God and Necessity

Abstract

God and Necessity aims to draw out the metaphysical implications of a particularly demanding view of divine ultimacy. It includes a major reconciliation project: making divine ultimacy compatible with absolute necessity. The book's topic is the challenge that necessary truths … pose for the claim that God is the sole ultimate reality. Its basic question is ‘How do bodies of necessary (or modal) truth relate to God? It also … takes up a subsidiary challenge about ‘abstract objects’, such items as truths, attributes, and numbers: does God account for their existence? (27) According to Leftow, the book proposes a theory according to which modal truth depends on God's nature and mental life. More specifically, the book offers a theory according to which modal truth depends on God's creativity and will. At the bottom of the explanatory edifice, we have a form of metaphysical voluntarism analogous to theological voluntarism.1 Why is it right to keep your promises? The theological voluntarist: ‘Because God willed that we do so’. Why does logical space have the shape that it has? The metaphysical voluntarist: ‘Because God imagined and willed these modal truths’. Metaphysical voluntarism leaves (almost) all of modality up to the divine imagination and volition. It is another question altogether whether anyone could find this credible. The metaphysical voluntarist maintains that Fido is necessarily possible, but it was in God to make Fido impossible. The reverence in such expressions can distract from their unstable intelligibility. It is fair to say that they borrow coherence from an indeterminate modality. More on this in a moment.