Personhood is teleologically relational in the sense that a person is the kind of being that necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with other persons.
Necessarily, any person other than God is a creature.
So, if God is a single person, this person necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with creatures.
If a being only finds its fulfillment in relationships with Fs, then the being’s fulfillment depends on Fs.
So, if God is a single person, God’s fulfillment depends on creatures.
God’s fulfillment does not depend on creatures.
Thus, God is not a single person.
thus, if God is a person, God is two or more persons.
(I think most non-Christian monotheists these days will say that God is a single person. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be a better view for them to deny that God is a person at all, and to insist that the centrality of personhood to the understanding of God is a mistaken Christian approach.)
Here is another variant on the argument:
Necessarily, a person can only flourish in relationship to another equal person.
It is possible that God flourishes.
If God is a single person, then it is impossible for there to be another person equal to God.
So, God is a single person, it is impossible that God flourishes. (9 and 11)
So, God is not a single person. (10 and 12)
So, if God is a person, God is two or more persons.
Now, granted, it is a standard view in Christianity that one cannot prove the doctrine of the Trinity by reason. If the arguments above are sound, have I contradicted that view? No, for several reasons. First, the arguments don’t establish that God is three persons. Second, the arguments only establish that if God is a person at all, then God is two or more persons—but a further argument is needed that God is a person at all. (Perhaps perfect being theology can yield that.)
12 comments:
The crucial issue is not whether relationships are valuable, but whether they are constitutive of personhood or merely an expression of an already perfect personhood. Premise (1) assumes the former without argument. If by the fulfillment of personhood we mean the complete actualization of what belongs intrinsically to a person, then it is not evident that interpersonal communion is among those intrinsic constituents. Personhood is ordinarily understood in terms of intellect, rational agency, will, and self-consciousness. None of these, considered in themselves, appears to require the actual existence of another person in order to be fully instantiated. Thus, the burden lies on the defender of (1) to show that interpersonal relation is not merely a valuable exercise of personal capacities, but an essential condition for the completion of personhood itself.
Relatedly, I think the argument conflates constitutive fulfillment with expressive fulfillment. Classical theism has traditionally understood God's love and creation not as completing some unrealized aspect of the divine nature, but as the free expression of a perfection that is already complete. If God's love for creatures is expressive rather than constitutive of His fulfillment, then the same possibility remains open even if one grants that love is an essential divine perfection. Simply asserting that the highest form of love is interpersonal does not establish that a solitary divine person would be metaphysically incomplete, because it has not yet been shown that interpersonal communion is necessary for the actualization of personhood itself, rather than being one of the ways in which an already fully actualized person freely manifests that perfection.
Hi Prof.,
I really like this argument but have a question about the implications of the first premise: does it make each of the Divine Persons dependent for their "teleological fulfillment" on another Divine Person in an inappropriate way? E.g., does it make the Father dependent for his teleological fulfillment on the Son or Spirit? And is it correct to think of an individual Divine Person being dependent for fulfillment in this way, even on another Divine Person?
- Harrison J.
I wasn't thinking that you have to have an interpersonal relationship to *be* a person. But maybe you have to have an interpersonal relationship to be a fully flourishing person. And a perfect being like God must fully flourish.
Well, since the divine persons are defined by their relations, there is a sense in which in their personal existence they are dependent on the persons they are related to. The Father is who he is, namely the Father, because of the Son, etc. So I am not particularly troubled by a fulfillment-dependence in addition to the personal-dependence.
Alternately, and perhaps preferably, one might say that the Father isn't so much dependent on the Son--whether for personal existence or for fulfillment--as on the relation of paternity that constitutes him and the Son as distinct persons.
Prof. Pruss do u believe there's a deductive argument for gods existence? If so, what's the best one?
There is a very interesting paper from Sijuwade (2024) called "The Love Argument for the Trinity: A Reformulation" that constructs an a posteriori argument for the Trinity, attempting to show that exactly two relationally distinct divine persons flow from a fundamental divine person (the Father). It was constructed utilizing your awesome work about agapeic love. Are you familiar with this paper? What is interesting is that is gives you exactly three divine persons, and that is considered partly "a posteriori" given that is depends on God's revelation about the nature of love, and not wholly a priori.
Another interesting paper is one by Dennis P. Bray (2022) where he reconstructs and evaluates Richard of Saint Victor's argument for exactly three divine persons, and it's very similar to the one you proposed.
Btw, how's your co-authored book with Rasmussen coming along? I was waiting for that book for so long. My specific area of research in philosophy of religion is the gap problem (see Ocampo 2024, IJPR). In fact, I'm currently working on an upcoming paper that seeks to show how the gap problem can be solved utilizing the contemporary notion of fundamentality and grounding, deriving the core divine attributes within a very general and minimal framework. I think this is one of the most crucial and overlooked topics in natural theology and philosophy of religion more generally that needs to get more attention by theists and naturalists alike. Classical philosophers have always inquire about the divine attributes within their arguments, and many of them have invested much more work on the attributes than on the existence of God per se. I hope that one day, much more papers and books by contemporary philosophers be devoted to the question about the nature of fundamental reality. And your book with Rasmussen seems to be the contemporary pioneer.
