Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

The basic dilemma that Plantinga unveils for us is as follows (we disregard nominalism which our author argues is irrelevant to the problem): either God is absolutely sovereign (or absolutely omnipotent), and all truths are contingent; or some things are independent of God and in fact condition or press against Him in causing Him to know them, and there are then necessary truths. He calls the dilemma, aptly, in my view, a “conflict of intuitions.” (127)

Now it’s certainly too bad that Aquinas did not discuss this problem in ST, I, 14, 8, “Whether the knowledge of God is the cause of things?”; so, we’ll have to do without his help.

The question, in other words, is this: Can God make the truths of logic or mathematics or things like “red is a color” or “what is colored is extended” (a synthetic a priori, if there ever was one) to be false? Here we come to Descartes’s “universal possibilism.” He writes:

The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on Him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures. … Please do no hesitate to assert and proclaim everywhere that it is God who laid down these laws in nature just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom.

It is because He willed the three angles of a triangle to be necessarily equal to two right angles that this is true and cannot be otherwise; and so in other cases.

You ask also what necessitated God to create these truths; and I reply that just as He was free not to create the world, so He was no less free to make it untrue that all the lines drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are equal. And it is certain that these truths are no more necessarily attached to his essence than other creatures are.

I turn to the difficulty of conceiving how it was free and indifferent for God to make it not be true that the three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, or in general that contradictories could not be true together. It is easy to dispel this difficulty by considering that the power of God cannot have any limits, and that our mind is finite and so created as to be able to conceive as possible things which God has wished to be in fact possible, but not to be able to conceive as possible things which God could have made possible but which he has in fact wished to make impossible. The first consideration shows us that God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite.

Again it is useless to inquire how God could from all eternity bring it about that it should be untrue that twice four is eight, etc.; for I admit that that cannot be understood by us. (quoted on 96ff)

What Descartes seems to be saying is that truths are constituted by the logical structure of the human mind. We cannot conceive of a world in which a stick is both 5ft long and 6ft long simultaneously, but God can conceive of it and could, as a matter of fact, have brought such a world about.

Elsewhere Descartes appears to endorse “limited” possibilism, viz., the idea that some of the truths co-eternal with God are indeed necessary, but only because they were made such by God who could have made them contingent:

And if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that willed them necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will them necessarily, or to be necessitated to will them. I agree that there are contradictions which are so evident, that we cannot put them before our minds without judging them entirely impossible, like the one which you suggest: that God might have made creatures independent of him. But if we would know the immensity of his power we should not put these thoughts before our minds. (quoted on 104ff)

(Limited possibilism is a rather strange doctrine. If God could have made a necessary proposition contingent, then this proposition is, in fact, contingent: it is false in one or more of those worlds accessible from that in which God makes it contingent.)

One unfortunate thing that follows from possibilism is that God is unknowable, not because He is too big (and requires an eternity to figure Him out), but because there are in Him possibilities that we cannot in principle entertain. And that is a conclusion I cannot accept. For is not God supremely knowable, being supremely actual? And are we not made in God’s image and likeness? As William Dembski points out, “God is transcendent and totally other, but he is also more and better.” God is certainly more rational than we are, and He cannot will errors and contradictions, which are the evils of the intellect, to be true.

Let’s pause for a moment and ask whether God can make what is good evil and what is evil, good? The familiar answer is no, because good and evil are reflections of God’s eternal nature. What then of true and false? Aren’t goodness and truth two out of four transcendentals convertible into one another and with being, perfectly in God and imperfectly in our universe? Are not truths in this world reflections of God’s infinite truth? Perhaps we can argue as follows: God defines good and evil, and truth and falsity, and some of these definitions are arbitrary. He brings about one world and not another solely for our sake. In some possible worlds contradictions are true by God’s decree despite such worlds’ being inconceivable to us. So, the worlds in which contradictions are true cannot support human beings. But this, too, surely is absurd, because then God could have created a world (or a set of possible for Him worlds) in which demons are rewarded and good creatures who are like God, punished. And that I cannot accept either.

Are necessary truths, too, then a reflection of God? The answer I’d like to propose uses, surprisingly, the doctrine of divine simplicity. For God is not only His own goodness but His own truth, as well. Now truth is a property held by propositions. By being true, therefore, a proposition imitates God; by being false, a proposition falls short of God, though, of course, “A is false” is a true statement if A is false. Similarly, “necessarily, A” is true insofar as it conforms to God. Thus, propositions, including modal statements, derive their truth values, their substance, from God, but not arbitrarily by God’s fiat, but by conforming to His nature which, of course, is identical with God. All truths about the actual world and the possible worlds pre-exist simply in God’s essence, which is an exemplar of all that exists, including numbers, propositions, and worlds themselves. Cf. Aquinas:

Even as the sun…, while remaining one and shining uniformly, contains within itself first and uniformly the substances of sensible things, and many and diverse qualities; “a fortiori” should all things in a kind of natural unity pre-exist in the cause of all things; and thus things diverse and in themselves opposed to each other, pre-exist in God as one, without injury to His simplicity. (ST, I, 4, 2, ad 1)

What this “natural unity” looks like is unclear. But it is obvious that this unity is identical with God, because in God that which understands, the act of understanding, and that which is understood are one. In other words, only the unity of all truths, of all that God is, is simple, like the unity of all colors of the spectrum results in white light, not that a conjunction of any finite number of particular truths is simple. Unity or “one” is, after all, yet another transcendental.

I should also add that the idea that God has no nature, that is, that for any property God could will Himself not to have it, is utterly preposterous. For example, if God can make it so that He is not omnipotent, then He won’t be able to bring Himself back into omnipotence.

To sum it up, Plantinga writes: “If there is no composition in God, then He won’t have a nature distinct from himself on which he depends; but there will still be many truths outside his control. Being red and being colored will be divine ideas and in some obscure way identical with God; but the truth whatever is red is colored will not be within his control.” (93) But now that we have seen that all propositions concerning the creation acquire their truth value by conforming to God’s essence and thereby being dependent on it, and the properties of God’s essence itself are identical with God, the doctrine of divine simplicity suddenly becomes essential to making sense of this difficult problem of the extent of God’s sovereignty and aseity.