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Absolute Creation

The view that God has created abstract objects is considered, with special attention to the modified Platonism of Christopher Menzel and Thomas Morris and the Aristotelianism of Hugh McCann. Two objections to absolute creationism are discussed in detail: the limits placed upon the doctrine of creation in its scope or nature and the bootstrapping objection. With respect to the first objection, since many abstract objects, if they exist at all, exist necessarily and eternally, the Christian doctrine of creation will need to be either restricted to the creation of the concrete realm, in which case its scope is minuscule, or else, if it is expanded to include abstract objects, God’s freedom with respect to creation is denied. With respect to the second objection, absolute creationism seems to involve a vicious circularity, since in order to create e.g. properties, God must already possess properties. One can escape the bootstrapping objection only at the expense of rejecting the typical Platonist ontological assay of things. While Peter van Inwagen’s favoured non-constituent, Platonist ontology enables the Platonist to elude the bootstrapping problem, these two objections are sufficiently serious to motivate theists to look elsewhere for a solution to the challenge to divine aseity.

Keywords: absolute creation, Morris and Menzel, bootstrapping objection, divine simplicity, constituent and relational ontologies

Introduction

Whatever one’s reason for adopting Platonism, the most obvious response to the challenge it poses to divine aseity is to advocate a sort of modified Platonism, according to which mathematical objects and other abstract entities are not uncreated, but rather are created by God. Such a view has been called ‘absolute creation’ by Thomas Morris and Christopher Menzel, whose seminal article ‘Absolute Creation’ in 1986 sparked the contemporary debate among

Christian philosophers over God and abstract objects.1

Actually, there are two contemporary debates going on concerning God and abstract objects, one over the challenge of Platonism to divine aseity, stemming from Morris and Menzel’s article, and the other over the challenge of Platonism to divine sovereignty, sparked by Alvin Plantinga’s 1980 Aquinas Lecture ‘Does God Have a Nature?’ at Marquette University.2 Mathematical truths like ‘2 + 2 = 4’ are necessarily true and so beyond the control of God, thereby presenting an ostensible challenge to God’s sovereignty. Because Plantinga was concerned with the challenge posed by Platonism to divine sovereignty, not divine aseity, he dismissed nominalism, or anti-realism, as

irrelevant to the discussion. For even if there are no such things as the (p.55)properties of being red and being coloured, for example, nevertheless, it remains necessarily true that whatever is red is coloured, and God can do nothing to make it otherwise.

Obviously, anti-realism, however irrelevant it may be to the sovereignty debate, is nonetheless central to the aseity debate, since if there are no abstract objects, the challenge their existence would pose to divine aseity simply evaporates. In the end, Plantinga opts for a conception of divine sovereignty that does not require the modal status of propositions (i.e. whether they are necessary or contingent) to be within God’s control. He does not address the question whether the existence of abstract objects somehow depends on God’s nature or activity.

Morris and Menzel addressed both challenges in their article. They espouse absolute creation to safeguard God’s aseity and what they call ‘theistic activism’ to safeguard divine sovereignty. The theistic activist, unlike Plantinga,

attributes even the modal status of propositions to God. Thus, Morris and Menzel refer to theistic activism as the ‘modal component’ of absolute creation.3 The most sophisticated defence of theistic activism to date is Brian Leftow’s massive God and Necessity (2012).4 As Leftow recognizes, ascribing the existence of abstract objects like

propositions to God’s creative activity does not entail grounding propositions’ modal status in God. In other words, absolute creation does not require theistic activism. Since our concern is divine aseity, not divine sovereignty, I shall leave largely to the side the question of theistic activism.

When Tom Morris, in consultation with Menzel, wrote ‘Absolute Creation’, he had, unfortunately, not yet clearly differentiated in his thinking absolute creationism from divine conceptualism (see Figure 1).5 As a result, the paper tends to conflate a modified Platonism, according to which abstract objects exist but are caused by God’s intellective activity, and a sort of divine conceptualism, according to (p.56) which objects usually taken to be abstract are really thoughts in God’s mind. Since the expressed goal of Morris and Menzel’s paper is to reconcile Platonism with

classical theism, I shall take them as defending the view that abstract objects do exist, just as the Platonist says, but have been created by God, and I shall reserve our discussion of divine conceptualism for the next chapter.

