Justified True Belief

(P1) Scripture teaches that God genuinely and distinctly possesses multiple essential attributes: He is omnipotent, omniscient, eternally self-existent, morally perfect, loving, holy, and just. + (1) The biblical starting point: a God of rich, articulated perfections. - The God of Scripture is not described in terms of bare, undifferentiated unity. He is presented through a rich vocabulary of distinct perfections that are genuinely informative and genuinely distinct from one another in their content. - He is holy, set apart from all creation and from all moral imperfection (Isaiah 6:3, Revelation 4:8). He is loving, directing his care and covenant faithfulness toward creatures and supremely toward those made in his image (1 John 4:8, Deuteronomy 7:9). He is omnipotent, sovereign over all things with unlimited power (Revelation 19:6, Job 42:2). He is omniscient, knowing all things exhaustively including the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Psalm 139:1-4, Hebrews 4:13). He is just and righteous, never acting contrary to moral perfection (Deuteronomy 32:4, Romans 3:26). He is self-existent, drawing his being from no external source (Exodus 3:14, Acts 17:25). - These are not redundant descriptions of the same feature approached from different angles. Holiness and love, omnipotence and justice, make genuinely distinct informative claims about who God is. To know that God is holy does not already tell you everything that knowing God is loving adds. Scripture treats them as distinct because they are distinct. (2) Statements about God use words with the same core meaning as in human discourse. - When Scripture says God is wise and a wise person is wise, the word "wise" is not being used in a completely different sense each time. If it were, "God is wise" would carry no information to a reader who knows what wisdom means in human experience. This would be like using the same word for a color and a temperature: technically grammatical but communicating nothing. - Nor are the terms applied in exactly the same way without qualification; God’s wisdom is unlimited and human wisdom is limited. The terms carry the same core meaning but are applied at an unlimited or maximal degree. When Scripture says God "exists," it is not using "exists" in a fundamentally alien sense that shares nothing with the existence of creatures. As Craig argues in his Systematic Philosophical Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2025), ch. 5, any doctrine of divine simplicity that requires denying this shared meaning collapses into agnosticism about God’s nature and contradicts the plain intent of Scripture to actually reveal what God is like. (3) Scripture’s teaching on divine attributes sets the boundary conditions for any acceptable doctrine of divine simplicity. - A doctrine of divine simplicity must be evaluated not only for its metaphysical coherence but for its consistency with what Scripture actually says about God. Any version of simplicity that implies God has no genuinely distinct essential attributes, or that meaningful positive language about God is impossible, fails on biblical grounds before we consider its philosophical problems. - The formulation of divine simplicity this argument defends begins from this constraint and asks: what is the most that can be said about divine simplicity that is both philosophically defensible and consistent with Scripture’s rich positive teaching about God? - A reader wishing to compare the alternative classical account, which accepts the stronger identity thesis at the cost of greater philosophical complexity, should consult the Divine Simplicity (Classical / Strong) argument on this site. Both arguments are presented so that the reader can weigh the full range of defensible positions.

