International Journalfor Phih~sophy~[Religion 36:8 I - 103, 1994. © 1994 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Omnipotence and the transfer of power WALTER GLANNON Department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

1. Introduction

On an intuitive level, the idea of omnipotence suggests that a being such as God has unrestricted ability to do anything whatsoever. This idea is captured in the following definition: (1) A being X is omnipotent if and only if X has unrestricted ability to do all things. Without some qualifications concerning this ability, however, (1) is likely to issue in unpalatable consequences. For the definition implies that an omnipotent being could do such things as square circles or otherwise render possible what is logically impossible. Exercised by this problem, Aquinas offered an account of omnipotence which seemed to avoid the difficulties occasioned by the formulation in (1) above. He reasoned thus: It is incompatible with the meaning of the absolutely possible that anything involving the contradiction of simultaneously being and not being should fall under divine omnipotence. Such a contradiction is not subject to it, not from any impotence in God, but because it simply does not have the nature of being feasible or possible. Whatever does not involve a contradiction is that realm of the possible with respect to which God is called omnipotent. Here Aquinas effectively asserts that God can do whatever is consistent with broadly logical possibility, or the law of non-contradiction. That is, God cannot alter the fact that, for all propositions p, it cannot be the case that both p and not-p. This line of reasoning recommends that we reformulate (1) as: (2) A being X is omnipotent if and only if X can do whatever is logically possible. There is a class of paradoxes concerning omnipotence, though, which cannot be resolved by appeal to principles that rely exclusively on broadly logical

82 possibility. Included in this class are the idea that God can create truths which He cannot subsequently render false, that God can create a stone which He cannot subsequently lift, and that God can create a being He cannot subsequently control. Each of these puzzles involves the notion of God having an ability at one time which He does not have at a later time. But this notion seems to imply that, in Richard Swinburne's words, 'the omnipotence of a person at a certain time includes the ability to make himself no longer omnipotent'. 2 What makes this issue so perplexing is that most theologians and philosophers take omnipotence to be an enduring property, a property that God could not lose at any time that He exists. 3 And yet if God has the ability at an earlier time to make Himself no longer omnipotent at a later time, then God cannot be omnipotent. The very concept of omnipotence, then, appears to be incoherent. 4 I shall argue that omnipotence is indeed a coherent concept by relying on some resources to which few have appealed in the recent debate on this topic. My argument turns on several related theses, the core of which is that God is a timeless being, a being who is outside of time and to whom past, present, and future states of affairs (or propositions) are simultaneously present. 5 Qua timeless, God performs a timeless act of will in creating from all eternity. This act has effects in time. But the temporal effects of the timeless act of divine will are not, strictly speaking, identified with God, since neither He nor His will has any temporal location. Hence it is mistaken to maintain that God has the ability to act at one time in such a way as to render Himself unable to do certain things at later times. An additional feature of the view I am proposing is that the divine will is identical with the divine intellect. 6 The objects of God's action fall into the same class as the objects of God's knowledge. Given this identity, if God knows from the standpoint of eternity that He timelessly performs a creative act of will, and that this act of will entails temporal effects that He cannot alter, then it follows that God knows from the standpoint of eternity that He lacks the ability to do anything in time to alter such effects. Yet insofar as God knows of this entailment relation in acting from eternity, that He cannot alter the temporal effects of His timeless act does not thereby undermine His omnipotence. I call this the Transfer of Power Principle (TPP), a principle that derives its force from construing omnipotence as timeless power over states of affairs rather than as temporal ability to bring about states of affairs. 7 Unlike the latter view, which is exclusively metaphysical to the extent that it is concerned only with divine will, power over states of affairs involves both metaphysical and epistemic aspects. The epistemic aspect is decisive in preserving the coherence of omnipotence because it allows us to say that God, in virtue of His intellect, oversees the entailment relation holding between His timeless act and its temporal effects. It is the

83 failure of the standard analyses of omnipotence to include the epistemic aspect of God's nature and their interpretation of God's mode of existence as temporal rather than atemporal which ultimately explain why such analyses do not adequately resolve the paradoxes of omnipotence. The paradoxes are resolved by showing that God, in virtue of His will and intellect, at once has and exercises power over all states of affairs from the standpoint of eternity.

2. Divine power We can define God's power over states of affairs as follows. For every state of affairs which obtains or might have obtained in time, God either allows that state of affairs to obtain or prevents it from obtaining. God's exercise of this power consists in either allowing or preventing states of affairs in time by acting as well as by knowing what He allows or prevents from all eternity. Thus a timeless God's power over what occurs in time involves a metaphysical, or freedom-relevant, aspect, and an epistemic, or knowledge-relevant aspect. The metaphysical aspect includes what God does outside of time and what God allows to obtain or prevents from obtaining in time, both of which figure in the content of the epistemic aspect. And insofar as God's power over states of affairs is a function of what He wills from all eternity, there is no distinction between His having and exercising this power. At creation, God performs a free act of will and thereby allows or prevents the obtaining of states of affairs in time. From the standpoint of eternity, then, God's power over alternative states of affairs is to be understood disjunctively. Once He creates, however, that one or the other disjunct, or state of affairs, obtains in time is an unalterable fact for God, on the assumption that God is outside of and thus unable to act in time. Moreover, insofar as the divine will is identical with the divine intellect, God freely wills and knows from eternity that He cannot alter the temporal effects of His timeless act. But inability to do things in time is no defect in power for a being who is timeless, precisely because He both wills and knows that certain temporal facts are unalterable for Him from the standpoint of eternity. God's power therefore transfers from what He does and knows timelessly to what He allows or prevents in time. Why God allows some states of affairs to obtain but prevents others from obtaining can be explained, I submit, in terms of God's overall purpose in creating the actual world rather than some alternative possible world which, on balance, would not contain as much good as the actual world. God's allowing World War II to obtain while preventing nuclear World War III between the USA and the Soviet Union from obtaining in 1962 might be accounted for along this line of reasoning. Nevertheless, in virtue of His free