It is worth noting in passing that the absolute creationist is not necessarily committed to the reality of a transcendent realm of abstract objects existing independently of concrete objects. That was indeed Plato’s view, but his student Aristotle took a different view. Aristotle thought that universals or properties exist in the concrete things which have those properties and do not exist in the absence of such concrete things. Chris Menzel’s colleague at Texas A&M,

Hugh McCann, defends a view like Aristotle’s. McCann thinks that abstract objects exist in the concrete world and are created by God in His creating concrete objects.6 So, for example, in creating cats, God also creates the property felinity. Although McCann struggles to explain how unexemplified properties, like unicornality—or

even felinity during the Jurassic age when no cats were about—exist, we may leave that to the Aristotelians to sort out. The overriding point is that absolute creationism takes abstract objects, wherever or whenever they exist, to be created by God.

Problems with Absolute Creation

Two main problems arise for absolute creationism, the first troublesome and the second truly serious.

Scope and Freedom of God’s Creating

The first problem is that absolute creationism’s modified Platonism is theologically objectionable because it misconstrues either the scope or the nature of creation. This problem arises because of two features of (p.57)many abstract objects: their eternality and their necessity. Things like numbers, propositions, and properties do not seem to be the sort of thing that could begin to exist. If ‘1 + 1 = 2’ is true at some moment of time, then it was obviously true at any earlier moment of time. Even if time began to exist, there is no reason to think that numbers began to exist along with time. Even if God should exist timelessly in the absence of a created world of concrete objects, it would nonetheless be the case that the number of concrete objects is 1 (namely, God). So the number 1 would exist. But if the number 1 exists, all the rest of the natural numbers generated by the successor relation also exist. God’s creation of abstract objects must therefore be either timeless or from eternity past. From the perspective of the absolute creationist, such objects exist co-eternally with God in a relation of ontological dependence upon Him.

Moreover, although not all kinds of abstract objects exist necessarily, many kinds, such as numbers, propositions, and possible worlds, do seem to exist necessarily, if they exist at all. Not only do such objects exist in every possible world, but, as even most theistic activists acknowledge, they exist independently of God’s will, being grounded in His nature, not in His will.7 According to the absolute creationist, the realm of necessarily existing abstract objects

flows non-voluntaristically from the very nature or being of God.

Trade-off between the Scope and Freedom of Creation

The eternality and necessity of abstract objects will force significant revisions in the traditional doctrine of creation. A biblical doctrine of creation assigns all created things to the realm of temporal becoming and implies a temporal beginning to the existence of created things.8 If, then, we think of abstract objects as ontologically dependent on God but not, properly speaking, as created by God, then the scope of (p.58)divine creation becomes infinitesimal. The

abstract realm dwarfs the concrete realm in its incomprehensible plenitude. Hence, scarcely anything, relatively speaking, is created by God. Most of reality is merely sustained in being by God but not, properly speaking, created by God. But, as we have seen, biblical writers bear witness to the truth that God through Christ has created all things other than Himself.

If, on the other hand, we expand the meaning of ‘creation’ so as to comprise eternal, ontological dependence as well as temporal origin of existence, then we subvert God’s freedom with respect to creation. For in orthodox Christian thought, creation is understood to be a freely willed act of God. He does not create from a necessity of His own nature, and there are possible worlds in which God refrains from creation and so exists alone. Absolute creationism, however, robs God of His freedom with respect to creating. God is free with respect to the creation of the realm of concrete objects alone. The vast majority of beings flow from Him with an inexorable necessity independent of His will. If the existence of abstract objects is a function of God’s nature, not of His will, then it is not up to God

whether (or which) abstract objects exist. Thus, conceptualist Greg Welty seems to be justified in charging that Morris and Menzel have traded in a biblical doctrine of creation for neo-Platonic emanationism with respect to the realm of abstract objects, which is, as I say, nearly all of the created order.9

