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God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism

Online ISBN:
9780191829024
Print ISBN:
9780198786887
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism

William Lane Craig
William Lane Craig
Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology and Houston Baptist University
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Published online:
17 November 2016
Published in print:
27 October 2016
Online ISBN:
9780191829024
Print ISBN:
9780198786887
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

God Over All is a defence of God’s aseity and unique status as the Creator of all things apart from Himself in the face of the challenge posed by mathematical Platonism, which holds that there are abstract objects which, like God, exist eternally, necessarily, and a se. After laying out the biblical, theological, and philosophical basis for the traditional doctrine of divine aseity, it explains the challenge presented to that doctrine by the Indispensability Argument for Platonism. That argument holds that we are ontologically committed to the existence of abstract objects by our assertion of sentences involving singular terms referring to such objects or quantifiers ranging over such objects. A wide range of responses to that argument, both realist and anti-realist, are examined in detail, with a view towards assessing the most promising options for the theist. Realist options include absolute creationism and divine conceptualism. Anti-realist options which challenge the criterion of ontological commitment underlying indispensability arguments include free logic, neo-Meinongianism, and neutralism. Anti-realist options which treat abstract object talk as not literally true include fictionalism, figuralism, and pretence theory. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and meta-ontology in order to construct a plausible anti-realist position.

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