God Over All

KEVIN HARRIS: It’s always good to have you on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. You know, when I was a kid every summer the pastor of my church preached a sermon about “the summer slump.” His observation was that every summer people tended to back off on church membership and service and on their giving. So every summer he made it a point to not fall prey to the summer slump. I want to encourage you in the same way, if you are listening to us during the summer of 2024, don’t let the summer slump get you. Dr. Craig and Reasonable Faith are having a huge impact all over the world, and your financial gift will be used for that. Please give. You can give anytime online at ReasonableFaith.org. And pray for Dr. Craig as well for wisdom. Not only are the philosophical issues controversial, but the cultural issues get more controversial all the time. He and his team need wisdom to handle these in a Christ-like way. Pray for us, and thank you for your giving as well. We’re doing a series of podcasts right now. Let’s join Dr. Craig in the studio.

Bill, the full title is God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism. It’s the next book in our series of podcasts featuring five of your books. Most followers of Reasonable Faith are interested in this topic. However, others may find the title alone to be rather daunting. So let's get a thumbnail sketch of the contents before we talk about what led to its writing.

DR. CRAIG: This is a book about the challenge posed by Platonism to Judeo-Christian theism. The biblical view of God is that God is the sole ultimate reality. He is the only uncreated being. Everything that exists apart from God has been created by God. Now that stands in stark contradiction with Platonism which is the doctrine that there exist abstract objects which are eternal, necessary, and uncreated. These would include things like mathematical entities (numbers, sets, matrices and things of that sort). It would include propositions, properties, possible worlds, and so forth. And there are supposed to be infinities of infinities of infinities of these abstract objects which exist just as really as fundamental particles like electrons. So this poses a tremendous challenge to Judeo-Christian theism and its doctrine of divine aseity, or self-existence. So what I do in this book is look at the principal argument on behalf of Platonism and then I explore a wide variety of alternatives to Platonism, most of which, I think, are unknown to Christian philosophers today.

KEVIN HARRIS: You dedicated this book to Richard Swinburne and included two words, “Thank you.” What were your thoughts?

DR. CRAIG: I had dedicated previous books to various family members, and so it seemed time to branch out to dedicate books to people whose work had been influential or who I appreciated. And on this particular topic of divine aseity, Swinburne was one of the very few philosophers who was willing to challenge Platonism and to adopt an anti-Platonic view of abstract objects. So I wanted to recognize that contribution on his part and thank him for it.

KEVIN HARRIS: You spent over 12 years researching this topic before writing your conclusions. What were some of the motivations for this book?

DR. CRAIG: The motivation for the book came from a conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers back in the 1980s in Milwaukee that I attended. Speaking at that conference was the philosopher Thomas Morris. He gave a paper entitled “Absolute Creation” in which he explained the challenge to divine aseity posed by Platonism, and he attempted to provide his own solution to the problem. The problem was that Morris' solution was just patently inadequate, and so I was left with this powerful objection to Christian theism that I did not know how to answer. And I have to say I had never encountered an objection to theism as powerful as this, even the problem of evil faded in comparison to the power of this challenge posed by Platonism to Christian theism. So I just put the problem on the back burner for a while. I was working during those years on God and time, as you know, and writing on divine eternity. But after I finished my work on divine eternity I decided to take this question off the back burner and to begin to explore divine aseity and the challenge of Platonism. I spent the next 13 years working on this topic full time as my major research interest. And it was an incredibly rewarding study. God Over All is one of the books that flowed out of this.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm trying to remember if you've ever had to use any of this material in your debates. Has this come up as an atheist objection in any of the public debates, or is this more of an in-house debate?

DR. CRAIG: It is an in-house debate, and I was so thankful for that, as I say, since I didn't know how to answer the objection. What I would have said if some atheist was clued in and brought this up, I don't know. But they never did, and so I don't think it ever has been raised in a debate.

KEVIN HARRIS: Last year you were on a panel discussion with Peter Van Inwagen titled, “Are There Numbers?” What's a summary of his view?

DR. CRAIG: Peter and I just released a book with Routledge on the subject: Do Numbers Exist? Peter is an ardent Platonist. He is a Christian philosopher, but he doesn't think that God created everything. He thinks that there are uncreated entities that God did not make. So we have a go at it in this debate as to whether or not that is a position that a Christian philosopher must or should take.

KEVIN HARRIS: When reading this book, I was surprised, especially looking at the chart at the front of the book, that there's a view that holds that numbers are concrete, physical objects (formalism). That seems so strange to me. How in the world could numbers exist as physical objects or even concrete?

DR. CRAIG: I include that for the sake of completeness. James Franklin has defended a view of mathematical entities as concrete objects, but it's not very popular. The idea here would be that numbers are just marks on paper that you manipulate according to the rules of the game, rather like chess pieces that are manipulated according to the rules of chess. So that would be an alternative to Platonism. It would be a form of realism, but it does not think of numbers as abstract entities but as concrete entities.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, you know that I'm somewhat of an amateur artist. I love art. Tell me about the cover art. Did you pick that out or did the publisher?

DR. CRAIG: I picked that out. That is Albrecht Dürer's wood engraving called “Melencolia,” and on it you see this angel pensive, wrapped in deep thought surrounded by these mathematical objects like a sphere and a magic square of numbers and other sorts of geometrical entities. I thought that it just epitomized the difficulty of this question of Platonism and its challenge to divine aseity, so I love that woodcut by Dürer.

KEVIN HARRIS: I got a chuckle when I re-read the preface. You mentioned asking Jan, “Honey, what do you think? Does the number 2 exist?” Recently you were asked by somebody on Facebook whether Jan was interested in these topics. Well, the answer is yes, she is. Do you recall her answer to the question about the number 2?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I do! I always talk with Jan about my work to bounce ideas off of her. And when I asked her, “Do you think the number 2 exists?” she said, “Ask any housewife. Of course not!” So she was skeptical of the existence of numbers as I was.

KEVIN HARRIS: You expand the kalam argument when you do a conceptual analysis of what the cause must be like, and you conclude there seems to be two options: abstract objects or a disembodied mind. In what other ways does God's aseity and Platonism interact with the kalam?

DR. CRAIG: I think that would be the main place of interaction. The kalam cosmological argument leads to an entity which is timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial. Now, that sounds very much like an abstract object. The hitch is that abstract objects have no causal powers. The number 7 has no effect on anything, and therefore abstract objects cannot be the cause of the universe. So it seems to me that you've got basically two choices of entities that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number, or an unembodied mind. And since only an unembodied mind can be causally related to the universe, it follows that the cause of the universe is a personal creator of the universe and a transcendent, unembodied mind.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we wrap up, I'm assuming that there's going to be a pretty hefty section in your upcoming systematic philosophical theology that you're currently writing on God and abstract objects. Is that right? And will you be adding anything new?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. You know, my philosophical career has basically been devoted to an exploration of the coherence of theism – exploring the coherence of the different attributes of God. So that will be the entirety of volume 2A: the coherence of theism. It will explore some new attributes that I haven't looked at before; particularly, there's a long chapter on divine simplicity in which I assess the coherence of that doctrine. Also, the question on divine omnipresence raises the question of God's relationship to space just as the question of divine eternity raises the question of God's relationship to time. And it turns out that the question of God's relationship to space is also very difficult and controversial. So those are some of the new questions that will be broached in volume 2A.^[1]