Radical Voluntarism

It seems that the only way the absolute creationist could safeguard God’s freedom with respect to creating would be to ground the existence of abstract objects, not in God’s nature, but in His free will. Although very few have been willing to take this line, the radical Dooyeweerdian philosopher Roy Clouser boldly affirms not only that abstract objects are created by God, but also that they are ‘the created products of God’s will’, the result of His free choice.10 Clouser (p.59) maintains that even the laws of logic, including the law of contradiction, are within God’s sovereign control. Clouser does not shrink from affirming that God’s own properties and therefore His own nature are the result of His free choice and so are created by Him. Even monotheism, as well as trinitarianism, is the result

of God’s choice, not His nature. Clouser sums up his voluntaristic absolute creationism as the position that ‘God chooses what he is and is what he chooses. Only God’s unconditional being is divine per se.’11

What might be said in response to Clouser’s radical voluntarism? First, I think it must be esteemed theologically perverse. Clouser privileges divine sovereignty even above God’s essential goodness, wisdom, trinitarian nature, and so on. There is simply no theological or scriptural reason for such a weighting of theological priorities. This is Reformed theology run amok, carried to such an extreme that God is said to decide whether He exists, whether He is one being, whether He is a Trinity, and what essential properties He will have. Such a theology is so strange as to be not recognizably Christian.

Second, Clouser’s voluntaristic theistic activism is self-refuting. For example, in claiming that ‘The transcendent being of God is beyond the domain of the law of non-contradiction as well as all other laws’,12Clouser assumes the validity of the law of contradiction for statements about God’s transcendent being. Similarly, in saying that God’s unconditional, transcendent being is propertyless and that properties are the products of God’s free creation, Clouser

implies that God’s unconditional, transcendent being must have at least the properties of being unconditional and transcendent. Moreover, on Clouser’s view, God, having created the world, now really does have, as a result of His free choice, various properties like oneness, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, being a Trinity, and so on, and really is related to the world as its sustaining ground. But if, as Clouser affirms, ‘Only God’s unconditional being is divine per se’, then it follows that God literally does not exist, nor ever has existed. For only God’s

conditioned, (p.60) relational being actually exists, and that is not divine. Clouser’s view is, in truth, atheistic.

In sum, if we take abstract objects to be ontologically dependent upon God, but not, properly speaking, created by God, then the scope of divine creation becomes unacceptably minuscule; but if we expand the meaning of ‘creation’ so as to comprise all dependent beings, including abstract objects, then, on pain of incoherence, we subvert God’s freedom with respect to creating. Thus, the ontology of theistic Platonism is incompatible with the doctrine of creation, attenuating either God’s freedom or the scope of creation.

Bootstrapping Objection

Vicious Circularity of Absolute Creation

The second, more serious difficulty with absolute creation is that absolute creationism seems to be viciously circular. In the literature, this is known as the bootstrapping objection, after the famous Baron von Münchhausen, who tried to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. The problem can be most clearly seen with respect to the creation of properties. According to absolute creationism, God has created all properties. But in order to create properties, God would already have to possess certain properties.13 For example, in order to create the

property being powerful, God would already have to be powerful. An impotent God obviously could not create anything. Thus, God would have to already possess a property in order to create it, which is viciously circular.

Now Morris and Menzel are acutely aware that absolute creation appears to involve what they call ‘the ultimate act of bootstrapping’, namely, God must be the creator of His own properties, like omniscience, omnipotence, and eternity, and, hence, of His own nature.14 They admit that it sounds ‘at least exceedingly odd’, and many would say

‘incoherent or absurd’, to say that God creates the very properties which are logically necessary for His creative activity, or to say that (p.61) God creates His own nature.15 Morris and Menzel reject any attempt to escape the problem by exempting God’s essential properties from absolute creation because ‘no such selective exclusion would work in the first place’ and such a move would amount to abandoning absolute creation, since God would not then

be the only uncreated being—there would also be all God’s essential properties, which exist as independent, abstract objects.16 They reject any appeal to purely negative theology or to divine simplicity—which they take to be ‘the denial that God has discrete, distinguishable properties which exist as abstract entities distinct from each other and from him’—because such doctrines encounter insuperable obstacles, which Morris addresses elsewhere.17 Instead, they boldly claim that it is unproblematic that God create His own essential properties.

