Does God Have a Nature?

by Alvin Plantinga

Overview

In this, the Aquinas Lecture for 1980, Alvin Plantinga proposes (p. 9) to discuss three questions: (i) does God have a nature? (ii) if so, is there a conflict between God's sovereignty and his having a nature? and (iii) how is God related to properties (including his nature), propositions, states of affairs, numbers, and other denizens of the Platonic realm of necessarily existing abstract entities? Plantinga's conclusions are straightforward: (i) God has a nature distinct from himself; (ii) the claim that God has a nature, while not incompatible with the belief that God is sovereign, does conflict with a common though mistaken intuition about God's sovereignty; and (iii) in whatever way we are ultimately to conceive of God's relation to his own nature and to other necessarily existing abstract entities, it is at any rate clear that God has no control over either their existence or their essential characteristics. I wish to commend Does God Have A Nature? as yet another Plantingean exemplar of tough-minded yet creative philosophical theology. It goes without saying that such work is sorely needed today as an antidote to the disappointingly uncritical modernism characteristic of so much contemporary theology. - Review by Alfred J. Freddoso, University of Notre Dame, for Christian Scholar's Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874621457
Publisher:	Marquette University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1980
Series:	Aquinas Lecture: 1980 Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Alvin Plantinga, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan