Metaphysics and God

Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump

Kevin Timpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415963657
• eBook ISBN: 9781135893071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

This volume focuses on contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion through an engagement with Eleonore Stump's seminal work in the field. Topics covered include: the metaphysics of the divine nature (e.g., divine simplicity and eternity); the nature of love and God's relation to human happiness; and the issue of human agency (e.g., the nature of the human soul and hell).

Part I
Preacipue de Deo

1
God and Other Uncreated Things

Peter van Inwagen

Is there anything (other than himself) that God has not created? In some sense, obviously, every Christian philosopher—every Christian—must answer No, for the Nicene Creed says that God has created all the visibilia and all the invisibilia.¹ But must a Christian take this creedal statement to mean that God has created everything, everything tout court, everything simpliciter, everything full stop, everything period? Or is it permissible for the Christian to regard the range of the quantifier ‘everything’ in the sentence ‘God has created everything’ as restricted to a certain class of objects—which is certainly a feature of many “everyday” sentences in which that quantifier occurs, sentences like ‘I’ve tried everything, and I still can’t persuade Winifred to apologize to Harold’? (“Really? Have you tried pelting her with bananas? Have you tried taking her on a holiday tour of the Pleiades?”)

It is by no means prima facie absurd to suppose that this might be so. The well-known dispute about whether God can do everything may serve as an analogy. Jesus says, “With God all things are possible.”² Could Descartes have used this logion as a proof text?—to provide biblical, and indeed Dominical, warrant for his thesis that God can create two mountains that touch at their bases and, nevertheless, surround no valley?³ Descartes might have thought so (as far as I know, he never mentions the Bible in connection with his views on the creation of the eternal truths), but Aquinas would deny it. I don’t know whether Thomas ever discusses Matt. 19:26,⁴ but here’s what I (who have a view of God’s power that is much closer to his than to Descartes’s) would say about that verse: The range of ‘all things’ is tacitly restricted to “things” that could possibly be of practical interest to human beings, and of interest particularly in the matter of their salvation; mountains that are removed and cast into the sea perhaps fall within this category, but mountains that are adjacent but have no valley between them certainly do not. (I mean this to be a point about that particular verse; I don’t mean to suggest that the scope of God’s power is limited to matters that pertain to practical human interests. I mean that those things are the things that were Jesus’ topic when he spoke those words, and that nothing that does not pertain to that topic can be a counterexample to the thesis that those words expressed in the context in which they were spoken.)

This example, the example provided by the biblical statement ‘With God all things are possible’, shows that it is at least not beyond dispute that in the creedal statement ‘God is the creator of all things’, ‘all things’ must be understood as an unrestricted quantifier. But if there are things that are, so to speak, not covered by the phrase ‘creator of all things’, what things might they be?

One obvious answer to this question is not really germane to my concerns in this paper, but I will deal with it for the sake of completeness.

There are nouns (‘suffering’, ‘sin’, and ‘death’) that in some sense have referents but which are such that Christians would say that God had not made those referents. (For everything that proceeds from God’s creative power is, as we learn from Genesis 1, good—intrinsically good. And suffering, sin, and death are certainly not intrinsically good things.) St Augustine solved the problem raised by such nouns by saying that their referents are not real things, not substances, but mere defects in substances. To bring about a defect in a substance is not, properly speaking, to create, and the “existence” of defects may therefore be ascribed to the acts of creatures. If Moses’ first attempt at smashing the Tables of the Law resulted only in a crack in one of them, Moses did not thereby add something, a crack, to God’s creation.

