Is God Simple?

The question of whether God is 'simple' is recently being discussed, again.

We all agree that 'God is One', and has an essential unity. The issue is whether there is any kind of internal structure to God.

The discussion started with David Bentley Hart's recent book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.  One reviewer summarizes Hart's view as

First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided). Second, this consensus was shared by nearly all the world’s oldest religions. Third, this consensus is crucial for the Christian faith. It is, in fact, the only way to make sense of God, and thus it is fundamental for everything that Christians believe and say about the divine.

This kind of view, Vincent Torley reminds us, is a theological consensus. Torley quotes the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser:

As I have indicated in earlier posts, the doctrine of divine simplicity is absolutely central to classical theism. To say that God is simple is to say that He is in no way composed of parts – neither material parts, nor metaphysical parts like form and matter, substance and accidents, or essence and existence. Divine simplicity is affirmed by such Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes. It is central to the theology of pagan thinkers like Plotinus. It is the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church, affirmed at the fourth Lateran council and the first Vatican council, and the denial of which amounts to heresy. (Classical theism, September 30, 2010.)

It should be noted that not only Christians, but Jews and Muslims, have traditionally affirmed the doctrine of God’s simplicity. According to the article on Divine Simplicity in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “the roots of [the doctrine of God's] simplicity go back to the Ancient Greeks, well before its formal defense by representative thinkers of the three great monotheistic religions— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” It adds:

…representative thinkers of all three great monotheistic traditions recognize the doctrine of divine simplicity to be central to any credible account of a creator God’s ontological situation. Avicenna (980–1037), Averroes (1126–98), Anselm of Canterbury, Philo of Alexandria, and Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) all go out of their way to affirm the doctrine’s indispensability and systematic potential.

I [Torley] might add that the doctrine of Divine simplicity isn’t an invention of medieval theologians. It actually predates Christianity:

Christianity is in its infancy when the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 B.C.E.– 50 C.E.) observes that it is already commonly accepted to think of God as Being itself and utterly simple. Philo is drawing on philosophical accounts of a supreme unity in describing God as uncomposite and eternal.

However, is it true?

Let me quote from George Porteous's book Emanuel Swedenborg: As a Philosopher, Metaphysician, and Theologian (text here), written in 1874:

Metaphysicians, since the sixth century, have all agreed that the Divine Being "is without body, parts, or passions," that He is a divine simplicity, divine essence or unity. The assertion that God is without parts, passions, and a form, amounts to the bold and blank declaration that "there is no God." It is this doctrine of the metaphysicians that is the basis of all that extreme imbecility exhibited and generated by the school-men and book-men respecting the nature of God and the faculties of man. The only hopeless mystics have been these metaphysicians. Though they lost the play of wisdom and insight, they endeavored to retain its gravity. They clutched at the reputation of being wise on the subject of Deity, and still they profess to know nothing of Deity! They built upon denials and assertions; and, in the words of the incomparable Droll—

     ^"They knew what's what, and that's as high As metaphysic wit can fly."

To every human note of inquiry they answered—"Mum!" To the painful utterances of struggling souls—to the voice wailing after God, "O that I might find Him," these cold men of the schools replied, "The substance of all our knowledge concerning God is the knowing what he is not, rather than what he is," and more modernly expressed by Bishop Beverage, "We cannot so well apprehend what God is, as what he is not."

God is represented on the one hand as a "pure idea," and on the other as a pure divine simplicity; now, as a "luminous abyss, without bottom, without shore, without bank, without height, without depth, without laying hold of, or attaching itself to anything—pure infinity then as a "formative appetency," a "metaphysical ens," an "infinite point," "the great ether of the universe." And solemnly let us repeat it, the framers of these definitions maintain that we cannot do better, when thinking (?) of God, than to think of Him after the fashion indicated above! Think of a luminous abyss, of a bottomless, fathomless, shoreless, bankless, depthless being! Truly this is mockery to the thought.

In striking contrast to this medley of absurdities, Swedenborg comes as a liberating angel, giving us, if not the absolutely true or final views, at least such views of God as redeem the nature of the Divine from the misapprehensions of a dull, scholastic theology, and an imbecile metaphysics, and show how God in himself exists, and what attitude He maintains to man. He clearly demonstrates that a being without body, parts, or passions, is not a being at all. His reasoning on this point, though more profound and less rationalistic and materialistic than John Locke's, is substantially the same. This great and gifted English philosopher has stated that whatever "has no form and parts has no extension, and having no extension, has no duration, and thus no existence." This is the severe logic of material reasoning: but it contains a spiritual application. Apply this reasoning to the doctrines currently taught about God. If God is without body, parts, or passions, He has no existence; for, as before observed, that which has no form, extension, and no duration, has no existence—no being—is not. When we say, " Our Father who art in heaven," we are, according to the stem logic of the preceding argument, addressing a nonentity. Do not mistake us. We are not insinuating for a moment that God has material parts or passions; all we are bent on advocating is, that God is a personality—is the infinite Divine Substance—is the only real substantial Being, with parts, and affections, and form, in ever hallowed and sublime activity. And this is Swedenborg's doctrine; yet without a knowledge of his doctrine of discrete degrees, and the nature of life, influx, and form, it is impossible, in the brief space allotted to a lecture, to give you anything approaching a clear and candid view of his position. Sufficient, however, has been advanced on the nature of God, as stated by Swedenborg, to quicken thought, and suggest volumes for your meditation.

Pure Act or Pure Love: which better describes God?

Here is a selection of a my own comments following Edward Feser's post Is [the] God [of classical theism] dead? I continue trying to resolve some fundamental differences with the Thomists, but it was difficult. I wanted to give them a chance to defend in their best way.

I do not here include anyone else's replies. The links are to my comments.

First the existing argument from Thomas Aquinas (emphasis added):

“God brought things into being from no preexisting subject, as from matter…
    Now, the order that obtains between act and potentiality is this: although in one and the same thing which is sometimes in potentiality and sometimes in act, the potentiality is prior to the act, which however is prior in nature to the potentiality. Nevertheless, absolutely speaking, act is necessarily prior to potentiality. This is evident from the fact that a potentiality is not actualized except by a being actually existing. But matter is only potentially existent. Therefore, God who is pure act, must be absolutely prior to matter, and consequently the cause of it. Matter, then, is not necessarily presupposed for His action.
    Also, Prime matter in some way is, for it is potentially a being. But God is the cause of everything that is…Hence, God is the cause of prime matter—in respect to which nothing [else] preexists. The divine action, therefore, requires no preexisting matter” (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Chapter 16).

If someone told you that being G was 'pure actuality', then you would think that it would be devoid of potentiality, capacity, power, and (hence) causal powers.

However, Feser claims about God that "it is precisely because He is pure actuality that He is the source of all causal (or actualizing) power." This is to repeat Aquinas' argument.

But I do not understand the inference here. There must be much more to God than 'pure actuality'. That does not seem to be a good characterization of his essence. What is missing? Can it be given a philosophical characterization (rather than by a theological accretion of attributes)?

I still have a problem, however, with the meaning of 'pure' in 'pure actuality'. (And how it is thereby supposed to refer to something essential about God.)

Normally, a 'pure A' means 'devoid of not-A'. Purely red means devoid of not red. Purely intellectual means devoid of not intellectual.

However, here, 'pure actuality' refers to something with no potentiality for changing itself, but still lots of power for changing other things. This does not seem to be a good sense of words. I am surprised that Aquinas uses it!

I agree that powers (whatever they may be) must be grounded in what exists. And that they cannot be grounded in 'pure potentiality'. From many examples, that is clearly ridiculous. I also agree that 'actuality' is practically synonymous what 'what exists'.

But then, how does the term 'pure actuality' get us close to identifying God? A god who is devoid of some potentialities (those for himself), but who is positively enthusiastic about other potentialities (those for others). Do you see the problem?

By 'potentiality' I refer to any capacity or power in onself to make a change, whether in the agent, or in another (patient).

I agree that god does not change himself. But, if he is defined as 'pure act' after Aquinas, is it possible for him to have in himself any powers to change others?

• It cannot be because 'actual' means 'exist', since ordinary existing things are not sources of powers. 
• It cannot be since god = pure actuality and god is the source, since i am asking an ontological question not a theological one. 
• It cannot be because every coming-to-be requires an actual thing to do that, because that has nothing to do with where the powers originate. 
• It cannot be because the original actual being can have no potentiality, since that directly blocks answering the question. 

