How has technology affected society?

The question is not whether or not technology has affected society; it is a fact it has and probably in as many negative ways as good. Technologies like home entertainment, cell phones, e-mail, caller ID and text messaging are great tools, but have they altered our sense of civility, sociability and care for each other? Are funerals and crisis events the only lasting occasions when we reveal the true humanity within us?

The debates have started

My students at St. Thomas have started their group debates. They are required to debate issues about the nature of the human person. The first day of debates went well. Some of the students in the debates had not spoken much in class before, so it was a first time to see them orally defend a philosophical view they held. In all, they did well.

Two weeks before classes are over

The year is coming to a close. I have had the opportunity to teach at two institutions in the Twin Cities area-Bethel University and the University of St. Thomas. In the former case, my students are between 25-50 years of age and in the latter case they are 18 years old. There definitely is a contrast between these two groups of students. My older students at Bethel are more expressive and seem to internalize the subject matter of the course; my 18 year old students at St. Thomas are reserved and respectful. They look to me to formulate what is true about the subject matter in the course. This is good in that they don't verbally second guess me. My comments about my students are not evaluative but merely descriptive of how my students present themselves. I am teaching a total of 6 courses! My Christmas gift this year will be the moment I reach the last paper or exam I have to grade.

Is God the only thing that exists a se?

CHRISTIAN THEISTIC ACCOUNTS OF ABSTRACTA: ARGUMENTS FROM NECESSITY OR ARGUMENTS OF DOGMA?

A certain orthodoxy (or dual dogmas) reigns among some Christian theists who take a realist[1] approach towards truth and are committed to the authority of the Bible. This orthodoxy asserts that God is the author of all truth and it has been taken to mean either one of the following: (1a) the truth-value and existence of necessary truths are volitionally dependent on God as his creation since God’s sovereignty is unconstrained by any logical limits over creation and aseity is a unique perfection of God or (1b) the existence of necessary truths are eternal features of God or are objects God creates since God is sovereign over all reality and aseity is a unique perfection of God. In light of (1a) and (1b), this paper addresses the following two questions: First, does theism that is foundationally based on the Bible entail or require either (1a) or (1b)? Secondly, are those committed to a realist conception of truth (whether theists or not) required to adopt (1a) or (1b) if they are to be realist? The answer I provide to both questions is no. To accomplish my task, part one of the paper focuses on (1a). Here I outline the specific nature of (1a), along with a critical analysis of the reasons offered in its defense. I argue that (1a) leads to nihilism and to forms of postmodernism that are incompatible with a biblical worldview and to realism which it entails. Part two of the paper focuses on (1b). Here I outline the specific nature of (1b), along with a critical analysis of the reasons offered in its defense. I argue that while (1b) is an improvement over (1a), it too is encumbered by problems of its own, e.g., being incoherent, having to appeal to ad hoc adjustments and being redundant. If anything counts in (1b)’s favor, it is its consistency with the traditional view of aseity and sovereignty as prescribed by classical theists of the Christian sort. Nevertheless, this favor falls short of being a categorical requirement for biblical theism or for realism simpliciter. Finally, I offer the conjunction of full blown Platonism and theism to account for truth that is consistent realism. Accordingly, while necessary truths would not have an ontological dependence on God for their existence, they would have a causal-epistemic dependence on God in so far as he makes them knowable to overcome their causal inertness.

What is the Orthodoxy?
A perennial orthodoxy concerning the relationship between God and necessary truths reigns among many proponents of Christian theism.[2] Stated broadly, the orthodoxy affirms that necessary truths and other associated abstracta are essentially grounded in God. The nature of this “groundedness” can be stated as either one of the following two theses:

(1a): truths and their associated truth-values are volitionally created and determined by God, respectively.

or

(1b): truths are necessarily and eternally dependent on God either as God’s thoughts or creation.

We can ask the all important questions: Does biblical theism entail or require either (1a) or (b)? Are those committed to a realist conception of truth (whether theists or not) required to adopt (1a) or (1b) if they are to be realists? In short I answer, no.
Let us begin with the first of these two questions. If this orthodoxy is required of a Christian theist who accepts the authority of the Bible, it should have biblical support or, minimal, philosophical support that grounds it as a necessary feature of the Christian worldview. Let’s take each thesis in turn. What passages in Scripture can be given to support (1a)? John 1:3a is a possible candidate:

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has
been made. (NASV)

1 Corinthians 8:6 is another possible candidate:

yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; (NASV)

And a third candidate is Colossians 1:16 as an example:

For in him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible….(NASV)

The supporter of (1a) holds that in these verses, the phrase ta panta (all things) should be taken in an absolute sense so as to include everything as a created thing ex nihilo, except God. From this reading of the biblical text, the obvious candidates of “created things” are concrete particulars. The not so obvious candidates of “created things” are nonphysical and invisible things like mathematical, geometrical and logical truths and other abstracta. So, on this reading, numbers, “the sum of the angles of any triangle equals 180,°” “the diagonals of a rhombus are perpendicular” and copious geometric figures are created things. Surely this interpretation of the biblical text concerning God’s creation is theologically consistent with such orthodox affirmations as the Nicean Creed’s declaration that “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” However, do we have reasons to think that this interpretation of the Scriptures has strong or correct hermeneutical support for it over say other competing interpretations? For starters, we can ask, what counts as “correct” and are there other interpretations? An initial reply to the former question is that correctness can be determined in some cases where the biblical passages in question allow for one interpretation without qualification, e.g., passages that affirm God’s goodness should be interpreted as affirming God’s goodness, for “goodness” is not equivocal. On this note, the cited passages for (1a) concerning “all things” do not meet this requirement because they can be interpreted equivocally. The set of “all things” according to passages like Colossians 1:16 refers to created things. However, there is nothing in the cited passages per se that requires truth to be included among things created.[3] It is an analytic formality to point out that if there are some uncreated things, they could not be included under the ta panta in these passages. So unless there are passages that denote abstracta and also connote them as created things, no case can be made that a position that rejects (1a) is necessarily incompatible with Scripture.
This brings us to the second question: Are there other interpretations of the cited texts? The answer I put forward is a qualified, yes. My answer is qualified since I do not think Scripture affirms or denies abstracta as described by (1a). Nevertheless, I hold that contrary to (1a) there are some uncreated things that do not fall under the ta panta referenced in the cited texts. Perhaps the use of a reductio ad absurdum would be of some help here without leading to hermeneutic quandaries. Let’s first consider the view that references to ta panta in passages like Colossians 1:16 is an exhaustive account of creation ex nihilo in a temporal sense, then there was a time when triangles, rhombuses and numbers did not exist and consequently there was a time when necessary truths associated with such objects were neither true nor false.
For those who take abstracta to be included among ta panta but take their creation to be a-temporal from eternity, a problem still emerges. There are serious problems with talk of creation as both ex nihilo and eternal. First, a natural reading of the biblical text presents us with an image of temporal creation ex nihilo (Gen. 1:1; John 1:1-3). Talk of a-temporal causation is foreign to the Bible. Secondly, talk of a-temporal causation is not consistent with the orthodox Christian view that God freely creates ex nihilo.[4]
Ultimately, it is an open question whether the writers of Scripture were concerned with quandaries that are essentially couched in philosophy. During the writing of the Bible, and particularly during the writing of the New Testament, very few if any Christian readers would have been concerned with the metaphysics of abstracta, let alone been concerned with the ramifications of abstracta. So should (1a) be jettison outright or are there philosophical reasons, independent of any hermeneutical considerations from Scripture that warrants (1a)?

The Origins of the Orthodoxy on the Philosophical Front: The Beginning of a Tradition
Historically speaking, perhaps the only philosophical account of (1a) comes from the noted rationalist Rene Descartes. Let us consider Descartes’ remarks on abstracta in his replies to Mersenne:

The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures. Indeed to say that these truths are independent of God is to talk of him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject him to the Styx and the Fates. Please do not hesitate to assert and proclaim everywhere that it is God who has laid down these laws in nature just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom.[5]

Elsewhere Descartes writes that:

It is not for having seen that it was better that the world be created in time rather than from eternity, that He willed to create it in time; and He did not will that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles because He knew that it could not be otherwise, etc. On the contrary, it is because He willed to create the world in time that its having been created in time is better than if it had been created from eternity; and it is because He willed that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles that it is now true that this is so and that it cannot be otherwise; and similarly for everything else.[6]

And to show that he is not dismissing the notion of necessity completely, Descartes says in a letter to Antoine Arnauld:

I would not even dare to say that God cannot arrange that a mountain should exist without a valley, or that one and two should not make three; but I only say that He has given me a mind of such a nature that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley or a sum of one and two which would not be three….[7]

Essentially for Descartes, the truth-value of the propositions of logic, mathematics and geometry is necessary only from a finite conceiver’s perspective but not from the perspective of the propositions themselves. Necessity as Descartes knew it then is a feature of the divinely structured human mind and not a feature of propositions and abstracta in general. Necessity de dicto then is an extrinsic property and ultimately a divine volitional affair. As Descartes states:

For it is certain that he is the author of the essence of created things no less than of
their existence; and this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths. I do
not conceive them as emanating from God like rays from the sun; but I know
that God is the author of everything and that these truths are something
and consequently that he is their author.[8]

This view is generally called universal possibilism.[9]
So from a philosophical perspective, does biblical theism entail or require (1a)? One way to answer this question is to ask the question: What is at stake if biblical theism endorses (1a)? Christian theists are committed to the belief that what they believe about God, creation and God’s involvement in creation are genuinely true and not true simply because God makes us believe such things are true, e.g., that God exists, that God is triune, that God is transcendent and thus independent of creation and that Jesus Christ is the savior of humanity. However, if Descartes is right about God’s providence over “truth” and about humanity’s inability to conceive reality independently of how God construed our minds, then (1a) bears fruit for a solipsist but not for one committed to realism or a mind-independent reality.[10] By grounding abstracta in God via a creation of God’s eternal will, truth itself lacks any jurisdiction beyond God’s will. Given the Christian theist’s commitment to monotheism, truth then is, in the sprit of Richard Rorty, whatever God allows himself to get away with. We have then a theistic albeit divine kind of postmodernism. The evidence for this unfortunate association with postmodernism also comes readily from the words of Richard Rorty:

We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that there where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.[11]

Sounds gloomy, but this is exactly what Descartes and other proponents of (1a) affirm when they assert that truth is actually a narrative God construes.[12]
In other words, the truths within God’s narrative are true only in so far as God willed that they be conceived as “true” by the human mind. This also amounts to saying, in the spirit of Rorty, that truth is not out there in the world, but in our minds.
As for the question of whether those committed to a realist conception of truth (whether theist or not) are required to adopt (1a), the anti-realist parallel to postmodernism should be sufficient to answer this question in the negative. So in light of the quandaries of (1a), why would anyone affirm that truths are creatable things? And more importantly, why would they affirm that the truth-value of necessary truths is a matter for God to determine? The obvious philosophical and theological reason for those who hold (1a) is that the existence and truth-value of necessary truths are affairs that cannot obtain independent of God, for if they do, God would not be sovereign and something like Platonism would be true. Platonism in its basic form holds, among other things, that abstracta exist a se and aseity equally applies to their truth-value.
To maintain God’s aseity and sovereignty, some theists have taken a middle position on this issue. They assert that the truth-value of necessary truths is independent of God, i.e., necessary truths cannot not be true and thus they are beyond God’s will to make false (contra Descartes). As to the existence of necessary truths, some of them hold a view that I hinted at earlier: a modified Platonist view that holds necessary truths are eternally created by God. Others take another middle position and argue that necessary truths are eternal but uncreated features of God noetic structure. This view is called Conceptualism. In all such cases, all middle of the road theists, contra full blown Platonism, affirm that the existence of abstracta, whether they are internal or external to God’s being, depend on God.
They both accept (1b). Necessary truths on these views exist eternally, immutable and in all possible worlds. They are not a threat to God’s sovereignty and aseity since their existence “depends” on God. Conceptualism is the traditional position taken by Christian theists and was the position of Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine writes:

But where are we to think these… [ideas, i.e., abstracta]… exist, if not in the mind of the creator? For he did not look outside himself, to anything placed [there], in order to set up what he set up. To think that is sacrilege. But if these… [ideas]…of all things to be created and [already] created are contained in the divine mind, and [if] there cannot be anything in the divine mind that is not eternal and unchangeable, and [if] Plato calls these principal reasons of things “Ideas”, [then] not only are there Ideas but they are true, because they are eternal and [always] stay the same way, and [are] unchangeable.[13]

Elsewhere Augustine writes:

The ideas are certain archetypal forms or stable and immutable essences of things, which have not themselves been formed but, existing eternally and without change, are contained in the divine intelligence.[14]

While essentially agreeing with Augustine, Aquinas held that God and his thoughts are identical to each other by way of divine simplicity. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas writes:

…things are called true from the truth of the intellect. Hence, if no intellect were eternal, no truth would be eternal. Now because only the divine intellect is eternal, in it alone truth has eternity. Nor does it follow from this that anything else but God is eternal; since the truth of the divine intellect is God Himself, as shown already.
Reply to Objection 1: The nature of a circle, and the fact that two and three make five, have eternity in the mind of God.[15]

This element of contingency for all truths results from Aquinas’s view that truths are necessarily mind dependent. Evidence that Aquinas adopts this antirealist conception of truth is evidenced in the De Veritate:

Even if there were no human intellects, there could be truths because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, per impossible, there were no intellects at all, but things continued to exist, then there would be no such reality as truth.[16]

It is clear from these passages from Augustine and Aquinas that necessary truths depend on God’s cognitive activity, existing either as God’s thoughts. For both Augustine and Aquinas, they deviate from Platonism in that creation, unlike what we see in Plato’s Timaeus, reflects or resembles God’s thoughts rather than abstract objects. So apples are not created with Appleness as a model idea; God’s own thought, which is a feature of his mind, is the exemplar for created particular apples. To speak of necessary truths on their view is simply to speak of thoughts that God necessarily thinks. In a similar fashion to how objects are sustained in George Berkeley’s ontology (esse est percipi) by God’s perception, truths are similarly sustained by God’s thoughts. Thus for Augustine and Aquinas, necessary truths exist a se only in so far as they are identified as features of God’s mind.
In recent times theists like Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Morris and William Craig have attempted to defend (1b). To do so, Plantinga and Craig adopt conceptualism while Morris adopts modified Platonism or what he calls “theistic activism.” Let us consider conceptualism first via Plantinga. Plantinga writes:

[A] proposition exists because God thinks or conceives of it. For propositions, as I see it, are best thought of as the thoughts of God.…God is a necessary being who has essentially the property of thinking just the thoughts he does think; these thoughts, then, are conceived or thought by God in every possible world and hence exist necessarily.[17]

Plantinga makes clear what most philosophers would affirm, viz., that there is a distinction between the truth-value of a proposition and the existence of a proposition. That is, God’s thinking of or conceiving of a proposition makes a proposition exist but this activity does not determine the proposition’s truth-value. Plantinga writes:

…God’s believing p is [not] prior, in some important sense, to p’s being true. God’s believing p is not, in general, an explanation of p’s being true, or what makes p true, or the reason for p’s being true . . . . On the other hand it is the case, I think,
that a proposition exists because God thinks or conceives it.[18]

