematics or metamathematics? The remaining contributions tackle stereotypes in the philosophy of religion. The (...) volume includes 35 contributions. It is divided into nine parts: 1. Who Created the Concept of God; 2. Omniscience, Omnipotence, Timelessness and Spacelessness of God; 3. God and Perfect Goodness, Perfect Beauty, Perfect Freedom; 4. God, Fundamentality and Creation of All Else; 5. Simplicity and Ineffability of God; 6. God, Necessity and Abstract Objects; 7. God, Infinity, and Pascal's Wager; 8. God and (Meta-)Mathematics; and 9. God and Mind. (shrink)

E.J.Lowe was a prominent and theistically–inclined philosopher who developed and defended a four–category ontology with roots in Aristotle’s Categories. But Lowe engaged in little philosophical theology and said even less about how a divine being might fit into his considered ontology. This paper explores ways in which the reality of a divine being might be squared with Lowe’s ontology. I motivate the exploration with a puzzle that suggests Lowe must reject either divine aseity or the traditional view that God is (...) a substance. After showing that the puzzle cannot be overcome by rejecting one of its premises, I consider ways in which Lowe might try to reject the puzzle wholesale. I argue that the best way to reject the puzzle is to countenance a fifth fundamental category, the category of supernatural substance. (shrink)

The doctrine of divine aseity has played a significant role in the development of classical theism. However, very little attention has been paid in recent years to the question of how precisely aseity should be characterized. We argue that this neglect is unwarranted since extant characterizations of this central divine attribute quickly encounter difficulties. In particular, we present a new argument to show that the most widely accepted contemporary account of aseity is inconsistent. We then consider the prospects for developing (...) a new account of aseity which avoids the pitfalls we have highlighted. (shrink)

This paper examines a variety of approaches in order to make sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity. Discussing the implications of traditional and contemporary philosophical concepts of divine simplicity, the author argues for taking the divine nature as a stupendous substance to serve as the one and only truthmaker of statements regarding God, while we can resolve the predication problem which is caused by the idea that, as implied by divine simplicity, God is identical to his attributes if we (...) conceive of the divine nature as an equivalent to Platonic forms. (shrink)

Divine simplicity is central to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of God. Most important for Aquinas is his view that God’s existence (esse) is identical to God’s essence; for everything other than God, there is a distinction between existence and essence. However, recent developments in analytic philosophy about the nature of existence threaten to undermine what Aquinas thought regarding divine simplicity. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I trace Aquinas’s thinking on divine simplicity through the various texts he wrote regarding the (...) matter. I establish that it is crucial for Aquinas that God is identical to his existence. But, is it even coherent to talk about “a thing’s existence?” In Chapter Two I summarize the arguments of C.J.F. Williams that existence is not a real property that individuals have and that predicating the word “exists” after the name of an individual produces linguistic gibberish. After considering, and rejecting, in Chapter Three attempts by some philosophers to refute Williams’s arguments, I turn, in Chapter Four, to a more detailed account of what Aquinas means by esse, the Latin word often rendered in English as “existence.” The conclusion that I come to is that Aquinas does not mean by esse what contemporary philosophers have usually meant by “existence.” Rather, he understands esse to be the act by which anything can be anything at all, instead of there being nothing whatsoever. In the final chapter, I turn to implications of this for Aquinas’s views of divine simplicity, showing that rather than being incoherent, Aquinas’s thinking on esse points toward the unfathomable mystery that is God. (shrink)

This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options (...) available to the classical theist for dealing with the challenge of Platonism. It probes in detail the diverse views on the reality of abstract objects and their compatibility with classical theism. It contains a most thorough discussion, rooted in careful exegesis, of the biblical and patristic basis of the doctrine of divine aseity. Finally, it challenges the influential Quinean metaontological theses concerning the way in which we make ontological commitments. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light two sources of tension for Christian theists who endorse the principle of unrestricted composition, that necessarily, for any objects, the xs, there exists an object, y, such that the xs compose y. In Value, we argue that a composite object made of wholly valuable parts is at least as valuable as its most valuable part, and so the mereological sum of God and a wholly valuable part would be at least (...) as valuable as God; but Christian theism arguably demands that no concrete object other than God can be as valuable as God. And in Creation, we argue that the conjunction of theism and unrestricted composition, together with the claim that every concrete entity that is numerically distinct from God is created by God, implies that God is created by God. We conclude by examining the prospects of restricting the thesis of unrestricted composition to the domain of material or spatiotemporal objects as a way to sidestep the above arguments against the conjunction of Christian theism and unrestricted composition. (shrink)