I agree that a purely actual being will be devoid of all passive potencies. The question is, is it not, for the same reason, devoid of all active potencies as well?

I think of myself as a classic theist. I just think that Aquinas at various points was let done by the poor development of Aristotle's ontology (physics and metaphysics).

It you look at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1025.htm for example, at the first section discussing whether there is power in god (my subject above!), all the crucial steps are based on ideas of 'perfection' and 'fittingly', etc. Aquinas does not have the philosophical machinery to give a robust answer, so he wings it, in order to get to the right answer. (Most of his final answers are quite good: it is the logic in the middle that is poor).

A 'normal ontology' need not badly constrain God, if the ideas in it came from God in the first place. Since much religion is to get us to listen to God, we should not be afraid to use the ideas we get. (At least, then, they would be consistent)

Now I propose a resolution of this problem, by means of

Actual powers:

How about this resolution of problem?

We take (at least for now) God to be immutable, in the sense that his essence is constant for all time. He never changes: he is famed for his constancy.
This implies that the essence as it actually exists at one time, exists as such for all times. It has NO potentiality to change himself. For these reasons, we may reasonably characterize God as 'purely actual'. Aquinas would define God as Pure Act, as our most direct description.

But we also take God as the source of all life, love, power and activity in the universe. He is essentially omnipotent. That is, it is from his own nature that God is the source of all power. But is this compatible with being purely actual?

Maybe we can resolve this by being clearer on what about God is purely actual? Some characterize God as 'love itself'.

Let us conceive of God as a 'fixed and immutable actual love'. 

Does that make sense? Does it help above? For our analysis, consider love as a specific kind of active power.

Certainly, a fixed and immutable love makes a good eternal essence for God. It makes sense for religion (find your own quotes). This love is always for others, so never changes itself: as we thought all along.

A God whose essence is love itself can then certainly give and share that love to creatures in the universe. This also makes sense for religion.

But a 'fixed actual love' is certainly not 'pure act' in the Aristotlean-Thomistic sense. Sorry about that, but tough for A-T ontology. It is a 'fixed energy source' (imagine your local star, for a metaphor). It is purely actual, with absolutely no passive powers, but is 'full' of active powers to create and share.

Steve Fuller's "Science of God"

Steve Fuller, at the University of Warwick in the UK, has been proposing for some time that science ought to take God seriously into account.  Here is a brief set of links to his work and related topics. He comes from a Catholic/Jesuit education, but his theology does not seem to agree with the standard Thomistic views as discussed by Edward Feser.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has posted his article The science of God: The philosophical antecedents of Intelligent Design, which is a useful summary of his position. I want to discuss the relation of his work to the theistic science that I am advocating.

Fuller writes:

"Theomimesis" is my neologism for attempts to acquire God's point-of-view - in short, to take literally that we might "get into the mind of God" or even "play God."

The deity in question is Abrahamic, indeed, the "monotheistic" deity that eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers such as John Toland and Gotthold Lessing abstracted as the rational common core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In practice, this monotheism was usually - but not always - heavily biased toward some version of the Christian deity. This deity is distinctive in that it transcends the world it has created, yet its nature is sufficiently close to our own that we might reasonably aspire to approximate the deity's virtues.

This agrees well with the principles of theistic science, following from the core principles of theism whereby God is Love Itself,  and whereby our life is a kind of reduced image of God. Our mental activities of desiring and thinking exist because they derive from the love and wisdom of God.

The theomimetic moment has been captured in several ways. Kant, ever the diplomat, spoke of God as a "regulative ideal of reason." More plain-speaking theologians and philosophers have followed the great fourteenth century Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus' theory of "univocal predication" whereby divine attributes differ from human ones only by degree not kind. Thus, God may be "all knowing" but the sense in which God "knows" is the same as our own, except we "know" to a much lesser degree. This in turn allowed for direct comparisons between human and divine conditions of being, resulting in a trajectory of progress - typically presented as a project of species self-improvement from Adam's Fall to (possibly) the construction of Heaven on Earth.

This is also more or less true, once we acknowledge that the work of 'species self-improvement' is something done largely by God's regeneration of our spiritual life insofar as we permit that to happen. I have discussed before the significance of "univocal prediction" of divine attributes.