So a proposition p could not be true if it did not exist (which is trivially true). And p exists only because God thinks it. Thus “[truth] is not the very same property as being believed by God, even though the former is necessarily coextensive with the latter.”[19] And regarding necessary truths, Plantinga holds that God necessarily thinks them and thus they necessarily exist.
William Craig also argues for conceptualism in Creation Out Of Nothing. In the tradition of Augustine Craig also holds that numbers, sets, properties, and so forth are thoughts in the mind of God.[20] God’s thoughts are not of abstracta least God’s thoughts be particulars. Craig notes, “if redness is a [particular] thought in God’s mind, what does it mean to say that a fire truck, for example, stands in the exemplifies relation to that particular thought?”[i][21] God’s thoughts consist of “pure concepts” which are not particulars, but are “the sort of things that are the intentional objects of thought.”[22] Like Augustine, Craig holds that God’s thoughts function as abstracta in so far as they are exemplars for creation and objects of knowledge. The property being red, for example, exists as a thought in God’s mind and God is able to cause this thought to be exemplified in objects such as red fire trucks. Being red then is explanatory prior to the existence of red objects. Moreover, according to Craig’s conceptualism, universals are also conceptual abstractions from particulars (at least conceptual abstractions from particulars for humans). Being red then as a conceptual abstraction is posterior to red objects from the perspective of humans knowers.
From the works of Plantinga and Craig we have an account of conceptualism which has not changed over its original formulation by Augustine and Aquinas. For conceptualism in general, abstracta qua God’s thoughts exist necessarily; they bear a quasi substance-property dependency relationship to God. Just as beliefs and other mental properties in general cannot exist independently of some mind,[23] neither can abstracta and necessary truths in particular exist without being features of God’s mind. With this much said to explain conceptualism, we have reasons to think conceptualism is muddled with unanswered questions and de facto objections.
First, it is a puzzling claim for conceptualists to hold that ultimately necessary propositions are just God’s thoughts. Conceptualists do not make it at all clear why the existence of necessary truths simpliciter qua necessarily existing things have to be thoughts in God’s mind. While it is quite clear why beliefs, for example, cannot exist without a mind, it is not at all clear what the conceptualist argument is for the assertion that propositions ultimately have a similar ontological life (in God’s mind). To be sure, propositions and beliefs are similar but distinct entities. By definition, beliefs are properties of a mind; they are first-person oriented. Beliefs are attitudes about propositions. They are essentially intentional. If concrete particulars exemplify God’s thoughts, they do so without also exemplifying their intentional content. This raises a question for the conceptualists as to how they can account for exemplification without intentionality. Moreover, propositions do not per se have a dependency relationship to a mind (surely the proposition “Earth is a sphere” exists and is true even if no one thought about it). Of course conceptualists share a different intuition. Within the context of created beings, they affirm a distinction between propositions and beliefs, such that the former can exist without human minds but not the latter. However, from their perspective, this distinction does not exist when the context is God’s mind. As Plantinga notes, “propositions, as I see it, are best thought of [as] the thoughts of God.”[24]
While Plantinga offers no argument to justify this asymmetry between beliefs and propositions in God’s mind, he does note, however, the obvious postmodern, antirealist difficulties for asserting that propositions just are human thoughts (the problem of varying truth claims). However, he does not state why these difficulties evaporate when propositions just are God’s thoughts. If the difficulty of grounding truth in our thoughts is due to our cognitive imperfections and copious perspectives on truth, then the corrective of grounding truth in God must at least be due to God’s cognitive perfection. But this is to confuse grounding truth with knowing truth, and surely some truths (e.g., I am appeared to greenly) do not require a “God’s eye” perspective on matters. Short of an argument that shows why truths and God have this necessary property-substance relation, the claim that necessary truths cannot exist apart from being God’s thoughts is a claim that should be shuffled to the category of theistic dogma.[25]
The second problem is a bit more serious for conceptualists and one they do not directly address. Here the questions for conceptualists are: (1) If the existence of necessary truths depends on God is it also the case that the truth-value of necessary truths depends on God or (2) If the truth-value of necessary truths does not depend on God is it also the case that the existence of necessary truths does not depend on God? While Plantinga says that “God is a necessary being who has essentially the property of thinking just the thoughts he does think” this claim should not be taken as an attempt to answer the joint questions I posed. For while God contemplates necessarily true propositions as true and necessarily false propositions as false in all possible worlds, this state of affairs does not tell us why God has the attitudes he has toward them in all possible worlds. It is trivially true that if God contemplates a necessary truth, he cannot contemplate it as false in any possible world. This is due not to God’s contemplation of the truth in every world but to the truth-value of the proposition.
It may appear that the question I am posing is confused about the nature of necessary truths. For, it may be argued, whatever we say about the basis of the truth-value of necessary truths, this is a separate matter from the existence of necessary truths. Accordingly, conceptualists do not need to ground the truth-value of necessary truths in God since their truth-value is a matter of the modal relationships among the various abstracta that they correspond to, i.e., concepts. Thus it should be understood that God, nor anything else, can determine their truth-values. So the reason why the proposition “A triangle has 3 sides” is necessarily true is simply because of the essence of a triangle and its relationship to the essence of threeness. And for conceptualists to make a case for conceptualism, all they have to do is show that necessary truths, independent of their truth-values, are grounded in God’s mind as his thoughts. But a closer look at the relationship between the truth-value of a necessary truth and the existence of a necessary truth shows otherwise. To reiterate the obvious, for any truth that is necessarily true, its falsehood cannot be conceived by God or any other mind in any possible world. Conversely, we can say that a necessary truth is a proposition that is true in every possible world. The basis for this trans-world property of necessary truths is the collective essential natures of the object(s) they describe. If necessary truths cannot be conceived as false in any possible world they equally cannot fail to exist in any possible world. Contrary to conceptualism, to require God to sustain their existence is to overstate the nature of what necessary truths are. Conceptualists hold that God necessarily thinks these truths in every possible world. What conceptualists fail to see is that the essence of abstracta qua truth-makers of necessary truths (viz., what the necessary truths describe), is what determines the truth-value of necessary truths in every possible world. Now since God cannot determine the essence of a triangle and thus any truths about a triangle, it follows that he is also not responsible for the existence of the truths about triangles. The truth-value of necessary truths and the essences of the objects they describe are necessarily related causal-closure, autonomous way.
In recent years, some theists have attempted to justify (1b) by shifting from conceptualism to a deified or modified Platonism. Work done by Thomas V. Morris is one the most well known. He agrees with Aquinas and Plantinga that “God is not in control of abstract objects or necessary truths, in the sense that he cannot annihilate or alter them intrinsically …[and] these things depend on God for their existence….”[26] However, abstracta, on Morris’ account, are platonic objects that necessarily exist, but are eternally created by God.
There are problems with Morris’ defense of (1b) as well. Essentially the argument against modified Platonism holds that if true propositions and all abstracta depend on God, in the way that (1b) affirms, then God is also responsible for his own nature and existence, which is incoherent. Consider the following two propositions:

(a) God exists
(b) God is omnipotent.

For theists, both propositions are considered true. In fact, many theists would affirm that part of the essence of these propositions is being true. But to cause these propositions to exist is to cause their essence to be exemplified.[27] So if God causes all propositions to exist, such as (a) and (b), then he also causes them to exemplify being true. This amounts to saying that what follows from (a) and (b) is the existence of an omnipotent God. Thus God existence and nature are explanatorily posterior to his causing (a) and (b) to exist. So God would be responsible for causing his own existence.
To put it another way, consider the property being omnipotent. Like all properties, modified Platonism holds that God causes being omnipotent to exist and it holds that properties exist prior to their exemplifications. So to cause some object to exist is to cause its prior existing essential properties to be exemplified. God exists as a being that exemplifies the property being omnipotent. However, for modified Platonists, the existence of the property being omnipotent must exist explanatorily prior to it exemplification and, most importantly, be caused by God. But then modified Platonism is left with a dilemma. Either God creates abstracta or he does not. If God were to create abstracta, as they argue, then God cannot logically be said to be omnipotent until he causes the exemplification of the property being omnipotent. Moreover, to create the property of being omnipotent God would have to be omnipotent to do so. But this amounts to saying that there are some abstracta that God does not create and the consequence of this acknowledgement is that God’s exemplifying omnipotence is prior to his creation of the property being omnipotent, which is the reverse of what Platonism allows. Thus God’s properties exist before they are exemplified, given the modified Platonist’s thesis. But this is incoherent.
One noted reply to these objections to modified Platonism comes from J. P.:

Perhaps the modified Platonist might maintain that all the properties that God exemplifies as part of his nature – for example, being loving, being powerful, and so on – do not exist in a “realm” outside of God, as do other properties. Rather, as a brute fact, God, along with his nature, simply exists a se. Other properties, such as being red, are sustained by God, either by his intellect, will or in some other way. Thus only these properties that are not constituents of God are timelessly created by God.[28]

Moreland claims that this distinction is not ad hoc since modified Platonists have “good, independent grounds for believing in God’s existence and aseity and in the existence of abstract objects construed along Platonic lines.”[29] Moreland, as a modified Platonist, does not state what these independent reasons are. Whether or not he is right, Moreland allows some abstracta (those properties that are features of God’s nature) to have no causal explanation but simply to exist a se. This is not a typical move for modified Platonists. To be sure, their position is modified simply because they take only God to exist a se. To recall, abstracta on their view, while eternal, are created things. Without collapsing into some form of simplicity where all abstracta exist a se in God or expanding into full blown Platonism where all abstracta exist a se outside of God, Moreland needs to explain the “brute factness” for just these properties. An argument that appeals to coherence to the traditions of classical theism won’t do.
A second problem with modified Platonism concerns its alleged incompatibility with God’s sovereignty. For according to the classical theist’s conception of God under (1a) and (1b), God’s will is unconstrained by anything except his own nature. This anxiety about God’s sovereignty is what led Descartes to the apparently absurd view of universal possibilism. Nevertheless, modified Platonists hold that God timelessly created abstracta. However, for modified Platonists, God has to put up with their truth-value. This would not be a problem for God’s sovereignty if all abstracta were part of God’s nature, but they are not for the modified Platonist. Abstracta, for them, exist eternally dependent on God but eternally external to God’s being. Along the lines of the objection posed against conceptualists, we are left wondering why modified Platonists maintain (1b) and are not full blown Platonists if they allow for God’s sovereignty to be constrained by the truth-value of things external to God’s being.
If the views of Descartes, Augustine, Aquinas, Morris, Plantinga and Craig in this paper reflect the main attempts to justify (1a) and (1b), I have argued that they have not succeeded. To be sure most contemporary Christian theists of the highest ranks are willing to concede the failings of (1a), but they are not willing to do the same for (1b) on the big scale. That is, conceptualists would argue that modified Platonism is problematic but this fact would not entail ~(1b) and modified Platonists would argue that conceptualism is problematic but this fact would not entail ~(1b). For both sides, ~(1b) is not an option.[30] Is this because ~(1b) is logically incoherent? If it is, what is the argument for it? Nominalism and Platonism are logical possibilities. As to a defense of either of these two views, since I am concerned with defending a realist view of truth, I will concern myself with only with Platonism. So what is so wrong with Platonism and more specifically what is so wrong with Platonism for Christian theism? Plantinga’s answer is that “Platonism properly so-called has been a rare bird in our philosophical tradition.”[31] Unfortunately consensus and unpopularity do not constitute an argument against Platonism. While Plantinga does not go on the attack against Platonism with objections in hand, such objections exist.

