Abstract
We explore a ‘Neo-Cartesian’ account of divine ultimacy that raises the concept of God to its ultimate level of abstraction so that we can do away with even the question of his existence. Our starting point is God’s relation to the logical and metaphysical order of reality and the views of Descartes and Leibniz on this topic. While Descartes held the seemingly bizarre view that the eternal truths are freely created by God, Leibniz stands for the mainstream view that the eternal truths are grounded in God’s nature. We argue that the implausibility of Descartes’ doctrine stems mainly from the assumption that there is a non-epistemic notion of absolute necessity (metaphysical necessity) that constitutes the ultimate court of appeal for all modal questions and that this assumption is questionable. We also question the assumption that God’s ultimacy merely requires that all reality be grounded in God in the sense of mere explanation, so that it suffices if the necessary truths are grounded in God’s nature but not in God’s will. This will lead us to a reassessment of Descartes’ position. In the final and main part of the paper, we push Descartes’ doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths to its ‘logical’ conclusion with the aim of getting to a novel conception of ‘God.’
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Minimal essentialism, the view that apart from universal properties like being self-identical, there are virtually no limits to the ways in which a given entity might have been different from the way it actually is, is very likely not a view a theist would endorse with regard to God.
According to classical logic, a proposition p is logically necessary if and only if it is a logical consequence of the axioms of logic if and only if it is a logical truth, that is, true under every interpretation of the non-logical constants.
According to Tahko (2009), a strong empirical case for the truth of LNC as a metaphysically necessary principle can be made on the basis of the necessary constraints for the forming of a stable macro-physical world. He relies on the Pauli Exclusion Principle according to which it is impossible for two electrons (or other fermions) in a closed system to occupy the same quantum state at the same time. This particular constraint keeps the atoms from collapsing and thus allows for stable macro-physical objects.
In classical logic, A → A is of course equivalent to ¬(A ∧ ¬ A), and Leibniz in fact considered LI and LNC as equivalent principles, but we do not want to rule out contradictions in general, not even metaphysically, so we content ourselves with a weak form of LNC. More on that later. Regarding LNC as a metaphysical principle, compare its formulation in Aristotle (Metaphysics 1005b19–20): The same attribute cannot at the same time both belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.
If the sentence that some a is not identical to itself is to be formalized as ∃x ((x = a) ∧ ¬ (x = a)).
One might wonder whether a non-self-identical entity would be self-identical, that is, a non-self-identical entity.
By existential generalization (in first-order predicate logic), we get a = a → ∃ x x = a (and the reverse implication also holds). A Meinongian will of course deny that a = a entails that a exists and hence that to be and to be self-identical are equivalent. She will insist that a round square has self-identity even though no such thing exists.
An interesting collection of articles on the problem of God and abstract objects is Gould (2014).
Were it for God’s aseity only, a nominalist or anti-realist view would indeed solve the problem: God would no longer depend on his essential properties existing in some Platonic manner independently of him, yet he could nevertheless be considered omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and so on. But, with regard to divine sovereignty, a mere change of ontology is ineffectual.
Divine conceptualism is a non-Platonic realism which reduces all abstract objects to some divine intellective activity. It began with Augustine who transposed the Platonic realm of forms into the divine mind, was the major view among medieval thinkers who wrestled with the problem of universals, and is currently again favored by many theist philosophers. Theistic anti-realism is propagated by William Lane Craig. See his God and abstract objects (2017).
For example, AT IV 118, CMSK 235: ‘God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore … he could have done the opposite.’
On the standard, Lewis-Stalnaker semantics subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (counterpossibles) are trivially true. Many philosophers regard this as inadequate. They maintain that counterpossibles are sometimes non-vacuously true and sometimes non-vacuously false. In order to allow for such a distinction, the possible-worlds framework is sometimes extended to impossible worlds. See Nolan (1997), or Brogaard and Salerno (2013).