(P2) Properties, rightly understood, are not real abstract objects or independent ontological constituents that compose their bearers. + Before engaging the argument, four terms deserve brief definition. A predicate is the part of a sentence that says something about the subject: in "God is wise," the predicate is "is wise." Making such a statement is called a predication. A constituent is a genuine building-block of something, in the way bricks are constituents of a wall or hydrogen and oxygen are constituents of water; a metaphysical constituent is a building-block at the level of being itself, not merely physical matter. Ontological means relating to what actually exists in reality, as opposed to what we merely think or say. An abstract entity (also called a universal or property in this debate) is something that would exist outside space and time, not physical and not located anywhere: the number 7 and the property redness-itself are typically treated as abstract entities by those who believe in them. (1) The question of what properties are. - When we say that Socrates is wise, or that gold is yellow, or that God is omnipotent, we are making true statements. But what, if anything, exists in reality that makes these statements true? The philosophical tradition offers sharply different answers, and which answer one accepts has direct consequences for how the problem of divine simplicity is framed. - Property realists hold that there are real abstract entities, sometimes called universals or exemplifiables, that correspond to such predicates. On this view, wisdom-itself is a real abstract entity that Socrates exemplifies (stands in a special relation to), yellowness-itself is a real abstract entity that gold exemplifies, and omnipotence-itself is a real abstract entity that God exemplifies. To exemplify a property is to be an instance of it, the way a red ball is an instance of the abstract universal redness. These properties exist as genuine members of the inventory of reality, independently of any particular thing that has them. - Property anti-realists deny this. They hold that true statements of the form "a is F" do not require the existence of a distinct abstract entity F-ness over and above the concrete individual a. The fact that gold is yellow does not require the existence of a thing called yellowness-itself floating somewhere outside space and time. The truthmaker for "gold is yellow" (meaning whatever it is in reality that makes that statement true) is simply gold itself, which is just the kind of thing it is. (2) The case for property anti-realism. - It is important to acknowledge at the outset that property anti-realism is a seriously contested philosophical position, not an established consensus. Property realism is also a serious and widely held view. The argument presented here adopts property anti-realism as its working framework, not because the debate is settled, but because the position is defensible enough to serve as the foundation for a doctrine of divine simplicity that avoids the difficulties of the classical strong form. Defeater 0 below addresses the challenge to this foundation directly. - Property anti-realism has deep and credible philosophical roots. W.V.O. Quine’s famous criterion of ontological commitment holds that we are committed to the existence only of what we must refer to in our best theories. True sentences like "Socrates is wise" need not carry commitment to the existence of wisdom-itself as a separate entity. As Quine argued in On What There Is (1948), the philosophical tradition of turning predicates into abstract objects is a grammatical illusion, not a metaphysical necessity. - Peter van Inwagen has argued that properties, in the ontologically loaded sense of abstract exemplifiables, are deeply mysterious entities. Their relation to their bearers (whether by "exemplification," "instantiation," or "participation") is philosophically obscure. We have little grip on what it means for a concrete particular to stand in a special relation to an abstract universal. The anti-realist avoids this obscurity by denying that there are any such abstract entities to be related to. - Craig argues in his Systematic Philosophical Theology that the anti-realist position is highly plausible in the current metaphysical climate. He develops the general philosophical case for this position at length in God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity (Springer, 2017). If we follow a relational approach in which property-talk is a useful descriptive device without requiring commitment to abstract entities, then the apparent problem of divine simplicity dissolves. Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey Brower develop a related case in "A Theistic Argument against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity)" (Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2, 2006), showing that the theist has independent theological reasons to resist Platonism about abstract objects. (3) Anti-realism about properties is not the same as theological nominalism or meaningless predication. - Theological nominalists have sometimes claimed that statements about God’s attributes carry no factual content at all: that "God is wise" does not say anything genuinely true about God. This is emphatically not the position here. - The distinction that matters is between "this predication is true" and "this predication commits us to the existence of a distinct abstract entity." The property anti-realist holds that "God is wise" is genuinely, factually, and informationally true. What the anti-realist denies is the additional claim that this truth requires a distinct abstract entity called wisdom-itself as a constituent of God or as a separate necessary being alongside God. True predications do not require exemplifiable universals as their ontological backers. God can be genuinely and distinctly omniscient, omnipotent, and holy, with all three predications fully meaningful and mutually informative, without any of these predicates naming a separate abstract entity that composes God’s being.

