Introduction

We only hear about the “logical problem of trinitarian monotheism (TM)”, but strangely enough, it seems like the logical problems of non-trinitarian (NTM) “vanilla” monotheism are rarely scrutinised. This is most likely on account of the Christian heritage of philosophical discussions in Western academia. So while we hear constant challenges directed at the personal distinctions in TM (three distinct persons, one essence), we might simply take it for granted either that a solitary entity can exist in the absence of any distinctions. In this article we therefore describe the problems with such a solitary entity, and then show that the TM in contrast actually addresses these issues and provides the solution, even the only available solution.

We argue that while the absence of distinctions is crippling for the solitary entity and means that it cannot act in any sense, the presence of distinctions in a solitary entity divide the entity, at the same time and leads to polytheism. When it comes to a solitary entity, it is seeminly a no-win situation. This is the conundrum – “action is not possible in the absence of distinctions, while monotheism is not possible in the presence of distinctions”. TM on the other hand posits personal distinctions as the only exception to this case, and we offer a brief outline of the means by which this is justified in that model. In NTM in contrast there is nothing else to be said about the entity, which means that there is no response to the issue.

The main NTM adherent groups today would be the Islamic faiths, some forms of Hinduism, and some splinter “unitarian” Christian groups including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphains and in some sense Judaism, but that is complicated by Kaballah in its Rabbinic form. Rather than being a mere polemic against those groups, this article also works as a negative proof of the validity of Tritarianism. Christianity is not saying that the monotheistic model is false, rather that it requires elaboration. In this it does not cancel out the bedrock assertions of monotheism which is simply to state that God is one. For example, literally this assertion alone in relation to the deity is sufficient to define a Muslim. Beyond that there is no dogmatic or settled theology of the deity, and the positions range from a sort of settled agnosticism which is mainstream, to Neo-Platonism in some strands. I have discussed these in my other articles to I don’t provide any details here. But essentially, as we said, the basic belief is a “vanilla” monotheism.

This article feeds into a couple of my other articles, which are linked in the conclusion as they are too much to discuss here, like my synopsis of the Islamic positions and Divine Simplicity.

The Logical problem for NTM

The problem for dynamism

There are certain entailments of a one-entity world (OEW), the main issue is going to be the lack of dynamism in it. When most people think of the monotheistic entity, they imagine something radiant “somewhere out there”. Quite the contrary, for monotheism to be true, the “one-entity world” (OEW) must be possible, where the entity itself is that world/universe, meaning its entire reality. This is because were there anything that entity were surrounded by, it must have been created by that entity, and therefore cannot have been present eternally. As a result the OEW must be a possibility, one in which the entity is not just the only reality, as though something within a space, but reality itself. Thus monotheism requires both, not just that there be no real distinctions within the deity, but also that the deity have the ability of existing as something in the absence of external distinctions, that is, the distinction between interior and exterior. In the OEW there is no concept of interiority and exteriority.

Now action requires the distinction between that which acts and that which is acted upon. In the OEW, as we have seen, there are no distinctions, period. Thus possessing no structure, there is no possibility of an action or an event in the OEW. An entity that does not act or operate or is not dynamic, is simply the opposite- inactive, inoperative, impotent or dead. Similarly, we can question the possibility movement, since movement might be seen as an act or a mark of dynamism and even life. In the OEW, there is nowhere to move, for there is no distinction between point of departure and point of destination. Thus there cannot be dynamism or movement either.

Problems of divine complexity

The only way to allow for action in the NTM is to partition the entity such that one part acts upon the other(s). But this is polytheism with multiple eternal entities. We have discussed the problem of a partitioned deity in detail in the essay on Divine Simplicity. But to state it simply for this article, it is not possible for multiple non-identical eternal to exist simultaneously. For example, if the point of the multiplicity is to admit of multiple distinct attributes, then obviously each separate eternal only has one attribute and nothing else. This is looking exactly like the pagan pantheon where each God does one thing. The problems are the same as those of paganism too- where did they all come from? Did one create the rest? But how can something that is devoid of any attributes create other attributes? Or is it because the first one had the attribute of creating? That does not get us anywhere, it just means that the first attribute created God except for God’s attribute of creating. You get a created God that could not create, created by a God which could do nothing except create. That’s absurd, how can something with no attributes create gods anyway.

