we want. An integrated personality would be one in which desires and self-knowledge are
in harmony. Theists presume that such integration is enjoyed by God. The more radical
step is not merely to assume that whatever God understands, God wills, and vice versa,
but to claim that in God, self-understanding and will are not two distinguishable modules
or faculties. God's “will” is perfectly rational and God's “understanding” is perfectly
voluntary; better yet, God is perfectly rational and voluntary, a being whose
unimaginably rich mental life is lived in complete, unfragmented transparency. Theists
will no doubt continue to describe God's activity in terms of belief-desire psychology, but
that vocabulary is based on, and better suited for describing, compartmentalized human
minds.
I cannot explore the issues more fully here, but what we have just encountered is one
aspect of a doctrine about God's simplicity. The core of the doctrine is the principle that
inasmuch as complexity is a source of fragility and dependence, a perfect being must be
perfectly noncomplex (see Aquinas 1948, 1: 14–20). The aspect of divine simplicity
deployed above denies modularity to God's mind. We will never know exactly what
Xenophanes meant, but this denial may be what he was struggling to express when he
said of God that “he sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, and he hears as a whole.”
We deferred discussion of reason and memory. To put it in a way calculated to shock, the
campaign against divine modularity denies that God has reason. Here is why. Distinguish
reason from understanding, reserving the latter term for the capacity to simply grasp or
“see” some truth without inferring it from other truths. You and I understand that 2 + 2 =
4; perhaps you but certainly not I understand that 789 + 987 = 1776. In contrast, reason is
a discursive practice, passing from premises to conclusion by the canons of either
deductive logic, inductive logic, or decision theory.
Because God's intuitive understanding of all things is maximal, God has no need of
reason. (Of course, God's understanding of the principles of discursive reasoning is also
perfect. One need not be a soccer player to know the rules of the game.)
That leaves memory. I propose to defer discussion of it a bit longer.
Simplicity and Accidental Properties
The persistent critic's second claim is that the contents of God's mind include every
contingent fact, knowledge of which God must have in order to qualify as omniscient.
Knowing that it rained last night, for example, is one of tremendously many accidental
properties that God has. The persistent critic's claim is that God's mind is both complex in
virtue of hosting an (infinite?) number of accidental properties and dependent on the
world as source of those properties.
We have already caught a glimpse of how one might respond to the dependency claim if
one espouses a doctrine of divine simplicity. Knowledge of the world is part of God's
self-awareness, and God's self-awareness and will are not two separate things. The critic's
dependency claim appears to rest on the assumption that as things are for us, so they are
for God. We are consumers of knowledge about the world, standing as recipients on
many causal chains, beginning with situations in the world and ending with states of our
minds. God, in contrast, is a producer of knowledge. The ordinary causal flow from thing