not only will but must create the best, as the second half of (3) maintains. Any being who
could create a suboptimal world would not be essentially omniscient, omnipotent, and
perfectly good God. To finish the story, a defender of (3) can remind us that the necessity
involved here has its source entirely in God's own uncompelled, unconflicted nature.
Recall that our strategy was to show that an advocate of (3) can plausibly advance an
argument for God's maximal freedom, not because of some belief that (3) is the most
acceptable position, but because (3) is the position that raises most pointedly questions
about God's freedom. I am inclined to doubt, for example, that there is a best possible
world or a best creatable world. Perhaps for any world God can create, there is a better
world God can create, ad infinitum. If this is so, it need not be a source of limitation or
frustration for God. If possible worlds just are the infinite possibilities that God
entertains, then to complain that God cannot find a best among them would be finding
fault with unlimited vision or imagination.
Summing Up
Most theists will agree that God depends historically and contemporaneously on nothing.
There are more ambitious versions of God's aseity. One of them maintains that God's
mind is not modular: what we call God's understanding and God's will, for example, are
not two things in God but the same thing described vagariously by finite minds that are
modular. Another holds that given an independently attractive conception of an
accidental property, God does not have and thus does not depend on any accidental
properties. Yet another claims that God's life does not depend on the occupancy of space
or the passage of time. Finally, we have looked at an argument to the effect that God can
be maximally free even if he must create and must create the best.
Reasonable theists can wrangle philosophically about some of these dimen
end p.56
sions of aseity. Some of those quarrels will, I suspect, begin with the question, Do we
really need to think that God is independent in that respect? Is it really important, for
example, to think that God has no accidental properties? Here I will end with an
observation and a wager. Importance is relative to a purpose. It may be important to one's
philosophy, but it is not likely to be important to one's salvation that one have the right
view about accidental properties. And I wager that whatever flaws there may be with
some of these dimensions of aseity, they cannot be faulted for depicting God as less than
fully personal.
NOTE
Earlier versions of this paper benefited from comments from Hugh McCann and William
J. Wainwright.