My question is: is there going to be any chapter dedicated to show in some deductive or metaphysical manner, similar to your prequel Necessary Existence, how we can move from fundamentality to interesting divine attributes? Or is the general approach something more akin to Oppy's worldview comparison style of argument? Perhaps showing the theoretical virtues fo theism (or 'perfect' fundamentality more specifically) given the relevant data about the world, over naturalism?
Dear Professor Pruss,
It is often noted in discussions of your work that you regard the argument from objective probability as one of the strongest motivations for accepting the Principle of Sufficient Reason. I have found this line of thought especially compelling, particularly the idea that if genuinely brute contingent events are possible, then they are not merely extremely improbable but lack any objective probability altogether. I have two questions about this argument that I hope you might clarify.
1. On the relationship between brute contingency and objective probability
Suppose ten thousand coins were to appear in my room literally ex nihilo, without any cause, explanation, or underlying mechanism whatsoever. Many people would naturally describe such an event as "astronomically improbable." You instead suggest that this is the wrong way to think about it: if the event is genuinely brute, then it is not objectively improbable but rather has no objective probability at all.
Could you explain the precise metaphysical step behind this conclusion? More specifically, why does attributing an objective probability to an event already amount to attributing an explanation (even if it were chancy) of that event? Is your thought that an objective probability necessarily presupposes some underlying chance-making feature, probabilistic law, propensity, or causal structure, such that once all explanatory structure is removed, the very notion of objective probability ceases to apply? In other words, what is the strongest argument for the claim that objective probability is itself explanatory, rather than being a primitive feature that brute events could simply possess?
2. On the epistemic versus metaphysical force of the argument
Suppose the argument succeeds in showing that denying the Principle of Sufficient Reason undermines objective probability, inductive reasoning, and ultimately our epistemic practices. Why should this be taken as establishing the truth of the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself, rather than merely showing that we are rationally compelled to reason as if the Principle of Sufficient Reason is true?
To put the concern differently, why doesn't the argument establish only an epistemic norm governing rational inquiry, instead of a metaphysical conclusion about reality itself? What bridges the gap between the claim that explanatory order is a necessary presupposition of rational thought and the stronger claim that reality is in fact constituted in accordance with the Principle of Sufficient Reason?
How do you define "God" in the argument?
I don't believe God is a person. I believe in the absolutely simple God of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas.
My view of the Trinity is simple: God is absolutely simple and identical to His attributes. The Son is God's Word, and the Spirit is God's Love (as Augustine said). God is completely identical to His attributes. Therefore, God's Word is identical to God Himself, and God's Love is identical to God Himself. Therefore, the Word is also God and identical to God, and the Spirit is also God and identical to God.
Divine simplicity is very important for me. I think if you reject divine simplicity, you ruin the entire motivation behind the Trinity. Without simplicity, there is no reason for the Son and the Spirit to be fully God. Your view collapses into partialism, where the Trinity is 3 parts or "percentages" that make up God.
Even worse, rejecting divine simplicity risks ruining the whole motivation behind classical theism, and you collapse into panentheism, where the universe is an eternal and necessary aspect of God.
Yujin Nagasawa argues that perfect being theism naturally leads to panentheism, because encompassment is a great-making attribute. The greatest possible being is one who encompasses every possible world. He calls this view "modal panentheism," where all possible worlds exist, and God encompasses them all.
I think divine simplicity is the only way to prevent collapse into panentheism, especially the version put forward by Nagasawa. You can argue that only an absolutely simple being can be the greatest possible being; simplicity implies independence and aseity to the greatest possible degree. An absolutely simple being depends on nothing else for its existence.
This is why I don't like divine temporalism either. By arguing that God is temporal, or at least that He couldn't have created the world without becoming temporal, then you're making God's existence depend on time (God wouldn't exist if time didn't exist, or God doesn't exist in any possible world where time doesn't exist, or at least God would have been causally sterile if time didn't exist).
I accept divine simplicity, and it is very important to me. However, I think it is important to say that personhood is among God's attributes (though of course all the attributes are ontologically the same): God is a being of love and choice and rationality, which is what persons are.
While I accept divine simplicity (and eagerly so), I think there is a sense in which God does encompass all the possible worlds. Possible worlds are God's ideas. (Of course, by divine simplicity, all of God's ideas have the same beingly reality, namely God himself.)
Unfortunately, most proponents of divine personalism (such as Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, Ryan Mullins, etc.) are so eager to get rid of divine simplicity and immutability because they believe that the classical Augustinian/Anselmian/Thomistic God is too distant and transcendent to be a person who can properly enter a loving relationship with creation.
I don't agree with this assessment. I believe simplicity and immutability are very important divine attributes, and getting rid of them creates more problems than it solves.
In a recent book, in response to those who reject divine immutability to make God more personal, Edward Feser wrote that this "marks a regression to a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God that Western thought moved beyond at the time of Xenophanes."
Proponents of divine personalism push back hard against the doctrine of divine simplicity. I think Dr. Mullins has written multiple papers against divine simplicity this year alone.
I think Christian philosophy would greatly benefit from more sophisticated formulations of how God can be a person while also being simple/timeless/immutable.
Dr. Pruss, perhaps you can help? 😄
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