Two versions of this project have enjoyed considerable secular influence in the modern era:

• Leibniz's theodicy, which would understand Creation in terms of a divine utility function that tolerates many local harms in service of ours being "the best possible world";
• Hegel's philosophy of history, which makes temporality constitutive of God's own self-realization, which means that Creation itself is incomplete as long as the distinction between God and humanity remains.

Historically these two secular theomimetic projects are known as capitalism and socialism, respectively. The theomimetic agents are correspondingly known as the entrepreneur and the vanguard.

But once religious believers started to take seriously that the actual world might reflect the design of a divine intelligence that is literally "superhuman" - that is, the ultimate extension of human intelligence - disaffection quickly set in, as God seemed to operate on the principle that the end justifies the means. For humans this normally means "unscrupulous."

To be sure, the Jesuits (God bless them!) had already seen this problem in the Counter-Reformation, proposing the "doctrine of double effect," which aims to dissociate what one intends and what one anticipates. Thus, God always intends good, and through his all-powerful nature can bring about good, but the good of primary interest to the deity is ultimate good, not immediate or transient good. These lesser goods are related directly to matter, which for God is always a negotiable instrument. So while it is unfortunate that many must suffer and die, this would happen in service of an end to which they themselves would have agreed (had they been asked). Both military invasion and land dispossession have been justified on these terms.

It seems that we are failing here to have a proper account of God's management of the world, and how Divine Providence is managed.  We see, furthermore, how misunderstandings of theology lead to strange political platforms.

In light of this reasoning, it is perhaps unsurprising that Charles Darwin renounced his lingering attachment to Christianity once he studied closely William Paley's Natural Theology, which openly endorsed Reverend Thomas Malthus' views of divine population control through resource constraint. Of course, Darwin retained the substance of Malthus' theory - now re-branded as "natural selection" - but he refused to believe in the existence of a deity who would allow so many members of so many species to endure such miserable existences. Darwin's morally fuelled atheism thus led him to a kind of Neo-Epicureanism that dissipated divine responsibility in a sophisticated version of metaphysical indeterminacy.

Again questions of divine providence seem to be driving scientific ideas, and in 'strange' directions. Darwin's principle of natural selection, I showed, is impossible within theism.

However, the decline of theomimesis among professional theologians is trickier to explain. Most embraced Darwin's empirical findings and hypotheses without losing their faith. Indeed, the strong pro-science orientation of theologians in the half-century following the publication of Origin of Species is exemplified in Adolf von Harnack, who served as political midwife to the birth of the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institutes, the pioneer vehicle for state-industry-academia research collaborations.

But the close bond between science and theology was undone by the German scientific community's strong presence in the First World War, whose unprecedented devastation led many theologians to doubt that science could be treated as the pursuit of God by technologically enhanced means. From this conclusion arose the sort of "fideism" championed by Karl Barth, which in the name of humanity's fallen state rendered theology a self-referential discourse without any aspirations or accountability vis-a-visthe world as understood by science. As the "Great War" had shown - at least to Barth's satisfaction - the very attempt to redeem theological claims in scientific terms was itself to court evil.

A very interesting observations, of how bad science and bad politics are repulsive.

Barth's regrettably influential inward turn helps to explain the ease with which science's staunchest twentieth-century philosophical supporters, the logical positivists, could get away with asserting the "non-cognitive" status of religious discourse - without hearing much theological complaint in return. Today's "New Atheists" merely raise the positivist ante by querying the whole point of religion, once its cognitive aspirations have been abandoned. In response, religious believers do themselves no favours by acting as if theology were literary criticism applied to an especially vividly experienced form of imaginative writing, otherwise known as "fiction."

Exactly. Theistic science aims to reclaim the cognitive status of scientific discourse, and show how theology may be used to make factual claims and predictions about the world.

Still worse offenders are those "religious pluralists" who declare intelligent design theory - the natural heir to the theomimetic tradition sketched above - as "bad science and bad theology" (here I think pre-eminently of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God). This must count as the "Big Lie" promulgated in the contemporary science-religion debate, for it merely serves to throw honest inquirers off a trail that would lead back to a literal construal of theology as the "science of God."