84 act of creation, it is open to God from the standpoint of eternity to prevent World War II and allow nuclear World War III. Insofar as God's creative act is free, and insofar as what He allows to occur or prevents from occurring in time proceeds from His free act, God's allowing or preventing is not something that proceeds from Him of necessity. Again, God's exercise of His power over states of affairs is to be understood disjunctively with respect to what He either allows or prevents. Thus construed, even if it were necessary that either He allows some state of affairs to obtain or prevents it from obtaining, it would not follow of necessity that He allows it to obtain. Nor would it follow of necessity that He prevents it from obtaining. For the necessity of the disjunction would not distribute to each of the disjuncts, on pain of committing a modal fallacy. God's power involves direct and indirect forms of agency. 8 Direct agency concerns God's timeless act of will at creation, while indirect agency concerns all of the temporal effects that proceed from His timeless act of will. The first form of agency pertains to what God does, the second to what God allows or prevents in virtue of what He does. Still, indirect agency is a genuine form of agency to the extent that, by acting from all eternity, God deliberately and purposefully allows or prevents the occurrence of events in time. To the extent that allowing and preventing constitute a form of agency, we can say quite plausibly that God not merely possesses but also at once exercises power over states of affairs by allowing or preventing them. I have maintained that the divine intellect is identical with the divine will. Since God's action and God's knowledge are one and the same, the objects of the divine will and intellect fall into the same class. But consider the moral evil of rape. If God knows from eternity that a rape occurs as a temporal effect of his timeless act of creative will, and God's intellect is identical with His will, then would it not follow that God wills the rape? Would this not, in a sense, make God the rapist? Generalizing, would this not make God the rapist of every rape and the doer of every evil deed? The identity of God's knowledge and will does not have this consequence, however. Recall that there are direct and indirect forms of divine agency. God knows both the object of His direct agency, His timeless creative act, and the objects of His indirect agency, the states of affairs which He allows as temporal effects of the creation. But from the fact that God knows that a rape occurs in time, it does not follow that He directly wills that rape, only that He indirectly wills it. That is, the rape is not something that God does from eternity but only something that He allows to occur in time as part of His overall purpose in creating the actual world. Accordingly, the class of objects of divine intellect and will must be divided into what corresponds to God's direct agency, on the one hand, and what corresponds to God's indirect agency, on the other.

85 Thus far, I have been proceeding on the assumption that God exists and acts timelessly, and that events occurring in time are to be understood as temporal effects of His timeless act of will in creating from all eternity. But there is a rival conception that understands God as existing and acting in time. Since my account of omnipotence hinges crucially on a conception of God as timeless, I must defend this conception against its rival.

3. Temporal and atemporal accounts As should be readily apparent from what I have said in the first two sections, I take God to be eternal in the sense of being timeless, as distinct from eternal in the sense of being everlasting. 9 An eternal God is everlasting, or sempiternal, to the extent that He exists without beginning or end at all times. By contrast, the mode of being of a timelessly eternal God is beyond or outside of time. ~° Furthermore, I take God to have atemporal duration, which means that His mode of existence encompasses past, present, and future states of affairs all simultaneously present to God? ~This conception has a rich pedigree, having been advanced or endorsed in various related forms by such philosophers as Descartes, Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, and Plotinus.~2 Its locus classicus is Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, wherein one finds the celebrated assertion 'eternity consists in the complete and total possession of unending life all at once'. ~3 As many have noted, one implication of atemporal duration is that, although God has knowledge of everything, He has foreknowledge of nothing. Aquinas, who endorses the Boethian thesis, understands God as eternal in the sense of being outside of time. By his lights, there is no succession in God; nor does God have any temporal location. J4 Still, that an eternal God exists outside of time does not mean that God lacks duration. Indeed, Aquinas holds that eternity is a measure of duration to the extent that it 'embraces all times'. 15 But if God does not exist in time, then His existence, will, and intellect cannot be measured in terms of successive states. Past, present, and future states of affairs are all simultaneously rather than sequentially present to God. Thus He has atemporal duration, from which it follows that there can be no change in God, who is immutable. ]6 Moreover, since there is no succession in God, there cannot be any distinction between the having and exercising of divine power. For such a distinction implies movement from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality. On the contrary, God is pure actuality and as such admits of no potentiality or incompleteness with respect to what He wills and knows, j7 It will be helpful here to defer to Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, who explicate eternity in terms of the atemporal duration that I sketched

86 roughly above, is Temporal duration is understood as succesion from the past which is no longer, to the present which is, to the future which is not yet, and therefore it never can be fully realized. By contrast, atemporal duration is fully realized duration. It encompasses past, present, and future as simultaneously and completely present to God. Still, to account for the relation between God's timeless act of will and the temporal effects of this act, we must posit both temporal and atemporal modes to God's existence. And in accordance with the notion of atemporal duration, each of these modes must be co-occurrent with the other. In their endeavor to devise a simultaneity relation holding in the divine intellect and will between eternal and temporal relata, Stump and Kretzmann propose the notion of ET-simultaneity (for eternal-temporal simultaneity), which they articulate as follows: If x and z are entities, they coexist if and only if there is some time during which both x and z exist. But if anything exists eternally, its existence, although infinitely extended, is fully realized, all present at once. Thus the entire life of any eternal entity is coexistent with any temporal entity at any time at which that temporal entity exists. From a temporal standpoint, the present is ET-simultaneous with the whole infinite extent of an eternal entity's life. From the standpoint of eternity, every time is present, cooccurrent with the whole of infinite atemporal duration) 9 ET-simultaneity permits one to say, for instance, that both the event of Richard Nixon's resigning his presidency on 9 August 1974 and Nixon's dying on 22 April 1994 are present to an eternal being such as God, who at once knows of these events because they occur to Him simultaneously rather than sequentially. This is intelligible despite the fact that these events are 'themselves neither eternal nor simultaneous'. 2° The simultaneity of the eternal and temporal to God has a distinctly Boethian resonance. Furthermore, it accords with Aquinas' contention that 'all that takes place in time is eternally present to G o d . . . because he eternally surveys all things as they are in their presentness'. 21 One might object that the doctrine of eternity is more germane to omniscience than to omnipotence, to what God knows rather than what God wills. But recall that what God knows falls into the same class as what God wills, owing to the identity of divine will and divine intellect, which makes omnipotence and omniscience intimately related divine attributes. This relation is reinforced by the idea of omnipotence as God's power over states of affairs, a power that is a function of metaphysical and epistemic aspects of His nature. As the name implies, the temporal (sempiternal) account of omnipotence envisages God as existing and acting in time and in all possible worlds. It defines God's power as a function of His relation to these worlds, understood as logically maximal consistent sets of states of affairs. 22 More specifi-

