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Truthmaking, resemblance, and divine simplicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2021

Mahmoud Morvarid Open the ORCID record for Mahmoud Morvarid [Opens in a new window]
Mahmoud Morvarid*
Affiliation:
School of Analytic Philosophy, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), P.O. Box 19395-5746, Tehran, Iran
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

According to the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, if an intrinsic predication of the form ‘God is F’ is true, then God's F-ness exists and is identical with God. To avoid the absurdity of identifying God with a property, a number of philosophers have proposed that God's F-ness should be interpreted, not as a property God possesses, but as the truthmaker for ‘God is F’, which is God himself. I shall argue that given some plausible assumptions, the truthmaker interpretation would undermine the highly plausible idea that there are ‘natural’ predicates which apply univocally or (at least) analogically to both God and some created beings. The only way in which the advocate of the truthmaker interpretation can avoid this problem is to embrace wholesale radical nominalism (with its own costs). That is to say, the truthmaker interpretation is far more constrained than it might initially appear to be.

Keywords

divine simplicitytruthmaker theorythe truthmaker interpretation of divine simplicitythe objective similarity argument
Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 547 - 563
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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