Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 133
points. For example, the claim that God is his essence bears on the metaphysical
inseparability, even notionally, of the thatness and the whatness of
God. When thinking about cats, say, we can distinguish between a certain
species of animal nature and the (realized) possibility of several individuals
possessing that nature. Felix and Felicity are both cats in virtue of participating
in, or sharing, a common nature. In the case of God, however, there is no
possibility of there being more than one instance of the kind, for individuation
is tied to materiality and that is a feature of the spatiotemporal order,
which is also the domain of change and contingency. Thus, if there is a God
identified initially as a first cause, then that he is and what he is are one and
the same reality. Unlike the case of catness, there is no sense to be attached to
the question of whether this kind of ‘whatness’ (quiddity) might be shared
by more than one thing.
Similarly, the odd sounding ‘identity of the divine attributes’ is a conclusion
derived from reflection upon the simplicity of God. Just as one aspect of
not being composed of parts is that there is no distinction in God between
that which has an essence and the essence itself, so another aspect of this
transcendent simplicity is that each attribute is co-extensive with every other.
One way of trying to understand this is by way of an analogy derived from
the philosophy of language. Following Frege (1848–1925), contemporary
philosophers distinguish between the sense and the reference of an expression;
between, that is to say, the thing that the term denotes, and the way the
referent is presented by the expression. 22 One consequence of this distinction
is that two or more expressions can be referentially or extensionally equivalent
though they have different senses.
Aquinas was already familiar with something like this distinction, for he
uses it to explicate the idea that truth, being and goodness – what he calls
‘transcendentals’ – are in reality one and the same. What he means, I think, is
that there is one reality at issue, but that it can be identified from different
perspectives and that the nature of these perspectives determines, in distinctive
and different ways, what is seen from them. Each perspective conditions
one’s view and bestows a certain character on the appearance of that which is
seen. Nonetheless what they are perspectives on is just one reality. Returning
to the thesis of the identity of the divine attributes and connecting it with
the earlier discussion of the ‘quia’ (effect to cause) character of the Five Ways,
we might say that the various features such as impassibility, necessity, mindedness,
and so on are attributed from different perspectives, which in this case
are provided by the nature of the mundane phenomena with which one
starts (change, contingency, human intentionality, etc.), but that the implied
simplicity of God reveals to reason that they are ontologically one reality:
God is necessary existence which is impassibility which is underived mind
which is God.