87 cally, according to Edward Wierenga there are two main features of the temporal account. 23 First, it takes God's activity to consist in strongly actualizing certain states of affairs at certain times. 24 Second, it involves the notion of an initial segment of a possible world. 25 In fact, this latter notion involves not one but two possible worlds that overlap and then diverge at a given time, with the initial segment consisting of the same states of affairs which the two worlds share in common, e6 The point seems to be that of conveying how God has the ability to cause a state of affairs S to obtain in a world W at a time T as well as the ability to cause a complementary state of affairs S* to obtain in a different world W' at T. The most elaborate analysis of the temporal version of omnipotence has been offered by Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso, who stipulate five conditions of adequacy for what they call 'maximal power' :27 (i) An analysis of maximal power should be stated in terms of an agent's power to actualize or bring about states of affairs. (ii) An omnipotent being should have the power to actualize a state of affairs only if there is a possible world where that state of affairs is actualized. (iii) Any adequate account of omnipotence must be related to a time. (iv) An omnipotent agent must act within the limitations of counterfactuals of freedom. 28 (v) To count as omnipotent, a being should have the maximal amount of power consistent with the first four conditions. I do not have the space to unpack all of these conditions or to explicate all of the technical details. Suffice it to say that the temporalist understands an omnipotent being as definable in the following way: (3) A being X is omnipotent if and only if X has the power to strongly actualize any state of affairs which it is logically possible to actualize in any possible world at any time. Significantly, God's maximal power does not consist in His strongly actualizing states of affairs at all times, but only in His strongly actualizing states of affairs at some times. Thus the temporalist distinguishes between having and exercising maximal power and claims further that having this power does not entail exercising it at all times. Anthony Kenny gives a more precise formulation of this view, asserting 'for a power to be a logically possible power, it is not necessary that every exercise of it should be coherently conceivable, but only that some exercise of it should be' .29 In the light of this, we can restate (3) as: (4) A being X is omnipotent if and only if X possesses a power some exercise of which does not as such involve any logical impossibility. How does the temporal account of omnipotence stand up to its atemporal rival? The idea that God exists and acts in time has many untoward implications for the extent of God's power. In addition, it is incompatible with most

88 of the other attributes traditionally ascribed to God, to wit: completeness, perfection, pure actuality, immutability, simplicity, and aseity. This is not to say that atemporal omnipotence can be adopted without any cost to the classical conception of God's nature. But the temporal picture exacts an even higher cost, thus recommending that we adopt the atemporal conception of God's power as a more tenable alternative. Consider now the temporalist's interpretation of omnipotence as God's power to strongly actualize states of affairs. This suggests that states of affairs exist as unactualized possibles prior to being actualized by God. In any case, it is unclear whether God's causing states of affairs to obtain is tantamount to creating them, or whether these abstract entities have an ontological status of their own apart from being actualized by God. But inasmuch as the temporalist endorses Alvin Plantinga's view that states of affairs and propositions are eternal and as such exist independently of God, albeit as unactualized, it seems to follow that the power of a God who exists and acts in time is indeed limited to merely actualizing what already exists nonactually. -~° This view threatens to impugn God's aseity and sovereignty, that is, His self-sufficiency and independence from everything. It also conflicts with the classical conception of God as the creator of all that is possible as well as actual, a creator a b a e t e r n o and ex nihilo. 31 Another respect in which the temporal account of omnipotence conflicts with the classical conception of God concems potentiality and actuality. Aquinas, for one, maintains that there can be no potentiality in God because He is pure actuality. 32 This does not mean that God is constantly performing individual acts, but rather that He simultaneously has and exercises control over all things from the standpoint of eternity in virtue of the identity of divine intellect and divine will. There is nothing incomplete in God; hence He is perfect in all respects. Furthermore, if God is perfect to the extent that He is purely actual, then there can be no transition from potentiality to actuality in Him. He cannot change; hence He is immutable. Against this conception, the idea of God actualizing states of affairs in time implies change in God, the change that occurs in the process that extends from His knowledge of a state of affairs as an unactualized possible to His directly causing it to obtain. Whereas the atemporalist can appeal to the distinction between God's timeless act of creation and its temporal effects to rule out any change in God, the temporalist's commitment to the thesis that both God's acts and the effects of such acts occur in time correspondingly commits her to the thesis that God changes. There is, then, a sense of both mutability and incompleteness in a being who actualizes at one time what for it was unactualized at an earlier time. And a temporal being, inasmuch as it is incomplete, is an imperfect being. Earlier, I noted that the temporalist distinguishes between an omnipotent being having maximal power and its exercise of that power. Specifically, I

89 cited Kenny's assertion that, in order for a power to be logically possible, only some exercise of that power should be coherently conceivable. Granted, a power need not be tied to particular occasions in which it is exercised in order to have the status of a power. Yet how does one infer that a being has a certain power from particular exercises of it? How many exercises of an alleged power constitute having that power? 'Some' exercises may be very few, indeed few enough to render God as limited in His action as the unmoved mover in Aristotle's Metaphysics XII, engaged in nothing but self-reflective thought. On the other hand, 'some' may imply many instances of God actualizing states of affairs, suggestive of a frantic agent at work. Still, the point here concerns motivation. How do we determine what moves God to actualize some states of affairs rather than others? God's omnibenevolence cannot serve as an answer, since omnibenevolence, like other divine attributes, presumably is an enduring property, one that God would have to exercise or at least possess at all times that He exists, not just some. Lacking a response from the temporalist on the question of motivation, the selection of which states of affairs to actualize and the times at which they are actualized seems to be arbitrary. Atemporal omnipotence avoids the problems that beset the temporal account. By construing states of affairs as co-eternal with God, we effectively rule out the possibility of entities existing independently and hence beyond the control of God, thereby ensuring divine sovereignty and aseity. Furthermore, insofar as there is no potentially but only pure actuality in God, there is no gap between His possession of power and His exercise of it. Instead, the power that God has from all eternity is the power that God exercises from all eternity. This also preempts the question of why God strongly actualizes of affairs when He does. So there is no problem of arbitrariness with respect to divine action. In addition, construing God as timeless lends itself to a simpler formulation of divine power, avoiding the temporalist's cumbersome practice of quantifying over worlds, times, and states of affairs. Finally, unlike its temporal rival, the atemporal view is compatible with the attributes of completeness, perfection, pure actuality, and simplicity, which, together with the sovereignty and aseity that I just mentioned, are traditionally ascribed to God. Given all of these points, together with the Anselmian intuition that there can be at most one perfect, all-powerful being, we can reformulate omnipotence as: (5) A being X is omnipotent if and only if X alone is eternal (has atemporal duration), and X at once has and exercises from eternity all the power it is logically possible for X to have and exercise. 33 One might raise two objections to the account that I have offered. First, it seems incoherent to maintain that states of affairs can come into actual existence as temporal effects of the action of a being who exists outside of time.