Objections to Platonism, the Bible and the doctrine of sovereignty
The question throughout this paper has been whether necessary truths (and any abstracta) depend on God either in the context of (1a) or (1b). As I have tried to show, contra (1a) and (1b), no argument has been presented to prove that truth necessarily is couched in either way. So against much Christian tradition, I have argued it is problematic to hold that abstracta have a de re dependence on God. That is, a Christian theist, or anyone for that matter, could take necessary truths as platonic.
This move to Platonism does not come without criticism. One charge against this move is that Platonism is allegedly incompatible with God’s sovereignty. In his defense of (1b) in Does God have a Nature Plantinga resounds Descartes’ concern about sovereignty when he writes:

According to Augustine, God created everything distinct from him; did he then create these things [necessary truths]? Presumably not; they have no beginning. Are they dependent on him? But how could a thing whose non-existence is impossible--the number 7, let's say, or the property of being a horse--depend upon anything for its existence? Does God (so to speak) just find them constituted the way they are? Must he simply put up with their being thus constituted? Are these things, their existence and their character, outside his control?[32]

Plantinga’s concerns are shared by most theists. But in what sense is God supposed to be sovereign? Plantinga offers the following account of sovereignty:
(a) he has created everything distinct from himself, (b) there is nothing upon which he depends for his existence and character, (c) everything distinct from him depends upon him, and (d) everything is within his control.[33]
(a) speaks of reality outside of God as created. (b) speaks of God’s essence and being as a se. (c) speaks of reality outside of God as ab alio. Thus (c) entails the counter-factual “If God did not exist no necessary existing thing would exist. (d) speaks of there being no states of affairs outside of God’s volition. Before engaging this philosophical account of sovereignty, we do well to affirm what the Bible says on this issue. After all, Christian theism is ultimately concerned with affirming what the Bible affirms about God. So does the Bible affirm (a)-(d)?
When we peruse the Bible it affirms God’s sovereignty but not per se in the grand manner presented in (a) through (d). We find that only (b) is unequivocally affirmed. When the focus of the Bible is humanity, (c) is affirmed as we see in Acts 17:28 when Luke speaks of God preserving “our being.” When the focus is humanity, (d) is also affirmed as in Romans 8:28 where Paul speaks of God’s sovereignty over the good of “those who are called according to His purpose.” There are no texts that unequivocally provide an exhaustive description of all reality and thus no texts that deny the aseity of other things (contra (b)). The closest the Bible comes to affirming (d) is Ephesians 1:11. Here Paul speaks of God working “all things (ta panta) after the counsel of His will.” However, even here the “all things” clearly is in reference to factors concerning the salvation of the elect (ref. Eph. 1:4) and not to the totality of all existence outside of God Himself. So a rejection of (1b) does not entail a rejection of biblical theism in so far as God’s sovereign is an issue.
Another charge against Platonism is its allege incompatible with creation ex nihilo. The incompatibility arises when aseity is understood in the tradition of Classical Theism described in this paper, i.e., to be a sui genris perfection of God.[34] However, the doctrine of aseity understood from a scriptural perspective is not per se incompatible with creation ex nihilo. In light of Scripture that affirms God’s eternality and uncreatedness (Exodus 3:14; Psalms 90:2; John 5:26; Acts 17:25l), there is reason to believe that God exists a se, but we have no proof texts that require us to believe only God exists a se. Moreover, as pointed out earlier, it is not at all clear that passages that reference God’s creation of “all things” or of the “heavens and the earth” have in mind necessary truths and abstracta in general: (e.g., Genesis 1:1; John 1:3a; Colossians 1:16; and 1 Corinthians 8:6).[35] Abstracta can be classified as uncreated things, as full blown Platonists do, and thus would not necessarily fall under “all things” of God’s creation. Thus there is nothing in Scripture per se that prevents us from taking necessary truths as uncreated things. Even conceptualists and modified Platonists like Moreland hold that some abstracta, in so far as God’s properties are concerned, like being omnipotent or being eternal, are not created properties.
But apart from those in the theological arena, are there objections to Platonism from those without a theological axe to grind? Well, while there is nothing self-contradictory about Platonism, there is one[36] particular epistemic defeater to Platonism that deserves attention independent of any concerns about God. According to the consensus among many contemporary philosophers, abstracta are inert. Accordingly, since abstracta are non-spatial and are not intentional by nature,[37] they can never by themselves enter into causal relations with anything, particularly to produce knowledge in us. Therefore, according to the objection, we can never have knowledge of necessary truths if they exist independently of God.[38] So while they could exist a se, they could not be known. Of course this objection fails to take into account that while abstracta are inert and cannot be known, their inertness is not per se an argument against them being true. If anything this objection shows, necessary truths would not be accessible to us as knowers. The objection counts against Platonism only if the following two conditions obtain: we have knowledge of necessary truths and there isn’t a means of accessing knowledge of necessary truths other than by considering them the thoughts of God. However, I deny the second condition. I suggest that while abstracta are by nature inert, an omnipotent God by some primitive act could cause abstracta, existing a se, to produce knowledge in us. In a sense then, theism is required for coming to know truths of this kind, though not required for their being truths of this kind. Hebrews 1:3 reads:

The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. (NIV)

Here the writer of Hebrews emphatically states that Christ “sustains all things” (or fevrwn te ta pavnta). The word fevrwn, in so far as “all things” is concerned, connotes the sense of “carrying it [viz., all things] along, of bearing it toward a goal.”[39] Thus the use of fevrwn speaks of Christ’s sustaining role as instrumental in a thing’s function or teleology, not in its existence. It is doubtful that the writer of Hebrews was preoccupied with abstracta by his reference to all things. Nevertheless, it is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that Christ’s role in bearing abstracta toward their goal has everything to do with making them known to the mind. Thus the theist who is concerned with grounding truth need not fear Platonism. His theism and epistemology can join hands but need not become the same hand.


Bernard Walker




[1] The term “realist” as I am using the term here refers to non-conventional notions of truth, where truth is not equivalent to what is stipulated by a community of human persons but is an account of how things really are independent of human conceivers.
[2] I am not attempting to undermine classical theism; my aim is directed at proponents of a tradition within Christian classical theism that adhere to the orthodoxy under discussion and are committed to the authority of the Bible.
[3] This is particularly the case when we consider Jesus’ claim that he is truth. Unless we are willing to give up the view that Jesus is eternal or is not truth in any sense of the word, truth cannot be created.
[4] I will return to the discussion of an eternal creation of abstracta when I address Thomas V. Morris’s view called absolute creation.
[5] Sixth Replies: CSM II, 293
[6] Sixth Replies: CSM II, 291-2.
[7] To Arnauld, 29 July 1648, K 236-237.
[8] May 27, 1630 to Mersenne CSMK 25
[9] One cannot help but notice the Kantian transcendentalism in Descartes.
[10] In fact, this glimpse into Descartes’ epistemic limitations is a bit surprising considering his cognitive aim in the Meditations that attempts to dismiss solipsism posed by the possibility of deception by an evil genius. In Meditation II, Descartes reasons that deception necessitates thinking (whether Descartes or just the deceiver himself). Thus he supposedly achieves his cognitive goal in Meditation II by arriving at indubitability via the cogito sum. However, this aim for an indubitability, that is not marred by solipsism, is a bit misplaced in the context of Descartes’ Replies and comments to Arnauld and Mersenne. As we saw in his correspondence with Arnauld and Mersenne, Descartes would have us believe the contrary, viz., that necessity de dicto and de re are not actual properties of things and propositions but are ways God structures our reality and consequently the way the human intellect comprehends things and propositions via God’s divine creative design. This disparity in Descartes’ thought is further noted in his defense of his ontological argument for the existence of God in Meditation V. There he writes: “From the fact that I cannot think of a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that a mountain with a valley exist anywhere, but simply that a mountain and a valley, whether they exist or not, are mutually inseparable. But from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God, and hence He really exists. It is not that my thoughts make it so, or imposes any necessity on any thing; on the contrary, it is the necessity of the thing itself….”

