Today, after a dozen years of work, I finished the final chapter of the first draft of my book on God and abstract objects. Hooray! Here are the final two paragraphs of the book as she now stands: In short, then, I see no good reason to be a realist when it comes to abstract objects. This represents a major change of mind on my part. When I commenced my study of divine aseity and Platonism’s challenge to it, I had expected to defend some sort of divine conceptualism with respect to putative abstracta. The unexpected outcome of my exploration of the challenge posed by Platonism to divine aseity is that I now find anti-realism to be a more plausible position. Conceptualism remains an option open to me, but I now see no reason to concede so much to the realist. If I am right about anti-realism concerning putative abstract objects, then the challenge posed by Platonism to divine aseity evaporates because mathematical and other abstract objects simply do not exist. To be sure, all of this is very controversial; but such intellectual uncertainty redounds to the advantage of the classical theist. For now there are a plethora of alternatives available to the classical theist and few, if any, knock-down arguments for or against any particular view. Indeed, many, perhaps most, metaphysicians would look at my conclusion as almost trivially true—of course, there are many tenable alternatives to Platonism! I beg their pardon for arguing for an obvious claim, but I hope to have been at least informative to those less familiar with this debate. When I began this study, I thought that Platonism constituted a significant challenge to the classic doctrine of divine aseity. I now view the situation with far greater equanimity.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Jun 2014 01:57:47 +0000
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