90 How can there be a genuine causal relation holding between some thing existing in time and another thing existing outside of time? 34 Appeal to Stump and Kretzmann's notion of ET-simultaneity may provide an answer. According to this notion, temporal and timeless entities can be epistemically present at once to the intellect of an eternal being. Temporal effects of the divine timeless act of will fall within the scope of what God timelessly knows and therefore are co-occurrent with the divine intellect. Stump and Kretzmann claim that 'if we do adopt co-occurrence as a theoretically justifiable condition on causal connections between an action and its effect, we can point out that any and every action of an eternal entity is ET-simultaneous with any temporal effect ascribed to it'. 35 Since causes need not always precede but may be simultaneous with their effects (e.g., the relation between the temperature and pressure of a gas), and since the relation of identity holds between the intellect and will of an eternal being, we can say quite intelligibly that there are causal relations between God's timeless act of will and the temporal effects of that act without locating either those relations or the being who makes them obtain in time. For the temporal effects are epistemically present to God's eternal intellect and co-occurrent with God's eternal will. So we can hold that the timeless action of an eternal being is ET-simultaneous with its temporal effects. ET-simultaneity allows us to say that God's eternal will and intellect have both timeless and temporal aspects. We can render this idea plausible by adopting a course-grained approach to divine action and knowledge which countenances only one eternal mode of simultaneously acting and knowing while permitting alternative descriptions of that mode. One description is timeless and pertains to God's will and intellect as they are in themselves; the other description is temporal and pertains to the effects of God's will, or what is the same, the objects of God's knowledge. As I noted earlier, divine agency similarly admits of alternative descriptions, with direct agency pertaining to what God does and indirect agency pertaining to what God allows. This approach squares with a tenet of contemporary action theory, which says that a single action or event may fall under different descriptions. 36 Perhaps a more serious objection to the view I am proposing is that it conflicts with the idea of an everlasting God who suffers and therefore changes in response to human need, sin, and suffering. 37 Indeed, a timeless beingwith the attributes that this mode of existence entails appears to be indifferent to His creation, which is radically at odds with the Biblical conception of God. What this calls for is a project that might reconcile the God of the Philosophers with the God of Scripture. Such a project goes well beyond the scope of this paper, however, and accordingly I shall not attempt to construct one. I acknowledge that the atemporal account of omnipotence does come at some cost to our intuitions concerning God's nature. But the costs incurred by

91 the temporal alternative are much greater. All of the considerations that I have adduced in this section indicate that we should adopt a timeless conception of God for our analysis of onmipotence. With this framework in place, we can examine three alleged paradoxes with regard to divine power and determine whether it is coherent to say that God can limit His ability to do things in time without thereby undermining His omnipotence. Consequently, we shall see whether the definition of omnipotence offered in (4) is satisfactory.

4. The eternal truths In a letter to his friend Father Mersenne, dated 15 April 1630, Descartes writes: 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. 3~ In another letter, Descartes writes further: You ask also what necessitated God to create these truths; and I reply that just as he was free not to create the world, so he was no less free to make it untrue that all the lines drawn from the centre of a circle to its circumference are equal. 39 Also: It was free and indifferent for God to make it not be true that the angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, and in general that contradictions could not be true together. 4° Harry Frankfurt takes what Descartes says in these passages to entail 'the logical possibility of the logically impossible'. 41 Presumably, this shows that the doctrine of the eternal truths in particular and omnipotence in general are incoherent. For Descartes, though, mathematical truths like 2 + 2 = 4 and the logical law of non-contradiction are co-eternal with God. Once He creates them, He loses the ability to subsequently alter or abrogate them. Nevertheless, Descartes claims, 'it is no defect of power in God not to do it', 42 because the inability is self-imposed by a being who 'determined Himself by creating what he created'. 43 As Richard LaCroix notes, Frankfurt's failure to be sensitive to Descartes' distinction between God's absolute power in creating the eternal truths and God's self-limiting power once the eternal truths have been created explains Frankfurt's mistaken attribution to Descartes of believing that God can in fact abrogate laws of logic and mathematical truths and thus do what is logically impossible. 44 Apropos of Descartes' and LaCroix's conclusion that God's inability to alter the eternal truths once He has created them is no defect in his power, Earl Conee responds thus:

92 That conclusion does not imply that God remains omnipotent. It may be no flaw in God that God's power no longer includes this ability. But Descartes' God has undergone a reduction of power. The fact that the reduction was self-imposed does not alter this . . . . This should not blind us to the fact that it is a loss of omnipotence. 45 As they stand, nothing in Descartes' argument nor LaCroix's defense of it can rebut Conee's charge. For if omnipotence is an enduring property, a property that a being has at all times that it exists, and if God acts in such a way as to render Himself unable to do certain things subsequent to creation, then it seems to follow that God is not omnipotent. Insisting on the contrary would commit one to the paradoxical thesis that an omnipotent being has the ability at one time to render Himself no longer omnipotent at a later time. Without clarification, however, to say that a God who creates truths from eternity such that He cannot alter these truths subsequent to creation equivocates between temporal and atemporal senses of God's existence. It suggests that God exists both outside of time and in time, which involves an obvious inconsistency. But insofar as God is an eternal being with an atemporal duration that extends infinitely to encompass past, present, and future states of affairs which are simultaneously present to Him, it would be incorrect to say that God can or cannot exercise His power in time subsequent to creating from eternity. For 'subsequent to' implies temporal duration, and yet we have described God as having only atemporal duration. Since God does not endure in time, He does not exercise His power in time. Recall, once again, the distinction between God's timeless act of will at creation and the temporal effects of this act. Further, take the unalterability of mathematical truths and laws of logic subsequent to creation as among such effects. Since only the will and not its effects are identified with God, qua eternal, it is of no consequence to God and His power that these effects are unalterable in time. The plausibility of this point hinges crucially on construing omnipotence not as God's ability to do things but rather as God's power over states of affairs, a power that includes metaphysical (will) and epistemic (intellect) aspects. On this view, the identity relation holding between intellect and will, plus God's atemporal duration, together imply that both the timeless act of divine will and the temporal effects of the will are simultaneously present to the divine intellect. God knows from all eternity that His timeless act of will entails unalterable temporal effects. Aquinas suggests that the relation between this act and its effects is closed under known logical entailment in asserting 'the divine intellect from all eternity is directed to each of the things that take place in the course of time'. 46 Moreover, a passage in LaCroix's interpretation and defense of Descartes alludes to this same entailment relation between the divine timeless act and its unalterable tem-

