In this first post, I want to reflect on two of the points Dumsday makes: (i) how might polytheists appropriate arguments for Bare Theism, or prevent monotheists from doing so? and (ii) how are henads different from bare particulars?

I. Appropriating arguments for Bare Theism

Dumsday notes that while thinkers like Greer and myself have made the point that arguments for Bare Theism (the claim that a God exists) do not automatically, or obviously favor Monotheism, monotheist thinkers readily concede this and have been exploring arguments that bridge from Bare Theism to Monotheism. So, while our point is taken, the challenge is to advance the dialogue by showing that we have bridges of our own.

This is a fair point, and I think it can be helpful to determine where the logical roads between propositions lead. In fact, it is a subject on which I have worked for years, and Dumsday covers some of my appraisals of monotheist strategies like appealing to Occam’s razor, or to an inherent metaphysical absurdity in a plurality of Gods. ¹ These are waters I have waded into multiple times on this site time as well, such as here and here.

Now, on the positive side of things, it might seem to one that polytheist bridges are there in the details specific to each bare theistic argument. For example, it could seem to one that there simply are divergent ends, ultimate values, or incompatible goods in Nature suggestive of plurality: a fine-tuning of initial constants for life, sure, but also a comparatively engulfing vastness of space hostile to life; predation at every level of biological organization, sure, but also a genuine moral arena. Mercy and Justice can point us in opposite, but good directions. The data, moreover, is not just that people have been having religious experiences, but that they have been experiencing a wildly diverse array of supernatural objects. And insofar as there is nothing epistemically, nomologically, metaphysically, or logically contradictory about polycentricity, even the ontological argument has a bridge within it.

But specifics aside, a far more efficient route is to find bridges by a priori analyzing the probability space. For example, given any bare theistic argument with the conclusion that there is at least one God who φ’s (i.e. constitutes, appears, legislates, creates, designs, works a miracle, etc.), we can reason like this:

If at least one deity φ’s, then either it is the only one who does so or it is not. If it is the only one who does so, then this is either because it is the only one that exists, or because others exist, but they just do not φ. On the other hand, if it is not the only God who φ’s, then Polytheism is thereby true. So, whether the deity who φ’s is the only one who does so or not, either way, Polytheism can be true, but not so for Monotheism.

From a bare theist’s point of view then, unsure of whether there is more than one God or not but trying to determine how many deities φ, we can know that simply as a matter of logic, the odds are that Polytheism is true. We can depict this as follows:

The interesting thing about this strategy is that it accumulates. With each successful bare theistic argument that one finds, the above C-inductive consideration applies again and again, and their probability compounds into a chorus.

Now, this whole way of looking at things is admittedly foreign to me at this point in my life. I have grown into a much more settled and considered polycentric view on which these sorts of considerations and projects are not necessary (and can even mislead). The Platonists took themselves to have discovered the unhypothetical principle of all things; the One, which, in neither being sheer nothingness, nor itself another one thing, designates wholly and singularly each of whom all things participate. That is, there is not some abstract ‘Unity’ as such; only each properly named Unit of which everything is a unit. That is a mouth full, of course, but my point is simply that in contrast to my 2015 work, I no longer take Gods to be the sort of thing that we posit, or hypothesize; argue for, or abstain from verdict on. They rather constitute us; we are made out of them, so to speak, in our very identities. They are the principle of individuation, of uniqueness.

I agree with Iamblichus (De Mysteriis 1.3) that the sort of contact we have with the Gods is “not to be taken as knowledge. Knowledge, after all, is separated (from its object) by some degree of otherness. But prior to that knowledge, which knows another as being itself other, there is the unitary connection with the gods that is naturally <and indivisible>. We should not accept, then, that this is something that we can either grant or not grant, nor admit to it as ambiguous (for it remains always uniformly in actuality), nor should we examine the question as though we were in a position either to assent to it or to reject it; for it is rather the case that we are enveloped by the divine presence, and we are filled with it, and we possess our very essence by virtue of our knowledge that there are gods.” ²

Far from an evidential approach to building bridges between Bare Theism and Polytheism, then, I would commend a polycentric approach. I think Edward Butler is right: for any God to exist just is for all the Gods to exist. As he has oft said, Theism just is Polytheism.

If I could help dialectically mature just one argument in my lifetime, it would be this one. It is a master argument of sorts, and while lengthier exposition must be postponed until the next installment where we can consider Dumsday’s third point, I can sketch a brief proposal here.

Consider first then that there are different routes to this conclusion.

A more indirect route is to argue that Monotheism is either trivially compatible with Polytheism, or materially equivalent to Atheism. The implication then is that only Polytheism is Theism. The idea here is that it can mean two different things to say that there is only one God: (i) that there is only one of this individual (which would be trivially true of each one that is), or (ii) that there is only one of this kind (which would leave nothing unaturalized, by classical and Platonist lights).

