Jacob Pressures
As I stated elsewhere insisting on doing math with the trinity is a category error and so is likely to get you the wrong results – this is not sour grapes dissonance, it’s a fact. (Avoiding dissonance is not always avoidance, for reason and coherence can do it as well.)
However your own mathematical construction is wrong anyway.
i.e.
A, God is made up of 3 divine persons (autonomous entities).
B. God is made up of 3 gods.
Statement B is clearly false for 1 x God does not equal 3 x God. If you are imagining 3 Gods of a Trinitarian nature then you would have 9 divine persons.
To be of one substance with another, is to be made of the same kind of stuff, but not necessarily the exact same instances of that stuff. It’s like chopping a blob of tapioca into 3 blobs which all retain the essential qualities of blobs of tapioca pudding, and yet then finding that all three blobs continue to work to one purpose as if they were still one blob. Of course if you then put the blobs all back together again you would find you still only had one blob of tapioca pudding. i.e. 1 + 1 + 1 would equal 1, if we are counting in the base of blobs.
To my mind the trinity is clearly distinguished by economy or role in the single overall creative purpose, each divine person taking on a different role (our divine blobs are now dressing up with roles) which can be shown to be essential to the act of creation if freewill and relationship is to be involved.
I am less clear on the ontology outside of creation for we can know little of this anyway. When the idea of trinity is extended to us it is always wrapped in creation, we cannot encounter it any other way because even our language is wrapped up in creation. The three divine persons of the trinity come with their creative roles attached to their names.
Craig argues that love being a necessary part of the divine character must imply relationship within it. (at least 2 divine persons in the Godhead beyond creation) But you could just as easily state that such love must of necessity wish (even though it does not need) to multiply its opportunities for such interactions with others and therefore create the entirely other to enable such. But to do so (in our world) needs 3 divine persons, one to support the entirely other through incarnation, one to enable the language of spiritual communication with that other, and of course the original to whom the communication or love is then made. To this end I think the economic aspect is our best handle on the trinity, allied to the fact that tapioca blobs (in place of spiritual blobs) can be coherently be shown to defy base ten maths,( if you assume base blob) and then there is no hint of dissonance or sour grapes involved. But as CS Lewis pointed out remember that the tapioca blob is a substitution for a spirit person. The incarnation in Christ is in the end a better visualisation than just a blob.
