Well, that's why I specified 'definitionally' singular, as it were, rather than just accidentally singular.Creyeditor wrote: ↑14 Feb 2024 22:19 Not trying to go full philosophical here, but couldn't you say that a singular entity contrast with other potential but non-existent entities if the same kind? I was thinking of stuff like "There is only one god and his name is X", which implies that any claim that something with name Y is also a god is false.
If we're talking about monotheism, not only is there only one God, but there is only one potential God - if anything else were God, it would be God, so it wouldn't be something that weren't God. You can ask "could God have different characteristics?", but you can't really ask "could a different thing be God?", because only divine beings can be God and there's only one divine being.
It's not like asking "I know there's only one President, but could someone else be President?" because we can imagine, for instance, Joe Biden NOT being President. Biden is one among many interchangeable beings, and the Presidency is an accidental, contingent property that this being sometimes possesses, but which we could easily imagine instead being possessed by one of the other Biden-like beings (or, as we normally call "Biden-like beings", people). But God is not one among many, and being God is not an accidental property of God. It's the definition of God. Put another way, Biden is one of many people who possess the essential characteristics that allow them to be President (being human, being over 35, being alive, being American, etc). And the characteristics of the President (being commander-in-chief, for instance) are merely some of the potential characteristics Biden (or Biden-like beings) can have. But there is only one being that has the essential characteristics (like perfection and omniscience and, importantly, singularity!) that allows them to be God. And the characteristcs of God (like perfection, omniscience and singularity) are not merely potential characterics God could have, but esssential and inalienable characteristics.
It's not like there are two God-like beings but only one of them is actually God but in a different timeline maybe the other one is God instead. All God-like beings are God, and there's only one of them. Anything that isn't God isn't God-like, and hence could never have been God.
There's a maxim in logic, "existence is not a predicate" - there aren't an infinite number of things some of which happen to have the property of existence and some don't. If you treat "exists" as a predicate equivalent to other predicates like "is yellow" or "likes cheese", you end up in a lot of logical paradoxes and some pretty weird metaphysics*. Similarly, to a monotheist, Godhood is not a predicate - it's not some accidental property that a being may have or not have. God is necessarily God and everything else necessarily isn't. I'm reminded similarly of Wittgenstein's observation about the meaninglessness of "is identical to": if you say a thing is identical to itself, you are never adding any new information, it's just a tautology or a definition of identity, but if you say a thing is identical to anything that isn't itself you are always saying something false. Likewise, "X is God" is true by definition if X is God, but false by definition if X is anything that isn't God. [whereas "Biden is President" conveys meaningful information, and "Trump is President" is currently false but only contingently, not by definition].