A new version of the ontological argument for the existence of God is outlined and examined. After giving a brief account of some traditional ontological arguments for the existence of God, where their defects are identified, it is explained how this new argument is built upon their foundations and surmounts their defects. In particular, this version uses the resources of impossible worlds to plug the common escape route from standard modal versions of the ontological argument. After outlining the nature of (...) impossible worlds, and motivating the need for positing them, the new argument is delineated and its premises justified. It is taken for granted that the argument cannot be sound, since it would prove too much. However, its premises are all plausible, and their denial promises to have significant ramifications. Several intuitive lines of objections are then explored in order to illuminate their shortcomings. The puzzle that the argument poses is therefore not whether the argument is sound, for it clearly cannot be. Rather, it is to place pressure on its plausible premises, so some plausible account of how the argument fails can be identified, and that the devising of such an account promises to be insightful. In the process, we should gain an improved understanding of how such ontological arguments work. (shrink)

The paper surveys two contrasting views of first‐order analyses of classical theistic doctrines about the existence and nature of God. On the first view, first‐order logic provides methods for the adequate analysis of these doctrines, for example by construing ‘God’ as a singular term or as a monadic predicate, or by taking it to be a definite description. On the second view, such analyses are conceptually inadequate, at least when the doctrines in question are viewed against the background of classical (...) theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity, for first‐order analyses presuppose an ontological complexity on the part of the propositions which they analyze, which fits ill with this doctrine. (shrink)

This paper is a comparative study between Brower’s solution to the problem of divine simplicity and that of Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāī (d. 933). First, I argue that the theory of aḥwāl is a semantic theory rather than a metaphysical one. Then, I present a reconstruction of Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāī’s theory of aḥwāl, based on Brower’s truthmaker theory of predication. Then, I show how Abū Hāšim would reply to some of the objections that Saenz raised against Brower’s truthmaker theory of divine (...) simplicity. Later on, I discuss Abū Hāšim’s explanation of the similarities between the properties that God and creatures share. (shrink)

Christian Platonism and Divine Simplicity remain the most commonly discussed views with respect to the way in which Christians ought to conceive of God’s nature and properties. In this essay, I suggest that we ought to consider seriously two versions of a quite different view, namely, what I call “the Nominalized Composite God View.” Both versions of the Nominalized Composite God View share two features: (1) they treat God as metaphysically composite, in opposition to Divine Simplicity, and (2) they deny (...) that God has God’s properties in virtue of instantiating abstractly existing universals, in opposition to Christian Platonism. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of religion there are three main ways in which God is conceptualised in relation to personhood:God is a person and so personal. God is non-personal, and so is not a person. God is a personal non-person. The first two of these options will be familiar to many, with held by most contemporary monotheist philosophers of religion and mainly by those who are pantheists., however, is a view some may not have come across, despite its proponents claiming it (...) was the view of great philosophical theologians from the past. However, within recent times has become more popular. On the face of it, it might not be clear what the difference between and is, and whether debate had between the two positions is substantive. The goal of this paper is therefore to clarify the debate and assess whether the many claims advocates of make as to why God cannot be a person stand up to scrutiny or are persuasive. My suggestion will be that on the whole they do and are not. As such, defenders of will either need to defend these reasons in more detail or focus on the area I suggest the debate really rests on. (shrink)

A new version of the ontological argument for the existence of God is outlined and examined. After giving a brief account of some traditional ontological arguments for the existence of God, where their defects are identified, it is explained how this new argument is built upon their foundations and surmounts their defects. In particular, this version uses the resources of impossible worlds to plug the common escape route from standard modal versions of the ontological argument. After outlining the nature of (...) impossible worlds, and motivating the need for positing them, the new argument is delineated and its premises justified. It is taken for granted that the argument cannot be sound, since it would prove too much. However, its premises are all plausible, and their denial promises to have significant ramifications. Several intuitive lines of objections are then explored in order to illuminate their shortcomings. The puzzle that the argument poses is therefore not whether the argument is sound, for it clearly cannot be. Rather, it is to place pressure on its plausible premises, so some plausible account of how the argument fails can be identified, and that the devising of such an account promises to be insightful. In the process, we should gain an improved understanding of how such ontological arguments work. (shrink)

This thesis was on how God is related to the truth-values of propositions on possible worlds - specifically, those propositions that do not seem to be about Him and constitute His ideas for what to create. It opened with a survey of some historical positions with special emphasis on Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza and Kant. Next, some criticisms were given for these so-called deity theories with the most space given to Brian Leftow’s critiques. The second chapter detailed Brian Leftow’s theological modality. (...) In it, secular modality is excogitated in an instant from eternity when God gets a set of creaturely natures in one imaginative act. His preferences that are based on His nature then determine the modality of what God thinks up. A number of objections were raised for the Leftowian project and the last chapter attempted to supplement an older deity theory with some insights from Leftow in order to avoid his initial criticisms. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show that the doctrine of divine simplicity suffers from difficulties which undermine its plausibility. The main difficulties explored are Plantinga’s problem of double identification, Pruss’ multiple attributes problem, and Schmitt’s co-specificity problem. In more recent years, defenders of the doctrine have offered a way out of these problems by interpreting it in light of a truthmaker account of predication. This paper analyzes this recent defense, among others, and attempts to show that this new interpretation of divine (...) simplicity still has problems which undermine the plausibility of the doctrine. (shrink)