In that case, one might expect theories about God's nature to have scientifically tractable consequences, just as the protagonists of Europe's seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution had thought, the main fruit of which was Newton's world-system. In this context, the physicist Frank Tipler, the most dogged proponent of a metaphysically full-blown version of the "anthropic principle," must count as someone who lives up to this ideal, despite his outlier status in both science and theology.

Frank Tipler's theology is very far from theism, we should note. Only rather strange ideas seem to be promulgated these days!

For those looking to work their way back to a clear theological foundation for theomimesis, the best place to start is with Augustine of Hippo's interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis. In particular, he stressed three points of lasting significance:

1. A strong reading of our having been created "in the image and likeness of God." The Jews had originally read this passage as a naturalistic explanation for why God found it so much easier talking to humans than other creatures, while Muslims took it to mean that humans were essentially God's robots, ideal vehicles for the conveyance of the divine message, as in the composition of the Qur'an by the functionally illiterate Muhammad. However, Augustine, following Paul (in Romans 5), read this passage to anticipate Jesus, understood not as another Jewish prophet but the "Son of God," which encouraged the idea that humans could be godlike. In the short term, this idea begat many of the heresies that Augustine sought to stamp out as Bishop of Hippo, but it opened the door to query what it might mean to live in imago dei: Are we to live our lives according to the dictates of Jesus' anointed successors, or are we to rediscover Jesus for ourselves in each new generation? In short: Peter's or Paul's way of spreading the Gospel. Nowadays the choice looks like Catholicism versus Protestantism, but it was already present at the medieval founding of the universities, with the Dominican stress on natural history and the Franciscan stress on optics. But equally it captures two scholarly ways of reading the Bible "literally": as a historical document or as a theatrical script. In the one case, we recover the Word (that is, we find out what they meant back then); in the other, we re-enact the Word (we find out what they would mean now). By the late-nineteenth century, this had crystallised as the distinction between "idiographic" and "nomothetic" sciences, the one focussed on the archive, the other the laboratory.

Remembering the "imago dei" is an extremely important part of theistic science. Further developments in theistic science furthermore indicate that the literal readings of scripture are only one of the many meanings that those texts may have. The Bible has many deeper meanings.

2. A stress on the qualified nature of God's forgiveness of Adam's sin. Augustine interpreted Adam's divine death sentence, which extended to all his descendants, as implying that his sin was forgiven yet not forgotten: Each generation is born with a version of Adam's sin that they must then somehow redeem for themselves, presumably with divine approval and preferably with the aid of Jesus. (Contrast this with the account provided in Qur'an 7: Adam's debt is cancelled in return for perpetual submission, the literal meaning of "Islam.") A key feature of what Augustine coined as "Original Sin" is the specification of Adam's failure as being one of judgement, not action. Adam and Eve had erroneously trusted the serpent's plausible reasoning. Henceforth there would be grounds for questioning one's understanding of words, even though God had called things into existence. Many of the distinctive preoccupations of modern science flow from this sensibility, including these three: (a) the search for a pure language of thought that overcomes the noise of natural languages; (b) the concern with distinguishing genuine causal relations from their virtual ("evil") twin, empirical correlations; (c) the desire to mitigate our inherent imperfections by reverse engineering the bases of our material nature, tellingly called "genetics." Common to these preoccupations is the idea that Evil, though radically different in nature from Good, is quite similar in its appearance. Thus, considerable ambiguity has dogged the moral standing of science "pursued for its own sake," as this most ennobling of human endeavours can easily tip over into inhumane acts, as in the Faust legend.

Fuller is here briefly touching on the fact that our understanding changes significantly during the stages of our spiritual regeneration. And similarly, if we spiritually decline, that our understanding of spiritual things will decline. He also notes the fact that everyone thinks of what they desire as good, even if they have poor spiritual insight and hence mistake evil for good.

