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Introduction
- Indiana University Press
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introduction – 1 This book is a study of the concept of God as creator and of problems that attend that concept. In part, it represents an application of insights I hope I have gleaned from my work in the theory of human action. More importantly , it is an exercise in what is often called perfect being theology. I wish to defend the thesis that God is an absolutely perfect being, who as creator exercises complete sovereignty over all that was, is, and will be. This sovereignty, I argue, extends not only over all that comprises the physical world, but also over human decisions and actions, over what is moral and what is not, over conceptual reality, and even reaches to God’s own nature. This kind of position has not predominated among philosophers of religion in recent years, and it faces significant difficulties—especially having to do with creaturely freedom and responsibility, the problem of evil, God’s own freedom, and the stability of conceptual truth. But the idea that God is perfect and absolutely sovereign lies very close to the heart of the Western theological tradition. It deserves a vigorous defense. I hope to provide one, and to offer plausible solutions to the problems it encounters. Chapter 1 presents an argument for the existence of a creator. I hold that such arguments should not aim for deductive certainty, since doing so diverts attention to fruitless disputes over infinite regresses and the principle of sufficient reason. Instead, the argument for a creator should be inductive, founded on the idea that the creative activity of a personal God counts as the best explanation for the existence of the world. The strongest competing hypothesis is that the world is self-propagating: its existence at any moment is to be explained by some causal activity through which the past is able to confer existence on the present and, thereby, on the future. I argue that there is no such process in our experience, and that the scientific laws often supposed to undergird such a process are not even diachronic. Rather, the Introduction 2 – introduction creative activity of God is alone responsible for the existence of the world in its entire history. In short, God not only produces the world “in the beginning ,” if it has one; he also sustains it throughout its existence. This leads to a problem that is often raised against sustenance theories, namely that they render natural causation otiose, thereby forcing us either to treat it as redundant or to adopt an occasionalist cosmology. This dilemma is addressed in chapter 2, where several efforts to resolve it are surveyed. The best solution, I argue, is to adopt a view of natural causation that treats it not as a process of existence-conferral but as consisting in the transfer of conserved quantities such as energy and momentum. God alone is the cause of the existence of things; indeed, to provide for their existence is precisely his role as primary cause. Chapter 3 defends the thesis that God is timelessly eternal. Such an understanding of God’s nature is called for if he is to have sovereignty over time rather than being subject to it. God’s eternity does not, however, mean that temporal becoming is in any way illusory. Time is a legitimate aspect of the created world. The concept of a timeless God is defended against objections that such a God would be unable to cause temporal effects, and that he could not know the truth value of tensed propositions. Chapters 4 to 7 concern the problem of evil. In chapter 4 this problem is described, along with the standard free-will defense against it. The question of God’s omniscience and sovereignty in creating free creatures who sin is examined, and the two most common answers to this question are rejected. One answer, sometimes associated with Boethius, points to God’s timelessness and argues that this means his knowledge of our actions is not truly ‘foreknowledge,’ so that his omniscience poses no threat to our freedom. But this view fails to accord God full sovereignty as creator, and introduces passivity into him as knower. The other solution is the Molinist one, according to which God knows of our actions in advance via “middle knowledge.” This, however, deprives God of omnipotence by calling for there to be some possible worlds he cannot create. It also encounters problems in the grounding of so-called counterfactuals of freedom, as well as failing...