Book Review: God and Necessity

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God and Necessity . By Brian Leftow . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2012, 575 pp., £62.50 ISBN 978-0-19-926335-6

Reviews

In 1974 Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity signaled a renaissance of Christian philosophy in the Anglophone world. Brian Leftow's new book God and Necessity epitomizes that renaissance. It is a major contribution to modal metaphysics, striking in its creativity, impressive in its argumentation, and mind-numbing in its thoroughness.

The fundamental aim of the book is to meet the ostensible challenge posed by necessary truths to the claim that God is the sole ultimate reality by formulating and defending a theistic metaphysics for grounding modal truths. The basic question which the book seeks to answer is how modal truths relate to God. The book also takes up the subsidiary challenge posed by abstract objects to divine ultimacy (27).

An alleged conflict with classical theism's claim of divine ultimacy arises from the assumptions that

9.

Some strongly necessary truths are not about God and are not negative existentials, e.g., mathematical truths.

10.

It is always the case that if a truth is necessary and not a negative existential, it has an ontology.

11.

If a necessary truth not about God has an ontology, all of it lies outside God.

The conjunction of (9)-(11) implies that there exists something ontologically outside God which supplies the ontology for mathematical truths. But Leftow thinks it difficult to see how such abstracta could be created by God, which contradicts God's being the sole ultimate reality.

Leftow identifies four possible ways to deal with this apparent conflict:

(i)

Deny that modal truths have an ontology.

(ii)

Restrict the scope of God's ultimacy to exempt various abstracta.

(iii)

Adopt a 'safe' ontology that does not conflict with divine ultimacy.

(iv)

Make God the ontological foundation of modality.

Leftow concedes that his brief discussion of (i)-(iii) does not suffice to dispose of them conclusively, but he thinks that he has given 'at least some reason to think that these will not do' (71). The bulk of the book is then taken up by an examination of the competing theistic views.

The dominant theistic position, what Leftow calls a deity theory, grounds...