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Goodness, Simplicity, and Aseity

The remaining classical divine attributes concern God's goodness, his mode of being, and his independence. God is perfectly good; God is simple — without parts, so that his attributes are not distinct components but one undivided reality; and God exists a se — from himself, depending on nothing, and necessarily. These are the most metaphysically demanding of the attributes, and divine simplicity in particular — long central to classical theism (Augustine, Anselm, Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas) — has become one of the most contested, attacked by leading contemporary theists as incoherent. They also reach back into the arguments for God (aseity and necessity are what the cosmological and ontological arguments aim at) and into ethics (how God relates to the good).

This page treats divine goodness and its link to morality, the doctrine of divine simplicity and the modern objections to it, and aseity, necessity, and the "bootstrapping" problem about God and abstract objects.

Divine goodness

That God is perfectly good is the attribute the problem of evil targets and the moral argument exploits. Two questions arise:

  • In what sense is God good? Metaphysical goodness (God is the supreme being, perfect and complete, the fullness of being — the sense in which Aquinas says "every being, as being, is good") differs from moral goodness (God is benevolent, just, loving — a moral agent who does right). Classical theism affirms both but grounds moral goodness in metaphysical: God is goodness itself (ipsum bonum), and finite things are good by participating in or resembling him.
  • How does God relate to the moral standard? This is the Euthyphro dilemma: is the good good because God wills it (arbitrariness) or does God will it because it is good (a standard independent of God)? The classical answer — that goodness is neither external to God nor a product of arbitrary will but identical with God's own nature — depends directly on divine simplicity: if God is goodness, the dilemma's "because" splits the inseparable. So the coherence of the standard reply to Euthyphro rests on the coherence of simplicity, developed below and applied in religion and morality.

A further puzzle: if God is essentially good and cannot do evil, is God praiseworthy for his goodness, and is God free? If goodness is necessary to God, God cannot do otherwise than well — which seems to remove the alternative possibilities some think praise requires. The reply parallels compatibilist and Frankfurt-style moves in the free-will debate: God's goodness flows from his own nature, which is the highest form of freedom (self-determination by one's deepest values), not a constraint imposed from outside.

Divine simplicity

Divine simplicity (DDS) is the doctrine that God is in no way composite — God has no parts of any kind: no spatial or temporal parts, no matter–form composition, no substance–accident distinction, and, most strikingly, no distinction between God and his attributes or among the attributes themselves. God does not have goodness, power, knowledge, and existence as distinct properties; God is his goodness, is his power, is his existence — and these are, in God, one and the same simple reality, differing only in how we conceive them. As Aquinas puts it, in God essence and existence are identical: God is ipsum esse subsistens, "subsistent being itself."

The motivations are deep:

  • From aseity and ultimacy. If God had parts, he would depend on them and on whatever composes them — but God depends on nothing (aseity). A composite being is explained by its components; the ultimate, self-existent ground of all cannot be so explained, so must be non-composite.
  • From immutability and eternity. Parts introduce potentiality and the possibility of change; a timeless, immutable being must be pure actuality, without composition.
  • From monotheism's logic. Only a simple being is unconditioned in the way the cosmological argument's terminus must be.

The objections

DDS is assailed by powerful objections, several pressed by theists (notably Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?):

  • The identity objection. If God is identical with each of his properties, and each property is identical with God, then by transitivity all God's properties are identical with one another — God's mercy is his justice is his power is his knowledge. But these seem distinct (mercy and justice can even pull apart). Worse: if God is a property, then God is an abstract object — and abstract objects are causally inert, impersonal, and necessarily non-living, so God would not be a person who knows and acts. Plantinga regards this as close to a reductio.
  • The modal/freedom objection. If God is identical with his act of will, and that act is simple and necessary (God is a necessary being with no accidental features), then God could not have willed otherwise — God necessarily creates this world, collapsing divine freedom and the contingency of creation. A simple God seems unable to be a free creator who might have created differently or not at all.
  • The intrinsic/extrinsic objection. God's knowing contingent facts (that this world exists) seems to depend on those facts, introducing a God–world relation that varies — but a simple God has no varying features.

The replies

Defenders (Stump, Brower, the Thomist revival) respond that the objections read DDS through a modern "property" framework alien to it. On a truthmaker reading (Brower), "God is good" is true not because God instances a property goodness but because God himself is the truthmaker for all the divine predications — the several predicates are made true by one simple reality without naming distinct constituents. The apparent identity of mercy and justice is defused: the terms differ in connotation and in the effects they pick out in creatures, while the reality in God is one. The modal objection is met by locating the contingency of creation in the effects (the created world) rather than in any intrinsic difference in God's one eternal act — God's act is "intrinsically the same" across worlds, differing only in what it brings about. Whether these replies fully succeed, or merely relocate the mystery, is unresolved; DDS remains a live dividing line between classical theism and the more anthropomorphic theistic personalism of Plantinga and Swinburne, who simply deny simplicity and treat God as a person with distinct (if essential) properties.

Aseity, necessity, and the bootstrapping problem

Aseity (Latin a se, "from itself") is God's complete independence: God exists in and through himself, depending on nothing else for his existence or nature. It is closely tied to necessity — God does not merely happen to exist but exists necessarily, could not have failed to exist (the property the ontological and cosmological arguments trade on). Aseity is, for many, the core of the concept of God: whatever else God is, God is the ultimate, the one reality that is unconditioned and on which all else depends.

This generates a sharp modern puzzle, the bootstrapping problem about God and abstract objects (Plantinga, Bergmann–Brower, Craig's God Over All). Platonism holds that there exist necessarily, and independently, infinitely many abstract objects — numbers, sets, properties, propositions. But:

  • If abstract objects exist independently of God, then God is not the source of all reality — there is a vast realm of necessary beings God did not make and on which, arguably, his own nature depends (if God's properties are abstracta). This violates aseity and divine ultimacy.
  • If, to save aseity, God creates the abstract objects, then he creates properties — but to create anything God must already have properties (power, intention), and those properties would have to exist before being created. God would have to "bootstrap" his own attributes into existence, which is viciously circular.

The proposed solutions trade off: absolute creationism (God creates abstracta, and bites the bootstrapping bullet or restricts it), divine conceptualism (abstract objects are thoughts in the divine mind — necessary, but ontologically dependent on God, preserving aseity), nominalism (deny abstract objects exist at all, so there is nothing to threaten aseity), and the classical DDS route (God's properties are not abstracta distinct from God but identical with the simple God — which is exactly why simplicity was wanted). The problem shows how tightly aseity, simplicity, and necessity are bound together: defending God's ultimacy against an independent Platonic heaven pushes one back toward the contested doctrine of simplicity.

Where these attributes sit

Goodness, simplicity, and aseity are the metaphysical foundation of the classical concept of God, and they stand or fall together. Goodness grounds the moral argument and the classical reply to Euthyphro — but only via simplicity (God is goodness). Simplicity secures aseity, immutability, and eternity and answers the bootstrapping threat — but at the price of the formidable identity and freedom objections that lead many contemporary theists to abandon it for theistic personalism. Aseity and necessity are arguably the irreducible core — what the cosmological and ontological arguments reach — but securing God's ultimacy against independent abstract objects forces a choice among unattractive options or a return to simplicity. The deep lesson, carried into the coherence-of-theism capstone, is that the divine attributes form an interlocking system: one cannot adjust omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, goodness, simplicity, or aseity in isolation, because each is defined partly through the others — which is what makes the question of their joint coherence both unavoidable and hard.