93 poral effects: 'God brought it about both that the eternal truths exist and that he cannot countermand them'.47 Nevertheless, neither Descartes nor LaCroix specifies the link between the metaphysical and epistemic aspects of God's nature. They fail to show that what cannot be altered in time subsequent to God's timeless creative act of will falls within the scope of God's timeless knowledge. The epistemic aspect of God's nature is necessary to defend the thesis that the unalterability of the eternal truths does not imply a loss of omnipotence in God. Ultimately, LaCroix cannot rebut Conee's charge for two reasons: he fails to give an adequate account of how God's atemporal nature bears on the relation between His timeless act of creation and its temporal effects; and he fails to specify the epistemic function of intellect in God's power over the obtaining of states of affairs, which, together with the metaphysical function of will, is necessary to preserve omnipotence, given that certain truths cannot be altered in time. Rather than taking the fact that God creates eternal truths and that He cannot countermand them subsequent to creation as a complex, conjunctive proposition, or state of affairs, as LaCroix presents it, the entailment relation for which I am arguing is supported more strongly by understanding one of the propositions in question as materially implying the other. More specifically, if God knows from eternity that He creates logical and mathematical truths, and if God knows from eternity that creating such truths entails His inability to abrogate them in time subsequent to creation, then God knows from eternity that He is unable to abrogate logical and mathematical truths in time subsequent to creation. By modus ponens, the relation between the antecedent and the consequent is closed under known logical entailment. This is the Transfer of Power Principle (TPP), which says that God's power transfers or extends from the divine timeless act of will to its temporal effects. Using K as an epistemic operator, subscripts g and e to denote 'God' and 'eternally', and p and q to represent the propositions expressed by the antecedent and consequent, respectively, we can state this Principle more formally as: (TPP) K~ep, K ~e(P --->q), ~- K,,, q. Although God cannot alter certain necessary logical and mathematical truths once He creates them, His omnipotence is not compromised as a result. For He exercises power over these truths and the effect of their unalterability in time to the extent that they proceed from the divine will and are present to the divine intellect from the standpoint of eternity. Similarly, God exercises power over temporally unalterable states of affairs like World War II to the extent that they proceed from and are timelessly present to God. In this way, we preserve the coherence of omnipotence as an enduring property of God. But the God in question must be one of atemporal duration.

94 It is equally important to point out that, although God is constrained by the limits of broadly logical possibility in creating etemal truths, it does not follow that He is necessitated in willing them from eternity. Citing Descartes once more: Even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will them necessarily or to be necessitated to will them. 48 God's power to will necessary truths is not compromised by the fact that these truths are necessary. Obviously, Descartes is drawing a scope distinction with respect to the modal status of two propositions. He affirms (a) God contingently wills from all eternity that necessarily 2 + 2 = 4. and denies (b) God necessarily wills from all eternity that necessarily 2 + 2 = 4. By affirming (a) and denying (b) Descartes is asserting that, for an eternal God, it is not necessarily necessary but only contingently necessary that a proposition such as 2 + 2 = 4 is true. In other words, what Descartes has in mind is captured formally not by

(p) (E2p ~ [] [] p), which says that (for God) everything which is necessary is necessarily necessary, but rather by

(p) ( o p ~ oE2 p), which says that (for God) everything which is necessary is contingently necessary. 5° Inter alia, this ensures God's freedom with respect to His creation of the truths of arithmetic. In the light of this point, (a) and (b) can be recast as: (a') It is contingently necessary that 2 + 2 = 4. and (b') It is necessarily necessary that 2 + 2 = 4. If God's creation of the eternal truths were adequately represented by (b) and (b'), then this would pose a serious problem for the doctrine of omnipotence. In this case, however, we would find ourselves at the opposite end of the charge of incoherence which Frankfurt imputes to Descartes. If we were to adopt the iterated modalities of (b'), then we would not be suggesting that God can do the logically impossible, but rather that God is constrained by necessity to create the eternal truths. But the scope distinction Descartes draws between the necessarily necessary and the contingently necessary and his emphasis on the latter notion are enough to ensure God's eternal power over propositions and to keep that power within the bounds of the logically possible. In effect, Descartes endorses the conception of omnipotence

95 articulated in the passage from Aquinas which I cited at the outset of this discussion. Nevertheless, from the fact that God contingently wills truths from all eternity, it does not follow that the truths themselves are contingent. Hence it is not the case that there are no necessary truths. And yet this is precisely the mistaken inference that Plantinga draws from Descartes' claim that, qua all-powerful, God could have acted in such as way as to make every true proposition false. 5° Like Frankfurt, Plantinga fails to distinguish between God's timeless act of will and the unalterable effects of this act, all of which are simultaneously present to God's intellect. Insofar as the eternal truths are co-eternal with God's will and intellect, it cannot be true that these truths existed in some sense prior to His creation of them. In fact, by Descartes' lights, nothing at all exists prior to the exercise of the divine creative will. 5~ God does not choose from among antecedently unactualized but existing possibilities and then actualize them as either contingent or necessary truths. Instead, from the standpoint of eternity God at once creates the eternal truths and wills that they are necessary, though His willing itself is not necessitated. For God could have created a world in which 2 + 2 = 4 and the Pythagorean Theorem were not true, just as He could have not created any world at all. s2 Strictly speaking, not all eternal truths are created by God. Surely, God does not make it the case that God exists, that God is omnipotent, or that God is timeless. Only s o m e eternal truths are created by God. But it would be incorrect to maintain that such truths are beyond God's control, since they involve essential properties of God's own nature, and what is essential to God is neither subject to nor beyond His control. The question of control can be raised intelligibly only insofar as the eternal truths at issue are those that are or could be objects of divine agency, the things that God does, allows, or prevents. So, although not all eternal truths are created by God, this does not mean that there are eternal truths beyond God's control. Against the background of the passages from Descartes' letters cited earlier, Plantinga's claim that the textual evidence supports what he calls 'universal possibilism' is rather surprising. This thesis says that every truth is contingent, as distinct from 'limited possibilism', which says that the truths of logic and mathematics are not necessarily necessary but instead contingently necessary. 53 It will be instructive to explore the likely reasons for Plantinga's attribution of universal possibilism to Descartes. Plantinga's discussion of possibilism should be read from within the larger framework of the sovereignty-aseity intuition. That is, the two core features of the Judeo-Christian conception of God are His 'control over all things and dependency of all else on his creative and sustaining activity' and His 'uncreatedness, self-sufficiency, and independence of everything else'.54 The