Although they offer an analogy to God’s creation of His own nature (a materialization machine which produces its own parts), Morris and Menzel insist that its value is mainly illustrative or pedagogical. Rather, the essential point is that there is no objectionable circularity in maintaining that, while God stands in a relation of logical dependence to His essential properties, they stand to Him in a relation of causal, ontologicaldependence.18 Earlier in their article,

they had exploited the same distinction to differentiate between the statements

(2) expresses a harmless, symmetrical, logical dependence of God on abstract objects. Since God necessarily creates abstract objects, it is impossible for Him to exist without them. So if there were no God, there would be no abstract objects, and if there were no abstract objects, there would be no God. Such a symmetrical, logical

relation (p.62) hardly deserves to be called dependence. By contrast, (1) expresses a more revealing, asymmetrical, causal, or ontological dependence of abstract objects on God.19 God is responsible for the existence of abstract objects, whereas abstract objects are in no way responsible for God’s existence.

Similarly, in the case of God’s relation to His own nature, Morris and Menzel maintain that God is ontologically or causally prior to His nature, even though it is true that were His nature not to exist, God would not exist. There is no vicious circularity because the dependence relations are different. It does not follow that, because God’s nature depends causally on God and God depends logically on His nature, therefore God depends causally on Himself. ‘Relations of logical dependence are always transitive. Relations of continuous causal dependence are always

transitive. But we have no good reason to think that transitivity always holds across these two relations.’20 Since

Morris and Menzel have rejected divine simplicity, or the view that God is identical to His nature, they claim that God cannot be said, on their view, to create Himself.

Unfortunately, the vicious circularity which Morris and Menzel seek to elude is not, I think, the circularity alleged by most proponents of the bootstrapping objection. Morris and Menzel want to show, in effect, that while God causes His properties, His properties do not cause God; therefore, God does not cause Himself. By contrast, the vicious circularity alleged by the detractor of absolute creationism is, I think, quite different. The vicious circle alleged by bootstrapping objectors is not that God creates Himself, but that properties, for example, must already exist prior to God’s creation of them, which is incoherent. Prior to God’s creating properties, there should be no properties, in which case, it is alleged, some of the causal conditions for the creation of properties are missing. This is the vicious circularity that absolute creationism seems to involve. Morris and Menzel say nothing to defeat the charge that, explanatorily prior to creating certain properties, God must already have those very properties in order to create them, which is incoherent.

(p.63) The priority at issue in the bootstrapping objection is throughout a sort of causal priority—which Menzel recognizes to be asymmetric.21 According to Menzel, ‘a is causally dependent on b iff (crudely) b has caused it to be the case that a exists’.22 This admittedly crude characterization might be plausibly nuanced in such a way that the causal prerequisites of a are also causally prior to a. In absolute creation, God’s creation of properties is causally prior to the existence of properties; but among the causal prerequisites of God’s creating properties is God’s having

certain properties and, hence, the existence of properties. Thus, the problem with absolute creationism is that causally prior to God’s creating properties, the causal prerequisites for His creating properties are missing, so that He cannot create properties. One could put the difficulty by saying that the existence of properties would have to be causally prior to the existence of properties, which is viciously circular. So the bootstrapping worry arises, not from confusion about logical priority, but from a pretty intuitive notion of the causal prerequisites for some action.

What is at stake in the bootstrapping objection is what my colleague J. P. Moreland calls one’s ‘ontological assay’ of things.23 Standard Platonism offers an ontological assay of things in terms of substances and properties which are exemplified by those substances. Logically prior to their exemplification of properties, substances either are mere

bare particulars or simply do not exist. Since absolute creationists accept the ontological assay offered by Platonism, they are immediately confronted with a severe bootstrapping problem, since logically prior to His creation of properties, God is either a featureless particular or non-existent, in which case He is impotent to create properties. In order to create any properties, God must already have properties, which is incoherent.