3. The placement of equal emphasis on the perfection of divine creation as a whole and the radical imperfection of its parts. The story of Creation is presented as a piecemeal process, in which God appears to weigh options, given the (undisclosed) limitations of the material medium within which creation must occur. With the rise of Islam, the divine modus operandi comes to be compared to a chess game in which the grandmaster always win but by means dictated by the position of the pieces on the board. In any case, the existence of such options suggests that God is an "optimiser" - or, as economists say, a "constrained maximiser" - whose ideal solution to the problem of Creation requires many calculated trade-offs that, when taken in isolation, may appear unbecoming of a supreme deity, if not downright evil. The "will" was the name coined for a divine faculty, also present in humans, which realizes the outcomes of such calculations. But it is arguably just such knowledge that God was trying to hide from Adam when he forbade him from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because he wished humanity to be innocent of the "dirty work" of creation - namely, the possibilities that had to be forgone to enable things to be as they are. However, once Adam had been persuaded to eat of the forbidden tree, the only possible (if at all) way back into God's good graces was by discovering - however fitfully and imperfectly it was likely to be - the divine plan to which the forbidden tree had promised access. This meant capturing in temporal terms (over many generations) an achievement that God had accomplished from a standpoint equidistant from all places and times ("the view from nowhere"). The signature legacy of humans trying to reverse engineer the intelligence behind divine creation is the idea that scientific inquiry should aim for the most economical set of universal laws, where such laws are understood as covering not only generalisations of experience but also counterfactual possibilities (for example, those that God considered but rejected).

This story of the nature of Adam's error is a little odd. According to theism, it is rather the desire to deny that his life is forever dependent on God and the desire instead to be 'as God' with life in himself. Fuller also fails to understand the deeper importance of "will". The true will of a person is the state of the loves which constitute the being and life of him or her.

Can Theists believe in one less god?

There is a common argument among atheists that 'we are all atheists', in the sense that they just disbelieve in one more god than theists do.

For example, we read:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." Stephen F Roberts

Failure of Analogous Arguments

Ed Feser, arguing from philosophical point of view, replies:

While your average “Internet Infidel” seems to regard the “one god further” objection as devastatingly clever, it is in fact embarrassingly inept, a sign of the extreme decadence into which secularist “thought” has fallen in the Age of Dawkins.

Suppose someone skeptical about Euclidean geometry said:

When you understand why you regard all the particular triangles you’ve observed as having sides that are less than perfectly straight, you will understand why I regard Euclidean plane triangles as such to have sides that are less than perfectly straight.

Or suppose a critic of Platonism said:

When you understand why you regard the things of ordinary experience as in various ways imperfect or less than fully good instances of their kinds, you will understand why I regard Plato’s Form of the Good as being less than fully good.

Would these count as devastating objections to Euclidean geometry and Platonism?  Would they serve as fitting mottos for blogs devoted to “Common Sense Anti-Euclideanism” or “Common Sense Anti-Platonism”?  Obviously not.  They would demonstrate only that the speaker didn’t have the slightest clue what the hell he was talking about. The “one god further” objection is no better than these stupid “objections” would be.


Rebuttal in Theism

According to Theism, God is not just one being among many, but is being itself.  Atheists may compare God with other possible creatures such as Santa, Zeus, and the Flying Spaghetti monster, and claim that where is an equal lack of existence for all of them.

However,  God is the "I Am", is being itself, and is therefore in a different category. None of the other putative Gods ever claimed, or had it claimed of them, that they were 'being itself'. In philosophy, this is called aseity, because in latin a se means 'in itself' or 'from itself'.

All we need to note now, for our Rebuttal, is this attribute of God. Just from God being "being itself", we prove that there is only one God:

For consider the logical possibility of two Gods. They would both be being itself, since they are Gods. But God is being itself. Therefore they are both God, and hence identical.

So the nature of God as 'being itself' implies monotheism. It implies that there can only be one god. Not many, and not zero. One is a special number when it comes to counting God.

This is the reason for monotheism, why Gods more than one are rejected, as also are Gods numbered only zero. Theists disbelieve all God who are not being itself. That set includes Zeus, Santa, the FSM, and all those others that have ever entered into polytheism (except, possibly, just one).

More general discussion is here.

We are connected with God, but we are not characters in God's novel

Continuing the previous discussion about how we have viewed, and should view, the relation between God and the world:

One view is that we are related to God as are the characters in a book to the Writer of the book.  Edward Feser, a new Aristotelean-Thomist philosopher, encourages us to use this metaphor:

On the classical theist conception of God, God is not one causal factor in the universe among others, not even an especially grand and powerful causal factor. He is not a “first” cause in the sense of being followed in a temporal series by a second cause, a third cause, a fourth cause, etc. Rather, He is “first” or primary in the sense of being the fundamental cause, the necessary precondition of there being any causality within the universe at all, just as the author of a story is the “first cause” of what happens in the story, not in the sense of generating effects in the way the characters and processes described in the story do, but rather in the sense of being the necessary precondition of there being any characters or processes in the story at all.