96 motivation for specifying these features is to determine whether, or in what sense, God can be said to have a nature. We can fairly assume that Plantinga's claims about universal possibilism are symptomatic of a commitment to strong Platonism. On this view, numbers, propositions, states of affairs, and other entities of the same abstract ilk are themselves eternal, not co-eternal with God at creation. As such, they are not within God's control. 55 There was no time at which they did not exist independently of the divine will and intellect. Weak Platonism, on the other hand, can be characterized as the doctrine that ideas whose content involves the abstract entities I just mentioned exist in the divine mind. It is in virtue of having this ontological status that they are eternal and immutable. 56 I do not believe that Descartes' doctrine of the eternal truths should be characterized as a form of weak Platonism. A fortiori, it cannot be accommodated within a framework of strong Platonism. For the idea of eternal truths or entities existing independently of God suggests that God's power is diminished in a respect that conflicts with the Cartesian idea of an all-powerful being with whom all logical and mathematical truths are co-eternal. The thesis that certain truths are co-eternal with God is more tenable than the competing thesis that there are eternal truths beyond God's control. We can defend this claim on the ground that the former but not the latter accords with the attributes of aseity, completeness, perfection, actuality, immutability, and simplicity which have been given pride of place in the classical conception of God. It seems, then, that the burden of proof is on Plantinga to offer a more compelling argument for the thesis that there are some states of affairs which God cannot actualize. 57 Lacking such an argument, and informed by Descartes' reasoning on this score, we should reject Platonism (in both strong and weak forms) and adopt limited possibilism as the correct way to understand God's power. To say that the temporal effects of God's timeless act of will are unalterable for God in time does not imply that they are necessarily unalterable, however. After all, the truths of arithmetic, geometry, and logic are only contingently necessary for God, and therefore He may will that they not continue to hold necessarily in time. For instance, God could have willed the equality of radii to be a (contingently) necessary truth up to the end of 1994, to be a (contingently) contingent truth until to end of 1998, and then a (contingently) contingent falsehood after 2000. Similarly, God could have willed in such a way that World War II not occur or else have a duration of only one year. But by the same token, He could have willed that all of these facts be unalterable once He creates from eternity. And it seems reasonable to suppose, as I have, that He wills necessary eternal truths and contingent states of affairs to be unalterable in time because this makes for a world that is better on the whole than a world in which such facts could be altered.

97 In sum, limited possibilism and the Transfer of Power Principle are sufficient to dispel any alleged incoherence occasioned by a confused view of the modality involved in the relation between God and logical and mathematical truths. There are two related paradoxes concerning unalterable states of affairs, though, which remain to be examined before we can decide whether the definition of omnipotence in (5) is satisfactory. It is to these paradoxes that I now turn.

5. Unliftable stones, uncontrollable beings Consider now the following argument laid out by C. Wade Savage: (i) Either God can create a stone which he cannot lift, or God cannot create a stone which he cannot lift. (ii) If God can create a stone which he cannot lift, then he is not omnipotent. (iii) If God cannot create a stone which he cannot lift, then he is not omnipotent. Therefore, (iv) God is not omnipotent. 58 Although it employs a line of reasoning distinct from what we saw in the preceding section, this argument also presumably shows that the notion of omnipotence is incoherent. But there are several ways of approaching the paradox, any one of which may be sufficient to resolve it and thereby rebut the charge of incoherence. One way is to reject premise (ii), as do George Mavrodes and C. Anthony Anderson, on the ground that, since God is by definition essentially omnipotent, it is logically impossible that God can create a stone which He cannot lift. 59 Another approach is to distinguish between what God c o u l d have done from all eternity and what God can do subsequent to creation. Just as God limits His ability in the sense of creating truths He cannot alter once they have been created, so too, one might argue, God, in the act of creating a stone, could freely limit Himself such that He cannot lift the stone once it has been created. Yet, as I noted with respect to LaCroix's discussion of Descartes' doctrine of the eternal truths, this view seems to locate God both in time and outside of time. Moreover, it specifies only a metaphysical aspect of divine power, ignoring the epistemic aspect that takes God's timeless act of will and its temporal effects to be eternally and simultaneously present to the divine intellect. Here we should employ the same model that we used earlier to argue that, although God may not have an ability to do things in time, He nonetheless at once has and exercises power over what occurs in time. More

98 specifically, God at once has and exercises power over the temporal effects of His timeless act of will insofar as both the act and its effects fall within the scope of God's eternal knowledge. Thus, if God knows from eternity that He creates a stone, and knows from eternity that creating such a stone entails His inability to lift the stone in time once He has created it, then God knows from eternity that He cannot lift the stone in time once He has created it. The relation between the antecedent and the consequent is closed under known logical entailment. Hence it is coherent to say that God can create a stone (from eternity) that He cannot lift (in time) without thereby compromising His power over states of affairs, His omnipotence. Once again, we can invoke the Transfer of Power Principle to resolve an apparent paradox. If God does not lose the enduring property of omnipotence in creating a stone He cannot lift in time, then the consequent in Savage's second conditional premise is false, and the premise as a whole is false, thus rendering the argument unsound. Similar reasoning can be applied to the question of whether God could create a being He cannot control, which at first blush has the same air of paradox as the case of the unliftable stone. In raising this question, Kenny links God's omnipotence with His immutability, arguing that 'the power to create a being that one cannot control and thereby give up one's omnipotence is not a power that could logically be possessed by a being who had the attributes of God including immutability'. 6° But God does not give up His omnipotence in creating a being (from eternity) which he cannot control (in time) because not being able to control a being in time falls within the scope of His timeless knowledge. Nor does this render God mutable, because both God's timeless act of will and the temporal effects of this act are simultaneously present to God's eternal knowledge. Thus construed, there is no process from action to effects which might suggest change in God. Provided that we countenance metaphysical and epistemic aspects of a God who acts and knows both of His timeless act and its temporal effects from the standpoint of eternity, God can create a being whom He is unable to control in time without becoming immutable or anything less than omnipotent. In response to Kenny's analysis of this problem, W.S. Anglin draws a distinction between proper and relative powers: 'A proper power is one which is proper to the person possessing it in the sense that it does not cease to exist unless there is some change in the possessor . . . . A relative power is one which presupposes a relation between the possessor of the power and his environment such that the power may cease to exist if there is a change not in the possessor but merely in his environment. '61 For present purposes, we can take Anglin's notion of a 'proper power' as equivalent to the power that a being exercises over states of affairs in virtue of its action and knowledge

