Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of God, Part 4.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

In our lesson, we've been talking about God's attributes, and in particular, his attribute of aseity or self-existence.

And we saw that the most serious challenge posed to God's unique, incommunicable

attribute of aseity is Platonism, which is the view that there exist other uncreated, necessary, eternal objects besides God,

things like mathematical objects, numbers, and sets and functions, and so forth.

And last week we began to review responses to the challenge of Platonism.

So if we could have the PowerPoint slide up again, we have discussed first of all the realist

alternatives to Platonism, which would take mathematical objects, either to be abstract ideas that are created

by God or else as concrete objects, namely thoughts in human minds or else more plausibly

thoughts in the mind of God. Now, these are all realist solutions to the problem posed by

Platonism because these solutions agree with the Platonists that in fact mathematical objects

exist. There really are such things. But in addition to these realist solutions, you see on the right-hand

side of the diagram a range of anti-realist solutions to the challenge of Platonism, and these

are united in denying that there are any such things as mathematical objects.

Mathematical objects simply do not exist. There are no such things.

And these anti-realist solutions immediately removed the challenge posed by the existence of abstract objects

to God's being the sole ultimate reality because on

anti-realism there just aren't any such objects and therefore God is the only uncreated,

self-existent, necessary, eternal being.

So let's just review briefly some of these anti-realist solutions.

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