The same metaphor was developed at some length in the talk by physicist Stephen Barr at the 2012 Science and Faith Conference: "Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?", the video for his talk being available on youtube. This metaphor of a Writer and his book characters has the virtue of emphasizing some of the great philosophical / ontological differences between us humans and God. God is (thereby) not just another person among us persons, or another object among the world's objects, but can be the necessary precondition for the existence of any of us persons or objects.

This Writer metaphor, however, has a serious defect, and one which I believe is fatal. This is that a writer can never love his characters in any manner which respects their freedom. And the characters can never love return love to God-as-writer in any way which gives delight to God. The ontological chasm between God and creation, having been made great, is now in fact too great to be bridged, even by love. Even God (who is love) cannot now make anyconjunction which should be of love.*

I wonder whether Thomas Aquinas has something to do with this separation. Was there something in his views which emphasizes separation rather than conjunction? I read more about Aquinas in an article by Elizabeth Johnson, for example:

One of the strengths of Aquinas's vision is the autonomy he grants to created existence through its participation in divine being. He is so convinced of the transcendent mystery of God (esse ipsum subsistens) and so clear about the sui generis way God continuously creates the world into being that he sees no threat to divinity in allowing creatures the fullest measure of agency according to their own nature. In fact, it is a measure of the creative power of God to raise up creatures who participate in divine being to such a degree that they are also creative and sustaining in their own right. A view to the contrary would diminish not only creatures but also their Creator: "to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.'' (SCG 3.69.15) This is a genuinely noncompetitive view of God and the world. According to its dynamism, nearness to God and genuine creaturely autonomy grow in direct rather than inverse proportion. That is, God is not glorified by the diminishment of the creature but by the creature's flourishing in the fullness of its powers. The nature of created participation in divine being is such that it grants creatures their own integrity, without reserve.  

This participatory relationship has strong implications for the question of agency. The power of creaturely forces and agents to act and cause change in the world is a created participation in the uncreated power of the One who is pure act. Conversely, God's generous goodness and wisdom are seen especially in the creation of a world with its own innate agency.  

Admittedly her article comes from part of a polemic by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in their 'perspectives' about evolution, but I still believe what she says about Aquinas.

If so, then Aquinas has a serious problem in his theory. He wants to be "allowing creatures the fullest measure of agency according to their own nature". However, our agency requires us to have things which only God has: we need being, we need love, we need wisdom -- we need life in general. And God, in theism, is being itself, love itself, wisdom itself, and life itself. Aquinas does indeed recognize this about God: he acknowledges the 'aseity of God'. The word 'aseity' come from 'a se - ity', where 'a se' is latin for 'in itself'. But he does not acknowledge that we have to receive love, receive wisdom, receive life from God. This cannot be done arbitrarily 'at a distance', but must be done by the actions of God. And the actions of God require the presence of God. So it is certainly not the case that "nearness to God and genuine creaturely autonomy grow in direct rather than inverse proportion."

Aquinas seems to follow the traditional view of God creating the world, that is by fiat, taking literally the commands 'fiat lux: let there be light,' and so on. He, and other theologians since, have usually separated the question of how God sustains the existence of things from the question of their dynamical properties. These properties are taken to give rise to secondary causation, which is assumed to be independent of whatever primary causation there is from God.

The creation of substantial objects nevertheless involves God giving them their being (since he is being itself). There can be no power without substance nor without some kind of presence. It is impossible that God sustains merely the existences of things while at the same time remaining completely absent. In the theism of my book, the immanence of God, by which all things are sustained, is less an abstract  metaphysical principle and much more the immediate and mediate re-generation of life by continual influx from God. The sustaining of being by re-generation does allow this, as long as the beginning of the chain is in the presence of God.

The fact that God sustains all beings by such 'influx' can be the meaning of Matthew 5:45: "He ...  sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." Alternative imagery in the same verse refers to light rather than liquid flow: "He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good."

For more discussion of these things, and the broader picture, see www.beginningtheisticscience.com.