This is a brand new book so I don’t know if Leftow will generate any following in this regard. There are examples of voluntarism with respect to certain kinds of necessary truths on the scene today. Yes, now that God has made his decree it is logically impossible but it was within God to have decreed otherwise.
That is logically impossible for a cat to be a reptile. It lay within God to have made cats be reptiles, or to have lizards be mammals. This is the locution he uses – you can’t say it was possible for God to do these things because what is possible and necessary has now been determined by God so it would be impossible. But he does defend the very radical view that other sorts of necessary truths are grounded in God’s will. Leftow is not a voluntarist about the truths of logic and mathematics. That is the mainstream Christian position, not Descartes’ position. He will ground the truths of logic and mathematics in God’s nature. The Oxford Christian philosopher Brian Leftow has recently published a book called God and Necessity where he tries to ground logically necessary truths in God. He historically thought that God could bring it about that 2+2=5, that logical and mathematical truths depend not upon God’s nature but upon his will and that he could have willed otherwise. Student: I know you said it was a minority position, but do you know of any philosophers or theologians that disagree with that definition?ĭr. In every case it is simply a matter of logic that circumscribe the limits of God’s power. Nobody could bring it about the different counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true than the ones that are true – that correspond to persons other than the agent. Nobody can bring about the state of affairs of God’s sinning, of a morally perfect being committing a sin. No one could bring about the state of affairs, for example, of God making a rock heavier than he can lift. So when the Scripture says that God can do all things, I think that what it means is what this definition implies – he can bring about any state of affairs which is logically possible to bring about for someone in such a situation. They are just contradictory combinations of words. When people talk about logically impossibilities they are not really talking about things that God cannot do because those are not things at all. That would mean that the limits to God’s power are simply those of logic. I suggested that the doctrine that God is omnipotent doesn’t mean that you can say God can do “blank” and just combine that with any sort of words like “make a round square” or “sin” or “act contrary to his nature.” I suggested that a rough-and-ready definition of “omnipotence” would be that God can bring about any state of affairs which is logically possible for someone in that situation to bring about. We’ve been talking about God’s attribute of divine omnipotence. Practical Applications of God’s Omnipotence
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