Preface
Preface
This book is an expansion of my 2015 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, England, which themselves were a distillation of a much longer study on God and abstract objects. I am grateful to Professors Yujin Nagasawa and David Cheetham and to the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion for the invitation to deliver these lectures.
The invitation came just as I was wrapping up a research project on divine aseity and the challenge to it posed by contemporary Platonism that had preoccupied me for the previous dozen years or so. This happy coincidence gave me the opportunity to state my arguments succinctly and in a semi-popular form, so as to make the lectures profitable for non-specialists.
Philosophers of religion and theologians, to whom this book is primarily directed, may be unfamiliar with the debates central to our topic which are raging in the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and logic. To aid understanding, I have compiled a Glossary of specialist terminology offering elementary definitions or explanations of key terms. I have also included a Figure 1 as part of the front matter of the book, to which I shall have occasion to recur, in order to provide at a glance a visual taxonomy of the various alternative views discussed in this book.
Having laboured for over a dozen years to understand how best to respond to Platonism’s challenge to divine aseity, I have, as one might expect, been greatly helped by the interaction of many colleagues in a wide range of fields on various questions. I wish to thank in particular for their stimulus and input: Robert Adams, Jody Azzouni, Mark Balaguer, J. T. Bridges, Jeffery Brower, Charles Chihara, Paul Copan, Thomas Crisp, Trent Dougherty, Mark Edwards, Thomas Flint, Paul Gould, Dorothy Grover, Geoffrey Hellman, Paul Horwich, Ross Inman, Peter van Inwagen, Dennis Jowers, Brian Leftow, Mary Leng, Christopher Menzel, J. P. Moreland, Thomas Morris, Kenneth Perszyck, Michael Rea, Maria Reicher-Marek, Theodore Sider, Peter Simons, Alvin Plantinga, Joshua Rasmussen, Elliott Sober, Robert Thomas, Achille Varzi, Greg Welty, Edward Wierenga, Dallas Willard, Stephen Yablo, Takashi Yagisawa, and Dean Zimmerman. I am also (p.viii) grateful for the comments of three anonymous referees of Oxford University Press. My research assistant Timothy Bayless deserves grateful mention for his procuring research materials, hunting down references, compiling the bibliography, and carrying out other related tasks for me. Thanks, too, to Kevin Whitehead for his proofreading the penultimate draft of the typescript! Finally, as always, I am grateful to my wife Jan, not only for her help with early portions of the typescript, but even more for her encouragement and interaction (‘Honey, what do you think? Does the number 2 exist?’).
As mentioned, my lectures were a condensation of a much longer, scholarly work on God and Abstract Objects to appear with Springer Verlag. Readers desiring a more extensive, in-depth discussion of the questions and views treated here may consult that work.