Anyway that’s just one rabbit trail of I’m sure many others possible, yet even if one is prepared to accept this cosmic jig-saw model, of many pieces completing the picture of God, there is another problem which is probably more fundamental, or at least as fundamental- parts cannot comprise a single reality, they must subsist within an “umbrella” reality. You can slice something up only because it lies within something else for the slices to exist within. A jigsaw can only exist within the space which accomodates it’s boundaries. We can think of a simple God as all-encompassing. That’s a deep and profound thought but not an impossible one. But a divided God is encompassed.

Can the NTM have distinctions that don’t divide it?

Now the conclusions that we made in the previous section are literally a crippling insinuation against the NTM entity. Is there any way it is still possible that there is…”wriggle-room” for it, to move, act, some argument that we might have ignored? We’ve already seen in a previous section that divine complexity is not an option and is practically polytheistic. Is there any way for the NTM to have distinctions that allow it to act and that yet do not divide it? Well there is the obvious candidate, which is trinitarianism, which is literally defined by just that- distinctions that do not divide, but those are explained through a different theology not available in NTM, which is personal distinctions. But is there an NTM alternative? Really, this is the crux of the whole discussion, if there is a viable alternative monotheism to TM.

The NTM deity obviously requires to possess attributes in order to be God. The Ash’ari school of Islamic thought (which has a majority following today), for example, has attributes like speech, life, sight, hearing as “attributes of essence” of God, whereas other schools of Islamic thought have different combinations of these, the exact combinations do not matter. What does matter is that these attributes are not identical to each other, nor to the essence. This means that they are distinct parts within the entity. But the existence of distinct eternal non-identical entities is complexity and we’ve already seen the problems with that, the main being as we said, polytheism. But the problem here is really the ontolgical non-identity, which precludes any possibility of the component parts coinciding. This is why in the trinitarian formulation the consubstantiality is indispensible. The only option for NTM would seem to be a deity without attributes, which is of no use to us either (some followers of the Shi’i branch of Islam actually believe in such an entity, following a neo-Platonic model which we do not examine here because its rather fringe and has some obvious glaring issues, but I discuss that in a different article).

Positing that these attributes are “simply descriptions” as an attempt at an ontological hand-wave does not get us very far either. If by that we simply mean descriptions of our subjective impressions/ experiences of the deity, then we are merely talking about ourselves rather than anything in the deity, and we’re back to square one. We are not asking about subjective descriptions or experiences here, we want to know about the real qualities the deities possesses, rather than abstractions. It is us that require abstractions and metaphor to comprehend the deity, the deity does not require them for comprehension. When we speak of the attributes of the deity, we are not merely interested in something poetic that lacks ontic reality. A powerful entity must have the output of the sun with the hearing of, well a desert fox, and so on! This is why if there are distinctions in things that are real in the deity, then those are really distinct. Of course there’s nothing to prevent us describing our subjective impressions of God, but that’s devotional writing, not theology.

Grounding our understanding of attributes in something palpable like “action” helps make concrete observations regarding them. In fact that’s all we need, because the syllogism denies the possibility of this most basic of attributes in the NTM deity. That’s the beauty of it. The same goes for thought or word/speech. The problems of content are insurmountable, because they cannot merely be abstract. One needs real words even to convey an abstract thought! But why does God need to convey abstract thoughts to himself.

The problem for thought, love

A deity should have at the very least, an “awareness”. Let’s say, it is not unreasonable to expect a deity should “know” what it is about. Awareness or knowledge is always in relation to information, or in the case of the deity, its transcendent equivalent. Yet the mere presence of dry data does not amount to awareness, rather it requires the presence of a “subjective” experience of possessing/processing that information. And just as in the case of the deity, information would be infinite, so also would be experience of it be infinite also. And yet one would be meaningless without the other: infinite data would be meaningless without the infinite experience of it, and there can be no subjective experiencing with nothing to experience in the first place.