[11] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4-5.
[12] To be sure, Descartes does not suggest, for example, that 2 +2=5 could be true relative to the noetic structure of beings different from humans. Yet his view of truth logically entails this possibility. Rorty and other postmodernists would enjoy Descartes’ company on this note.
[13] Augustine, On Eighty-Three Different Questions, q. 46, 2, in De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, translated by P. V. Spade, 383.
[14] Augustine,De Ideis 2
[15] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 16, Article 7.
[16] Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate Q. 1, A.6 Respondeo.
[17] Alvin Plantinga, “How to Be an Anti-Realist,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 56 (1982), 70. In a less technical work, Norman Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks present a similar stance about God’s relationship to logic. They assert that “Logic comes from God….God is the author of all logic; logic flows from God.” See Come Let Us Reason: An Introduction To Logical Thinking (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1990), 17.

[18] Plantinga, 69-70.
[19] Ibid., 69.
[20] William Lane Craig and Paul Copan, Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker books, 2004).
[21] Ibid., 194.
[22] Ibid., 194.
[23] For those committed to some sort of physicalism or property dualism, the substance in this case would be the brain and the beliefs would be its properties.
[24] Plantinga, 70.
[25] While Plantinga does not go to battle against Platonism to rule it out as a viable competitor to conceptualism, theist William Lane Craig does. However, while Craig criticizes Platonism, the just of his attack centers around Platonism’s implausibility given the commitments he has to a traditional line running through classical Christian theism, viz., (1b). He holds that “The divine attribute of a se (from himself) is traditionally understood to be a unique perfection of God, the ens realissimum (ultimate reality). God alone exists self-sufficiently and independently of all things…” In short, theists like Craig affirm without argument that since God exists in the manner understood in the traditional sense stated, then it must be the case that God exists in the traditional sense stated. See William Lane Craig, Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration,173.
[26] Thomas Morris, “Absolute Creation,” in his Anselmian Explorations (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). 171.
[27] The argument developed here is made by Matthew Davidson in “A Demonstration Against Theistic Activism,” Religious Studies, 35 (1999): 277-290.
[28] J. P. Moreland, in JP Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 505.
[29] Ibid., 505
[30] While Craig is a conceptualist and Moreland is a modified Platonist, they both agree that “abstract objects should be thought of as in some way grounded in God.” See J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 507.
[31] Plantinga, “How to Be an Anti-Realist,” 68.
[32]Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1980), 4-5.
[33] Ibid., 78,79.
[34] This is the way William Craig describes the problem with Platonism and creation ex nihilo. He writes, “the metaphysical pluralism entailed by Platonism’s denial of creatio ex nihilo robs God of his aseity. The divine attribute of existing a se (from himself) is traditionally understood to be a unique perfection of God, the ens realissimum (ultimate reality).” The problem with Craig’s objection to Platonism here is that it is incompatible only with the view of aseity adopted by tradition within Classical Theism. Craig says nothing about whether this traditional view is entailed by Scripture. See Craig’s Creation Out Of Nothing, 173.

[35] The writer of Hebrews does not make it clear in what sense Christ sustains all things in 1:3. However, the context of this passage suggests “all things” is the created order.
[36] Craig points out two arguments against Platonism. One of them Craig refers to as the uniqueness objection. According to the objection, only the structural properties of natural numbers (the relationships numbers have to each other in terms of being first, second, third, forth, etc.) satisfy the basic axioms of arithmetic. Craig says, “any series of abstract objects exhibiting that ordinal structure satisfies the basic axioms of arithmetic. There does not seem to be anything metaphysically special about any of these sequences of abstract objects that would set one of them apart as the unique series of natural numbers. But if Platonism is true, there is a unique sequence of abstract objects that is the natural numbers. Therefore, Platonism is false.” Unless Craig is able to extrapolate this objection to all abstrata, his objection, if valid, holds only for mathematical abstracta. See Craig’s Creation Out Of Nothing, 171.
[37] At least modified Platonist do not take abstracta to be intentional.
[38] This is also an objection Thomas Morris holds against Platonism. Initially he admits that there is a symmetrical relation between the de re necessity of God and abstracta, such that (1) If there were no God, there would be no abstract objects and (2) If there were no abstract objects, there would be no God are both true. Yet, for Morris, while there is a logical dependence relationship running both ways between the antecedents and consequents of both propositions, causal dependency obtains only in (1). Morris’ reason for this claim is that abstracta are inert. See Thomas Morris, Anselmian Explorations, 164-165. William Craig is another theist who throws his hat into this discussion. He argues that since we have knowledge of mathematical truths and abstracta are inert, then Platonism is false. See Craig’s Creation Out Of Nothing, 171.
[39] Leon Morris, “Hebrews” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1981), 14.

DIVINE EPISTEMOLOGY OR DIVINE ONTOLOGY: DIVINE COMMANDS AND VALUES REVISITED

It is uncommon to come across literature in scholarly circles that gives attention to the divine metaethics, e.g., the Divine Command Theory (DCT). When the effort is made to address divine-based metaethical claims, the entire project is couched at best in an air of apologetics or at worst in ridicule. Many assume that Plato put the last nail in the coffin for divine based metaethics when he introduced a dilemma for its proponents in the Euthyphro. Hence many moral theorists ignore divine-based metaethical claims altogether or, if they are sympathetic to them, try, in a painstaking way, to respond to the Socratic dilemma. The project of this paper will not continue this confused obeisance to Plato. I will neither ignore divine metaethical claims as illegitimate for metaethical concerns nor try to show how one can solve the Socratic dilemma. My aim is short: I intend to show that Plato set us in the wrong direction about how we are to view divine based metaethics. I take it that Plato and other theorists who try to bury or ignore divine-based metaethics were and are misguided. As such I aim to show that there is no dilemma for divine based theists to solve. I will show this by arguing that divine metaethics should be grounded epistemically, not ontological.

Broadly speaking, metaethics is concerned with the meaning and source of ethical terms like right, wrong, good and bad. A theistic approach to metaethics argues that God somehow grounds ethics. On this view, God is the basis of moral rightness and wrongness and/or that He is the basis of moral value. Let us call the thesis that ethics depends on God, the Divine Metaethics (DM) thesis.
Opponents to the DM thesis have maintained that such a relationship entails a dilemma. This dilemma has its origin in Plato's Euthyphro, where Socrates asks Euthyphro, "For consider: is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy? Or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?"[1] Accordingly, either way Socrates' question is answered precludes any hope that a grounding relationship exists between God and ethics. Generally the dilemma is described as follows:
a)If the theist answers that the relationship obtains in so far as the source and meaning of morally right/wrong actions and moral goodness/badness is God, then ethics would be arbitrary.
b)If the theist answers that the relationship obtains in so far as God informs us of the source and meaning of morally right/wrong and moral goodness/badness via his decrees, then God is redundant.
Let us call the above dilemma the DM dilemma.[2] Supposedly the dilemma follows given the theist's commitment to the antecedent of either (a) or (b). Taking the offensive, the critics claim that the consequent of (a) and (b) are unacceptable.

Considering the First Horn
The first horn of the DM dilemma is an ontological assertion about what ethics is in so far as God is its source (in virtue God’s will or nature). Accordingly, actions and values are morally right/wrong and good/bad solely because God wills them to be so or because they are grounded in his being. It is interesting the claim that God is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the objective moral realm can be found in the works of both theists and non-theists alike. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, claimed that if there is no God there can be only descriptive facts in the world, no normative facts.[3] The contemporary atheist Kai Nielsen remarks:
Perhaps there are human purposes, purposes to be found in life, and we can and do have them even in a Godless world, but without God there can be no one overarching purpose, no one basic scheme of human existence….[4]
Representing the contemporary theist perspective, William Lane Craig similarly remarks that “if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is a Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted.”[5]