Divine Simplicity

So what is the absolute creationist to do? Unlike Morris and Menzel, he might try to escape the bootstrapping problem by appealing to the doctrine of divine simplicity. According to that doctrine, God is not (p.64) in any way composed. In particular, He transcends the distinction between a thing and its properties. Rather, God is identical to His properties, and all His properties are identical with one another. Thus, we should affirm with respect to God that omniscience = omnipotence = holiness = omnipresence = eternity = God. The doctrine of divine simplicity avoids the vicious circularity threatening absolute creationism because God does not have any properties; rather, God is a simple being identical with His own nature.

Morris and Menzel’s scepticism about the plausibility of the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity seems to me, however, well justified. I shall not rehearse its problems here.24 Suffice it to say that since, according to Platonism, properties are abstract objects, if God is identical to His properties, then God is an abstract object, which is absurd.

McCann acknowledges the problems with the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, which in his mind render that doctrine implausible, if not wholly untenable. But he proposes an amended doctrine of divine simplicity by means of which he hopes to solve the bootstrapping problem, while avoiding the pitfalls of the traditional doctrine. McCann suggests that God be identified, not with His properties, but with a concrete state of affairs—not, indeed, a static state of affairs, but a dynamic state of affairs. God is, then, an event. McCann holds that God creates His own properties just by being God. Just as felinity exists because cats exist, so God’s nature exists because God exists; and just as felinity exists only in cats, so God’s nature exists only in God. God, then, does have properties, but they are created by God. On McCann’s view, there just is nothing prior to the actual state of affairs that is God; therefore, God cannot be dependent on His nature, and the bootstrapping problem is avoided.

Very little reflection is needed, I think, to see that McCann has abandoned any claim to divine simplicity. For on his view, God does have a nature which exists immanently in Him, just as felinity exists in cats. Moreover, even on McCann’s novel view that God is an event, that dynamic state of affairs, like any concrete state of affairs, is, on McCann’s view, also ineliminably composed of a subject and a property.25 So God is not simple.

(p.65) But then it is evident that McCann has done nothing to solve the bootstrapping problem. McCann thinks that he has solved it because he would make God’s nature asymmetrically dependent upon God, thereby avoiding God’s depending on His nature. But that, as we have seen, is not the problem. The problem is that, in order to create properties, God must already have properties, which is viciously circular. McCann would solve the problem by having God’s properties depend upon God for their being. But unless God is already omnipotent explanatorily prior to having properties, there is no explanation why He will have the property of omnipotence in the explanatorily posterior moment. The only apparent way to avoid the vicious circularity is to maintain with the anti-realist that in that explanatorily prior moment, God can be omnipotent without exemplifying the property of omnipotence, which just is to abandon the Platonistic assay of things. In fact, McCann’s view threatens to make universals metaphysically superfluous; they seem to just float along as concomitants of God’s creation of concrete things and do not do any metaphysical work.

Worse, McCann’s view seems to be incoherent. For the complex state of affairs which McCann identifies as God is itself a composition of (God + a property). But then what entity is the subject of that dynamic state of affairs? If it is not God, then the view is self-contradictory, since the subject of that state is said to be God. If it is, indeed, God, then we are launched on an infinite regress in which every concrete state of affairs that is God is itself partly composed of a subject which just is that same concrete state of affairs: God = (God + a property) = ((God + a property) + a property) = (((God + a property) + a property) + a property) = ((((God + a property) + a property) + a

property) + a property)…This regress is explanatorily vicious, since at every prior level, the existence of the property is already posited, so that no explanation is given of God’s nature.26 Far from avoiding bootstrapping, this view affirms it: in order to create the property, God must already have it.

(p.66) Thus, McCann, far from exploiting the doctrine of divine simplicity to avoid vicious circularity, not only abandons divine simplicity, but also, it seems to me, plunges headlong into the maelstrom of the bootstrapping problem.

Created and Uncreated Properties

With their backs apparently to the wall, some absolute creationists have conceded that God does not create His own properties; but they insist that God has created all other properties. This recourse, however, will either sacrifice divine aseity on the altar of Platonism or else seems to yield the palm of victory to the anti-Platonist. Consider the options.