Finally, once we have spoken about the impossibility of act and thought in an NTM situation, as we also layout in the syllogism, love becomes impossible anyway. There can be no love with no act, since loving itself is an act, and in any case there can be no possibility of love without the possibility of thought. The NTM is obviously an extremely deprived situation, love would appear to be a pretty distant consideration when even existence is dubious and certainly intellection.

A definition of love can be slippery and so it’s worth discussing the issue. We can define a “person” very simply, as that which we can have a rational relationship. The classical definition of Boetheus “an individual entity of a rational nature” omits to define what “rational” is, while in using “rational relationship”, we include that which is indeed unique to and even defines rational natures. In fact that’s probably what Boethius implied by “rational” anyway, the ability to live in relationship, at the very least. If this is accepted, then persons have that unique property of being defined in relationship. Thus one can ask how a solipsistic entity could be personal, since it had no personal relationships. A relationship is precisely what makes something personal. In fact this is precisely the problem with NTM models like new-age and modern-day Hinduism- there is no personal deity, and so unsurprisingly they have even done away with prayer, worship and ritual, replacing it with meditation and the sense of “one-ness with the Universe”.

Syllogism- The Logical Problem of Non Trinitarian Monotheism

We can summarize all the above points in the form of a syllogism in this section. If we are to give any description of the nature of God at all, it must describe his attributes, since that is what represents “who-he-is” to us. Those attributes must include knowledge, else all is obviously lost, and love, else all is lost too. I would contend that every other attribute were secondary to these or included in them. We can assume “life” and “being”, else there would be nothing to describe, so we are “describing the existence” of God, not “describing whether he exists”, we assume that for the purpose of the syllogism and perform a reductio argument. We do not make any reference to creation or created things, which enables a “pure” description of the deity avoiding any extraneous factors. In a sense we are asking the question, “What can God do, if not creating?” and the answer from the syllogism is mainly “nothing”:

1. Action requires distinction between that which is acting/ that which is acted upon
2. NTM possess no inherent distinctions
3. From (2)&(1) NTM cannot act.
4. Thought is an act, requires dinstinction between thinker and thought.
5. From (2),(3),(4), NTM cannot think.
6. Love requires act, thought, distinction of lover/beloved.
7. From (2),(3),(5), NTM cannot love.
8. From (3),(5)& (7), NTM cannot be God.

In case there were still any questions, we can also add that the act of creation requires thinking of creating, acting in Creating, and love for creating, and so from (3),(5),& (7) NTM cannot create. That which does not possess any acts cannot have any content of thought, since there is nothing to think of, we’re dealing with a null set.

To summarize, in the case of the NTM Deity: since power acts upon something, it lacks power; since knowledge is about something, it lacks knowledge, and since love is for another, it lacks love. It is not God and nor is it anything at all.There is no rational indistinguished entity. There is a logical problem of rationality along with its descriptors like thought, love, dynamism (action) arising in a system which lacks composition or distinction, this is the LPTM. We can see that the fundamental problem of the NTM deity is the inability to act (3), and the primary reason for this in turn being the lack of distinctions (2), which as a result appears as the premise to every conclusion. No event is logically possible in the absence of distinctions.

Trinitarianism explains Distinctions in God

TM also states something like “A is not B”, the Father is not the Son is not the Spirit and so on. However TM makes an additional assertion, that the three share the same substance/essence. It proposes a means by which that might be possible, through their being persons, whereas NTM does not have such a proposition. TM does not have word/speech/life/power/sight/hearing/mercy and whatever combination as non-person entities inherent to the divine essence. Rather it makes the metaphysical claim that personal distinctions do not necessarily divide the deity. Thus NTM never approaches a decription of the problem of how distinct attributes can subsist in the deity, while TM circumvents the problem entirely by shifting it to a description of how distinct persons might share the same subsistence. If this is indeed the way that the deity does not suffer the problems we have stated we discuss in much more detail elsewhere, but this is the only proposed way.

