MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONS 95and what occupies the C place is the consequent. On the first view described,
there might be various ways of putting individual laws together into
logically consistent groupings such that a universe could be created
containing the things referred to in the antecedents of these particular laws.
There would be as many choices between orderly worlds as there were such
sets of laws. On the second way of putting things, a similar result arises.
The essence of some object is the set of properties necessary and sufficient
for its existence as possessing a nature it cannot exist without and the
existence of which in an object suffices to identify a kind.^14 Let an essence
description be a description of a universe in which one or more logically
compatible kinds of things co-existed. Every essence description would pick
out a different world that God might create.
There are other conceptions of laws, or perhaps of conceptions on which
there really aren’t any laws. On another view, for example, what we call
laws are only generalizations that we may discover to be strictly false
though still fairly accurate, and that there is no more to a law than that –
a typically accurate generalization which may well be false, and in any
case is as explanatorily deep as things get. On this view, explaining why
some generalizations are accurate and others are not is not going to be
possible – not at any rate for the class of generalizations that have the
widest scope.
There seems to be good reason to think that there are basic laws that
are probabilistic – laws of the form (L1) If A-type things exist, and
condition C obtains, then the probability of a B-type thing existing is
.987 or (L2) If A-type things behave in way W1, and condition C* holds,
then the probability of B-type things then behaving in way W2 is between
.997 and .999.
The philosophical interest of such matters, insofar as they relate to
monotheism, has to do with how different notions of the relations between
God and the world, and of God and laws of nature, relate to questions
about creation, determinism, freedom, and responsibility – matters for
later reflection.
Questions for reflection
1 What are the basic tenets of Greek monotheism? Does Greek
monotheism serve as a sort of minimal monotheism, a possible
philosophical position, with no religious importance, or is it a religion?
2 What are the basic tenets of Semitic monotheism? How do the different
Semitic monotheisms differ? From the perspective of these traditions,
how religiously important are the differences?