On the one hand, the absolute creationist might affirm that God’s properties, or at least His essential properties, are exemplified by Him logically prior to His creation of all remaining properties and so are not created by Him.27 Thus, there are two sorts of properties: uncreated properties and created properties. Unfortunately, this recourse constitutes an abandonment of the doctrine of divine aseity in favour of Platonism; it just is the theologically unacceptable position that in addition to God there exist other uncreated entities.

The absolute creationist might insist that objects which are parts, aspects, or attributes of God should not be taken to detract from God’s being the sole ultimate reality.28 While this claim is not in general unreasonable, in the case of a Platonistic ontological assay of things, the exceptions do seem objectionable. For on a Platonistic ontological assay, the standard view is that properties are constituents (p.67) of things or in things only by way of

exemplification.29 Things have properties, only in the sense that they stand in a primitive relation of exemplification to separately existing abstract objects. Thus, properties remain objects apart from God. On this view, there exist uncreated, necessary, eternal abstract objects to which God stands in a relation of exemplification. God is not, therefore, the sole ultimate reality.

It gets arguably even worse. For as we saw in our discussion of philosophico-theological objections to Platonism, on Platonism, God’s essential properties or nature, what Brian Leftow calls deity, serve to explain why God is

God.30 Leftow’s objection to a realist view of deity is all the more powerful if the absolute creationist resorts to the

position that God’s properties are uncreated. For then God’s nature is causally independent of Him, and He depends for His Godhood on His exemplifying the relevant properties. This makes God actually dependent upon His independently existing nature for His existence as God. The problem, then, is not merely that things other than God exist a se; the problem is that on Platonism, God does not exist a se, a flat denial of divine aseity.

In fact, if deity includes, as it must, the property of aseity, then absolute creationism of this variety becomes incoherent. For in order to exemplify deity, God must exemplify aseity and so exist a se. But if His aseity derives from His exemplifying aseity, then He does not exist a se. For He depends upon aseity for His aseity, which is incoherent. Thus, absolute creationism becomes necessarily false.

On the other hand, if the absolute creationist affirms that, explanatorily prior to His creation of properties, God has no properties but is as He is without exemplifying properties (since they have not yet been created), then we have abandoned the Platonistic ontological assay of things with respect, at least, to God and conceded to the anti- Platonist (p.68) that in order to be, for example, powerful, God need not exemplify the property of being powerful. Then it becomes unexplained why creatures also cannot be as they are without exemplifying properties. The problem is especially pressing in the cases of resemblance between God and creatures. Indeed, Platonists who appeal to the problem of the One over Many to explain similarity relations will be hard-pressed to explain how creatures resemble God in being powerful, since God and creatures do not share the relevant property.

Perhaps the absolute creationist will say that only logically posterior to His creation of properties does God come to acquire properties; prior to His creation of properties, God is, for example, powerful, even though the property

of being powerful has not yet been created. But then properties are not doing any metaphysical work, since God is already powerful before coming to exemplify being powerful.31 This is to deny the standard Platonist ontological assay of things. By rejecting the Platonist’s ontological assay of things, the conceptualist, for example, can hold

coherently that logically prior to His abstraction of any property, God is as He is without standing in an exemplification relation to properties. Similarly, an absolute creationist who denies that properties are fundamental ontological constituents of things could maintain that logically prior to His creation of properties, God is as He is without having properties. Deny the Platonist’s ontological assay of things, and the bootstrapping problem will not arise.

Metaphysically Heavy Absolute Creationism

Thus, it seems to me that an absolute creationism which rejects the Platonistic ontological assay of things is a defensible option for the classical theist. But in adopting such a view of abstracta, the absolute creationist seems to

have lost any rationale for positing the existence—in a metaphysically heavy sense—of such objects. They are not doing any metaphysical work, as they do in the usual Platonist scheme of things. As Moltmann says, they simply enable reference for reifying expressions like ‘the number 7’ or ‘the property wisdom’. (p.69)This smacks of lightweight Platonism, which does not involve serious ontological commitment to abstract objects.