By definition, there are no distinctions in a possible NTM- world. In order to act, the entity requires further qualification. In the end, the argument that the article is making is an incredibly simple one- a monotheistic deity requires to possess distinctions or it cannot escape impotence. TM asserts that those distinctions are present and further that they are personal, which is what makes them possible. That is, almost as a starting point, we do not find the person/ non-person distinction in TM, they’re all persons. Further what distinguishes them is not a demarcation between one attribute and the next, rather the relationship in which the divine attribute is possessed. The attribute itself is simply one, it is divinity. All the distinctions that we perceive as separate attributes are simply the interactions in the three relations, and because these are infinitely transcendent interactions, they can provide infinit color to our perceptions of them and their working in the Universe.

This solves the problem of havving to “map out” each attribute separately onto the deity separately and distinctly, which is all that NTM schools are able to perform. Since the persons are co-equal, each person possesses the whole attribute, or every one of our perceptions of the divinity. The persons themselves do not possess distinct attributes, rather all that divinity requires for its working is persons and all that persons require is the attribute of divinity. With this we really can say that everything else we perceive is our own experience or description of the divinity, because as regards the divinity, person and essence is already saying enough. For example, the entire divinity might be described as “speech”, not just a part of him and that speech is the Son, the Word, or the same as love for the Holy Spirit, or the speaker for the Father. The distinctions are not demarcations rather they are relationships. Trinitarianism provides the only such qualification in all of monotheism, even in all of religion. Because NTM has impersonal distinctions, it has no way of avoiding the problem of dividing the deity into distinct parts, this is what is meant my “distinctions”.  

Christianity gives a unique description to a unique God. The fact that attempting to describe the inner reality of God should lead us into the unexpected should hardly be unexpected itself.   Trinitarianism seemingly catches people by surprise, yet it should hardly be surprising that the entity responsible for everything transcends anything in our understanding. Again, the TM doctrine always takes everyone by surprise, but one does also wonder why they did not expect to be surprised by God in the first place. After all what else can it mean to be transcendent other than to transcend our understanding? Thus if the entity defies logic itself it is hardly surprising that the means by which it does so defies anything we can conclude through logic too.

Trinitariamism also provides a solution to the PSR

Now while we ave seen how the TM emerges as a solution to a negative syllogism against the NTM, we can also present a positive proof for it, as fulfilling the PSR or “Principle of Sufficient Reason”, which is the strongest logical proof for the existence of God, something that the NTM cannot offer, or is silent on. The PSR, like Douglas Adams’ “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” or Sean Carrol’s “The Particle at the End of the Universe”, PSR is “the Explanation at the End of Explanations”, an “entity at the end of all things” which we call God. This is not much different from what some might know as the contingency argument, I just prefer the PSR wording of it.

Briefly stated, the PSR asserts that everything must have a sufficient reason for its existence, or in other words, that which enables it’s existence, or enables it to be. Either nothing exists or there is that entity which enables things to exist. Since the explanation is not one of that the existence of which is being explained, it must be distinct from everything else that exists and hence it is right to call it an entity, because explanations can lie within existing things as abstract laws, equations and so on. This entity-explainer is itself independent of external explanation, else the PSR is not sufficient, its just a PR and we get an infinite regress. To be honest, it should really be called the principle of the sufficient reason-independent explanation (PSRIE). But as it is, we have PSR.

The beauty of the PSR proof is its sheer simplicity as a result of which it simply cannot be ignored and does not even require any training in logic philosophy or rhetoric whatsoever. It is no more than asking that existential question upon the lips of every individual at some point of their lives, “did we really need to be here”? If the answer is “no”, then the question remains “what then necessitated our being here?” or the well known hard question “why is there something rather than nothing”?

Now the PSR says nothing of the SR itself, apart from that it is one because its scope ends there. Further, inspite of being a “proof”, the PSR also entails an inherent circularity- it is premised on the impossibility of reason-independent entities, yet it concludes one as the solution! Thus it is necessary that the PSR-entity possess some quality that known entities do not, such that the premise does not apply to it: “that which everything needs does not itself need anything”. Now the position that the NTM adherent will adopt is that we do not/cannot know what that quality is, rather “God knows”. TM on the other hand, does propose such a quality- the Tri-Personhood. Even right off the bat, tri-personality is identifiable as a property which no known entity possesses, so it fulfils the criterion of uniqueness. Thus rather than simply claiming the uniqueness of the deity, TM attempts a description of what that uniqueness might consist in.

Thus TM proposes that an entity might be the PSR of all existence through having inherent distinctions that do not partition it- thats’ TM 101. In the TM formulation the origin is inherent to the entity rather than external to it. It is the entity itself that is both origin and originated, begetter and begotten. The origin is not external to the originated nor is the originated internal to the origin, they are coincident. And yet being inherent it is not superior (in dignity) nor posterior (temporally or causatively) because it is the same entitatively. Although this sounds impossible, yet because this is possible, therefore we have the PSR. God is reason-independent in the external sense, because the reason is himself, it is inherent to him and it is a Person, or a personal reason. Neither is the effect of the reason other than himself, it is a personal effect and it too is himself. In God there is not inequality between reason and effect. This too sounds impossible, but because it is possible therefore we have the PSR.

Summary and Concluding remarks

Monotheism is hardly a free ticket to an unbridled metaphysical hubris. For God to be a philosophically valid concept, he must necessarily have a priori power and attributes, else theology becomes an exercise in question- begging. In the end, the argument that the article is making is an incredibly simple one- a monotheistic deity, the one that fulfils its own proof, which is the PSR, requires to possess some distinguishable attributes. TM asserts that those attributes are in conversation, because they are personal, and this is why they are possible in the first place. NTM on the other hand must assume the presence of distinct attributes, without being able to defend their presence without dividing the deity. A divided suffers from the problems of divine complexity which are effectively polytheism, the very thing NTM is usually trying to avoid.

Appendix

TM’s solution to the “One and the Many”- the problem of Universals

In a sense the PSR provides a rough solution or at least a roadmap the the solution for the problem of universals- “why are there many things?” is answered by “because there is one thing”, or “why many things are?”, answered by “because one this is”.

Much as we might have come to expect it to be the case, yet monotheism is not actually a given. One of the reasons people do not believe in the existence of God is the sheer logical improbability of any single thing possessing the qualities entailed in being the single cause of reality. But while being sympathetic to the cause of their incredulity, I would venture that this position is the result of not fully developing the train of thought involved. Atheists seem to conclude multiple entities possessing those entailed qualities more viable, and of reality arising chaotically more probablistic than directedly. That is a questionable conclusion, as to whether the kind of power inconceivable in a single entity is more conceivable in the collaboration of multiple entities, or that the kind of result inachievable through design should be achievable through chaos. Everything in our experience points to the opposite being the case. It is directed progresses that produces the most gratifying and impressive gains for mankind and locii of individual brilliance, albeit often collaborating rather than unthinking rule-following.

Monotheism, and nothing but gets to the heart of one of the hard problems if not the hardest problem in philosophy- that of “the one and the many”, one that the greatest philosophers have grappled with. This has been severally stated, but let me put it this way- what is the reason that in the Universe, you never get one of anything, rather quite to the contrary, infinite repetitions of infinite variations of everything. In the Universe, every quality you can think of seems to repeat ad infinatum. Is “whiteness” actually a thing in reality, or just a mental category. Why is the exemplar never found in nature, only its infinite derivations, and why is the universe pervaded by these multiple repeats like an annoying eternal TV channel that produces no new episodes but can never be switched off either. Wy do we find these repeats in the first place, why does nothing exist but the exemplars? In the TM doctrine, the exemplars are in the mind of God. And if that sounds contrived, then TM can add that the exemplar of multiplicity itself is found in God too, in the multiplicity of persons.

I’ve presented the naked argument in this article, because it is expedient to have this simple logical framework for reasoning through what is nearly always an over-complicated issue. Among the world religions, the major NTM adherent is Islam and there are smaller groups which are Christian splinter groups like the so called “Unitarian” groups, Jehovah’s Wintnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians and so on. In the earliest days of Chrsitianity all of these would have roughly lined up with the well-known Arian heresy. This was in the second and third Christian centuries. Islam in its earliest years which was the 7th and 8th centuries went through a similar sort of struggle with being able to define just what was being said by monotheism. Just like with Christianity, they encountered the struggle of trying to define the relation of God’s attributes, which he obviousy must have, with God’s essential essence, which he also must have, to which the attributes are attributed to in the first place. Islam never unerwent a deep thought process of the nature fo love in relation to all this, but it did undergo a thought process and lively and even violent debate at times with regards to the “word” or “speech” of God. An early faction which was actually dominant, the Mu’tazilites was eventually itself dominated and became extinct somewhat, echoes remain today. But their position was that the speech is in fact something created. Relegating the attributes to created entities ostensibly circumvents the problem of having to describe their presence in essence and inherent relation within it. But it raises the impossible question and really the contradiction of how the deity could possibly create attribute if he did not have any in the first place. This is an absurd position and so the Ash’ari position, that the attributes do subsist within the deity, prevailed, although in an unstated manner. We have seen in this article that while that is the correct position, it requires an effective defense and coherent description which only TM provides.

What if this does not apply to transcendental abilities? It does not, hence TM

A counter argument might be that the sort of logical reasoning we have employed in the syllogism does not apply to transcendental abilities. Now the syllogism is not a metaphysical proof, rather it is a simple logical proof like any syllogism, and logic is based human reasoning ability. What the objection is stating is that even though the syllogism is logically valid, yet God might be able to function beyond our sense of what is logical or not. In reply, one might concede the possibility of that which is indeed beyond our logic, but along with that also admit that one of those things might be TM. So the answer is “yes, but because TM”.

The purpose of the syllogism is to show there there exists a logical difficulty in the first place, because without this there might be objections to the TM seeming to defy logic. At least with the syllogism we know that whatever the solution, its not going to be a logical one of the type that we are accustomed to at least. Thus the objection actually supports TM, since if the assertion is that the syllogism does not apply to God, then this is indeed merely because of TM that it does not. After all that’s the whole reason both TM and NTM adherents will agonize over the real relations of God’s attributes to his essence. If metaphysically all this meant nothing anyway, there would be no reason even to suppose that God had thought/awareness/act/love. Of course this would not be an option also because both the scriptures, whether in NTM or not, state that these are indeed the case for God.

What about reflexive/latent ability?

Trying to say something like the ability is reflexive or latent does not get us very far either. The latter yields an inactive deity, which is absurd, like an eternal stone or brick. The former, reflexive acts, which are acts upon oneself also require distinctions, rather reflexive acts are only possible if there are inherent distinctions, that’s the whole point of the syllogism anyway, and well, that’s really to concede TM, since the acts in TM are reflexive and made possible by precisely this, the internality of distinctions. So one might hear the objection “well while I might agree that the syllogism works and that the deity cannot act without externality of the type that created objects might offer the deity of possibity of, yet the deity might simply remain latent until it does create”. Well that’s the problem, an eternally inactive deity. If that really is the option to TM, then TM seems a lot less unlikely.

Whatever logic be employed, natural or transcendental, thought and love simply cannot do away with the necessity of distinction. The whole point of theology is to be able to make transcendental assertions anyway, it is not shy of doing so. It is certainly possible to make the theological assertion that in the absence of distinctions, thought/act/love not be possible. The assertion remains metaphysical and not merely physical since we are not merely including externality but also internality, since all we are asserting is “distinctions” without further qualification, hence to include both possibilities. It is one thing to reject both the logical as well as the metaphysical aspects that hte syllogism covers but if that be the case, then it is an admission that theologically, the NTM cannot be supported and that theology and metaphysics itself be invalidated. If that be the case then there is nothing to say on the issue, and it merely remains to choose whichever model seems personally more appealing. Without distinctions, it is not even possible to construct a sentence, natural or metaphysical. The point is that “God thinks” or “God acts” is not a coherent or valid statemnet in a lonely world scenario, and as a result neither is “God loves”. Considering love as a result of thought and act prevents us from assuming the possibility of some sort of reflexive “love for oneself” since that too requires act and thought.

For further reading on a couple of topics related to this, this is a detailed analysis of divine simplicity, with the problems of divine complexity hodels Divine Simplicity and here I discuss the various Islamic positions on monotheism Non-Trinitarian Monotheism (NTM)- Islamic “Tawhid” models.