Does God Have a Nature? by Alvin Plantinga (review)

616 BOOK REVIEWS Does God Have a Nature? (The Aquinas Lecture: 1980.) By ALVIN'j PL.ANTING.A. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980. Pp. ii + 146. Among the divine attributes important for Christians and other theists is God's aseity, which Alvin Plantinga in this excellently crafted book initially glosses as God's " uncreatedness, self-sufficiency and independence of everything else" (p. 1); "all things depend on him, and he depends upon nothing at all" (p. 2). But the existence of abstract objects, according to Plantinga, poses problems for belief in God's aseity. " [P]roperties, propositions, numbers and states of affairs [for instance] ... are objects whose non-existence is quite impossible" (p. 4). God cannot be said to create them, since they are beginningless; and since their non-existenec is impossible, they do not seem to depend on God in any other way either. But if such objects are parts of the world which God just has to accept, their existence appears to impugn God's aseity. The problem is made more acute by considering God himself. If God has a nature, that is, if he has some properties essentially, then it is not within his control whether or not he has those properties. "So God's having a nature seems incompatible with his being in total control" (p. 8). In the history of philosophical theology, nominalism, possibilism, and the doctrine of divine simplicity have been presented as solutions to this problem. Nominalism attempts to solve the problem by denying the existence of abstract objects such as properties and propositions. Plantinga argues that there are a number of difficulties with nominalism as a solution (one of them, he says-p. 85-is its obvious falsity), but chief among them is the fact that nominalism is simply irrelevant to this problem, which remains even if we pare our ontology down to concrete objects only. On Plantinga's interpretation of it, the doctrine of God's aseity is the doctrine that all things, including all truths, are up to God. Given that interpretation, the p11oblem with God's aseity is not really addressed by nominalism. Although nominalism denies that properties, divine or otherwise , have independent existence, certain propositions about God's nature nonetheless remain necessarily true; and these truths are not within God's control. Therefore, even if nominalism were correct, there would still be truths about God's nature which are not up to God and which consequently impugn his aseity. Possibilism attempts to solve the problem by claiming that God has no nature; all truths, including truths about God himself, are up to God. Much of Plantinga's discussion of possibilism is occupied with the question of whether Descartes was a possibilist. Plantinga concludes that he was and that he held a somewhat confused version of possibilism, an in- BOOK REVIEWS 617 consistent mixture of " limited possibilism" (the view that some truths are necessary though God could have made them otherwise) and "universal possibilism " (the view that there are no necessary truths, only contingent ones). Plantinga argues that contrary to appearances universal possibilism is a coherent position. And he maintains that, of the traditional solutions to the problem of God's ascity, universal possibilism is the only one really relevant to the problem because it alone puts everything , including all truths, within God's control. As for the doctrine of divine simplicity, on Plantinga's view, it is like nominalism in that both positions, besides their other flaws, have the overriding failing of irrelevance to the problem since according to each of these putative solutions some truths are not up to God. The strategy of Plantinga's own solution to the problem is the mirror image of that of nominalism. Nominalism attempts to resolve the apparent incompatibility of abstract objects and God's aseity by denying the existence of abstract objects. Plantinga attempts to resolve it by denying God's aseity. At the beginning of his last chapter he asks his "final question": "should we follow Descartes in giving full sway to the sovereignty -aseity intuition, thus denying that God has a nature'" (p. 126); and his answer is 'No'. He concludes by maintaining that God does have a...