Properties

I mentioned in the previous post that one need not think of properties as existing apart from their instantiations. In this post, I want to elaborate on that idea, and try to show how God's existence can collapse the distinction between platonism and nominalism about properties in some cases, and thereby defend a Christian form of nominalism.

Platonism about properties says that properties exist independent of and prior to their instantiations. Generally, platonism also holds that these properties are eternal and unchanging entities. Christian Platonism holds that they are ideas in the mind of God.

Nominalism about properties says that there is nothing to properties above and beyond their instantiations. There are just various things which exist in certain manners. We abstract properties from these various things in virtue of similarities we find in them.

Now, if one starts with the nominalist picture of properties and posits that God always exists, then the ways in which God and creation are similar will be eternally existing properties. Further, if properties which exclude one another also entail the concepts of each other--so that any degree of power brings along all other degrees, and so on--then a larger set of properties are given as properties with God's existence as what God is not.

Some properties are left out of the collapse. That is, sense properties are left out. Ethical and modal properties are included, as concepts of number ("being one," "being three"). Concepts such as "side" or "blue" are not included.

By adopting a nominalist account of properties, we can adopt divine simplicity without claiming that God is identical with each of his properties. We can, nevertheless, maintain that there are properties which form a kind of blueprint for reality. Given that God created the world, and particularly human beings, in order to reveal his character, the properties which apply to God will also be applicable, in some way, to creation insofar as creation succeeds in revealing God. Thus, God is the standard of goodness and is the being whose expression of certain properties shows what the perfection of those properties consists in.