Thursday, February 16, 2006

Q3 A6: Whether in God there are any accidents?

No. God can have no incidental characteristics (a.k.a. "accidents") because of His essential simplicity.

Accidents play a role in actualizing the potentiality of an underlying subject. But God is Pure Act with no admixture of potentiality.

Because God is His own existence, He does not need anything added incidentally to His essence.

In things, essential characteristics are caused by constituent principles. But God is First Cause, meaning there is nothing caused in Him. So He does not have essential characteristics the way that things do. He simply is.