First Interpretation of the First Horn
As stated, theists who would hold the first horn may claim that God's will somehow structures certain types of actions and things, in their very natures, to be morally constituted, such that there are objectively right or wrong actions and morally good or bad things. That some actions and things are morally constituted is as much a part of the furniture of the universe as physical properties and objects are part of the universe. How the universe acquired these non-natural, objective moral features is solely due to God.[6]
If God has this relationship to metaethics, proponents of the DM dilemma charge, then what counts as "moral" under the description of the first horn is a contingent, non-cognitive and capricious affair. It just so happens that in the actual world, certain actions (e.g., rape) are morally wrong and certain things (e.g., persons) have value. In other logically possible worlds they might not have a normative status at all. These are possible worlds where God does not will that they have any normative status. Accordingly, critics claim, if such were the case, God could have willed in the actual world that acts of coveting thy neighbor's wife have the property of being moral as opposed to having the property of being immoral.[7] Since God's will is the sole arbitrator for deciding which state of affairs obtains in the actual world, God can have no reasons for willing either way he does. In some logically possible world, instances of "coveting thy neighbor's wife" are moral because God in some mysterious sort of way placed "moralness" on them there. Thus the result of relating God to ethics according to this first interpretation of the first horn is undesirable for the theist.
Now a theist could object to the critic's charge of arbitrariness. She could argue that as far as actions are concerned, God would not will or command that infidelity be morally permissible because he is a loving God. Here God's will is constrained by God’s loving, benevolent nature. Thus actions are not arbitrarily morally right or wrong; they are right or wrong because they are willed, forbidden or commanded by a benevolent God. William Craig holds that our moral duties are “determined by the commands, not merely of a supreme potentate, but of a just and loving God. God is essentially compassionate, fair, kind, impartial and so forth, and His commandments are reflections of His own character.”[8] In short, moral decrees derive from God’s loving character. The theist makes this move in order to establish an objective, non-arbitrary basis for ethics and to ensure that the status of moral judgments is not determined independently of and above the sovereignty of God. However, this move does not adequately respond to the DM dilemma for the following reason. By admitting that God's will is constrained by His benevolent nature, the theist would also be admitting that actions are genuinely morally right or wrong, independently of God. After all, why would a theist object to God willing that infidelity be morally right unless she understood that God is also constrained by a standard of what could be classified as morally right and wrong? Surely the proponent of DM has a response. She will proclaim that God is “benevolence” or “goodness itself.” A noted proponent of this view, Greg Bahnsen, provides us with the following clear description of it:
Certain behavior is good because God approves of it, and God approves of it because it is the creaturely expression of His holiness -- in other words, it is good. To be good is to be like God, and we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of it. The important point is that good is what God approves and cannot be ascertained independent of Him.[9]
This proclamation simply begs the question as to what goodness is. What is good is replaced by what God approves, which in turn is replaced by what is good.
To highlight the circularity of this view another way, consider what its proponents consider to be the basis of rightness and wrongness, viz., what a benevolent God wills. But we can ask what they means when they say God is benevolent? The obvious response for them to give is that God is benevolent because he always does what is right. With this reply in hand, we should now see the DM proponents’ circular logic. As we saw earlier, they equate “what is right” with “what God wills.” So to say God is benevolent is to say God does what he wills. If we are looking at what God does to discern his benevolence, then short of admitting to an independent standard of benevolence, theists like Bahnsen must say that benevolence is whatever God does or wills.
Equally problematic is Bahnsen’s claim that “we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of it.” This is a rather extreme epistemic claim about axiology. It entails that short of God’s revelation, no one can discern what constitutes good behavior. Does this mean that all non-Christians are hopelessly lost as to what goes by the name good behavior? It surely seems so. Of course Bahnsen would reply that his reference to revelation includes general revelation, which is available to all. But this won’t work, for how does the non-Christian know what behavior God approves given his exposure just to general revelation? Is God’s moral approval known by reflecting on creation? This is a highly dubious claim and it suggests that special revelation is superfluous. After all, why seek God’s 10 Commandments in the book of Exodus when they are accessible from nature? Perhaps rather the non-Christian’s recognition of God’s approval is known by intuition? But like the former claim about God’s general revelation, intuition has its own set of problems.
It is no compromise of God’s glory to hold that his benevolence is measured by his actions, which in turn are measured by an independent standard of benevolence. Theists like Bahnsen make the common mistake of confusing what God makes to be true and what God knows to be true. Consider the following analogy from the benevolent parent example. A benevolent parent would command her child “do not touch the stove” because she cares for her child. If the child asks, “why should I not touch the stove,” the parent could simply say, “because I said so.” Of course, the parent does not mean that her command is capricious. The prescriptive “because” here does not refer to the act of touching the stove but to the act of obedience. As things turn out, there are reasons why the child should not touch the stove (e.g., physical pain and damage to the child’s body). So the parent could say the command to not touch the stove is also obligatory because the act of touching the stove is detrimental to her child. Thus the parent’s command is not arbitrary. So the reason why touching the stove is wrong[10] has nothing to do with the benevolent character of the parent. Whether the parent gives the command or not, the act of touching the stove is wrong in virtue of the effects that follow for the one who touches it. This story simply shows that benevolent parents would never command their children to do what they already know to be wrong. By analogy it illustrates two points about God’s commands. First, it shows that certain actions are wrong or right independently of God’s command to do or not to do them. The fact that God commands us not to do certain things is because he knows that they are immoral and as a benevolent being, could not command that we act to inflict harm to our self or others. However, God commanding in this benevolent way in no way leads to or is identical to the ontological assertion that God constitutes moral states of affairs.
Secondly the story notes the distinction between some action being wrong and some wrong action being prohibited. Actions that are prohibited merely exact obedience whether or not performing them entails doing something wrong. A child who disobeys her parent’s prohibition to eat food for a week is actually doing what is right although she acts from disobedience. Thus disobedience is not intrinsically wrong, particularly when starvation is a threat. However, when an action is neither right nor wrong, to fail to do it can be indirectly wrong if it is done out of disrespect. This is an important point to mention since the Bible is filled with commands from God to do things that are neither morally right nor wrong in themselves (e.g., like the command or prohibition against eating meat mixed with milk or the command to follow the copious dietary laws) and commands to do or refrain from doing things that are right or wrong in themselves (e.g., like do not rape or murder).
Not withstanding definitive problems of what makes actions right/wrong and how we come to know that actions are either right or wrong, DM proponents also have problems defending their version of axiology. Theists of this sort have traditionally held that God is the source of values. As the "source" of values, God is intrinsically valuable and anything reflecting God's image is likewise valuable. In this "platonic" way, God represents the eternal, maximum Good itself, and anything participating in His nature in any degree likewise has value, though to a lesser degree. For example, theists hold that humans have value and the basis for this claim is the presence of the Imago Dei in human nature. Accordingly, human nature is qualitatively similar to the divine nature. This can be taken to mean that humans are valuable because of their possession of, or potential for, various forms of rationality that God possesses, viz., self-determination, moral reflection, social discourse and personal preferences.[11] God's role in metaethics then is twofold: (1) He functions as a maximum, objective standard of value and (2) He creates humans who reflect this intrinsic value and who are the objects of moral judgments. I do not dispute these two claims; however, I do not think that talk of "source" should be taken in a robust way such that God plays a major, necessary role in value production. Those who take this robust approach towards God as the source of value, generally claim that God is a necessary condition for value.[12] Here things in the universe have value only if God exists. Championing this position, theist J. P. Moreland writes:
On an evolutionary secular scenario,.. [human] beings are nothing special. The universe came from a Big Bang. It evolved to us through a blind process of chance and necessity. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about human beings in terms of having moral non-natural properties. The same process that coughed up humans beings coughed up amoebas; there is nothing special about being human. The view that being human is special is guilty of specie-ism-an unjustifiable bias toward one’s own species….There is no point to history[13]
This theistic driven axiology also finds support in the work of William Craig. For Craig, God is the standard of value, where nothing else could be that standard. Thus without God, or where naturalism obtains, we would live in a world without value where nihilism reigns. As Craig notes:
The question might be pressed as to why God’s nature should be taken to be definitive of goodness. But, unless we are nihilists, we have to recognize some ultimate standard of value, and God seems to be the least arbitrary stopping point….[because] God is a being worthy of worship.[14]
I reject this robust axiological claim for two reasons. First, Moreland and Craig fail to explain why valuable things in this world require a transcendent foundation. Surely naturalists would hold that all things are constituted by randomly organized molecules but would not be required to hold that they are identical to them. On naturalists’ and theists’ accounts, rationality is the content of human value. Naturalists and theists differ primarily[15] over the mechanism responsible for the rationality. Thus upon reflection, we see that humans are not valuable per se because of the mechanisms responsible for their possession of value; rather humans are valuable because they possess value. Thus it can be asked, what difference does it make what kind of causal factor(s) are responsible for producing rationality? Whether God or naturalistic evolution is responsible for our having rationality, it does not matter. The fact is we have rationality. If there is no God, then naturalistic evolution perhaps is the only alternative to account for our rationality. It would be ad hoc for a theist to admit that humans are valuable in light of their rationality but then to deny this claim if it turns out that rationality were the result of blind Darwinian forces. Thus theists like Moreland and Craig confuse the causes of value with our being valuable.
But what about value simpliciter? Craig specifically addressed this issue and it is unclear what Craig means by standard. The word “standard” in the context of determining value asks for a definition of value as Craig correctly points out. This much is clear, but why is a definition of goodness difficult to come by? If God is required to define goodness, how is it that God does so? If God did not exist, is it even conceivable that a toothache is good and drinking clean water to stay alive a bad thing? But suppose God is definitive of goodness, we can always ask the question, “Why is God definitive of goodness?” Craig’s answer is that “God is a being worthy of worship.” But this answer simply places us back where we started since God would be worthy of worship because in part he is good. Should we offer higher-order definitive explanations of goodness (as in this last question), or should we accept goodness as something earthly or non-supernatural? In this latter case, we could simply take goodness as some unanalyzable non-natural property that certain actions and things possess or we could take goodness as some analyzable property of actions (e.g., psychological and physical pleasure) that is teleologically oriented towards some enity’s well-being. In either case, an assent to God is not required.
Now Craig, Moreland and other DM proponents would object that no argument has been offered for my last claim. And on this note, I am not convinced that an argument needs to be given. Surely to ask whether feeding the poor is good or not, is an ill-placed question. What makes such actions good is that they promote a human’s well-being. What is not ill-placed is the question why God is needed to affirm these types of actions as good. To retreat to the position that human well-being ought to be pursued because they are made in God’s image is another instance of confusing the cause of some thing’s value with its being valuable. Surely the issue of goodness simpliciter is the latter concern.

