Sometimes, thinkers articulate monotheism in such a way that it is not primarily about denying the existence of anything. Other thinkers will suggest instead that whether monotheism is about what exists, or has some salient feature, it is not about counting anything. What they both seem to have in common is a view that there is something positively distinctive or unique about one that monotheism recognizes.

Consider two more recent expressions of this:

“The widely attested position of Second Temple monotheistic belief is thus grounded upon the expression of God’s utter uniqueness–His ‘species uniqueness’ and ‘transcendent uniqueness’–rather than a negation or denial of the existence of other divine beings, as noted by Heiser (2012, 6).” ¹

“If we weave the threads together in offering a responsible statement about God’s singularity, we may say that God is without quantity and yet at the same time suitably called one and singular as long as his unity is acknowledged as transcendental and absolute, never anticipating an enumeration of deity or deities.” ²

Of course, relative to one’s causal series or products, there is an incontestable status of ‘principle’. Here, one is positionally privileged, normative, exemplary, base, or whatever.

But what does x’s coordinate from the perspective of its global causal order have to do with its coordinate apart from that order? Indeed, where it has no such coordinate in the abstract, just what does x have to do with y–where y is one in total autonomy from x?

The presupposition, of course, is that x’s order is exceptionless, and unrestricted, such that there is no such y, and nothing but x is irreducible to its order.

Now, my historical response to this has been that it confusedly depicts y being collated with x and its order within some larger domain, when in truth, of x and y, each would principally precede all domains.

I would like to introduce a new problem which has occurred to me the deeper I have thought through classical theism. According to divine simplicity, if something is divine, then it is the same as its attributes and acts. This needn’t mean these are synonyms, as they can differ in sense, but they must refer to the one and the same thing.

But if what is divine just is its attributes and causal acts, then none of these have an unindexed descriptive content.

Classical theists are accustomed to pointing out that God is not ‘an’ anything–like ‘a’ being among others–such that no indefinite article can precede his attributes or acts. But, it is likewise true that there is a respect in which no definite article can precede what is divine. In the state of absolute precedence, what is divine is wholly non-articular.

The problem this poses for classical theism, and monotheism, is devastating and catastrophic. It is not the case that we reason from effects to some definite, demonstrative cause whose singular-ness, individual-ness, or centricity is implicit: there is no unindexed, purely descriptive ‘the’ cause of all contingent reality, or design, or whatever. There is only this one’s causation, because it just is its causation.

The classical theist will undoubtedly respond that this is correct: it is the act of the First Cause, or Principal Act of Being, etc. But this is to not have grasped the systematic reach of the point. Even these are indexed.

In his wonderful introduction to Edward Butler’s recent Polytheistic Platonism, Antonio Vargas points out that for Butler, “the content of reality is disclosed on the side of divine individuals, while philosophy provides abstract forms or schemata through which that content can be articulated… Concepts by themselves are empty; they require the disclosure of divine individuals to have determinate content.” ³ I am seeing this distinction at play here, where it is being supposed that there can be unindexically determined descriptions of the divine.

1. Sijuwade, Joshua. “The Nature of Monotheism: A Philosophical Explication”. Forum Philosophicum 30, no. 2 (December 29, 2025), 92. Accessed May 25, 2026. https://czasopisma.ignatianum.edu.pl/fp/article/view/2025.3002.05. ↩︎
2. Duby, Steven J. Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, vol. 30 (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 101. ↩︎
3. Antonio Vargas, in Edward Butler’s Polytheistic Platonism: Collected Essays, (Lydney: Prometheus Trust, 2026), 6. ↩︎