A more direct route, and the one taken in Section 2.2. of my Polytheism: A Platonic Approach is, essentially, to argue that part of what it means for a God to be wholly or maximally unique is that it precedes intelligible structure so that it does not even “become” countable, or indeed “sole” or “plural,” until a moment logically posterior to or distinct from itself as it is in itself. In other words, the class of ‘Gods’ is something that comes after each God, and so they are each individuated prior to it. It is thus impossible and maybe even incoherent, as Syrianus hit on, to give an upper-bound number to the amount of Gods as they are in themselves since there is nothing there that is ‘countable’ until a logically posterior moment. Incidentally, this also addresses the Occam strategy of monotheists: the razor is only relevant when we are counting. But what polytheism says most directly and immediately is not that there is a plurality of Gods, but that each God is real. The plurality is logically downstream.

When I interact with Dumsday’s third point next week, I will dig into whether we can count equivocal things–a newer tool in my bag to articulate this.

II. Differentiating henads from bare particulars

Dumsday says that “while Dillon has insisted that the gods’ individual identities are not contentless blank slates (akin to the bare particulars of contemporary substratum theory), I do not see the justification for this insistence. They are denied any nature or properties, and it has also been said that their identities must precede any relations they stand in.” ³

I appreciate the point that Dumsday is making here, and I perhaps spoke too loosely about identities in terms of being blank or, by extension, filled. Indeed, what even is it for an identity to “have” content? What does that mean? Moreover, since I have insisted that these identities are logically prior to any intelligible predicates, am I not just saying that there is a bareness to each particular God?

Granted, I argued in Polytheism: A Platonic Approach that each God belongs to all the other Gods as non-complexifying predicates, and that, while there is no divine “nature” as such, of which each God is an instance, nevertheless each God functions like a nature or Form of which all things are constituted. But with all that said, I believe he is picking up on the claim that each God is utterly unique and entirely herself and asking if this is just a sort of emptiness. In fact, given that each God is like a center for which everything else is a periphery, are not Gods like substrata? Bare on the one hand, substrata on the other?

But I think it is rather quite the opposite. We do not arrive at the notion of ‘Gods’ by a sort of continuous subtraction or abstraction until we reach the most encompassing, albeit empty, container of everything else (a Tupperware theology!). Neither is it that Gods are like philosophical atoms, glimpsed by way of elimination or diminution. Instead, the more positive individuality one has, the less things there will be that figure into her composition that are generic. The most positively individual one, then, is the one who will have nothing generic figuring into her composition: her maximal, unsurpassable uniqueness will have unrestricted distribution, and individuate whatever is within her–an act I call ‘genitive finality’ which I think everything does qua participations of the One.

The polycentric doctrine of Divine Simplicity thus differs starkly from the scholastic doctrine of the same. A God’s simplicity is a function of her uniqueness, which protects her, not from having things, but from having anything that she does not individuate. All that is within a God is that God.

Interestingly, Porphyry had apparently wondered what differentiates Gods from each other, and from other ‘higher kinds’. In his response (De Mysteriis 1.8), Iamblichus argues that properties, accidents, potentialities, motions, and all the like are logically posterior to or downstream from the Gods. Far from these things individuating Gods, in other words, Gods individuate them. Indeed, he says “For neither is it the case that the gods are confined to certain parts of the cosmos, nor is the earthly realm devoid of them. On the contrary, it is true of the superior beings in it that, even as they are not contained by anything, so they contain everything within themselves…” ⁴

I say all of this because a God’s identity does not seem empty to me, or, bare, or bereft, on account of not participating in anything. On the contrary, it seems incomparably full and rich; inexhaustible, in fact, since all things are able to partake of it. So, I would wish to clarify that it does not have properties, a nature, or anything of the sort in the sense that these things do not precede it and impart intelligibility to it. But that does not prevent Gods from having minds, souls, bodies, and whatever else, at least in the way that the first principle has everything that it gives.

Perhaps this will not be satisfying. Dumsday might see all of this as an extended way of saying the same thing: that the Gods’ particularity is bare of any intelligibility. But, I think my ultimate point here is that transcendence of intelligibility is not the same as bareness of identity, or unity. Insofar as all intelligibility is a participation of a God’s ineffable character, it seems that the one must be an expression of the other. Ineffable character, then, is not nothingness on account of transcending intelligibility, but rather the perfection, or fullness of its imperfect, limited expression that is intelligibility.

Stay tuned for next week’s piece!

1. On p. 37, for example, Dumsday considers various strategies I offered in my 2015 The Case for Polytheism (pp. 30-31) to challenge the assertion that Monotheism is simpler, or more parsimonious than Polytheism. i.e. whatever simplicity Monotheism gains in positing fewer entities might be lost or counter-balanced in the complexity of the entity it posits.
   
   On p. 43, Dumsday cites my 2016 An Ontological Argument for Polytheism (pp. 49-50) where I challenge one of Aquinas’ objections to Polytheism on the grounds that it concerns a straw man and begs the question. i.e. To assume that Gods must be differentiated by ‘properties’ is to assume they are not divinely simple, and so not Gods, after all. ↩︎
2. Iamblichus, On the Mysteries. Translated with introduction and notes. Emma C. Clarke, John Dillon and Jackson P. Hershbell. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003,13. ↩︎
3. Dumsday, Travis. Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual Polytheism, Animism, and More in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 50. ↩︎
4. Iamblichus, ibid. 37. ↩︎