The interpretative difficulties concern mostly Descartes’ insistence on the one hand that although created the eternal truths are nevertheless necessarily true, and his statements on the other hand that God could have made the negations of necessary truths true. On one interpretation known as Universal Possibilism (Frankfurt 1977), Descartes took the eternal truths as ‘inherently as contingent as any other proposition.’ Its thesis can be stated as: for any proposition p, it is possible that p. On the interpretation known as Limited Possibilism (Curley 1984), Descartes held the weaker thesis that for any proposition p, it is possible that p is possible. On the most plausible interpretation, however, it is a decisive feature of the creation doctrine that a proposition is true only if God wills it to be true and that this applies equally to all modal propositions. Therefore, there are no true modal propositions about and prior to God’s creation of the eternal (modal) truths by which all modal propositions came to be, and hence Descartes’ statements in this respect must either be interpreted non-modally or regarded as simply erroneous. For a clear exposition of these interpretative issues, see Kaufman (2002).
According to Leibniz, modality is grounded in the thinking (understanding) of the divine mind. But if so, could God have thought possible worlds governed by different logics? Could God’s mind have been structured differently so that it would have given rise to a different modality? These are questions about modality itself, or meta-modal questions. We can, if not imagine, at least abstractly conceive such higher-order modalities. For example, one might consider all sets of sentences that are closed under logical consequence in some particular logic and take that as one modal space. That modal space then would contain all and only those worlds that are possible relative to that particular logic (see Bjerring [2013]). And, this construction could be repeated with any set of (logical) rules thereby giving rise to a space of (logic-relative) spaces of ‘possible’ worlds. But, I take it, were modality indeed structured in such hierarchies, God would have to be the creator of the whole hierarchical structure.
The same argument could equally be used as a response to the charge against divine command theory that it entails that morality is arbitrary. For the charge of arbitrariness relies on the assumption that God could have commanded different moral laws than he in fact has; that he could have established, for example, a moral standard according to which it would have been morally right to torture children and to kill people. But, if God has created no such possibilities regarding his creation of the moral laws, then this assumption is unwarranted. If God has not also created the modal fact that the moral laws could have been different (for example, that he could have chosen different propositions as moral laws), then there is no fact of the matter of the moral laws being arbitrary despite their having been commanded by God since there have never been alternatives to the moral laws he has actually created.
Brian Leftow (2012) calls such theories ‘deity theories.’ A deity theorist is someone who holds that God’s nature (deity) makes true all necessary truths including those that are about creatures only.
On the notion of metaphysical grounding, see Bliss and Trogdon (2014).
Deity, or God’s nature, is not to be construed in a Platonist manner, but simply as God’s ‘identity’: What makes God the being he is. A deity theory is accordingly any theory according to which all modal truths are ultimately a function of what God essentially is.
Could God choose his own nature without succumbing to a bootstrapping problem? According to Hugh McCann he does.
God is, essentially, an act of free will—an act with no prior determination of any kind, in which he freely undertakes in the very action itself to be and to do all that he is and does. … Far from escaping his sovereignty, God’s having the nature he does turns out to be in itself an exercise of his sovereignty. That is, the reality that is God’s having the nature he does is itself the action of his freely undertaking to have it, and all that is essential to him is grounded in this exercise of freedom (McCann 2012, 231).
If I understand this correctly, God’s nature here is the ‘profile’ of an absolutely spontaneous and undetermined divine willing activity. McCann also speaks of God as an event and a dynamic state of affairs (Ibid., 228). But, does this account of divine self-determination avoid all bootstrapping concerns? Would the divine will, in order to freely and spontaneously will anything, not already have to have the (essential) property of being able to will anything? My take on the issue is the following: Is God a being who is subject to the laws of logic and the universal conditions of being, then he cannot choose his own nature; is God on the other hand a being who transcends logical possibility, as McCann has him (Ibid., 235), then why should God care about giving himself a nature in the first place?
As an anonymous reviewer points out, theists like Yujin Nagasawa may be prepared to deny that God is essentially omnibenevolent. The motivation for such a view may be that essential omnibenevolence seems incompatible with moral responsibility, that is, with God’s freely choosing the good over the evil. But, if God is not essentially omnibenevolent, he could torture innocent children just for fun; it is just that he actually chooses not to (in some possible world he does). I have my doubts that this corresponds to the regular believer’s intuitive understanding of God. Goodness is very likely a fixed point concerning God’s nature because ethics is central to religion, and then it seems natural to assume that this should have some basis in the divine itself.