(P3) If properties are not real abstract entities or metaphysical constituents, then having multiple distinct attributes does not entail metaphysical composition. + (1) The conditional removes the pressure for the identity thesis. - The classical argument for the strong form of divine simplicity runs: God has multiple attributes; those attributes are distinct abstract entities or metaphysical constituents; if they are distinct from each other and from God, then God is composed of them and depends on them; composition and dependence are incompatible with divine aseity (God’s self-existence from nothing outside himself); therefore, the attributes must all be identical to God and to each other. - This argument is valid. But it depends on the premise that properties are real abstract entities or genuine metaphysical constituents. If P2 is correct and properties are not such entities, the second premise is false and the argument for the identity thesis does not go through. One can affirm that God has distinct attributes without those attributes being real abstract objects or building-blocks of which God is composed. (2) Jeffrey Brower’s truthmaker account shows how the weak view works in practice. - A truthmaker is whatever it is in reality that makes a true statement true. The truthmaker for "the cat is on the mat" is the actual cat in its actual position. Truthmaker theory asks: what in reality must exist for each of our true statements to be true? - Jeffrey Brower argues in "Making Sense of Divine Simplicity" (Faith and Philosophy 25, 2008) and "Simplicity and Aseity" in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2009) that the doctrinal core of divine simplicity can be preserved without the identity thesis by adopting this truthmaker approach to predication. On this approach, a statement like "God is omniscient" is made true not by the existence of a distinct abstract property (omniscience-itself) that God exemplifies, but by God himself, considered as the concrete reality he is. - God is the truthmaker for all true intrinsic statements about him. "God is omniscient" is true because of God; "God is omnipotent" is true because of God; "God is holy" is true because of God. There is no distinct abstract entity for each predicate, no separate constituent for each attribute. One concrete reality, God himself, makes all these distinct true predications true by being the kind of thing he necessarily and essentially is. - This account allows genuine conceptual distinctions among divine attributes, which are genuinely distinct in their content and meaning, without requiring genuine ontological divisions in the divine being. The distinctions are in our concepts and predications; they need not be mirrored by distinct abstract entities or metaphysical building-blocks within God. (3) God transcends the normal constituent structure of creatures. - Creatures typically require property instances, called tropes, to serve as the truthmakers for their predications. A trope is a particular instance of a property belonging to one specific individual. The wisdom of Socrates is a trope: it is Socrates’s own particular wisdom, not the abstract universal wisdom-itself, and it is something he can acquire or lose. This trope is a genuine ontological constituent of Socrates at the time he is wise; remove it and something real changes about Socrates. - God differs from creatures in two important respects. First, all of God’s intrinsic predications are necessary: God cannot fail to be omniscient, omnipotent, or holy. There are no contingent intrinsic properties that God has at some times and lacks at others. Second, God’s necessary existence means that God himself can be the truthmaker for all necessary truths about him, without requiring distinct property instances as intermediate truthmakers. God’s being the way he necessarily is suffices to make all true essential predications about him true, with no need for additional ontological building-blocks.

(P4) God is a spiritual substance not assembled from separable parts and not dependent on any external or more fundamental ontological constituents. + (1) God's simplicity as non-composition rather than attribute-identity. - The weak doctrine of divine simplicity this argument defends does not require identifying all divine attributes with each other or with the divine essence. It requires only that God not be metaphysically assembled from separable parts, whether physical or metaphysical. - God is not a composite physical substance made of matter. He is not a composite of form and matter in the Aristotelian sense. He is not made up of separable parts that could be divided from each other and that would leave God diminished or destroyed by their removal. And given property anti-realism, he is not made up of abstract property constituents either. - This is the formulation Craig identifies in his Systematic Philosophical Theology as the doctrinally appropriate version of divine simplicity: "(DS₄) As a spiritual substance, God is not composed of separable parts; neither does he have metaphysical constituents." This formulation captures the legitimate core of the historical doctrine without requiring the controversial identity thesis. (2) This is a substantive claim, not a trivial one: it distinguishes God from every composite being including immaterial ones. - One might object that DS₄ merely says the obvious: of course God is not made of physical parts, since he is an immaterial spirit. But DS₄ says considerably more than this. - Consider what classical theology said about angels. Aquinas held that even angels, being purely spiritual with no material component, are still composed of essence and existence as distinct metaphysical principles. What an angel is (its essence) is genuinely distinct from the bare fact that it exists, and this distinction means that something must account for why the angel’s essence is actualized into existence rather than remaining a merely possible nature. God alone is not like this. In God, essence and existence are not distinct items requiring something to unite them; God simply is. DS₄ draws precisely this line: God’s simplicity is not merely the simplicity of being immaterial. It is the simplicity of a being that, unlike even the highest created immaterial substances, has no internal metaphysical divisions of any kind on which it depends for what it is. - DS₄ also rules out God being assembled from form and matter even in a non-physical sense, rules out his being composed of essence and existence as separately grounded items, and rules out his being composed of distinct abstract property-constituents. It distinguishes God from every kind of composite being and establishes that his unity is absolute rather than the unity of a compound that could in principle be analyzed into components. This is a substantive theological claim that does genuine systematic work. (3) The weak doctrine is sufficient to ground important theological conclusions. - Even without the identity thesis, the weak doctrine does real theological work. It rules out God being assembled or dependent on more fundamental external constituents. It rules out God being a composite being whose unity could be threatened by the separation of his parts. It grounds the observation that God’s attributes are not separable from him as they would be in a creature: God cannot lose his omniscience while retaining his omnipotence, as Socrates can lose wisdom while retaining strength. - The weak doctrine, combined with the other divine attributes established by the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments, yields a picture of God that is genuinely unified, non-composite, and irreducibly one, without requiring the metaphysically demanding and scripturally contested claims of the strong doctrine.