Second Interpretation of the First Horn
For other theists, the claim may be that actions are either "morally right" or "morally wrong" and things "morally good" or "morally bad" because of how God feels about them and not because of any objective properties within them. For example, to say that God likes or prefers X type of actions is to say X type actions are morally right and to say that God hates or does not prefer X type of actions is to say X type of actions are morally wrong. Thus God decrees actions to be either moral or immoral based on how he feels about them. Unfortunately then, if it is God who decrees certain actions to be either moral or immoral, based simply on the pleasure or pain state they place him in, then the basis of morality is non-cognitive and capricious. That is, if God says "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," He can have no prior reason for willing this act as immoral other than that this type of act places Him in a certain unpleasant emotive state or because He simply dislikes it. Moreover again, such a scenario equally leaves open the counterfactual “If God willed that adultery be permissible, then it would be permissible.” Such a decree would stem from God’s affinity to adulterous behavior. As any critic of the DM thesis would point out, this is not an entailment from the first horn the DM theorists would want to accept.
As I have tried to show, theists have failed to show how ethics depends on God, such that ethics is not arbitrary, non-cognitive or redundant. Until theists provide a theistic basis for ethics without these problems, the criticism of the DM dilemma stands. Theists have long tried to solve the DM dilemma, particularly from the point of view of the Divine Command Theory.[16]

Considering the Second Horn
Perhaps the second horn of the dilemma is a better option to ground ethics in God for the theist. This is so because both interpretations of the first horn allow for the absurdity of God's will-being non-cognitive, unlimited and the sole, arbitrary foundation of ethical actions and values. Again, the second horn asserts that actions and things are morally constituted for reasons independent of God's handiwork. Here God is related to ethics in that He knows what types of actions are morally right or morally wrong and what things are morally good or morally bad. Thus His decrees for moral agents express what He already knows to be true about ethics and the moral order. Unfortunately, critics claim, this entails that the second horn of the dilemma offers little hope for the theist as well. For even if it is true that God's decrees correctly describe what is morally right/wrong and what is morally good/bad, given the problems in (a), God cannot be the basis for what such terms mean or for what they are. The charge then is that God occupies a redundant position in a theist's metaethical theory. Accordingly, God knows that there are reasons for why certain actions are morally right/wrong and why some things have value and others do not. His decrees for us simply reflect this knowledge. These reasons, then, become the foundation of ethics and God simply plays a secondary role as a divine ethical informer.
Of course accepting the second horn requires that the theist answers two questions: How can there be reasons that ground our ethical claims about moral rightness, moral wrongness, moral goodness and moral badness without God? And how is God not redundant in an ethically autonomous world?

The Theist’s Triumphal Acceptance of the Second Horn
In answering these questions, I argue for the acceptance of the second horn. Let’s consider the first question. Our option for grounding ethics in the second horn does not lead to ethical nihilism and skepticism. For example, one can take a kantian view and claim that child abuse and rape are wrong, whether God exists or not, simply because such acts violate the autonomy of their victims. Or one can appeal to empirical considerations and take a utilitarian ethical view. Here such actions as child abuse and rape are wrong, whether God exists or not, because of the amount of disutility (in terms of pain or psychological damage) such acts produce. The ethical judgments or truths corresponding to such actions (e.g., it is wrong to cause pain for pleasure sake or it is wrong to restrict a person’s autonomy irrespective of the person’s goodwill) are necessarily true are not made true by God, albeit they are platonic.
Some theists argue that platonic truths that exist a se are hard to comprehend. This is the position that J.P. Moreland and William L. Craig take.
It is difficult…even to comprehend this view [non-theistic ethics]. What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value justice just exists? It is hard to know what to make of this….it is bewildering when in the absence of any people, justice itself exists….it is hard to know what it is for a moral value to exist as a mere abstraction.[17]
This quote is a bit surprising coming from these theists, particularly Moreland who has written in defense of universals.[18] At least for Craig, he holds that abstracta do exist independently of the concrete particulars that they instantiate.[19] A consequence of this claim is that an abstractum like the number 2 exists independently of two apples. Whether abstracta are grounded in God or not is not the issue here since Moreland and Craig’s above objection concerns the comprehension of abtracta in the absence of concrete particulars. In fact, given Moreland’s commitment to modified platonism, he should not find it hard to comprehend abstrata in abstration. Nevertheless, Moreland and Craig’s text asks how can there be justice without just people? Questions like this have the potential of leading to a stalemate. Is it any more difficult to affirm the necessity of “It is wrong to arbitrarily torture persons” even before God created humans? At any rate, able ethicists have historically been able to comprehend ethics either in part or in whole without ethics being couched in theistic metaphysics. They have argued from secular considerations to justify the ethical nature of situations also maintained belief in God.[20]
As for the second question, there is ambiguity in the charge that an acceptance of the second horn entails a redundant relationship between God and ethics. According to the Oxford dictionary, for example, redundant is defined as "no longer needed or useful; superfluous; able to be omitted without loss of meaning or function." Theists who take the second horn admit that God is not strictly needed to ground ethics. So God is redundant in this sense but God is not redundant if redundant is taken to mean superfluous. All the theist needs to do is show how the following claims are compatible:
i. Ethical judgments can be true independent of God’s will.
ii. For any ethical judgment that is true independent of God’s will, God does in fact know to be true.
iii. Given the truth of (i) and (ii), God does not occupy a superfluous relationship to ethics.