One might think that if we were to take this claim seriously, we would have to take the following claim equally seriously: ‘If I have no choice regarding my nature – which I clearly do not – in what sense can I be said to be responsible for whatever derives from it?’ In fact, this is one of the main arguments for moral responsibility skepticism (see for example Galen Strawson [1994]). It states, in a nutshell, that in order to be truly or ultimately morally responsible for one’s actions, one would have to be causa sui, a cause of oneself. We are all determined by the genetic, biological, and social givens of our existence, and these factors shape and impact the ‘hardware’ of our brains. And, there seems to be no principled reason why such pathological cases like that of the man who developed pedophilic impulses due to a tumor in his brain cannot be generalized to the ‘normal’ case when, for example, neuroscientists claim that the extent of a person’s ability to feel compassion can be read off from microstructural features of that person’s brain. To what extent are we responsible for what is more or less hardwired in our brains, for what has its source in our genetic make-up or in the social circumstances under which we grew up? How many of our psychological character traits are ultimately like our intelligence level for which we are clearly not responsible? Nevertheless, there may be differences between God’s being determined by his perfect-being nature and a human person’s being determined by her human nature. Unlike God’s nature, there may be parts of our personal nature that can be shaped by ourselves. The idea here is, roughly, that by performing a serious of actions which contribute to the forming of our character, we may become responsible not only for our character but also for any actions which subsequently issue automatically from it (such character formation plausibly has a physiological basis in the neural plasticity of our brains). So, a human person may at least to a certain extent be responsible for her nature. But, the same is of course not possible with God. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing to this link between divine and human (moral) responsibility.
As already remarked in footnote 14, it seems perfectly sensible to ask the question: Of all of modal space, could it have been shaped differently than it ‘actually’ is? I do not see how this could be ruled out without begging the question. OK, someone may take the modal space as a whole to be amodal such that no proposition about it has a modal profile. But, such a person then cannot claim that the modal space must be as it is; its shape then is simply a brute fact (Cowling 2011). According to Leftow (2012, 494), it is a brute necessity that a perfect personal God with a limited nature (deity) exists. But if the modal space, or modality itself, is a function of God’s nature and the modal space is without modal profile, then it would seem that God is also without modal profile, that is, then it is not true that God necessarily exists and necessarily has the nature he has.
An anonymous reviewer raised the question: If God is outside modality, then it has never been true that it was possible for God to make our universe. Whence, then, claims about divine creation of our universe? Indeed, in that case, it has never been true that it was possible for God to create the universe (just as it has never been true that it was impossible for God to create the universe); what is true is only that God created the universe. Exactly that was already the point in our interpretation of Descartes’ creation doctrine: There are no modal truths about God’s creative activity because God is always the author of any modal truths which are therefore always the subsequent product of that activity.
Clarke-Doane mentions three familiar grounds for judging that possibly P from the epistemology of modality literature: (i) because we can conceive of P; (ii) because it is not the case that had it been that P, then a contradiction would have obtained; and (iii) because P has no defeaters (Clarke-Doane 2017, 3–5).
Necessitarianists about the natural laws, i.e., those who take the laws of nature to be metaphysically necessary, of course do maintain that alternative physical laws are absolutely impossible. But, that does not detract from our argument.
Of course, in order to pass from superposition to contradiction, one has to assume that a vector sum in the Hilbert-space representation amounts to a logical conjunction in the ‘underlying reality,’ a simultaneous reality of whatever the single vectors represent. In other words, one must assume that the properties corresponding to the vectors in a superposition are all genuinely attributable to the system. QBists (a strand of quantum Bayesianism) deny at all that a quantum state represents a physical system. Rather, they take it to be the epistemic state of an agent who assigns it concerning her own possible future experiences.
It is well-known that classical propositional logic is associated with a Boolean algebra, but since the work of von Neumann and Birkhoff in the foundations of quantum mechanics, we know that the lattices associated with quantum systems are not Boolean since they are not distributive.
According to Schrödinger (1996, 121), ‘[i]t is not a question of our being able to ascertain the identity in some instances and not being able to do so in others. It is beyond doubt that the question of “sameness”, of identity, really and truly has no meaning.’
