Substance metaphysics

William Alston challenges Trinitarian critics of substance metaphysics, arguing that they have misrepresented classical notions of substance: “there is absolutely no justification for saddling substance metaphysics as such with these commitments to timelessness, immutability, pure actuality with no potentiality, and being unaffected by relations to other beings. To see this, we only have to recall that the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance was developed for application to finite created substances, particularly living organisms. And these are far from ‘invisible, unchangeable, eternal,’ pure actuality with no trace of potentiality, and absolutely simple . . . . Aristotle takes one of the basic features of substance to be that they retain their identity through change .”

Again, challenging John Macquarrie’s use of a “rock” as the paradigm of substance: “For Aristotle and the medieval Aristotelians, the paradigm was a living organism. Living organisms, though they may be ‘solid’ are by no means inert or static, as any dog owner can testify. And when Macquarrie suggests replacing substance with temporality as his key notion, he, like Moltmann, is guilty of posing a false dichotomy. Aristotle’s individual substances, most basically organisms, are very much involved in temporality, in the contrast of past, present, and future. Hence, if we are to use Aristotelian substance as our basic model for conceptualizing God, we can think of God as being as temporal as you like.”