What My Dissertation Is About

In less than one week, I defend my dissertation. So, I thought it might be fun to tell you what it’s about.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably already know that it has something to do with the doctrine of divine simplicity. So far, that’s correct.

Essentially, my dissertation looks at how the traditional, “full-throated” Thomistic doctrine of divine simplicity resolves a host of issues across a number of areas: philosophy of God, metaphysics, metaethics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and more.

As I’ve emphasized in many places, this understanding of divine simplicity can only be properly appreciated as it is embedded within, and emerges from, a wider constituent ontology and realist metaphysical program. So, the first part of my dissertation articulates this program and provides some defense of the more controversial bits—for example, that existence is a first-level property of concrete individuals, that essences are real, numerically distinct configuring principles of being, and that they are really distinct from the existence element within contingent entities.

The second part of my dissertation defends what has come to be known as “strong” divine simplicity. I think this is a sort of silly term—either something is simple in the sense that it is not built up out of components more basic than it, or it is not—and much of this section shows that the proposed alternatives to DDS either result in rendering God a caused or derivative entity, suffer from some incoherence otherwise, amount to un-wholly wholes, or else just collapse back into the strong form of simplicity anyway.1

Aside from providing a master argument for the traditional notion of divine simplicity—which I contend follows from rather straightforward conceptual truths—I survey and critique the main alternatives on offer today. Ultimately, I argue that only the strong form of simplicity these alternatives seek to reject is capable of securing God’s status as metaphysically ultimate, ontologically independent, and self-sufficient. This section of my dissertation, with slight modification, won the ACPQ Rising Scholar Essay Contest this year and will be published in their next issue under the title “Simply Put: The Argument for Divine Simplicity.”

I then turn to look at how DDS solves issues in different areas of philosophy, some more specific than others. My first area of interest concerns priority issues within constituent ontology, from which I contend that metaphysical composites are either all grounded entities or else contradictory structures. For those who’ve read my article “The Millerian Cosmological Argument,” you will have a strong idea of what is going on in this section of my dissertation, as it substantially builds upon what I first developed there.

Skipping the complicated details for now, I propose that such a constituent ontology can only ultimately be stabilized—that is, avoid contradictory implications—by positing a being that itself has no constituents that go into making up what it is, such that all composites are ultimately grounded in that which is absolutely simple.

Of course, there is another important element here, which concerns whether grounding chains must terminate. I spend considerable time arguing that, in fact, they do—indeed, that such chains are necessarily terminating, insofar as they either must terminate or they fail to be explanatory, or in any sense causal, in the first place. This section develops a line of thought that was originally teased in my Review of Metaphysics article, “Is Grounding Essentially Ordered Causation?”

Of course, I contend that the above considerations function as a powerful cosmological argument for the existence of the absolutely simple God, insofar as everyday familiar objects (EFOs, oh no!)—which are metaphysical composites—are deeply caused to exist and must ultimately be caused to exist by that which is absolutely simple: namely, the being whose essence just is its existence.

My attention then turns toward the nature of explanation, where I propose that only this sort of being is the right sort of thing to be suitably auto-explicable, or genuinely self-explanatory. Here I am attempting to resolve difficulties surrounding the nature of the principle of sufficient reason and whether it can be driven all the way through, such that we can say reality is, in fact, fully intelligible—namely, that there is an adequate answer to every coherent question to be asked about why something exists or has the character it does, even if we do not have direct access to that answer. My answer is in the affirmative, and that DDS—and only DDS, as situated within the metaphysical program I’ve been at pains to defend—can make sense of this. In fact, I argue that everything I have defended up to this point is itself an argument for the PSR, insofar as it establishes everything needed for a robust version thereof, without at any point requiring the PSR as a premise in the argument.

After all this time spent in metaphysics, I then turn my attention to metaethics, where I argue that DDS—again, as understood through the broadly Thomistic metaphysic—is an impressively well-suited paradigm for securing the core desiderata of robust moral realism. Namely, that there are moral facts, that they are stance-independent, that they are under substantive constraints, and that we have reliable, justified cognitive access to them. Again, I won’t spoil the details here, but I show how DDS quite easily secures all of these without ad hoc additions to the theory—itself an extremely promising reason to consider this doctrine favorably. (Two other forthcoming papers were developed out of this section of my dissertation: “Cruel Worlds and Counterfeit Natures,” forthcoming in International Philosophical Quarterly, and “Theistic Ethical Optimism,” forthcoming in TheoLogica.)

The final chapter of my dissertation offers several programmatic sketches of areas where I think DDS offers helpful resources, but which I did not have the space to develop fully. Originally, it was my intent to do so, but, as is often the case, one begins with ambitions that are simply larger than what is ultimately manageable or reasonable. In other words, I had hoped to devote entire chapters to how DDS helps with issues in epistemology, skepticism, philosophical anthropology, libertarian freedom, and so on. Instead, I had to rest content with compressing these into a single chapter, where I provide my primary contentions, obviate a few objections, and point to where the conversation might be further pursued.

Overall, I’m quite happy with how my dissertation has turned out so far. While it isn’t exactly the original vision I had, it’s actually pretty darn close—and, if nothing else, a very good start toward what I had originally intended, which, of course, I can continue to work on afterward. Perhaps if I decide to turn it into a book on DDS.

But I should avoid getting ahead of myself. After all, I still have my defense to pass first, and I certainly don’t want to take anything for granted.

So until then…

The Contingency Argument: A Clear Introduction to One of the Best Arguments for God

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Apr 9

Simply put, a cosmological argument moves from some broad feature of the world to the conclusion that God exists as its necessary condition. In its simplest form, the structure is: if no God, then no x; x; therefore, God. Classic candidates for x include change, becoming, and composition. More recently, much of the focus has been on contingency—so let’s…