It was taken that quantum particles did not obey the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII) which states that two objects with all the same qualities are identical. But, the crux here is of course what the term ‘qualities’ in the context of quantum particles are to comprise. The relation ‘has opposite component of spin to’, would allow electrons to be discerned because no electron has spin opposite to itself, hence if relations of so-called weak discernibility, i.e., dyadic relations that are symmetric and irreflexive, are allowed in PII, the received view that quantum particles are non-individuals since indiscernible can be challenged (See for example Saunders [2006]). But, even if the relation of weak discernibility holding between two electrons may ensure that the number of objects is indeed two, it still may fall short of separating them in a way such that they can be successfully identified.
Quasi-set theory has been developed with the specific purpose of encoding in a formal system the idea of non-individuals and collections of non-individuals. It uses first-order logic without identity. See French and Krause 2006, chap. 7). So-called non-reflexive logics are logics in which the relation of identity is restricted, eliminated, or replaced by the weaker relation of indiscernibility. See da Costa and de Ronde (2014).
Again, I am fully aware how controversial things are when it comes to the question of how the world is like according to quantum mechanics. The only thing that seems uncontroversial is that, however we interpret it, it remains a challenge for our intuition (with the possible exception of Bohmian mechanics).
Chris Mortensen (1989) argues that since all our beliefs are fallible, anything is possible. That may confuse fallibility with possibility, but the view that there is no principled distinction between ‘merely epistemic’ and real possibility is, I think, defensible.
Some qualification is in order here: I do not believe that it requires the universal validity of LNC to get a differentiated and intelligible reality. Just to give one example: Were some otherwise normal apple both green and not-green all over at the same time, the resulting entity would still possess all other characteristic properties of an apple which allowed it to be distinguished from, say, a tomato, banana, or even all other apples not displaying this particular contradictory property. Advocates of paraconsistent logics and in particular dialetheists make exactly this point. Why should a local ‘black-hole of contradiction’ swallow everything into trivialism or indistinction? However, it seems that for at least some A—whatever that A may stand for—it must be the case that not both A and not-A simultaneously hold or be the case. Otherwise, as Aristotle already made the point, no entity could delimit itself from any other entity and not a single word uttered by anyone could be taken to have a definite meaning.
According to McCann (2012) for example, God implicitly establishes the LNC by freely creating things (see the above quote) and is a being ‘who by his own choice transcends logical possibility itself’ (Ibid., 235). Yet, McCann constantly argues on the basis of LNC and other logical principles when he develops his account of God (Ibid., chap. 11).
The ‘prior to’ is of course not to be construed as indicating a temporal but a logical or metaphysical order.
Descartes’ creation doctrine can be interpreted as an account of divine self-determination. Although God was not determined or necessitated to establish the eternal truths that he did establish, having established them as necessary (in one single act from all eternity), he also determined himself not to be able to change or violate them. In particular, since essentialist truths are eternal truths, the essentialist truths about what it is to be God have likewise been established by God.
This is a common mistake in discussions about the scope of absolute omnipotence. Bernard D. Katz, for instance, argues that ‘if God is an absolute, unconditioned reality, then there must be truths that are independent of God’s power.’ If God’s power was unlimited even by the truths of logic, he says, the various possible worlds would have nothing in common, for to suppose that some truth were to hold in every possible world would be to imagine a constraint on God’s power, and then no being including God could have any essential properties. Thus, ‘on the supposition that there is an omnipotent being whose power is unlimited even by the truths of logic, one must conclude that no being is independent of external conditions for its existence or nature. Indeed, one must conclude that no being has any essential properties and, in particular, no being exists necessarily’ (Katz 2003, 5–6, emphasis mine). But how can he conclude this when the premise is that God’s power is not limited by the truths of logic? Why should God follow this very (logical) conclusion in that case? Another case is Plantinga (1980) who likewise draws all sorts of (logical) conclusions from the assumption that God is sovereign over the laws of logic. In particular, he takes the latter to entail universal possibilism, i.e., the view that everything is possible, and since he considers such a view untenable, he comes to the conclusion that a strong reading of (what he calls) the sovereignty-aseity intuition cannot be maintained.
