of propositions specifying free human decisions about which not even God knows the
truth-values in advance. It is not the purpose of this essay to provide adequate treatment
of the problem. It is more in this essay's ambit to ask a different question, one that
concerns the very status of contingent propositions: Even if God gets to determine which
contingent propositions will be true, who got to determine that the propositions were
contingent?
end p.43
Necessary Truth
Many philosophers have alleged that the necessary propositions stand apart from the
contingent propositions. Necessarily true propositions are true and could not have been
false. They are true in every possible world. Necessarily false propositions are false and
could not have been true; they are false in every possible world. According to Leibniz,
God surveyed all the infinitely many, infinitely diverse possible worlds in the process of
selecting which world would be made actual by his creative choice. The imagery alone
does not settle the issue of what God saw when he surveyed the possible worlds. Did God
perceive that there were some propositions that just kept on coming up true in each
possible world, some that always turned out false, and still others that were true in some
worlds and false in others? This way of describing things suggests that God was a passive
observer of the galaxy of possible worlds, able to single out one of them, to be sure, for
creation, but not able to alter the modal status—contingent or necessary—of the
propositions describing the worlds. Or was it rather that God's “seeing” the possible
worlds was God's determining their structure, thereby conferring modal status on
propositions?
The dichotomy of propositions, contingent versus necessary, is typically understood to be
exclusive (no proposition is supposed to be both contingent and necessary) and
exhaustive (no proposition is supposed to be neither). Philosophers as diverse as
Descartes and Quine have, for reasons as diverse as the philosophers themselves,
challenged the dichotomy. Quine regards the distinction as invidious, founded on bad
metaphysics and having no more classificatory warrant than, say, the distinction between
thoughts about the natural numbers and thoughts entertained on Tuesdays.
There is scholarly controversy about what Descartes' views on the subject are (see Curley
1984). There is one defensible interpretation, however, that goes like this. God's
omnipotence extends even over what we call the necessary truths. God has it in his
power, for example, to make the sum of 2 and 3 not equal to 5. On this interpretation,
every proposition is, from the point of view of God's power, metaphysically contingent.
Yet God also made us so that, given our cognitive constitution, it is epistemically
necessary for us that 2 + 3 = 5. That is, we are incapable of conceiving what it would be
like for the sum of 2 and 3 not to equal 5. Inasmuch as every proposition is
metaphysically contingent, God's power over what propositions would be true is not
constrained in any way. The firm belief we creatures have that some truths could not have
been otherwise than what they are is a consequence not of their metaphysical necessity—
for there is no such thing—but rather of their epistemic necessity for us.