99 from eternity. 'Relative power', on the other hand, may be construed as pertaining to the temporal effects that God allows in virtue of His timeless creative act. These two powers correspond closely to the direct and indirect forms of divine agency which I presented in Section 2. Insofar as God's relative power is subsumed by, or falls within the scope of, His proper power, His inability to control a being in time, which is a relative power, does not as such diminish His proper power, or what He exercises from all eternity. God's proper power transfers from the timeless to the temporal owing to the fact that the effects of His action which occur in time are timelessly present to His eternal intellect. Now, a consequence of God's willed inability to control beings in time is that He allows the occurrence of certain evils, such as rape and war. Yet, as I have suggested, this could be explained in terms of God's overall purpose in creating human beings capable of doing both good and evil. A world containing such beings would be more conducive toward human moral progress, and thus on balance would be better than a world in which they lacked the capacity for moral evil. 62

6. Conclusion On the strength of the metaphysical and epistemic aspects of God's nature which I have explicated in general, and the Transfer of Power Principle in particular, we can say quite intelligibly that from eternity God can create truths which He cannot subsequently alter, can create a stone which He cannot subsequently lift, and can create a being whom He cannot subsequently control without thereby losing His omnipotence. I have defined omnipotence in terms of the power that God exercises over eternal logical and mathematical truths and contingent states of affairs in virtue of His timeless action and knowledge, a power that is compatible with His inability to do certain things in time. Because this inability falls within the scope of God's eternal knowledge, it is something over which He exercises power in a way that does not undermine His omnipotence. All of the reasons that I have offered in support of the distinction between timeless power over things and temporal ability to do things, with the aim of resolving the three paradoxes that we have examined, recommend that we retain (5) as part of a satisfactory definition of omnipotence, with additional specification of the metaphysical and epistemic aspects of divine power. This yields: (6) A being X is omnipotent if and only if X alone is eternal (has atemporal duration), and X at once has and exercises from all eternity all the metaphysical and epistemic power it is logically possible for X to have and exercise.

100 As I have acknowledged, the eternal conception of God which I have defended here comes at some cost, specifically with respect to its failure to accommodate the idea of a suffering God which figures prominently in Scripture. Nevertheless, as I also noted, the alternative view that envisages God as acting in time comes at an even higher cost. For a temporal God would be mutable, incomplete, and imperfect, attributes not traditionally ascribed to the God of the Philosophers. Adopting the notion of a God with metaphysical and epistemic power that He at once has and exercises from all eternity enables us to resolve the three paradoxes that we have considered and therefore to preserve the coherence of omnipotence. 63

Notes 1. Summa theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Blackfriars, 1964-1980), la. 25.3. See also Aquinas' De potentia, art. 7. q. 1. These and other views that Aquinas held are discussed by Brian Davies in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 2. The Cohelence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 158. 3. Edward Wierenga offers this definition in The Nature t~f God: An Inqutry into Divine Attributes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 31. Wierenga distinguishes enduring properties from essential properties at pp. 31-32. 4. J.L. Mackie was the first to make this point in 'Evil and Omnipotence', Mind 64 (1955), pp. 200-212. Others who have addressed the same problem include: Peter Geach, Providence and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Ch. 1; George Mavrodes, 'Defining Omnipotence', Philosophical Studies 32 (1977), pp. 191-202; Richard LaCroix, 'The Impossibility of Defining 'Omnipotence',' Philosophical Studies 32 (1977), pp. 181-190; Gary Rosenkrantz and Joshua Hoffman, 'What An Omnipotent Agent Can Do', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1980), pp. 1-19; and Wierenga, op.cit, pp. 14-18. 5. I take states of affairs and propositions to be isomorphic. States of affairs either obtain or fail to obtain; propositions are either true or false. 6. At Summa theologiae la. 14. 8., Aquinas writes that 'divine knowledge is a cause only in conjunction with divine will'. Similarly, Descartes reasons 'In God, willing and knowing are a single thing, in such a way that by the very fact of willing something He knows it, and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true'. (Euvres de Des~'artes. volumes 1-12, trans, and ed. Charles Adams and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerg, 1897-1910), Vol.l, p. 147. See also Augustine, De Trinitate, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1963), XV, 13. 7. There are affinities between the distinction that I draw here and Geach's distinction between an almighty being's power over all things and its power to do all things. Yet I do not believe that thinking of God as almighty rather than omnipotent, as Geach does, is very helpful in exploring possible ways of resolving the paradoxes of omnipotence. 8. Construing God's power in this way, rather than in terms of positive and negative agency, captures the idea that God purposefully allows temporal consequences of His timeless creation. Negative agency figures in discussions of the doctrine of double effect and refers to the foreseen but unintended consequences of one's actions. For one recent