So, God could be genuinely ultimate even if he is in fact merely a ‘preliminary’ reality.
This is why we always only say ‘may/could’, and never ‘must’, when we describe what our account of a god beyond logic may involve.
It does not matter that this statement may be self-refuting since coherency is not a condition of the present account which takes God to be beyond logic.
As Beebe (2011) shows, even what we call a priori knowledge, i.e., the knowledge of logical, mathematical, and other ‘self-evident’ truths, succumbs to serious epistemological challenges, notwithstanding that many philosophers may think that such skepticism must be self-defeating.
References
Aristotle (1984) Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, revised by J. Barnes, (Princeton: Princeton UP).
Beebe, J. R. (2011). A Priori Skepticism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(3), 583–602.
Bjerring, J. C. (2013). On Counterpossibles. Philosophical Studies, 2, 1–27.
Bliss, R., & Trogdon, K. (2014). Metaphysical grounding. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: N/a.
Brogaard, B., & Salerno, J. (2013). Remarks on counterpossibles. Synthese, 190(4), 639–660.
Clarke-Doane J (2017) ‘Modal objectivity’, Forthcoming in Nous.
Conee, Earl (1991) The possibility of power beyond possibility, philosophical perspectives (5), 447–473.
Cottingham J., Stoothoff R., and Murdoch D. (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols. 1 and 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Cottingham J., Stoothoff R., Murdoch D., and Kenny A. (1991) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Cowling, S. (2011). The limits of modality. The Philosophical Quarterly, 61(244), 473–495.
Craig William Lane (2017) God and abstract objects. The Coherence of Theism: Aseity, Springer.
Curley, E. (1984). Descartes on the creation of eternal truths. Philosophical Review, 93, 569–597.
Da Costa, N. C. A., & de Ronde, C. (2013). The paraconsistent logic of superpositions. Foundations of Physics, 43, 854–858.
Da Costa, N. C. A., & de Ronde, C. (2014). Non-reflexive logical foundations for quantum mechanics. Foundations of Physics, 44, 1369–1380.
Frankfurt, H. (1977). Descartes on the creation of the eternal truths. Philosophical Review, 86(1), 36–57.
French, S., & Krause, D. (2006). Identity in physics: A historical, philosophical, and formal analysis. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Geach Peter, T. (1973). Omnipotence. Philosophy, 48(183), 7–20.
Gould, P. M. (Ed.). (2014). Beyond the control of God? Six views on the problem of God and abstract objects. New York NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
Katz, B. D. (2003). On the limits of divine power. Sophia, 42(1), 1–7.
Kaufman, D. (2002). Descartes’ creation doctrine and modality. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 80(1), 24–41.
Leftow, B. (2012). God and necessity. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Mann, W. E. (1989). Modality, morality, and God. Nous, 23(1), 83–99.
McCann, H. J. (2012). Creation and the sovereignty of God. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Morris, T. V., & Menzel, C. (1986). Absolute creation. American Philosophical Quarterly, 23(4), 353–362.
Mortensen, C. (1989). Anything is possible. Erkenntnis, 30(3), 319–337.
Newlands, S. (2013). Leibniz and the ground of possibility. Philosophical Review, 122, 155–187.
Nolan, D. (1997). Impossible worlds: A modest approach. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 38(4), 535–572.
Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical explanations. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Plantinga, A. (1980). Does God have a nature? Milwaukee: Marquette UP.
Quine, W. V. (1953). From a logical point of view. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Rowe, W. L. (2004). Can God be free. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Saunders, S. (2006). Are quantum particles objects. Analysis, 66, 52–63.
Schrödinger, E. (1996). Nature and the Greeks and science and humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Strawson, G. (1994). The impossibility of moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies, 75(1–2), 5–24.
Tahko, T. E. (2009). The law of non-contradiction as a metaphysical principle. Australasian Journal of Logic, 7, 32–47.
Tillich, P. (1955). Biblical religion and the search for ultimate reality. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Platzer, J. Does a Truly Ultimate God Need to Exist?. SOPHIA 58, 359–380 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0686-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0686-1