ABSTRACT
Most of the medieval philosophers believed that it could be shown that an absolutely necessary being was totally simple. ‘Simplicity’ is a highly metaphysical notion, and, as it was traditionally understood, it seems to have such utterly counter-intuitive implications as hardly to merit serious discussion. For it appears to require the denial of all distinctions in God; God’s omnipotence is supposed to be the same as his mercy, or his justice; God is identical with each of his actions, and hence each of his actions seems to be identical with each of the others. Perhaps most difficult of all, simplicity, involving as it does the identity of essence and existence in God, seems to involve the view that no descriptive predicates can possibly be true of God - not even the traditional ones such as ‘omniscient’, ‘omnipotent’ or ‘creator’. For all these terms are obviously intended as descriptions of God, however inadequate they might be; but if God’s essence simply is to exist, and ‘exist’ is not a descriptive term at all, then it would appear that no description can be of the essence of God. Kant, as we have already discussed in Chapter I, saw no prospect of proving any link between the notions of absolute necessity and transcendent simplicity; and Hume believed that any attempt to describe a totally simple God was both gratuitous and vacuous. As a result, simplicity has until recently been perhaps the least discussed, as well as one of the most fundamental, of the attributes of God proposed by the classical tradition.’ This chapter will attempt to chart the course of the debate.
