Brian Leftow

This essay by Brian Leftow provides an account of the nature and extent of God’s freedom. Theists typically believe that God could have done other than He has done. Many think that God gives them gifts He need not have given. Most Western philosophical theologians have held that God had the choice not to create, for instance. While there is general agreement that God has some leeway, there is disagreement over how much He has. The central point is a defense of a voluntarist rather than a rationalist account of the extent of God’s live options: God is not bound to effect the best, where the sort of value in question is nonmoral.

This chapter adumbrates a Thomistic, non-Cartesian version of dualism, defending the Thomistic theory from the familiar charge of inconsistency by showing how it is possible to assert simultaneously that the human being is a single, unitary substance, that the soul is the ‘form’ of the human body, and yet that the soul can exist without the body by virtue of being an immaterial particular. It demonstrates that a Thomistic ‘form’ need not be a mere state of a thing, like a shape: it may also be an immaterial particular, present in every part of a substance, that _causes_ it be in a certain state (such as that of being alive). Aquinas's view of the embodied souls avoids being _dualistic_ by denying that the human body is a separable substance in its own right. What combines with the soul to produce a substantial human thing is not one thing but a plurality. Moreover, the chapter explains that Aquinas's claim that human thought has no bodily ‘organ’ does not entail the natural independence of our cognitive functions from the physical condition of the brain. It does, however, imply that mental content cannot be _fully and determinately_ encoded in the brain's physical condition. Finally, the chapter clarifies the sense in which the disembodied soul is not for Aquinas (unlike Descartes) a substance.

The doctrine that God is omnipotent takes its rise from Scriptural texts which concern two linked topics. One is how much power God has to put behind actions: enough that nothing is too hard, enough to do whatever he pleases. The other is how much God can do: ‘all things’. The link is obvious: we measure strength by what tasks it is adequate to perform, and God is so strong he can do all things. The Christian philosophical theologian who seeks to explicate omnipotence seeks a convincing account of the reality beneath the ‘phenomena’ of Scripture. This article looks briefly at some historic accounts of omnipotence. It emerges that the early history of the concept emphasized strength more than range of action, with range coming to prominence in Aquinas's day. Three recent attempts to define omnipotence are then considered. All are found wanting, but the author draws morals that help him hazard his own definition.

Augustine, Aquinas and many other medievals held the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) -that God has no parts of any sort. Augustine took this to imply that for any non-relational attribute F, if God is F, God = Fness. This can seem to create three problems. I set them out. Having done so, I show that Augustine's DDS is set within a view of attributes now unfamiliar to us. When we bring this into the picture, it turns out that two of the problems do not really arise and the third is not really problematic. I then suggest that my rescue of Augustine may rescue other prominent friends of DDS as well.

One central claim of orthodox Christianity is that in Jesus of Nazareth, God became man. On Chalcedonian orthodoxy, this involves one person, God the Son, having two natures, divine and human. If He does, one person has two properties, deity and humanity. But the Incarnation also involves concrete objects, God the Son (GS), Jesus’s human body (B) and—I will assume—Jesus’s human soul (S). If God becomes human, GS, B and S somehow become one thing. It would be good to have a metaphysical account of their oneness. I have suggested one. Thomas Senor has criticized my suggestion. I now reply to his case.