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God Over All
The classical theist is seen to have a number of realist and anti-realist options open to him in meeting the challenge of indispensability arguments for Platonism. The most plausible response will involve challenging, with free logicians, neo-Meinongians, and neutralists, the customary criterion of ontological commitment which lies at the heart of indispensability arguments. Beyond that the theist’s options are wide open for filling out his account with insights appropriated from a diversity of perspectives.
When I commenced my study of divine aseity over a dozen years ago, I anticipated that I would be defending the historic Christian position with respect to abstract objects, namely, divine conceptualism. Platonism was ruled out theologically, and I was keenly aware of the bootstrapping problem that attended absolute creationism. I was not, however, aware of the difficulties confronting divine conceptualism. More than that, I had little acquaintance with the wide range of anti-realist alternatives that are available to the theist. It now seems to me that both absolute creationism and divine conceptualism concede far too much to the realist.
My study of the New Testament materials and of the Church Fathers, not to mention considerations of philosophical theology, have cemented my conviction that God is to be conceived as the sole ultimate reality, the Creator of all things apart from Himself. While I now think that the absolute creationist can escape the bootstrapping objection, he can do so only by abandoning the Platonistic ontological assay of things and holding that logically prior to His creation of abstracta God can be as He is without exemplifying properties or propositions’ being true. But then the nerve of realism has been cut, for if God can be, for example, omnipotent without exemplifying the property
of omnipotence, we may as well forgo the postulation of properties at all. In any case, even if the bootstrapping problem can be solved, absolute creationism is still saddled with the existence of necessary and eternal objects other than God, which, as I have explained, attenuates either God’s freedom or the scope of creation. There is no good reason to take on board these problems in formulating one’s doctrine of divine aseity.
While divine conceptualism remains for me a fallback position, its difficulties—in particular, the ill-suitedness of divine thoughts to (p.207) play the roles attributed to various abstract objects—make it a much less attractive option than it at first appeared to be. It is noteworthy, moreover, that Church Fathers who apparently espoused conceptualism did not always attribute a substantial existence to the divine thoughts standing in for abstract objects. Many of them, I suspect, were actually closer to anti-realism than to a sort of divine psychologism.
The overriding point, however, is that there is just no compelling reason to be a realist. The Indispensability Argument, which is the centrepiece of contemporary Platonism, is, in my studied opinion, a hopeless argument. Both its premisses are plausibly false. But for the purposes of our study, so bold an opinion need not be defended. In order to defeat the Indispensability Argument, one need not rebut either of its premisses, but simply undercut the warrant for one of its premisses. Given how controversial the debate over contemporary Platonism is, no view can plausibly commend itself philosophically to the exclusion of all others. (Recall that even our reason for rejecting Platonism is not philosophical but theological.) As I have tried to show, there is a plethora of philosophically defensible anti-realist alternatives to Platonism on offer today. In order to undercut the Indispensability Argument, the theist need not defend any one of these views, but can recognize the viability of a plurality of viewpoints.
For my part, I find a combinatorial approach to abstract objects to be most plausible. To begin with, I think that neutralists are right that first-order logical quantification and use of singular terms are not ontologically committing. The first-order quantifiers simply facilitate logical inferences and should not be taken as devices of ontological commitment. A deflationary theory of reference affords us the option of construing reference, not as a word–world relation, but as an intentional activity of persons. As such, given the pervasiveness of terms used to refer to socially constructed realities, most of the things we successfully refer to do not exist. A deflationary theory of truth,
according to which the truth predicate is simply a device of semantic ascent, naturally and plausibly accompanies a deflationary theory of reference.
Of course, often we will find it convenient to speak of things like properties, propositions, numbers, and possible worlds. Such talk may be viewed as proceeding within an adopted linguistic framework in which we speak without making metaphysically heavyweight commitments. We can view the expressions of such a language
as (p.208) figurative or involving pretence. As I have argued, set theory seems to me a very plausible example of make-believe, whose affirmations carry no metaphysical weight. Ordinary English seems to be just such a metaphysically lightweight language.
Now on occasion we shall be forced to assume a perspective external to the linguistic framework in order to make our metaphysical commitments (or lack thereof!) clear. We shall want to say, for example, ‘There are no uncreated abstract objects.’ In this case, we are using the first-order quantifier in a metaphysically heavyweight sense. We are then speaking Ontologese, not the lightweight language of the framework. We can make this clear by rhetorical devices or modifying phrases such as ‘There really are no uncreated abstract objects’, or ‘There are no uncreated abstract objects in a metaphysically heavyweight sense of “there are”’.
Ontologese is the language spoken by the fictionalist when he says that abstract object statements are untrue. But given a deflationary theory of reference, we need not go so far as the fictionalist in treating singular terms as devices of ontological commitment, even in Ontologese. Rather, with the positive free logician and with Quine himself, we may take only the logical quantifiers of Ontologese to be ontologically committing. We can still affirm the truth of predications involving singular terms for things like numbers and properties, for example, ‘2 + 2 = 4’ and
‘Wisdom is exemplified by Socrates’, without implying ‘There is something which is identical to 4’ or ‘There is something which is exemplified by Socrates’, since in free logic the rules of Existential Generalization and Universal Instantiation apply only to things of which metaphysically heavyweight existence has been truly predicated, and we have not agreed or asserted that 2 + 2 exists or that Wisdom exists. Thus, one need not with the fictionalist deny the truth of such predications.
Such a combinatorial approach makes good sense of the many insights of the diversity of anti-realisms. Almost all of them offer valuable insights, and we may glean from them the best of the lot.
I conclude that the challenge posed by Platonism to the doctrine of divine aseity can be met successfully. The doctrine that God is the sole ultimate reality is eminently reasonable. We may affirm without hesitation or mental reservation Paul’s doxology: ‘God who is over all be blessed for ever. Amen’ (Rom. 9: 5).