(C1) Therefore, God is simple in the sense that he is not metaphysically composed: he has no separable parts and no metaphysical constituents, while genuinely possessing the multiple distinct essential attributes Scripture ascribes to him. + This conclusion follows from P1 through P4. P1 establishes that God has genuinely distinct essential attributes, truly and meaningfully predicated of him in language that carries real informational content. P2 establishes that properties are not real abstract entities or metaphysical constituents of their bearers, and acknowledges this as a contested but seriously defensible philosophical position. P3 establishes that without property realism, having multiple attributes does not entail metaphysical composition. P4 specifies the form of simplicity that remains: non-composition in the sense of no separable or more fundamental parts, a claim with real content that distinguishes God from every composite being including immaterial ones. Together these establish that God is both genuinely multi-attributed and genuinely simple. A fork in the road for the reader. - It is worth being transparent about what this argument depends on. Its central moves (that distinct attributes do not entail composition, and that God can be the sole truthmaker for all true predications about him) rest on the defensibility of property anti-realism. A reader who finds property realism more natural and intuitive, roughly: that when two things share a quality, they genuinely share a third thing called that quality, will find that the dissolving move of P2 and P3 does not grip. For that reader, the strong doctrine’s approach of acknowledging the metaphysical problem and resolving it through the identity thesis becomes the more compelling path, with its own philosophical costs and benefits. - The two arguments are not rivals so much as alternative routes depending on one’s prior metaphysical commitments. Neither route is without difficulty. The weak doctrine faces the grounding objection (see Defeater 8 below) and the challenge that property anti-realism must be defended on its own merits. The strong doctrine faces the modal collapse objection and the challenge of reconciling full attribute-identity with the personal distinctions of the Trinity. Readers who wish to compare the two positions in full should work through the Divine Simplicity (Classical / Strong) argument alongside this one. (1) Compatibility with Scripture’s positive revelation of God. - Scripture affirms that God is omniscient, omnipotent, loving, holy, and just with the expectation that these words mean something. The weak doctrine preserves this meaningfulness fully. God is genuinely omniscient in a way that is genuinely distinct from and not identical with his being omnipotent. These are real and distinct truths about him, conveyed in words that carry their standard meaning applied at unlimited degree. (2) Compatibility with the doctrine of the Trinity. - The strong doctrine of divine simplicity has always faced difficulty with Trinitarian theology, since the three divine persons are genuinely distinct and yet share one divine nature. The weak doctrine has no such difficulty. The three persons share one simple, non-composite divine nature. Their personal distinctions are real, not reducible to each other, and not requiring that any person be a metaphysical part of the divine nature. The divine nature is wholly present in each person, undivided and non-composite. (3) Compatibility with divine freedom in creation. - The strong doctrine generates the modal collapse problem: if God’s act of creation is identical with his necessary essence, creation appears to be necessary rather than free. The weak doctrine faces no such problem. God is necessarily omnipotent, omniscient, and holy. Whether he creates, and what he creates, are genuinely contingent matters of his free will. His contingent act of creating this particular universe does not require any contingent intrinsic property-constituent to be added to his nature; it simply is a free exercise of the unlimited power he necessarily has. (4) Philosophical parsimony. - The weak doctrine requires no commitment to constituent ontologies, no commitment to Platonic abstract entities, and no subscription to the controversial identity thesis that has generated centuries of philosophical difficulty. It requires only the affirmation that God is a spiritual substance not composed of separable parts, combined with the independently motivated position of property anti-realism. It is philosophically leaner than the strong doctrine while preserving the theologically essential content of divine simplicity.