Is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity consistent with a very strong version of DDS? Yes, so long as the simple divine nature is a relational nature, a nature that could be characterized in terms of such relations as knowing and loving.
- Divine Persons as Relational Qua Objects, Rob Koons
(a) The Modalism Problem: The Father is God and the Son is God, but the Father is not the Son.(b) The Polytheism Problem: All three members of the Trinity are a god, yet there are not three gods.
Relative identity (as defended by Inwagen and Geach) and Social Trinitarianism (WLC) are the two main options to resolve these contradictions.
Social Trinitarians take it that the “is” in (a) is an “is” of predication; just as three individual humans share the same human nature. That resolves (a). But this doesn’t resolve (b). WLC’s tripersonal soul analogy is an example of a predicate reading of the “is” statements.
Relative identity is harder and conflicts with common sense. Identity is relative to a sortal concept. Seems to be a nice solution, but costly. Restructures logic entirely, denying identity relations simpliciter. May be possible. Pruss seems to think that something like relative identity is true but only in the case of God’s nature (for Thomistic reasons? Not sure what he’s referring to tbh).
New Proposal: Take the “is” in (a) and (b) in an absolute sense without affirming (b) via an appeal to opacity.
Suggestion: (a) and (b) contain an opaque context so that substitution of co-referring terms is not allowed.
Clark Kent is Superman
Lois Lane loves Clark Kent
So Lois Lane loves Superman
“Love” is an intensional operator and introduces an opaque context, and thus the logic is invalid.
The suggestion is that the relations in the Godhead introduce an opaque context. We need a justification for thinking that the relations introduce an opaque context--what would this justification look like? It’d take some deep reflection to get an idea of how the mechanics of this is supposed to work.
I’ve been drawn to Leftow’s time-travel analogy for some time. Might be interesting to see how this analogy works with relative identity.
Obj I: Bob’s timesplices are mere parts of him, and not the whole of him, and so the time-traveling analogy is a version of Partialism. If this line of thought is right, then the objection would be devastating.
Response I: We can think of Bob as an extended simple, extended across time. If that’s the case, the analogy can be preserved without implying Partialism. Martin Pickup takes this insight and runs with it in the link below.
Obj II: The divine nature is Trinitarian. Each person possesses the whole of the divine nature. So why does not each person have a further Trinitarian nature ad infinitum?
Response II: Maybe we can solve this problem with a qua move. Each divine person qua divinity has a trinitarian nature, but not qua person. Worth exploring this option.
I guess I hold to a Latin position. But I’d retreat to a Social view if pressed hard enough.
http://christweedt.com/Tweedt_AbsoluteIdentityandtheTrinity.pdf
Extended Simples:
https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2481&context=faithandphilosophy
Relative Identity:
https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-analogy-for-trinity.html
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