This is certainly at least a plausible way of dealing with the problem. I myself would advocate a more radical form of Augustine’s thesis. I would say that phrases that purport to denote defects in things—‘the suffering of the innocent’, ‘the crack in the Liberty Bell’—do not really denote anything, not even some such ontologically substandard or second-tier item as a “defect.” To say this is to say that nothing that is to be met with in the world is a defect; it implies nothing about whether the things that are to be met with in the world are defective. In particular, it does not imply that the innocent do not suffer or that the Liberty Bell is not cracked. (My position on the ontology of suffering is therefore not to be confused with Mrs. Eddy’s. In her view, someone who thinks he is seeing people suffer is in every case like someone who is looking at a sound bell and thinks he is seeing a cracked bell because of an optical illusion, and not like someone who is looking at a cracked bell and affirms the metaphysical thesis that no part or component or constituent of the bell is a crack. I have to make this point very carefully, since one meaning of the sentence ‘Suffering does not exist’ is ‘No one suffers’, and this is indeed the only meaning this sentence could have outside metaphysics. So please don’t tell anyone that I believe that suffering does not exist. Telling them that would be like telling them that I have never stopped beating my wife: what you tell them would be true but a slander nonetheless. Falsity isn’t the only thing one can object to in a statement.) I think that my more radical version of the Augustinian ontology of sin and death and suffering is preferable to Augustine’s own ontology of these things (or non-things) because his ontology faces an objection that mine does not face. The objection is this: “All right, sin and death and suffering aren’t substances but only defects in substances. Still, they’re there. If there are defects, they’re among the items to be found in the world. So either God has made them or there’s something to be found in the world that God has not made.” But if a philosopher’s position implies, as my position does, that the nouns ‘sin’ and ‘death’ and ‘suffering’ have no referents, then this objection does not apply to it.

If defects or deficiencies or absences are not the putative counterexamples to the thesis that God has made everything that I propose to discuss, what putative counterexamples to this thesis do I propose to discuss? You have probably guessed. I mean to discuss what Quine has called “abstract objects”—properties or attributes, numbers, propositions, fill out the list as you will. I will not attempt to give a definition of ‘abstract object’. I have had something to say about how this phrase should be defined in an essay called “A Theory of Properties,” and I refer anyone who is interested in what I have to say about that problem to that essay. In the present essay, I will assume simply that we all have a grasp of the concept of an abstract object that will suffice for a consideration of the theological questions that abstract objects raise.

Why are abstract objects “putative counterexamples” to the thesis that God has created everything? Why would anyone suppose that, granting for the moment that there are abstract objects, God has not created them—or at any rate, has not created some of them.

One relevant consideration is this: many philosophers believe that at least some abstract objects exist necessarily. Pure sets, for example, purely general propositions, purely qualitative attributes, and numbers.⁵ Suppose this common belief is true. Suppose that at least some abstract objects exist necessarily. Does its truth entail that God has not created such abstract objects as exist of necessity? To ask this, I suppose, is to ask whether God can create something that exists necessarily. Or put the question this way: Does ‘x exists necessarily’ entail ‘x is uncreated’? Anyone who said that this entailment held would be contradicted by Richard Swinburne, if by no one else. For Swinburne holds that the Son and the Holy Spirit are necessarily existent beings who were created (not, of course, at some point in time) by the Father. Revealed theology aside, one might point out, simply as a matter of abstract logic, that if A exists necessarily, and if it is a necessary truth that if A exists, then A creates B, it follows that B exists necessarily.⁶ I am myself inclined to think that ‘x exists necessarily’ does entail ‘x is uncreated’, but I will not use this thesis as a premise because it is controversial and I know of no very interesting argument for it.

There is a second line of reasoning that might be used to defend the proposition that abstract objects (if such there be) are uncreated. It is this. Creation is, in the broadest sense of the word, a causal relation, and abstract objects cannot enter into causal relations. Therefore, abstract objects are uncreated. The second premise of the argument, at least, has been disputed, but I want to point to another sort of problem the argument faces. According to some metaphysicians, there are contingently existent abstract objects, and at least some of them are contingently existent precisely because they depend for their existence on contingently existent concrete (nonabstract) objects. Consider, for example, the proposition that Alvin Plantinga is an able philosopher. (Suppose for the moment that there are propositions—and that there is such a proposition as that one.) Some theorists of the abstract say that Plantinga is in some sense a component or constituent of this proposition (along with the attribute “being an able philosopher,” and perhaps even some other items, such as a “predicative tie” whose business it is to unite the man and the attribute into the whole that is the proposition). And they maintain that Plantinga is an essential constituent of this proposition, a thesis that obviously entails that the proposition cannot exist if Plantinga doesn’t. And they seem to believe (though they may not say this explicitly) that if Plantinga does exist, the proposition exists. (I suppose the argument would be that the predicated attribute—and the “tie,” if that’s involved—are necessarily existent, and that it’s a necessary truth that a proposition exists if all its constituents exist.) But God created Plantinga. And, of course, before he created Plantinga, he knew that when he created Plantinga that act of c...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Preacipue de Deo
• Part II Preacipue de Hominibus
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index