also extends to the creation of absolute space and time. Perhaps the most startling feature
of the rejoinder is that, when combined with the thesis that time is infinitely extended—
more precisely, the part of that thesis that maintains that time has no beginning—the
rejoinder entails that God created something that has no beginning! But a similar result
will follow on Leibniz's view for any Leibnizian who maintains that some created things
have existed forever.
The doctrine of divine conservation may help to dispel some of the air of paradox.
According to divine conservation, the only difference between creation and conservation
is that “creation” applies to the divine activity that results in a thing's first coming into
being and “conservation” applies to the divine activity
end p.42
that keeps the thing in existence once it has come into being. If some things, like
Newtonian space and time, have no beginning, then they have been perpetually
conserved; they just have no first coming-to-be. (Note that it would seem to be a
consequence of divine conservation that if some things are beginningless and have been
conserved at all times by God, then God must be infinitely old. I argue later that the
inference is invalid.)
Contingent Truth
Let us say that a proposition is contingently true if it is true but might have been false. In
the idiom of possible worlds, a contingently true proposition is one that is true in the
actual world but false in some possible worlds. The Leibnizian imagery of God's
choosing among the possible worlds extends God's creative sovereignty not only to
creating and sustaining the actual world, but also to determining which world would be
actual by his selecting which set of contingent propositions would become the set of
contingently true propositions. Theists should have no qualms about much of this
imagery. It grounds a theistic explanation for the phenomenon of “fine-tuning,” that is,
the observation that if the physical parameters had had virtually any other values than the
ones they actually have, then a vastly different kind of universe, most likely to be
inhospitable to life, would have existed. But other aspects of the Leibnizian imagery are
more controversial. For centuries there has been a thriving cottage industry devoted to the
problem of divine foreknowledge and future contingents: Does the set of contingent
propositions selected by omniscient God include in it propositions specifying what his
creatures would freely do in the future? Is it coherent to suppose both that God
knowingly selected a world in which, say, the proposition In 2020 Smith will cheat on her
income taxes is true and that Smith will cheat on her income taxes freely? If God selects a
world in which that proposition is true, what role, if any, is left for Smith's selection?
Compatibilists, philosophers who maintain that human freedom is compatible with
determinism, will see no particular problem here: divine determination is just one kind of
determination and not a kind of coercion. In contrast, libertarians, who insist that human
freedom requires the absence of any kind of determination, will tend to stake out a class