You are correct; not all ideas have the potential to actually exist.
There exists ideas that have the potential for material, spatial and temporal being. (circles, triangles)
There exists ideas that do not have the potential for material, spatial and temporal being. (round-triangles)
Not all that can be said can be done.
Non-sense exists as ideas that cannot be.
I think I see what you're saying here. You're right, of course, that impossible objects like round triangles can't exist, but I'm not so sure that they would qualify as discrete
ideas.
I would say that what we do when we conceptualize and talk about such impossible "objects" is we conceptualize separate and mutually incompossible properties and then loosely and superficially "combine" them into what we call "impossible objects," but they're not really
discrete objects or ideas at all, since they fail both to cohere as such in abstraction
and to be concretely realizable as genuine universals. They don't
really have any sort of intrinsic being (i.e. existence in and of themselves) at all--even as ideas--basically.
God is simple actuality. He has no potentiality. He has no potential to change including no potential to not be.
I agree with you that God is metaphysically
simple. I think he would have to be simple in order to preserve the divine
aseity, since if he were complex, he would have to be ontologically posterior to (and thus dependent upon) his parts.
Divine simplicity entails that God's existence would have to be in some sense intrinsic to his essence, which would mean that he necessarily exists. It also entails that he would be immutable.
We are a complex of actuality and potentiality. You actually exist; you have being. But, you also have potentiality. You have the potential to change including the potential to not be.
Well, our human nature might or might not be concretely realized in the particular individuals you or I. I might also quibble over your precise meanings of "actuality" and "potentiality." I'm not
entirely convinced that the standard Thomist understanding of those terms (I presume you're taking your cue from St. Thomas; forgive me if I'm mistaken) is correct, but I still need to give that subject a good bit more thought.
But what I believe to be your basic point is correct, I think: We, ourselves, as individual human beings might or might not exist. That is, there is nothing intrinsic to
what we are that would entail
that we (individually) exist.
The idea of you is conceived in the mind of God eternally, known by God necessarily, "before the foundation of the world" the idea of you existed. However, you came to be when you were physically conceived in the womb of you mother. Only then could you be perceived by the rest of us.
Yep, I think this is about right!