101

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

account of this notion, see Warren S. Quinn, 'Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing', Philosophical Review 98 (July 1989), pp. 287-312. The two senses of eternity are discussed by, among others,: Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness (New York: Schocken Books, 1970): Nicholas Wolterstorff, 'God Everlasting', in Steven Cahn and David Shatz, eds., Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 77-98: Paul Helm, Eternal God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Alan G. Padgett, 'God and Time: Toward a New Doctrine of Divine Timeless Eternity', Religious Studies 25 (1989), pp. 209-215; William Hasker, God, Time. and Knowledge (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1989), Ch. 8; and Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). For this view, see especially Leftow, Ch.3. As explicated and defended by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, "Eternity', Journal of Philosophy 79 (1981), pp. 429-458, reprinted in T.V. Morris, ed.. The Concept of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 219-252, and 'Atemporal Duration', Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), pp. 214-219. Descartes' views on eternity are discussed at some length in section 3 of this paper. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, la. 10. 4., Anselm, Proslogion, Ch. 13: Augustine, Confessions, Books 11, 13; Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), Vol. Ill: 3, 7, 11. The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5. Summa theologiae, la. 14. 13. Ibid., Ia. 10. 2 ad. 4. Summa contra Gentiles, Book l: God, trans. Anton Pegis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), I. 16. Also, Compendium theologiae, 9, I 1. Summa theologiae, Ia. 3.1.. Responsio. Seen. 10above. 'Eternity', pp. 232-233 in Morris. Ibid., p. 234. Summa theologiae, la. 14. 13. This is Alvin Plantinga's conception of possible worlds, as formulated in 'Actualism and Possible Worlds', Theoria 42 (1976). reprinted in Michael J. Loux ed., The Possible and the Actual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 139-160, at pp. 258-259. See also Plantinga's The Nature ~'Necessio" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 44 ff. The Nature of God pp. 18 ff. Wierenga borrows this notion from Plantinga, who, in The Nature of Necessity says that to strongly actualize a state of affairs is to cause it directly to obtain (pp. 172-173). 'Initial segment of a possible world' also derives from Plantinga, Ibid., pp. 175-176. For details concerning the notion of comparative similarity of possible worlds, see David Lewis. 'Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow', Nous 13 (1979), pp. 455-476, 'Counterfactuals and Comparative Possibility', ,lournal of Philosophical Logic 2 (1973), pp. 418-448, and Countelfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 'Maximal Power', in Morris, pp. 134-167. Counterfactuals of freedom are propositions stating what free persons would do in certain circumstances or states of affairs. These involve the controversial Molinist doctrine of divine middle knowledge, which I shall not discuss here. Robert M. Adams offers a critique of Molinism in 'Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil', American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977), pp. 109-117.

102 29. The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 96. I assume that this formulation avoids the problem of the infamous 'McEar' character, so dubbed by Plantinga in God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 170. 30. See The Nature of Necessity, pp. 169 if, and Does God Gave a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 84 ft. 31. James F. Ross criticizes the modal Platonism to which Plantinga seems committed in 'God, Creator of Kinds and Possibilities: Requiescant universalia ante les'. in Rationality. Religious Belief. and Moral Commitment, Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 315-334. 32. See n. 16 above. 33. That there can be at most one such being derives from the idea that there exists something than which none greater can be thought, as Anselm argues in Chapter 15 of the

Proslogion. 34. Criticism of the idea of an eternal God along these lines has been made by Pike, in God an Timelessness, and Delmas Lewis, 'Eternity Again: A Reply to Stump and Kretzmann', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 15 (1984), pp. 73-79, and 'Timelessness and Divine Agency', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 I (1987), pp. 143-159. 35. 'Eternity', p. 242. Aquinas distinguishes between the two aspects of God's action, His timeless performance of acts of will and their temporal effects, at Summa theologiae Ia. 14. 2, la. 18.3, Ia. 27. 1, Ia. 54.2, and Summa ~'ontra Gentiles, Book II: Creation, trans. Anton Pegis (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), pp. 35-36. 36. Alfred R. Mele discusses the representative fine- and course-grained accounts of action in the Introduction to his Springs of Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 37 See Wolterstorff, 'God Everlasting', and Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 38. Descartes: Philosophi~'al Letters, trans, and ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 111-112. Kenny discusses the doctrine of the eternal truths in The God of the Philosophers, Part I, Ch. 2. 39. Philosophical Letters, p. 14. 40. Ibid., p. 151. 41. 'Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths', Philosophi~'al Review 86 (January 1977), pp. 36-57, at pp. 43-44. 42. Philosophical Letters, p. 241. 43. Descartes' Sixth Replies, in The Philosophit'al Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane and Ross (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 250. 44. Richard LaCroix, 'Descartes on God's Ability to Do the Logically Impossible'. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (September 1984), pp. 455-475. 45. 'The Possibility of Power Beyond Possibility', in Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 5: Philosophy of Religion, ed. J.E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991), pp. 447-473, at p. 458. 46. Summa eontra Gentiles, I. 67.2. 47. 'Descartes on God's Ability to Do the Logically Impossible', p. 451. 48. Philosophical Letters, p. 15 I. 49. E.M. Curley examines the modality behind the doctrine of the eternal truths in 'Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths', Philosophical Review 93 (October 1984), pp. 569-597. See also Gijsbert van den Brink, 'Descartes, modalities, and God', International Journal for Philosophy ~/'Religion 33 (1993), pp. 1-15. 50. Does God Have a Nature?, pp. 94 ff.

103

51. Philosophical Letters, p. 14. 52. Ibid. 53. Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, pp. 92 ft. Plantinga credits Geach with interpreting Descartes as committed to limited possibilism at pp. 103-104. See Geach, Providence and Evil, pp. 10-1 I. 54. Plantinga, Ibid., pp. 1-2. 55. Ibid., pp. 84 ff, 56. Kenny (p. 16) attributes this view to Augustine and his Eighty-Thlee Different Questions, 46, 1-2. 57 See The Nature of Necessity, pp. 180-184. 58. 'The Paradox of the Stone', Philosophical Review 76 (1967), pp. 74-79. Wierenga, op. eit., discusses this paradox at pp. 29-33. 59. Mavrodes, 'Some Puzzles Concerning Omnipotence', Philosophical Review 72 (1963),

60. 61.

62.

63.

pp. 221-223; Anderson, 'Divine Omnipotence and Impossible Tasks: An Intensional Analysis', International Journal for Philosophy ~/Religion 15 (1984), pp. 109-124. The God of the Philosophers, p. 98. 'Can God Create a Being He Cannot Control?', Analysis 40 (October 1980), pp. 220-223. Also, Free Will and the Christian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), Ch. 3. This is in accord with Plantinga's 'Free Will Defence', as spelled out in The Nature of Necessity, Ch. 9. and with Swinburne's remarks on the same issue in The Existence ~?[ God, Revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Ch 11. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, whose many insightful criticisms and suggestions on an earlier draft have led to many improvements in this paper.

Address for correspondence: Walter Glannon, Department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA