#826 Maximal Greatness and the Number of Divine Persons

Dr. craig’s response

I think that you are over interpreting my word “richly,” Jack. I meant the word merely in the sense “abundantly,” not in a sense implying greatness. So a God endowed with ten sets of cognitive faculties, each sufficient for personhood, would, indeed, be more abundantly endowed with rational faculties than a tri-personal God, but He would not for all that be greater. There is no reason to think that merely increasing the number of divine persons increases God’s greatness.

Now I do in fact think that a tri-personal God is greater than a unitarian God, who is a single person.  But that is not due merely to an increase in the numerosity of persons. Rather as several Christian philosophers have argued, God’s essential moral perfection implies a plurality of divine persons. God is by definition the greatest conceivable being.  As the greatest conceivable being, God must be morally perfect.  Now a perfect being must be a loving being.  For love is a moral perfection; it is better for a person to be loving rather than unloving.  God therefore must be a perfectly loving being.  Now it is of the very nature of love to give oneself away.  Love reaches out to another person rather than centering wholly in oneself.  So if God is perfectly loving by His very nature, He must be giving Himself in love to another.  But who is that other?  It cannot be any created person, since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of His nature.  It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to His essence to create.  So we can imagine a possible world in which God is perfectly loving and yet no created persons exist.  So created persons cannot sufficiently explain whom God loves. It therefore follows that the other to whom God’s love is necessarily directed must be internal to God Himself.

Now the obvious reply to this argument is to say that being perfectly loving requires no more than the disposition to love another, should another person be about. A sailor marooned on a desert island, for example, may be said to be a loving person due to his disposition to love and should not be characterized as less loving because he happens to be alone. But the case of God is crucially different, I think. For God, as a maximally great being, is not dependent upon contingent circumstances to express His love. He can create persons to love if needs be. In His case His essential disposition to give Himself away in love to another cannot remain unactualized. A unitarian God who has the power to create persons to whom He can give Himself in love but who refuses to do and is content to remain alone cannot be said to be perfectly loving, even dispositionally. But if God includes within Himself a plurality of persons, then there is no need to create persons in order for His loving disposition to be expressed.

In other words, God is not a single, isolated person, as unitarian forms of theism like Islam hold; rather God is a plurality of persons, as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms.  On the unitarian view God is a person who does not give Himself away essentially in love for another; essentially, He loves only Himself and it is a contingent matter whether He loves anyone else.  Hence, He cannot be the most perfect being.  But on the Christian view, God is a triad of persons in eternal, self-giving love relationships.  Thus, since God is essentially loving, the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than any unitarian doctrine of God.

This argument entails that God is greater if there is a plurality of divine persons, but it does not entail the specific number of divine persons there must be. Some Christian philosophers, notably Richard Swinburne, have defended the position that there must be exactly three divine persons, but I haven’t found their arguments to be persuasive. I should say, though, that there is no reason to think that merely multiplying the number of divine persons is great-making. I’m therefore content to rest with the affirmation that God’s being triune is just an essential property of God.