William Lane Craig.*God and Abstract Objects – The Coherence of Theism : AseityWilliam Lane Craig. God Over All : Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism

Abstract

One effect of the ever-increasing tendency of professional philosophers to specialise is that connections between different parts of our subject fail to be noticed. We are so often oblivious to the fact that a position adopted within the boundaries of one subdiscipline constrains our freedom to take up certain stances within a distinct field. On the other hand our focus on small regions of the philosophical terrain can make us unaware of the opportunities work in other subdisciplines might present for our own researches. One example of this kind of failure to interact lies between the philosophies of mathematics and religion. William Lane Craig’s magisterial and engaging God and Abstract Objects (GAO) is an attempt to make good this deficiency. It might seem far from obvious that these two areas of philosophy could have a significant impact on each other. Perhaps there is a certain kind of resemblance between them; on learning that I worked both on the philosophy of religion and on platonistically inclined philosophy of mathematics, a colleague once remarked that I had a ‘yearning for the transcendent’! (In actual fact there is something of substance in this comment: on the face of it both mathematics and religion concern purported non-spatiotemporal realities, and so both raise issues around epistemic access, reference, and so on.) But beyond this kind of community of subject matter, is it really the case that the philosophies of religion and mathematics have much to do with each other? Certainly philosophers working in one area seem able to go about their day-to-day business undisturbed by considerations from the other.