It might be said that we are involved in metaphysically heavy commitments to the reality of such entities by the customary neo-Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, which comes to expression in premiss (I) of the Indispensability Argument. This is, in fact, Peter van Inwagen’s view. Van Inwagen classifies ontologies as either constituent ontologies or relational ontologies. He rejects constituent ontologies, which ascribe to particular things

an ontological structure.32 He therefore repudiates the Platonist’s ontological assay of things, denying that properties are ontological constituents of things.33

The reason for van Inwagen’s scepticism is that he cannot make sense of constituent ontologies. ‘I do not understand the words and phrases that are the typical items of the core vocabulary of any given constituent ontology. “Immanent universal”, “trope”, “exist wholly in”, “wholly present wherever it is instantiated,” “constituent of” (said of a universal and a particular in that order): these are all mysteries to me.’34 With respect to properties, he is mystified by exemplification. He asks, ‘How does a concrete object (like a green ball) reach out and take hold of a

property (like the color green), an abstract object, and make it had or exemplified or instantiated?’35 On van Inwagen’s view, properties are metaphysically idle, serving to explain neither why objects are the way they are nor

their resemblance to one another. He insists, ‘I do believe that there is an object I call “the color green.”…But I should never want to say that the fact that greenness was a property of both the apple and the book explained the fact that they were both green or the fact that they were both of the same color.’36

So why include abstract objects at all in one’s ontology? Van Inwagen confesses, ‘I’d really like to be an austere nominalist’, but he finds himself reluctantly committed to the reality of properties by ineliminable quantification over abstract objects in our discourse.37 (p.70) An absolute creationist of van Inwagen’s stripe, who similarly holds to the neo-Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, could hold to the reality of abstract objects without falling prey to the bootstrapping objection because his favoured ontology denies the typical Platonist ontological assay of things.

Van Inwagen himself rejects absolute creationism, taking properties and other abstract objects to be uncreated beings alongside God. But his cursory dismissal of absolute creationism does not do justice to this viewpoint. In his fullest treatment of the viewpoint that I am aware of, van Inwagen criticizes absolute creationism on the grounds that

(1) it is hard to make sense of God’s deciding to create an abstract mathematical object, and (2) creation is a causal relation, and abstract objects cannot enter into causal relations.38 With respect to (1), absolute creationists (unless they are radical theistic activists) do not typically root mathematical necessities in God’s will, but in

God’s nature.39 Hence, though mathematical objects depend ontologically on God, they are not the result of His deciding. As for (2), while abstract objects have no causal powers and so cannot be causes, why can they not be effects? Most philosophers of aesthetics who are, like van Inwagen, realists about fictional characters take them to be abstract objects created by their authors.40 So why could God not be the author of mathematical objects?

Thus, a Christian Platonist like van Inwagen ought to find absolute creationism to be an attractive option. Nevertheless, to my knowledge, (p.71) no one has adopted this viewpoint. Van Inwagen reports, ‘I am the only proponent of the Favored Ontology I am aware of’,41 and he is not an absolute creationist! Nor do I personally find his favoured ontology attractive. To my mind, having to include such metaphysically idle entities as are countenanced by van Inwagen’s favoured ontology ought to prompt us to call into question the criterion of ontological commitment that foists such unwanted freeloaders upon us.

Concluding Remarks

I conclude, therefore, that absolute creationism may be, after all, a tenable option for theists who want to preserve God’s status as the sole ultimate reality in the face of Platonism’s challenge to that doctrine. In particular, by denying a constituent ontology, the absolute creationist can avoid the bootstrapping objection, since explanatorily prior to His creation of properties, God can be just as He is without exemplifying properties. So there is no vicious circularity in His creation of properties and other abstract objects. Still, in light of the metaphysical idleness of such entities—not to mention the theological dislocations forced in the doctrine of creation—it seems to me that theists would be well-advised to look elsewhere for a solution to the challenge posed by Platonism to the doctrine of divine aseity.

Notes:

(19) Ibid., 355.

(33) Ibid., 33.

(34) Peter van Inwagen, ‘Relational vs. Constituent Ontologies’, Philosophical Perspectives, 25/1 (2011): 393.

(35) Ibid., 396.

(36) Ibid., 398.

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