Abstract

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.