There are several ways the theist can do so.
According to the first way, an ethics couched in theism (according to the second horn in a non-grounding sort of way) is more robust than an ethics couched in naturalism for epistemic reasons. God can play an occasional, but important, role in our discernment of what is ethically right/wrong and ethically good/bad. For example, when the theist asserts an ethical judgment of the form x is ethically wrong, she is actually asserting truth conditions for knowing that x is wrong. In other words, our belief that x is ethically wrong can be[21] justified if God condemns x and similarly our belief that x is ethically right can be justified if God wills x. Being omniscient and benevolent, God knows all possible states of affairs, including all possible ethical states of affairs. Such an account of divine commands or divine will is not open to the attack of the DM dilemma since actions are not ethically right or wrong because of God's commands or will. They are ethically right or wrong for other reasons that say a kantian or utilitarian can offer; however, God's benevolence and omniscience provide a basis for why we should follow his commands.[22] In either instance, it is not God acting as the determining cause of x's ethical status, but God acting as the objective discerner of x's ethical status in light of His omniscience and benevolence. We need not know whether God’s commands are continuous with deontology, utilitarianism or natural law theory. It is enough for us to know that there are ethical and unethical acts and that an omniscient being would necessarily know which acts were of those kind.
The limitation of such a theory is its redundancy as warrant for a certain set of ethical beliefs of which I shall now talk about. These beliefs concern certain states of affairs that do not beg for justification. Mere introspection tells us that these beliefs are ethically self-justifying. They are properly basic ethical beliefs. One such properly basic belief is the belief that murder is wrong, persons have intrinsic value or the belief that harming innocent infants by inflicting them with pain is wrong.[23] We do not need to appeal to God to justify our holding these beliefs, in so far as these beliefs describe certain normative states of affairs. If what I say here sounds suspect, that there are properly basic ethical beliefs, then theists who assert the strong assumption that actions are ethical/unethical or that things are valuable only if God exists must remain skeptical about all ethical beliefs. Put another way, if the existence of God is necessary for discerning the ethical status of all beliefs qua objectively ethical, then skepticism rules if it were not the case that God was in the ethical discerning business. In a counterfactual sort of way, this entails that if God did not assert any moral decrees concerning murder, adultery and the like, necessarily we would never be within our epistemic rights to assert that such acts or any act are immoral independent of His discernment.
At worst, God's will would only be consistent with the ethical status of properly basic ethical beliefs and acts, though uninformative. However, when it comes to holding beliefs concerning the ethical status of polemic issues like abortion, the death penalty and euthanasia, God's objective discernment would be crucial. It is here that the DCT has its appeal. Since we are fallible, at times unconsciously bias and sometimes lack pertinent information and the virtuous character to make right, objective ethical judgments, we often disagree about what actions are right and what actions are wrong. Moreover, as many theists hold, a human's ability for ethical discernment is also infected by adamic depravity. Looking to what an omniscient and benevolent God knows and wills would be crucial in such circumstances. Short of hermeneutical problems with the revealed text, DM is not open to this problem.
A second way ethics is more robust, if couched in theism than an ethics couched in naturalism, is that while God is not necessary for ethics, God qua creator and benevolent Lord provides a qualitatively greater motivation to act morally than in a world without God. So, for example, while ethics can exist in a purely naturalistic world or what George Mavrodes calls a Russellian world,[24] ethics in a theistic world would prompt greater motivation to be ethical, e.g., to respond in gratitude to a loving God. Plato notes this motivational element in the Apology. He quotes Socrates as saying: "Men of Athens, I respect and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you….For know that the god commands me to do this, and I believe that no greater good ever came to pass in the city than my service to the god."[25]
Finally ethics couched in theism is more robust than ethics couched in naturalism even when the issue of value is the concern. As I argued earlier, humans in a Russellian world have value (viz., in light of their sentience, self-determination and rationality); however, they would be qualitatively more valuable in a theistic world since we are seen as created by an ethical and loving God who calls us to be ethical and loving - we aren't just the random effect of an amoral and purposeless world.[26]
Final Remarks to the Secular Moralist
It has not escaped my notice that the approach to divine metaethics I have presented or any other approach to divine metaethics has to face the objection that its range of normative applicability does not go beyond the bounds of those who believe in God. A similar hermeneutical objection holds that even if the existence of God is granted, the particular God and the particular decrees we are obligated to follow is an open question. Both objections should be taken seriously, but not any more seriously than issues of objectivity for any other metaethical theory. Talk of what rightness and wrongness mean, what acts are right or wrong and what has value are ipso facto relative to a given metaethical theory. For example, a consequentialist can deny any moral obligation to do or not do x according to the ground rules a deontologist provides and a Nazi can deny that he is acting immoral by how he views and treats non-Aryans, relative to his own ontology and conception of rationality. I do not intend to espouse a relativism about ethics, far from it. My point is simply to show that the objectivity and obligatoriness of a metaethical theory should not be called into question simply on the basis of actual or possible dissenters of the theory. Unlike any other philosophical enquiry taken to be objective, metaethical theories are often asked to be objective in the sense that their truth conduciveness entails necessarily that they compel everyone to believe that they explain how things really ought to be. But I take this to be a mistake. If my approach to DM is a defensible metaethical theory, our obligation to comply with it follows even if we don't believe it. The truth of a theory does not rest on its universal acceptance. When did any theory require this condition?

BERNARD WALKER
[1]Plato, Euthyphro 10a in Greek Philosophy: Thales To Aristotle, trans. R. E. Allen (The Free Press: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889).
[2]This dilemma is broader than the one against the Divine Command theory; here the focus is on moral values and not just on moral rightness and moral wrongness.
[3]Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948).
[4] Kai Nielsen, “Ethics Without Religion,” in Introduction To Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. Louis Pojman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 556.
[5]William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 67.

[6]On this view, it is not enough to say that God describes certain actions and things to be morally constituted a certain way. This would suggest that actions and things are not objectively morally constituted. For actions and things to be morally constituted, they must genuinely have moral features within them. This claim is true by definition; nothing can be morally constituted unless there is something about it that makes it that way. This is analogous to saying a red pencil is red because it really has the property "redness" in it. For moral realists, these moral features of actions and things are not reducible to descriptive physical features of the universe. See George Mavrodes, "Religion and the Queerness of Morality," in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, edited by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 213-226.
[7]A well-known proponent of this view is William of Occam. According to Occam: "The hatred of God, theft, adultery, and actions similar to these actions according to common law, may have an evil quality annexed, in so far as they are done by a divine command to perform the opposite act. But as far as the seer being in the actions is concerned, they can be performed by God without any evil condition annexed; and they can even be performed meritoriously by an earthly pilgrim if they should come under divine precepts, just as now the opposite of these in fact fall under the divine command." See Guillelmus de Occam, Super 4 libros sententiarum, bk. II, qu. 19, O, in Vol. IV of his Opera plurima (Lyon, 1494-6; reimpression enfac-simile, Farnborough, Hants, England: Gregg Press, 1962).

[8]See William Lane Craig, Does God Exist?: The Craig-Flew Debate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 172-173. See also Robert Merrihew Adams, "Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again" Journal of Religious Ethics 7 (Spring 1979): 66-79.
[9] Let us restate Bahnsen’s claims by replacing the word “it” with what he identifies as “good behavior:” “Certain behavior is good because God approves of good behavior, and God approves of good behavior because good behavior is the creaturely expression of His holiness -- in other words, good behavior is good. To be good is to be like God, and we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of good behavior. The important point is that good is what God approves and cannot be ascertained independent of Him.” If one thing is clear from Bahnsen’s words it is that God approves of good behavior, but we are left wondering what defines behavior as good. We can make the circularity in Bahnsen’s claim more obvious by connecting other identity claims he makes and get something like the following: good behavior = what God approves = the creaturely expression of God’s holiness=good. See Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, (New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. 1977), 284.
[10] The term wrong is being used in a prudent sense, but the analogy holds for ethical situations as well.
[11]In chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, the Bible says that God created humans in His image. A being of God's nature cannot lack significance and value, and if we are made in His image we likewise have value. For a biblical discussion of this issue, see Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 442-450. For a theological and philosophical discussion of this issue, see Keith Yandell, Christianity and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, Co., 1984), 260-261.
[12]Craig, Reasonable Faith, 57-72.
[13] J. P. Moreland and Kai Niesen, Does God Exist? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), 112.
[14] Craig, Does God Exist?: The Craig-Flew Debate, 173.
[15]It must be granted that causal factors in the existence of value are not irrelevant, for surely a splash of paint on canvas is valuable merely because of its arrangement. However, it is more valuable when the arrangement is the result of a designer rather than chance.
[16]For contemporary defenses of the DCT see Robert M. Adams, "Divine Command Ethics as Necessary A posteriori," in Divine Commands and Morality, edited by Paul Helm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 109-119; Richard G. Swinburne, "Duty and The Will of God," in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. IV, No.2 (1974); and Philip L. Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).


[17] J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2003), 492.
[18] J.P. Moreland, Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
[19] See chapter 10 of Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview.
[20] This is certainly the case for Immanuel Kant and John S. Mill. Recent ethicists who champion ethical realism without theism are not few. See, Richard Boyd, “How To Be A Moral Realist” in S. Darwall, A. Gibbard and P. Railton (eds.), Moral Discourse and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[21]It is important to notice my use of the phrase "can be justified" when talking about the ethical status of some act. My claim here is that God can be a sufficient condition for discerning the ethical status of an act, though He need not be nor ever is a necessary condition for discerning the ethical status of all acts. The playing field is large and we can appeal to other considerations that are equally sufficient for discerning the ethical status of some act, e.g., utility, logical consistency and natural teleology of the entities involved.
[22]Robert Merrihew Adams makes a point similar to this when he defends divine commands for their motivation input: God is supremely knowledgeable and wise--he is omniscient, after all; and that is very important motivationally. It makes a difference if you think of commands as coming from someone who completely understands both us and our situation." See Adams in "Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation," Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 272.
[23] The proposition “It is wrong to boil innocent infants in hot oil” isn't a basic belief. The wrongfulness of this proposition is a contingent matter. It depends on whether the infants are constituted in such a way that harm results from the boiling oil. There is a possible world where the boiling point of oil is much lower and where boiling infants in hot oil might be a standard way to give them a bath.
[24] Mavrodes’ description of a Rusellian world comes from Bertrand Russell’s description of a world without God in his 1903 essay, A Free Man’s Worship. In such a world the following are true: a)Minds and mentality are produced accidentally by blind evolutionary forces and b)human life ends at the grave. See George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality in Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, eds. R. Audi and W. Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
[25] Plato, The Apology 29d-30a, ed. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
[26] I am grateful to Harry Gensler for his helpful comments on this paragraph.